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dedalvs · 1 year ago

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Hi!

Just came to ask on an issue I've ran into regarding neography.

People in my circle of conlangers/worldbuilders/neographists say that what I do isn't right and is not to be considered neography - here's what I did:

I made over 500 neographies made since the creation of my Reddit account last year, all documented on @thecrazyneographist

And while some of them are seen as cool and all, most are trash bullshit I throw at the wall waiting for something to stick. I literally have diamonds laying under heaps of crap.

I love neographying, this is out of question. But I, despite making a couple WIPs, cannot make a conlang for every script aesthetic I come up with, thus, 90% of my works are just English ciphers (and a devastating part of them are alphabets).

Question:

Am I a valid neographist if most of my creations are nothing more than "children-level ciphers" for English, or not? No matter the answer I will continue making them because that's what I like to do.

Thanks in advance.

Hey, sorry I didn't respond to this sooner, but there are a lot of issues in here, and I wanted to tease them apart, so I can be quite clear on each one.

First, "I am a valid x", where x refers to some sort of artist, is always kind of a sad question to me, because those who ask it are undoubtedly asking it as a result of one kind of gatekeeping or another. For example, fanfic authors who ask "Am I real writer?" are undoubtedly asking it because someone (or several someones) have told them that they're not because all they write is fanfic. There are often a set of assumptions that come with the definition of a given art, such that the belief is if you haven't fulfilled certain criteria, you can't claim to be an artist in that field. For me, I think the definition is rather simpler.

In any artistic field, you qualify as that type of artist if you attempt that type of art. Notice I didn't say finish. This is especially clear for conlangs, as no conlang is finished. If the criteria for being a conlanger is having one finished conlang then there are no conlangers, and there never have been. There's no such thing as a finished conlang. There is such a thing as a finished painting, though, but I don't think you have to have finished a painting to be a painter. You need to be working at, but you don't need to have finished anything.

This doesn't mean that anyone is an anything. For example, to be a novelist, you have to be in the process of writing at least one novel. If all you've ever written is short stories, you're not a novelist. You are a writer, though.

For a neographer (or orthographer or conscriptor or whatever term is in vogue), all you have to do is attempt to create one conscript. That is the only criterion that needs to be satisfied. You've done that in spades, so you are a valid neographer.

Now, when it comes to an invented script, there are a number of elements involved—or that may be involved. They are as follows:

A unique set of glyphs (i.e. letterforms that are crucially different from any other glyphs in any other script—at least partially).

A unique flow (i.e how the glyphs look when lined up to make wordforms).

A specific instantiation or presentation (e.g. the Roman script has a unique set of glyphs and a unique flow, but in presenting a script, Copperlate looks different from Arial, Times, Palatino, Verdana, etc. Each one is a specific presentation or font face or style).

A unique assignment to a set of sounds and/or words/concepts.

Each of these involve artistic decisions, and they all can be assigned different levels of importance/interest. The fourth bullet above seems to be where unhelpful people in your circle are complaining. That is, one thing to do with a script is assign it to, say, the English version of the Roman alphabet. This is a cipher. Here's an example that's used on the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland:

Let's evaluate this based on the criteria above:

There are a unique set of glyphs—kind of. However, if you kind of stand back and evaluate, you'll see that in fact, every letter is a stylized variant of a letter in the Roman alphabet—with, perhaps, the slight exception of I, which looks like a stylized eye (because this is for Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye. It's a theme). So, actually, it's not super unique. Additionally, making each vowel glyph red is rather silly.

When written together, the script has a unique flow, but that flow is actually pretty poor. It's a bit like writing in all caps in English, but even all caps Roman has a better balance than this script. It's honestly kind of tiresome looking at this script on the wall. For an alphabet, the characters aren't distinct enough, so it gets poor marks there.

The style of the swooshes/wedges/talons is nice, for the most part (I and U cause me to raise an eyebrow—O, too). The distinction between the very short wedges (as in A, B, and N) and the dots (as in J, L, and M), and the few characters with an even smaller dot (E, X, S, and Y) is, frankly, baffling. Additionally, sometimes the wedges are balanced nicely (A and N are great examples), and sometimes they're way too close (cf. B and Z). While the line work is clean, this honestly even the best version of this style of this script, which is unfortunate, to say the least.

This is a straight-up English cipher. That can only be evaluated based on the goals of the script designer. If the script creator is doing it for fun, then there's nothing to say. That's their choice. If this were done for an Indiana Jones movie or television show, I'd cry foul (cf. Star Wars and their incredibly lazy work). However, this is for a ride. The intended level of interaction for this script is for fans who are standing in line anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours, depending on the time of year and time of day. There are actual messages written in this writing system that fans are supposed to decode. Given the time allotted, I think a cipher—and, in fact, a cipher that can be somewhat easily deciphered—was the right way to go. It's either do a cipher so park goers can actually read the messages without working at it beforehand and have some fun as they're waiting in line, or go all-out stylewise with the expectation that NO rider will ever figure out what's been written.

That's how a script needs to be evaluated. Sometimes purpose overrides style; sometimes not. It totally depends.

It SHOULD go without saying that if you're doing this for your own purposes, then no one can say shit about its intended purpose, or lack thereof. I always thought that in fora like r/neography posters share their script for the look of it, unless they say otherwise. There's both positives and negatives to that. Sometimes the way a script is used makes it cool, so presented without that background renders the script a bit less interesting, but other times, as with your scripts, it should be rather freeing. That is, it doesn't matter if the script is a cipher, is for a conlang, or is asemic: The question is, does it look good? If it does, it shouldn't matter what the hell it's for.

I've looked at your scriptwork here, and I've also seen it on r/neography before. Yes, some of it's a little sloppy, some of it's a little basic (i.e. variation on a theme without thought to how the system as a whole hangs together), and the presentation of some of it could use polishing, but a lot of it is quite interesting, quite striking, and presented quite well. Given the volume of work you've done, it's not surprising that some of it isn't as interesting, but by percentage, your work, on the whole, is outstanding. I honestly never noticed they were ciphers because it's, frankly, totally irrelevant. It'd be like going to an art exhibition and complaining that the titles of all the paintings start with the letter s. lol Like who gives af. That level of criticism is uncalled for and plain silly. Unless someone posts and says, "What do you think about this writing system that I created for a conlang?", I don't see the relevance of commenting on how the script ties to a phonology.

I would also like to take a moment to comment specifically on r/neography. I've frequented there for some time now, and I've seen a lot of good work, but the percentage of good work to bad work (or even relevant work) is extremely low. This is why I say so:

My biggest complaint is there are a metric ton of posts that are Romanization systems or Cyrillicization systems or the like. There is absolutely nothing ne about that ography. I joined that subreddit to see some NEW scripts, not already existing ones assigned to some phonology. There can be interesting discussions about that, sure, and I'm happy to see those types of discussions if I go to a forum specifically for those discussions. A place that purports to be about creating new scripts is not that place—period. If I were a mod, I would ban all of those posts as wholly irrelevant—and yet it is the majority of posts there on any given day.

