Recent comments in /f/history

Iwantmyflag t1_j0wwnio wrote

Reply to comment by Allidoischill420 in Ancient Grammatical Puzzle That Has Baffled Scientists for 2,500 Years Solved by Cambridge University Student by Superb_Boss289

Well...you start with Latin and ancient Greek in school, then you study linguistics and history with a focus on old languages. And you keep reading and reading whenever you come across something you don't understand. It also helps to be curious.

There's probably easier ways today like just reading Wikipedia. Not everyone has to suffer through deciphering Hittite cuneiform ;)

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JamesTheJerk t1_j0wujgo wrote

Reply to comment by PfizerGuyzer in Ancient Grammatical Puzzle That Has Baffled Scientists for 2,500 Years Solved by Cambridge University Student by Superb_Boss289

Criticism is natural in every aspect of life and if the author is offended, so be it. I don't care and neither should they due to me being a lowly redditor and not a peer to the writer on the subject.

This is my opinion on the article and that's how I feel.

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temalyen t1_j0wf4ii wrote

Reply to comment by Yrcrazypa in Ancient Grammatical Puzzle That Has Baffled Scientists for 2,500 Years Solved by Cambridge University Student by Superb_Boss289

I had an English teacher in High School who, when we were reading Canterbury Tales, would basically call us lazy if we said we couldn't understand what the heck it was saying. She said a bunch of times, "This isn't any harder than anything else written in english, you're just being lazy. If you actually concentrated, you'd have no problems at all reading it."

It always pissed me off because that is obviously not true, but she'd shut down any sort of dissent and insist we're making up a problem that doesn't exist. Annoying. To this day, I still don't understand why she'd take an attitude like that when it's very obviously wrong.

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Adlach t1_j0vr7ar wrote

Reply to comment by Volgin in Ancient Grammatical Puzzle That Has Baffled Scientists for 2,500 Years Solved by Cambridge University Student by Superb_Boss289

Not to my knowledge. English went through some huge shifts in pronunciation and orthography since the Old English period. I actually feel that using English as context for this article is misleading because of that—most other languages haven't undergone such dramatic transformations.

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Volgin t1_j0vj670 wrote

Reply to comment by Adlach in Ancient Grammatical Puzzle That Has Baffled Scientists for 2,500 Years Solved by Cambridge University Student by Superb_Boss289

Are there other texts that are contemporary to Beowulf but easier to read? I tried something similar in french a few months back and could easily read early 13th century letters and such but if the text was lyrical or some sort of poetry it was often way harder to read since it was written in an classical/older style that borrowed heavily from Latin.

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CalEPygous t1_j0v0gfl wrote

Reply to comment by atre324 in Ancient Grammatical Puzzle That Has Baffled Scientists for 2,500 Years Solved by Cambridge University Student by Superb_Boss289

Supposedly Latvian and Lithuanian are the closest living, spoken, languages to Sanskrit. This likely reflects the fact that Sanskrit being that it is not spoken doesn't evolve and Lithuanian and Latvian have changed the least among living Indo-European languages.

https://www.news9live.com/art-culture/why-lithuanian-sanskrit-similarities-continue-to-intrigue-linguists-two-centuries-on-158492

https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/aqjegs/connections_between_lithuanian_sanskrit/

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theshredder744 t1_j0uz55a wrote

Reply to comment by PenPineappleAppleInk in Ancient Grammatical Puzzle That Has Baffled Scientists for 2,500 Years Solved by Cambridge University Student by Superb_Boss289

That's interesting. Admittedly, I'm not knowledgeable enough to tell the difference between Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Urdu words in conversations.

But I completely agree about how many Sanskrit words are used in Telugu, Kannada, and even Malayalam to an extent. It's always interesting how some words and phrases are the same across borders.

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Tealtime t1_j0usmvk wrote

Reply to The Original Fight Club. by Thumperings

Rarely have I ever read an article so wrong on almost everything.

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1). First of all, Mensur still exists among fraternities. It is not an antiquated thing you only saw "back in the day".

  1. Whatever is being said about it being offered only at "the most prestigious universities" is somewhat false. It wasn´t the universities, but rather the fraternities doing their own thing. Since fraternities have a long history in germany, they were already present in every university city, and thus you could do fencing everywhere. The notion of them becoming "leaders" most of the time is not wrong, but the reason for that was because having a university degree before the first world war practically guaranteed you a good position.

  2. The notion of fencers going out to deliberately get scars is plain wrong. If you got a scar, that means you were a bad fencer. I don´t understand why this myth prevails until today.

4) Most importantly, Mensur has absolutely nothing to do with Nazis. Fraternities were in fact entirely prohibited because they all had a democratic principle, and the Mensur in particular was forbidden because in their view, getting scarred was "Wehrkraftzersetzung".

  1. The reason for the lack of headgear was not because "getting a scar was desirable", but because the Mensur is a test of bravery among students to stand up for himself and his fraternity, and if need be, bleed.

  2. A Mensur does not go on until one capitulates or is completely cut up. Depending on the Fechtcomment, it goes on for 25-40 rounds with about 5 strikes for each combatant. This means that more often than not, noone would have been struck so as to leave a scar. The reason why it still happened sometimes was, as mentioned, either because of bad technique, or because the combatant has done many duels, often exceeding the minimum amount prescribed by his fraternity.

  3. "It became known as the 'Nazi Dueling Scar'" No it didn't.

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It is true that some Nazis had dueling scars, but they got them before the Nazis took power in 1933 and forbade student unions.

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AnaphoricReference t1_j0uqj02 wrote

Reply to comment by SteampunkDesperado in "Imperialism" Before ~16th century? by ImperatorScientia

The irony is that the notion of "Age of Imperialism" is part of a very Eurocentric storyline. It is when a handful of Western European countries started behaving like traditional land-grabbing empires of old for a brief period.

It is a fitting storyline for a British or French school system, explaining their history in broad strokes from their own perspective, but one would expect haters of Western Civilization to be less uncritically Eurocentric if they actually aimed for a more balanced understanding of world history.

Europeans did not invent "Imperialism" in any meaningful sense. They just repurposed a Latin word that sort of described an important dynamic in a historical period of their own country well.

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