The presentation of scripts is often abysmal. I mean ABYSMAL. For example, take an English-speaking preschooler writing their name. That's an example of the Roman script. Now imagine presenting that—and only that—as an example of the Roman script, which the viewer has never seen before. What would you say about that? I mean, it looks like garbage. You can't evaluate a writing system if it looks like it's written with one's offhand on a crowded train. And yet that is precisely the type of work that is OFTEN presented there. How can anyone expect to have their script evaluated if the way they present it makes it look like someone tried to handwrite "happy birthday" on a card but started too close to the edge? It's embarrassing—or should be, anyway. I couldn't imagine presenting my own work like that to anyone for critique or showcasing.

The scriptwork itself is often poor. Honestly, there's nothing much to say about this. I rarely comment there, because sometimes the most helpful comment I can think of is, "Maybe creating conscripts isn't for you", which is not a comment worth sharing. Part of it is talent, but part of it is patience and knowing (a) what makes a good glyph, and (b) what makes a good flow for your glyphs. A lot of it is subjective, but "subjective" means that there will be some scripts that 90% of viewers will think is subjectively good; some that 60% will think is "good"; some 20%... So even though it's subjective, it doesn't mean that every single script is equal. There's a lot of room for improvement.

Because of the above, the kind of feedback you get at a place like r/neography is, frankly, suspect, and often not worth the effort it took to type. For my own stuff, I respect the opinions of people whose work I respect. If I don't respect someone's script work, their criticism is worthless. For your own work, I'd recommend you adopt a similar approach.

Finally, I'd like to applaud you for the very last thing you wrote—that you were set to continue whatever I wrote. Because if you enjoy it, you should keep at it. There's no other reason to do it.

Thanks for the ask, and keep it up!

#ageblue #conlang #language #neography #orthography #conscript #thecrazyneographist

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tricksterontheweb · 6 months ago

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Constellation: Cygnus, the Goose Bayer, Johann (1572-1625)

Publication date 1655

51 unfolded engraved plates of celestial constellations by Alexander Mair. The very rare fourth edition of Bayer's Uranometria (first published in 1603), the first atlas to cover the entire celestial sphere, in fifty-one star charts, including one containing twelve new constellations unknown to Ptolemy. The illustrations are based on Jacob de Gheyn's designs for the Grotius edition of Aratus, published in Leiden in 1600. Johann Bayer (1572-1625) practised as a lawyer in Augsburg, but his principal interest was in the rapidly developing field of astronomy. His most important innovation was a new system of identifying all stars (prior to the invention of the telescope) by Greek and Roman letters, known today as the Bayer designation. The 1655 edition is much rarer than the 1661 edition" (Milestones of Science Books). "Bayer's was the first accurate star atlas. Earlier star catalogues followed Ptolemy's Almagest in using verbal descriptions to describe the location of stars within the 48 northern constellations of classical astronomy, an awkward system that occasioned constant errors and misapprehensions. Bayer, a lawyer and amateur astronomer, was the first to identify the location of stars within a constellation by the use of Greek letters (with the addition of the Latin alphabet for constellations with more than 24 stars). This simple innovation greatly facilitated the identification of stars with the naked eye, just five or six years before the invention of the telescope, and Bayer's stellar nomenclature is still in use today. Bayer used Brahe's recent observations for the northern sky, and included, in chart 49, twelve new southern constellations observed by the Dutch navigator Pieter Dirckzoon Keyzer and reported by Pedro de Medina. To simplify identification of the stars Bayer included in his typographic descriptions both the traditional star numerations within each constellation and the many names for the constellations employed since Ptolemy (Christies). The Uranometria was reprinted in 1639, 1648, 1655 (this copy) and 1661. Constellations largely identified by cataloger.

Deborah Warner, The sky explored: celestial cartography 1500-1800 pp. 18-19

Found in the David Rumsey Map Collection

#astronomy #astro observations #illustration #stars #star map #map #johann bayer #celestial #david rumsey #archive

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mysterious-cuchulainn-x · 2 years ago

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I love the idea of Varric as a playwright, but it's worth noting that without the printing press, his work probably still doesn't get very far very fast. And I do love that book-stabbing scene (although not as much as I hate damaging books).

So.

Historically, the Roman alphabet printing press was invented in 15th-century Germany. Since the Free Marches feel, to me, vaguely Hanseatic, this raises an interesting possibility: that the Theodosian printing press was actually invented not in Orlais (where there are plenty of Chantry scholars and Tranquil mages to copy manuscripts, and the peasants don't need to be literate (perhaps that's another cultural difference with Ferelden?)) but in the Free Marches, around the time of the Fifth Blight.

Varric, after all, isn't a writer, at least not a famed one, when we meet him (or else my memory is awful). He's a dissatisfied second son of a merchant family with a flair for the dramatic and a talent for storytelling: exactly the sort of person—to the extent that there is one type of person—who would jump at the chance to get his adventure tales (and terrible smut) to as many people as possible, and would possess the means to contract the owner of such a device to print those stories.

Initially, it's the sort of thing that has to be kept somewhat under the table: the Chantry is powerful, especially in Kirkwall, and mass dissemination of tawdry material would not be looked on fondly. But Varric is a master, his audience grows... and then Kirkwall finally explodes, and within the year half of Thedas "knows exactly what happened" because they read it in The Tale of the Champion.

(No wonder Cassandra, in her pursuit of international conspiracy, stabbed that book.)

Of course, this doesn't quite explain the existence of The Randy Dowager, but if Varric can gain international recognition within a decade of the invention of the printing press, Val Royeaux can probably develop an underground smut review for the nobility in the same period.

#dragon age meta #varric tethras #fantasy print culture

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gaykarstaagforever · 2 years ago

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So Putin is old and bored and decides to make himself a sexy Russian autocratic in the traditional Russian way, randomly committing human rights abuses in Ukraine. So far so typical, the Russians terrorizing Ukrainians for no good reason is so standard issue historically that them doing it now is met with little more than frustrated whining from the rich lawyers democracy has embarrassingly put in charge of the West.

But here is the especially weird part. This is the symbol adopted by the racist thug-bullies supporting that Little Bitch Putin®'s evil invasion and war (which has cost 200,000 Russian lives, and they are losing):

This is a letter Z, in the style of a traditional Russian military St. George ribbon.

Here's the thing. The Russians use the Cyrillic alphabet. It doesn't have a Z. Or, it does, but it doesn't look like that. So they are using a Z from the Roman alphabet. That we use in the West.

A big part of Little Bitch Putin®'s justification for this war is, trust me on this, that Ukraine is ruled by evil invisible Nazis that created Covid-19, a virus they invented to specifically destroy traditional patriarchal society so that everyone automatically becomes atheist and gay, like in the Western world. Also, there is a bunch of weird Slavic-supremacist mystical religious stuff mixed in here too. Which is especially odd, since the Ukrainians are also Slavs, and belong to the same church. And also, that virus started in China and has ruined the whole world...especially China.

It's almost like this is a bunch of nonsense desperately made up by a monster to try and justify his evil behavior to people whose taxes pay his secret salary.

The point is, in Little Bitch Putin®'s version of reality, the West is a drag show teaching evolution to children so hard that all Russian penises will shrivel up and fall off, and the only solution is blowing up Ukrainian schools with missiles. And his chosen symbol is this:

A letter from the Western alphabet. That Russia doesn't use.

In the colors of the Ribbon of St. George. This is, truthfully, a traditional military honor in Russia, dating from a long time ago.

Namely, the 18th century. When Russia was ruled by 1) not a Slavic patriarch, but by a woman. And 2), that woman was Catherine II or Catherine the Great. A GERMAN PRINCESS.

The yellow-orange and black colors are the traditional colors of her royal family. Her royal GERMAN family.

If you don't know, when Russia complains about "the West," they mean America now. Doesn't everyone?, and with good reason. BUT. Before like WWI, when Russia hated "the West," they meant Germany. Russia and Germany have, in various forms and across various times, been feudin' mount'in holler clans for a very long time. For proof, look at what Russia did to East Germany after WWII. Russia HATES Germany.

In fact, that is why Little Bitch Putin® always calls the invisible evil Ukrainians "Nazis". He's invoking the traditional Russian-to-German hate.

And this is his symbol:

A Western letter Russians don't use, in the colors of a German royal family.

My goodness, Vladimir. You really are a stupid little bitch.

#z #putin #russian war on ukraine #special military operation #fuck putin #fuck russia #Little Bitch Putin®

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el-smacko · 9 months ago

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I know this isn’t the point but I love this shit

In Latin you have mater, pater, frater, but “sister” (-ter again) is soror, while in Greek ματήρ (matēr), πατήρ (patēr), and θυγάτηρ (thygatēr) for “daughter” but φράτηρ (phratēr) was exclusively used for the member of a φράτρα (phratra), which most generally means “faction” (clan or party) rather than “family,” while ἀδελφός/ἀδελφή (adelphos/adelphē) was used for “brother/sister.” The latter is fun because it’s literally ἁ- (ha-*, equivalent of Latin sim-, “same”) + δελφύς (delphys), “womb,” and the grammatically neutral and diminutive ἀδελφίδιον meant “little/dear sibling,” similar to how the neutral German Mädchen, “girl,” is the diminutive of Magd, “maid.” We call them dolphins from δελφίς (delphis), because their heads with a blowhole like a belly-button look like swollen tummies. This is also the likely source of Δελφοί (Delphoi), “Delphi,” because it was considered the ὀμφαλός (omphalos), “navel,” ie “center,” of the world, a distinction later given to Rome, Rome 2: Constantine’s Revenge, and Jerusalem, specifically the Holy of Holies on the Temple Mount in rabbinical literature, the cornerstone of the creation of the earth. Oh and another fun acronym is PAKiSTan: Pakistan, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, BaluchisTan.

*Having lost the rough breathing, ( ̔)/h-, by psilosis, “smoothing,” while the smooth breathing mark, ( ̓), was called ψιλή (psilē). We find this in the names epsilon and upsilon, although the latter’s ability to be aspirated suggests that the distinction indicated by -psilon was between vocalic and consonantal: eta (Η/η) was originally the rough breathing (“heta”), as we use the letter h now, rather than the ē of later Greek, and the digamma (Ϝ/ϝ; its name is from looking like stacked gammas, Γ) stood for /w/, the consonantal form of upsilon (Υ/υ). This is owing to the alphabet’s origin in Phoenician, which had 𐤇 (ḥēt, Hebrew ח) and 𐤄 (hē, Hebrew ה), the latter a “mater lectionis,” that is, a consonant (h, distinct from the harder ḥ, which is often ch in later Hebrew) that may be a vowel, often “ah” at the end of words; meanwhile another Phoenician mater lectionis, 𐤅 (waw, Hebrew ו), became upsilon but in some places also digamma. When the Etruscans adapted the Greek alphabet for their non-Indo-European language, they used 𐌇𐌅 to approximate /f/ before using 𐌚. Presently, the latter sign is considered an Etruscan invention and we understand 𐌅 as /w/ according to the Greek digamma. However, it seems rather likely to me that 𐌚 is a form of beta, Β/β, which was free for the unique but related Etruscan /f/ sound because they did not have /b/. 𐌇𐌅 points to 𐌅 being closer to /v/ than /w/, since 𐌚 was a modified 𐌅, that is, f is like an aspirated v. Latin, whose Roman alphabet was adapted from the Etruscans and the Greeks, had a /b/ and used beta accordingly, but would use V for both upsilon and digamma, so F was free for /f/, like it still is used today.

one of those false etymology posts but with the actual etymology of the word

#linguistics #latin #ancient greek #etruscan

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govindhtech · 10 months ago

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Brief Cryptography history: Sending secret messages

Cryptography, from the Greek words for “hidden writing,” encrypts data so only the intended recipient can read it. Most major civilizations have sent secret messages since antiquity. Cryptography history is essential to cybersecurity today. Cryptography protects personal messages, digital signatures, online shopping payment information, and top-secret government data and communications.

Despite its thousands-year history, cryptography and cryptanalysis have advanced greatly in the last 100 years. Along with modern computing in the 19th century, the digital age brought modern cryptography. Mathematicians, computer scientists, and cryptographers developed modern cryptographic techniques and cryptosystems to protect critical user data from hackers, cybercriminals, and prying eyes to establish digital trust.

Most cryptosystems start with plaintext, which is encrypted into ciphertext using one or more encryption keys. The recipient receives this ciphertext. If the ciphertext is intercepted and the encryption algorithm is strong, unauthorized eavesdroppers cannot break the code. The intended recipient can easily decipher the text with the correct decryption key.

Cryptography history and evolution are covered in this article.

Early cryptography dates back to 1900 BC, when non-standard hieroglyphs were carved into a tomb wall in the Old Kingdom of Egypt.

1500 BC: Mesopotamian clay tablets contained enciphered ceramic glaze recipes, or trade secrets.

Spartans used an early transposition cipher to scramble letter orders in military communications in 650 BC. The process involves writing a message on leather wrapped around a hexagonal wooden scytale. When the strip is wound around a correctly sized scytale, the letters form a coherent message; when unwound, it becomes ciphertext. A private key in the scytale system is its size.

100-44 BC: Julius Caesar is credited with using the Caesar Cipher, a substitution cipher that replaces each letter of the plaintext with a different letter by moving a set number of letters forward or backward in the Latin alphabet, to secure Roman army communications. The private key in this symmetric key cryptosystem is the letter transposition steps and direction.

In 800, Arab mathematician Al-Kindi introduced the frequency analysis technique for cipher breaking, a significant advancement in cryptanalysis. Frequency analysis reverse engineer’s private decryption keys using linguistic data like letter frequencies, letter pairings, parts of speech, and sentence construction.

Brute-force attacks, in which codebreakers try many keys to decrypt messages, can be accelerated by frequency analysis. Single-alphabet substitution ciphers are vulnerable to frequency analysis, especially if the private key is short and weak. Al-Kandi also wrote about polyalphabetic cipher cryptanalysis, which replace plaintext with ciphertext from multiple alphabets for security that is less susceptible to frequency analysis.

1467: Leon Battista Alberti, the father of modern cryptography, most clearly explored polyphonic cryptosystems, the middle age’s strongest encryption.

1500: The Vigenère Cipher, published by Giovan Battista Bellaso but misattributed to French cryptologist Blaise de Vigenère, is the 16th century’s most famous polyphonic cipher. Vigenère invented a stronger autokey cipher in 1586, but not the Vigenère Cipher.

In 1913, World War I accelerated the use of cryptography for military communications and cryptanalysis for codebreaking. The Royal Navy won crucial battles after English cryptologists deciphered German telegram codes.

1917: American Edward Hebern invented the first cryptography rotor machine, which automatically scrambled messages using electrical circuitry and typewriter parts. Simply typing a plaintext message into a typewriter would automatically generate a substitution cipher, replacing each letter with a randomized new letter to produce ciphertext. To decipher the ciphertext, manually reverse the circuit rotor and type it back into the Hebern Rotor Machine to produce the plaintext.

1918: German cryptologist Arthur Scherbius invented the Enigma Machine, an advanced version of Hebern’s rotor machine that used rotor circuits to encode and decode plaintext. Before and during WWII, the Germans used the Enigma Machine for top-secret cryptography. Like Hebern’s Rotor Machine, decoding an Enigma message required advanced sharing of machine calibration settings and private keys, which were vulnerable to espionage and led to the Enigma’s downfall.

1939–45: Polish codebreakers fled Poland and joined many famous British mathematicians, including Alan Turing, to crack the German Enigma cryptosystem, a crucial victory for the Allies. Turing founded much of algorithmic computation theory.

1975: IBM block cipher researchers created the Data Encryption Standard (DES), the first cryptosystem certified by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (then the National Bureau of Standards) for US government use. The DES was strong enough to defeat even the strongest 1970s computers, but its short key length makes it insecure for modern applications. Its architecture advanced cryptography.

1976: Whitfield Hellman and Martin Diffie invented the Diffie-Hellman key exchange method for cryptographic key sharing. This enabled asymmetric key encryption. By eliminating the need for a shared private key, public key cryptography algorithms provide even greater privacy. Each user in public key cryptosystems has a private secret key that works with a shared public for security.

1977: Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman introduce the RSA public key cryptosystem, one of the oldest data encryption methods still used today. RSA public keys are created by multiplying large prime numbers, which even the most powerful computers cannot factor without knowing the private key.

2001: The DES was replaced by the more powerful AES encryption algorithm due to computing power improvements. AES is a symmetric cryptosystem like DES, but it uses a longer encryption key that modern hardware cannot crack.

Quantum, post-quantum, and future encryption

Cryptography evolves with technology and more sophisticated cyberattacks. Quantum cryptography, also known as quantum encryption, uses quantum mechanics’ naturally occurring and immutable laws to securely encrypt and transmit data for cybersecurity. Quantum encryption, though still developing, could be unhackable and more secure than previous cryptographic algorithms.

Post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) algorithms use mathematical cryptography to create quantum computer-proof encryption, unlike quantum cryptography, which uses natural laws of physics.

Post-quantum cryptography (also called quantum-resistant or quantum-safe) aims to “develop cryptographic systems that are secure against both quantum and classical computers, and can interoperate with existing communications protocols and networks,” according to NIST.

IBM cryptography helps businesses protect critical data

IBM cryptography solutions ensure crypto agility, quantum safety, governance, and risk compliance with technologies, consulting, systems integration, and managed security services. Asymmetric and symmetric cryptography, hash functions, and more ensure data and mainframe security with end-to-end encryption tailored to your business needs.

Read more on Govindhtech.com

#Cryptographyhistory #Cryptography #postQuantum #Quantum #IBM #IBMcryptography #technews #technology #govindhtech

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kamreadsandrecs · 1 year ago

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In 1941 an ambitious Philadelphia pediatrician, the wonderfully named Waldo Emerson Nelson, became the editor of America’s leading textbook of pediatrics. For the next half-century the compilation of successive editions of this large volume advanced his career, consumed his weekends, and encroached heavily on his domestic life. Every few years, when a new edition was being prepared for the press, he would dragoon his family into assembling the index for him. He would read through the proofs of all 1,500 or so pages, calling out the words and concepts to be listed, while his wife, Marge, and their three children—Jane, Ann, and Bill—wrote down on index cards the thousands of entries and their corresponding page numbers.

Though Nelson was a brilliant physician, even his most admiring colleagues were struck by his “austere and stern” appearance, his “façade of gruffness,” his “granite conviction of right and wrong.” “Whenever I talk to my residents,” he once proudly recounted about his treatment of junior doctors, “they never know whether to laugh or cry. That’s the way I like it.” So it’s not surprising to find that when his teenage children complained about their indexing duties, he responded by printing the following dedication at the front of the 1950 edition of what became known as the Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics:

Recognizing that children, like adults, prosper under the stimulus and responsibility of a task to be done, WE ACKNOWLEDGE the contribution that this book has made to JANE, ANN, AND BILL in providing them such privileges, and the satisfaction in family living which has come from group activity

Nowadays we take for granted that any kind of learned book should be indexed, however tedious the labor. So valuable is this tool, so central to our ways of thinking about and using information, that in the case of multivolume scholarly editions of texts, it’s not uncommon for the index itself to constitute an entire book. Yet in the classical world the concept of such a search aid was unknown. To Cicero, an “index” meant a label affixed to a scroll that indicated its contents, rather like the printed spine or dust jacket of a modern volume on a bookshelf. As Dennis Duncan notes in his clever, sprightly Index, A History of the, the rise of the index in its current form is a story of many interrelated developments, each with its own contingencies and chronology: the replacement of scrolls by the codex, the triumph of alphabetical order, the rise of new pedagogies and genres of learning, the invention of print, the adoption of the page number, and the constantly changing character of reading itself.*

Take alphabetical order. Even though the consonantal alphabet had been around since the early second millenium BCE, the earliest known examples of its application as an organizing principle date only from about the third century BCE. The now lost 120-scroll catalog of the Library of Alexandria listed authors partly in alphabetical order. That the ancient Greeks were fond of using it is evident in everything from their fishmongers’ price lists to records of taxpayers and monuments to playwrights (the background panel of one surviving marble statuette of Euripides lists the titles of his plays from alpha to omega).

Yet after them the Romans largely disdained the alphabetical principle as arbitrary and illogical, and so did Europeans throughout the Middle Ages. Books about words—like lexicons, grammars, and glosses—employed it, but it was not a widely understood rule. As late as 1604 the first printed dictionary of English, Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall, was obliged to begin by explaining that its readers should attend to

the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand…and where euery Letter standeth: as (b) neere the beginning, (n) about the middest, and (t) toward the end. Nowe if the word, which thou art desirous to finde, begin with (a) then looke in the beginning of this Table, but if with (v) looke towards the end. Againe, if thy word beginne with (ca) looke in the beginning of the letter (c) but if with (cu) then looke toward the end of that letter.

The term “index” didn’t come to be used in its current sense in English until quite recently. There’s no entry for it in Cawdrey, while Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) defined it as “the table of contents to a book.” For centuries words like “table,” “register,” and “rubric” were used interchangeably for what we now call indexes and contents pages: only very gradually, over the past two hundred years or so, have the two forms come to be regarded as essentially distinct. (The related Anglophone convention that indexes appear at the back of books and contents pages at the front seems to have been part of a similar, relatively recent process of separating them.) Nonetheless, names aside, the alphabetical index as a type of textual technology turns out to be much older than that.

There are two basic types, which in modern books are usually combined into a single list. One type collates words, the other concepts. The former is a concordance, the latter a subject index. The first is the kind of literal, specific listing of entries that you can get your computer to produce by using CTRL+F for any word or phrase in a text; the second is the product of a more subjective, humanistic attempt to capture the meanings and resonances of a work. Duncan, understandably, is mainly interested in the evolution of the latter type—even though, because of the rise of the word-based online search engine, we now find ourselves living in a golden age of the concordance. But the two forms need to be treated together, he argues, because both were invented at the same time and place: in northwestern Europe, in or around 1230.

The index was, in fact, part of an entire range of organizational and reading tools that were conceived in the thirteenth century. (Others included the division of the Bible into standard chapters and the genre of distinctiones, a new kind of search aid for preachers that helpfully grouped together biblical extracts on the same subject.) Two social developments at this time created a novel demand for information to be organized in rapidly accessible ways: the foundation of the first European universities and the rise of the new orders of mendicant friars, with their stress on the frequent and engaging preaching of God’s word. In Oxford the scholar and cleric Robert Grosseteste (so named, it was said, because of his gigantic brain) compiled an enormous subject index to the whole of the world’s knowledge, to aid him and his students in navigating it all. His Tabula, of which only a fragment survives, encompassed the entirety of the Bible, the writings of the Church Fathers, the works of classical authors like Aristotle and Ptolemy, and Islamic authorities including Avicenna and al-Ghazālī.

Meanwhile, in Paris, the Dominican Hugh of Saint-Cher (soon to become the first person ever to be painted wearing reading glasses) oversaw the compilation of an even more stupendous alphabetical word index. This was the first concordance to the Bible, listing over 10,000 of its keywords with all their locations, from the exclamation “A, a, a” (now usually translated as “ah!”) all the way to “Zorobabel,” the sixth-century-BCE governor of Judea.

Soon enough, medieval readers were making their own indexes to volumes they owned. The invention of printing brought further refinements. Page numbers had already been used to number the leaves of individual manuscripts, but the uniformity of printed books gave them a different utility, as a means of referring to the same place across different copies of the same work. It took time for this idea to catch on. The first printed page number was not produced until 1470; even by 1500 only a small minority of books had adopted the practice. Instead, early printed indexes referred to textual locations or to the signature marks at the bottom of pages (“Aa,” “b2,” and the like), which printers and binders used to keep their finished sheets in the correct order. But in the course of the sixteenth century, use of the page number spread, alongside the creation of increasingly sophisticated indexes by scholarly authors.

As early as 1532, Erasmus published an entire book in the form of an index because, he quipped, these days “many people read only them.” A few years later his colleague Conrad Gessner, one of the greatest indexers of his day, rhapsodized about how this new search tool was transforming scholarship:

They are the greatest convenience to scholars, second only to the truly divine invention of printing books by movable type…. Truly it seems to me that, life being so short, indexes to books should be considered as absolutely necessary by those who are engaged in a variety of studies.

Like every widely observed change in reading and learning habits before and since (the invention of writing, the launch of Internet search engines, the spawning of ChatGPT), the spread of the index was accompanied by anxiety that flighty, superficial modes of accessing information were supplanting “proper” habits of reading and understanding. In the sixteenth century Galileo complained that scientists seeking “a knowledge of natural effects, do not betake themselves to ships or crossbows or cannons, but retire into their studies and glance through an index or a table of contents.” To “pretend to understand a Book, by scouting thro’ the Index,” jibed Jonathan Swift in 1704, was the same “as if a Traveller should go about to describe a Palace, when he had seen nothing but the Privy.” Yet as Duncan wisely points out, our intellectual habits are always changing, and for good reason. Every social and technological shift affects how we read—and we also all read in many different ways. Twitter, novels, text messages, newspapers: each demands a different kind of attention. The older we get, the more invested we are in modes of reading that we’re familiar with and the more suspicious of technologies that seem prone to disrupt them.

The eighteenth century produced a great efflorescence of indexing novelties, jokes, and experiments, which Index, A History of the has great fun cataloging. For a while it seemed as if indexes might become part of almost every genre of writing, including epic poetry, drama, and novels; the inclusion of an index had become a literary status symbol, a sign that a text was prestigious or that a book had been lavishly produced. Alexander Pope’s multivolume, best-selling translation of the Iliad, which earned him a fortune,included several grand, exhaustive, and intricate tables and indexes (including one listing the emotions in Homer’s work, all the way from “Anxiety” to “Tenderness”).

In the 1750s Samuel Richardson produced an eighty-five-page index to his enormous novel Clarissa. (It included its own index to the index.) This wasn’t really a reference for the main text, but more like a summary of the moral lessons contained in the original, seven-volume, million-word monster of a book. He called it “a table of sentiments” or (to give it its full title) “A Collection of such of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Cautions, Aphorisms, Reflections, and Observations, contained in the History of Clarissa, as are presumed to be of General Use and Services, digested under Proper Heads,” and toyed with the idea of publishing it separately as a work in its own right. But Richardson, who started out as a printer, was an outlier in his love of indexing (he also later produced a huge unified index to all three of his novels), and this proved to be a largely abortive branch of literary evolution. After all, names and facts are rather easier to index than thoughts and feelings.

Instead, by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the textual forms of fiction and nonfiction had grown increasingly distinct. The latter were ever more energetically and impressively indexed. In the 1850s Jacques Paul Migne’s monumental collection of the writings of the Church Fathers, in 217 volumes, was accompanied by an equally humongous four-volume index, which was produced by a team of more than fifty laboring for over a decade and was itself divided into no less than 231 parts. There were indexes by author, subject, title, date, country, rank (popes before cardinals, cardinals before archbishops, and so on), genre, and hundreds of other categories—including separate indexes to heaven and hell.

Toward the end of the century, librarians from around the world combined forces to produce a universal, international index of all the most important books and knowledge in existence—as well as, on a more modest but still extraordinary scale, the first global indexes to the flood of periodical publications. In modern fiction, on the other hand, indexing by this time largely appeared only as a literary conceit: a play on genre, fictionality, and facticity. Both Vladimir Nabokov and J.G. Ballard wrote stories that used the index form (in both of which the last entry, at the end of the Z’s, reveals a final twist of the plot).

Duncan is a brilliantly illuminating and wide-ranging guide across this richly varied terrain, though his cast of characters remains overwhelmingly male. He notes in passing that since the 1890s, with the emergence of secretarial agencies, indexers have been largely female, and that today they are overwhelmingly so—including the compiler of his own book’s fine index, Paula Clarke Bain. Unfortunately he doesn’t pursue the point. Yet the gendered, patriarchal hierarchy of labor through which twentieth-century scholarly indexes were commonly produced is fascinatingly evoked by the prefaces to countless books of the era.

In 1983, at the conclusion of his monumental eleven-volume edition of the diary of Samuel Pepys, the lead editor, Robert Latham, compiled what is often regarded as the finest index ever produced in English. Thirteen years earlier, the first volume in the series had appeared in harrowing circumstances: just as it was going to press, his wife, Eileen, to whom he had been married for thirty years, suddenly died. “The late Mrs Robert Latham read many of the proofs,” the anguished editor recorded at the end of his acknowledgments, in the standard, buttoned-up phraseology of midcentury male academic prose. “Beyond that, she gave help which can never be measured.”

By the time he composed the acknowledgments to the index volume, Latham had happily remarried, and the sexual revolution had passed even through Cambridge. His remarks now conjured a more relaxed, less overtly chauvinist world—as well as providing an appealing vignette of familial indexing in practice:

My wife Linnet has shared in the making of this Index. I laid down the ground plan, but she involved herself in every process of its construction. She read aloud the entire text of the diary while I took notes—discussing with me, as we went along, exactly what words might best introduce the successive groups of references, and thus converting what might have been a chore into a paper-game. At later stages she undertook innumerable investigations into detail, and checked from the text every reference in the typescript.

“As a joint enterprise with his wife’s energy and powers of organization, and with a text so entertaining,” he elaborated to the Society of Indexers,

the work in fact often spilled over into hilarity, becoming a game rather than a job. Indeed indexing itself may be seen as a word game, seeking the appropriate word for comprehensive headings or verbal formulas for a whole series of related subjects; Mrs Latham’s expertise in word games accounted for many of their solutions found.

Not every such marital collaboration around this time was as harmonious. In the mid-1970s the new lead author of America’s standard textbook on obstetrics, Jack Pritchard, asked his wife, Signe, to prepare the index for him. They had been married for thirty years. She was a nurse, a mother, and a feminist who had recently changed her title to “Ms.”; his textbook was suffused with attitudes toward women and their bodies that evidently infuriated her. When the index appeared, it turned out that she had included the line “Chauvinism, male, variable amounts, 1–923” (i.e., on every page of the book). Four years later, for the next edition, she improved this to “Chauvinism, male, voluminous amounts, 1–1102” and added, for good measure, another judgment on the whole enterprise: “Labor—of love, hardly a, 1–1102.”

Perhaps she had heard about the Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics.A few months after Ann Nelson’s father completed the sixth edition of his book, she went off to college. On graduating in 1954 she wed an aspiring lawyer, Richard E. Behrman. Before agreeing to marry him, he later recalled, “Ann made him promise never to ask her to help him write a textbook.” But within a few years, as the seventh edition neared completion, her domineering father demanded that Ann (now referred to as “Mrs. Richard E. Behrman”) and her siblings once more rally around to help him make its index. So she did—and paid him back by adding an entry of her own. Under “Birds, for the,” she listed the entire book, pages 1–1413. Never cross your indexer.

#history #nonfiction #libraries #books #reading

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kammartinez · 1 year ago

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“As a joint enterprise with his wife’s energy and powers of organization, and with a text so entertaining,” he elaborated to the Society of Indexers,

#nonfiction #history #libraries #books #reading

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itsideh · 2 years ago

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Reading 2

critical Media #522

In the early 1980s, there was a debate in the academic design journal Visible Language between Stanford Professor Donald Knuth, who wrote about his software MetaFont, and mathematician Douglas Hofstadter, who challenged Knuth's view that the shape of a letterform is mathematically containable. Hofstadter argued that the shape of a letterform cannot be contained and that type design should allow for change and adaptation. Geoffrey Sampson, a linguistics professor, later weighed in, saying letterforms can be both closed systems (Knuth's A-shape) and open systems (Hofstadter's A-ness).

The history of typography has been marked by a desire for rationalization, starting with the invention of movable type in the 15th century. In the 17th century, Louis XIV commissioned the "King's Roman" in Paris to apply Enlightenment rationality to technical ends. It was a mathematically rigorous structure imposed on organic forms. With Herbert Bayer's Universal Alphabet, a pared-down sans-serif made up of lower-case characters, the Bauhaus revived this approach. TheBauhaus Stencil Alphabet by Josef Albers was also created using similar principles. Futura, a commercially successful typeface, toned down the hard geometry of the Bauhaus fonts. The letterform of the age cannot be created by one person alone, according to Tschichold, a prominent figure in the "New Typography."

Stanley Morison was a British type designer who was asked by The Times, London's newspaper, to publish a 1,000-page ad in the 1930s. The paper's typography had to be redesigned by Morison. The result was Times New Roman, a typeface that was amalgamated from various historical typefacesHis role was similar to that of a producer, editor,or or arranger. The foundry Deberny & Peignot released Adrian Frutiger's Univers in 1957 as an extended family of fonts, with 21 fonts at any given size. Frutiger later added more variants, bringing the total to 63. Univers was charted in a two-dimensional matrix, with the potential to expand in any direction, and Frutiger has kept the project open since its inception.

Donald Knuth created MetaFont, a font generation system, as a companion to his typesetting system TeX. He aimed to enhance the appearance of text by adjusting the details of a font based on the output device and to meet the need for variety in typefaces. However, he emphasized that typefaces should be a medium rather than a message and that they should have a clear appearance while being subliminal in their effect. Knuth did not expect the widespread use of novelty as an end in itself.

Walter Benjamin, a German cultural critic, wrote about the relationship between technology and writing in his 1928 book "One Way Street" and his 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." He believed that the increasing intimacy between the writer and technology would result in the writer composing work with a typewriter rather than a pen, leading to a closer connection between content and form and a new evolution of writing. Benjamin was a Marxist who believed that the means of production should be owned by the people who operate them. In "The Author as Producer," he demanded that artists transform the root-level means by which their work is produced and distributed, rather than just adopting political content. He offered Sergei Tretiakov and Bertolt Brecht as examples of artists who implicated themselves in their work and transformed the functional relationships between their work and production.

The essay "A Noton Type"e" discusses the relationship between writing and production in the arts. The author argues that artists, including writers, should not be limited by norms, job descriptions, and expectations, but instead should freely explore different mediums and methods of expression. The author uses the thMeta-The-Difference-Between-The-Two-Fontsnt (MTDBT2F) project, which is a revised version of Donald Knuth's MetaFont project. In the author's view, the difference between MetaFont and MTDBT2F is not easily discernible, but is related to time and intellectual backstory. MTDBT2F is not only a tool for generating PostScript fonts, but also a tool for thinking around and about MetaFont. Boris Groys argues that the new is not just a difference, but a difference without a difference, or a difference not recognizable because of the lack of preexisting structural code.

The concept of "letter vs. spirit" can be traced back to the "Visible Language" debate and was keenly foreseen by Douglas Hofstadter, who believed that typefaces could inspire readers to reflect on the intelligence of alphabets. The idea is also related to Walter Benjamin's "The Author as Producer," where he called for writers to reflect on their role in the production process. Several design critics have updated this notion to reflect the digital age, when code has replaced heavy machinery and hand tools as "tools of production." To reflect the influence of digital technology on religious practices, Boris Groys also updates Benjamin's title in his essay "Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction." He argues that contemporary fundamentalism is grounded in the repetition of a fixed "letter" rather than a free "spirit," and this antinomy informs all Western discourse on religion.

This passage is discussing the evolution of media and how it affects the distribution of religious and philosophical ideas. The author argues that with the advent of digital media and the internet, the spread of idiosyncratic views has become easier. However, the author also argues that this has led to a lack of trust in the form of images and that meaning is no longer tethered to definite surfaces. The author proposes the creation of a shapeshifting typeface, called MTDBT2F4D, which would constantly move and change. Through cross-domain thinking, this would enable a more dynamic representation of ideas. An example of the "Hello World" script in a new programming language is used to illustrate the distinction between instructions and instances.

#ArtGr522

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loadsofplaces · 2 years ago

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South Korea

General Information South Korea is a country in East Asia. Korean history can be traced back to the ancient kingdom of Gojoseon, the name Korea comes from the Goryeo dynasty, which was founded in 918. 1392 to 1897 was the era of the Joseon dynasty. From 1910 to Japan’s World War II surrender in 1945, Korea was occupied by Japan. Following World War II, Korea was divided by the Allied forces, with South Korea (officially Republic of Korea) being aligned with the West. The Republic of Korea was officially established in 1948. In 1950, North Korea invaded the South. The Korean war was fought for 3 years until an armistice, while there has never been a formal peace agreement, making the war de jure ongoing. Democratization of South Korea started in the late 80s, with its first peaceful transfer of power taking place in 1988, after years of democracy activism. South Korea has 51 Million inhabitants, only few of them are not ethnic Koreans. Most South Koreans have no religion, but there’s also large numbers of Christians (around 20% Protestant, around 8% Roman Catholic) and Buddhists (around 15%). The capital is Seoul.

Korean/Hallyu Wave Since the 1990s, the South Korean government has been very active in supporting the countries’ creative industries in order to push the country’s brand and its soft power. Since then, Korean pop culture has grown very popular worldwide in areas such as K-Pop, K-Movies, K-Dramas, K-Food or K-Beauty, with its success being branded the Korean wave/Hallyu wave (Hallyu literally meaning “wave”). Hangul Koreans are very proud of their alphabet, Hangul. During the Joseon dynasty, King Sejong the Great invented Hangul. With only 24 letters perfectly matched to the sounds of the Korean language, Hangul was invented for increasing the literacy rate as the Classical Chinese writing system is difficult and time-consuming to learn, and not always the most fitting for the Korean language. Every year on October 9, Hangul Day is celebrated in South Korea. ~ Anastasia Economy The economy of South Korea is a highly developed mixed economy. By nominal GDP, it has the 4th largest economy in Asia and the 10th largest in the world. South Korea is notable for its rapid economic development from an underdeveloped nation to a developed, high-income country in a few generations. This economic growth has been described as the Miracle on the Han River, which has allowed it to join OECD and the G-20. South Korea still remains one of the fastest growing developed countries in the world, following the Great Recession. It is included in the group of Next Eleven countries as having the potential to play a dominant role in the global economy by the middle of the 21st century.

~ Damian

Sources: https://www.britannica.com/place/South-Korea https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/04/korea-culture-k-pop-music-film-tv-hallyu-v-and-a https://www.ivisitkorea.com/hangul-the-korean-alphabet/

#South #Korea #Hallyu #Wave #Hangul #Economy #Seoul #K #Pop

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aboutanancientenquiry · 2 years ago

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“Classics for the people – why we should all learn from the ancient Greeks

The dazzling thought-world of the Greeks gave us our ideas of democracy and happiness. Yet learning classics tends to be restricted to the privileged few. It’s time for ‘elitist dinosaurs’ to embrace a citizens’ classics for all

Lessons in liberty … ancient Greece produced ideas that have subsequently informed the most significant moments in western political history. Illustration by Romy Blumel for the Saturday Review

Edith Hall

Sat 20 Jun 2015 08.00 BST

Just how special were the ancient Greeks? Was there really a Greek “miracle”? The question has become painfully politicised. Critics of colonialism and racism tend to play down the specialness of the ancient Greeks. Those who maintain that there was something identifiably different and even superior about the Greeks, on the other hand, are often die-hard conservatives who have a vested interest in proving the superiority of “western” ideals. I fit into neither camp. I am certainly opposed to colonialism and racism, and have investigated reactionary abuses of the classical tradition in colonial India and by apologists of slavery all the way through to the American Civil War. But my constant engagement with the ancient Greeks and their culture has made me more, rather than less, convinced that they asked a series of crucial questions that are difficult to identify in combination within any of the other cultures of the ancient Mediterranean or Near Eastern antiquity. This is why, as I will go on to argue, I believe in classics for the people – that ideas from the ancient Greeks should be taught to everybody, not just the privileged few.

The foundations of Greek culture were laid long before the arrival of Christianity, between 800 and 300BC. Greek-speakers lived in hundreds of different villages, towns and cities, from Spain to Libya and the Nile Delta, from the freezing river Don in the northeastern corner of the Black Sea to Trebizond. They were culturally elastic, and often freely intermarried with other peoples; they had no sense of ethnic inequality that was biologically determined, since the concepts of distinct world “races” had not been invented. They tolerated and even welcomed imported foreign gods. And what united them was never geopolitics. With the arguable exception of the short-lived Macedonian empire in the later 4th century BC, there never was a recognisable, independent, state run by Greek-speakers, centred in and including what we now know as Greece, until after the Greek war of independence in the early 19th century.

What bound the Greeks together was an enquiring cast of mind underpinned by a wonderful shared set of stories and poems and a restlessness that made them more likely to sail away and found a new city-state than tolerate starvation or oppression in a mainland metropolis. The diasporic, seafaring Greeks, while they invented new communities from scratch and were stimulated by interacting with other ethnic groups, made a rapid series of intellectual discoveries that raised the Mediterranean world to a new level of civilisation. This process of self-education was much admired by the Greeks and Romans of the centuries that followed. When the texts and artworks of classical Greece were rediscovered in the European Renaissance, they changed the world for a second time.

The Education of Achilles by Chiron fresco from Herculaneum. Photograph: Leemage/Corbis

Yet over the last two decades the notion that the Greeks were exceptional has been questioned. It has been emphasised that they were just one of many ethnic and linguistic groups centred in the eastern end of the ancient Mediterranean world. Long before the Greeks appeared in the historical record, several complicated civilisations had existed – the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, the Hattians and Hittites. Other peoples provided the Greeks with crucial technological advances; they learned the phonetic alphabet from the Phoenicians, and how to mint coins from the Lydians. They may have learned how to compose elaborate cult hymns from the mysterious Luwians of Syria and central Anatolia. During the period in which the Greeks invented rational philosophy and science, after 600BC, their horizons were dramatically opened up by the expansion of the Persian empire.

In the late 19th and 20th centuries, our understanding of the other cultures of the Ancient Near East advanced rapidly. We know far more about the minds of the Greeks’ predecessors and neighbours than we did before the landmark discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh on clay tablets in the Tigris valley in 1853. There has been a stream of newly published texts in the languages of the successive peoples who dominated the fertile plains of Mesopotamia (Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians). The words of Hittites on the tablets found at Hattuša in central Turkey and the phrases inscribed on clay tablets at Ugarit in northern Syria have been deciphered. New texts as well as fresh interpretations of writings by the ancient Egyptians continue to appear, requiring, for example, a reassessment of the importance of the Nubians to North African history. Many of these thrilling advances have revealed how much the Greeks shared with, and absorbed from, their predecessors and neighbours. Painstaking comparative studies have been published which reveal the Greek “miracle” to have been one constituent of a continuous process of intercultural exchange.

Erechtheion, an ancient greek temple in Athens. Photograph: Alamy

It has become a new orthodoxy that the Greeks were very similar to their Ancient Near Eastern neighbours, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, Persia and Asia Minor. Some scholars have gone so far as to ask whether the Greeks came up with anything new at all, or whether they merely acted as a conduit through which the combined wisdom of all the civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean was disseminated across the territories conquered by Alexander the Great, before arriving at Rome and posterity. Others have seen sinister racist motives at work and accused classicists of creating in their own image the Oldest Dead White European Males; some have claimed, with some justification, that northern Europeans have systematically distorted and concealed the evidence showing how much the ancient Greeks owed to Semitic and African peoples rather than to Indo-European, “Aryan” traditions.

Taken singly, most Greek achievements can be paralleled in the culture of at least one of their neighbours. The Babylonians knew about Pythagoras’s theorem centuries before Pythagoras was born. The tribes of the Caucasus had brought mining and metallurgy to unprecedented levels. The Hittites had made advances in chariot technology, but they were also highly literate. They recorded the polished and emotive orations delivered on formal occasions in their royal court, and their carefully argued legal speeches. One Hittite king foreshadows Greek historiography when he chronicles in detail his frustration at the incompetence of some of his military officers during the siege of a Hurrian city. The Phoenicians were just as great seafarers as any Greeks. The Egyptians developed medicine based on empirical experience rather than religious dogma and told Odyssey-like stories about sailors who went missing and returned after adventures overseas. Pithy fables similar to those of Aesop were composed in an archaic Aramaic dialect of Syria and housed in Jewish temples. Architectural design concepts and technical know-how came from the Persians to the Greek world via the many Ionian Greek workmen who helped build Persepolis, Susa and Pasargadae, named Yauna in Persian texts. Nevertheless, none of these peoples produced anything equivalent to Athenian democracy, comic theatre, philosophical logic or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

I do not deny that the Greeks acted as a conduit for other ancient peoples’ achievements. But to function successfully as a conduit, channel or intermediary is in itself to perform an exceptional role. It requires a range of talents and resources. Taking over someone else’s technical knowledge requires an opportunistic ability to identify a serendipitous find or encounter, excellent communicative skills and the imagination to see how a technique, story or object could be adapted to a different linguistic and cultural milieu. In this sense, the Romans fruitfully took over substantial achievements of their civilisation from the Greeks, as did the Renaissance Humanists. Of course the Greeks were not by nature or in potential superior to any other human beings, either physically or intellectually. Indeed, they themselves often commented on how difficult it was to distinguish Greek from non-Greek, let alone free person from slave, if all the trappings of culture, clothing and adornment were removed. But that does not mean they were not the right people, in the right place, at the right time, to take up the human baton of intellectual progress for several hundred years.

And that period of intellectual ferment produced ideas that have subsequently informed the most significant moments in western political history. Thomas Jefferson, framing the Declaration of Independence, took the idea of the pursuit of happiness from Aristotle. Toussaint Louverture read Plutarch’s account of Spartacus before leading the first successful slave rebellion in Haiti in 1791. Thomas Paine argued that issues such as the relationship of religion to the state should be discussed with reference to historical examples from antiquity onwards. Chartist leaders were inspired by the Athenian democratic revolution. Women suffragists recited at their meetings the resounding speech that the tragedian Euripides gives his heroine Medea on the economic, political and sexual oppression of the entire female sex.

The Greeks, more even than the Romans, show us how to question received opinion and authority. The earliest myths reveal mankind actively disputing the terms on which the Olympian gods want to rule them, and the philanthropic god Prometheus rebelling against Zeus in order to steal fire – a divine prerogative – and give it to mortal men. Sophocles’ Antigone refuses to accept her tyrannical uncle’s arbitrary edict, draws crucial distinctions between moral decency and contingent legislation, and buries her brother anyway. Aristophanes, in his democratic comedies, subjected politicians who wielded power to satire of eye-watering savagery. Socrates dedicated his life to proving the difference between the truth and received opinion, the unexamined life being, in his view, not worth living. No wonder Hobbes thought that reading Greek and Roman authors should be banned by any self-respecting tyrant, in Leviathan arguing that they foment revolution under the slogan of liberty, instilling in people a habit “of favouring uproars, lawlessly controlling the actions of their sovereigns, and then controlling those controllers”.

Cambridge University students on graduation day. Photograph: Paul Thompson/Paul Thompson/Corbis

The recent general election has exposed the danger inherent in vote-based democracies: that they inevitably entail large disaffected minorities being excluded from executive power. The ancient Greek inventors of democracy vigorously debated this issue, having painful historical experience of it – recorded by Thucydides – and theoretical solutions – discussed by Aristotle. Yet in Britain today, few secondary school students are ever given the opportunity to investigate the dazzling thought-world of the Greeks. This is despite the existence for half a century of excellent GCSE and A-level courses in classical civilisation, which have been a success wherever introduced, and can be taught cost-effectively across the state-school sector. The failure to include classical civilisation among the subjects taught in every secondary school deprives us and our future citizens of access to educational treasures which can not only enthral, but fulfil what Jefferson argued in Notes on the State of Virginia (1782) was the main goal of education in a democracy: to enable us to defend our liberty. History, he proposed, is the subject that equips citizens for this. To stay free also requires comparison of constitutions, utopian thinking, fearlessness about innovation, critical, lateral and relativist thinking, advanced epistemological skills in source criticism and the ability to argue cogently. All these skills can be learned from their succinct, entertaining, original formulations and applications in the works of the Greeks.

The situation is aggravated by the role that training in the ancient languages, as opposed to ancient ideas, plays in dividing social and economic classes. One of the many ways in which the schism between rich and poor in Britain is reflected educationally is in access to Greek and Latin grammar. In 2013 (the last year for which figures are available), 3,580 state-sector candidates took A-levels in classical civilisation or ancient history. Greek A-level was taken by 260 candidates; 223 of these were at independent schools, which only 7% of our children attend; Latin was taken by 1305 candidates, a depressing 940 of whom were at independent schools. High grades in the ancient languages – easily enough won by solicitous coaching – provide near-guaranteed access to our most elite universities. For those without Greek and Latin A-levels there are indeed Oxbridge opportunities: a four-year classics course at Cambridge, and at Oxford the fast-track “Course II” as well as two smaller courses (ancient and modern history, ancient history and archaeology) focussing on history and material culture rather than literature and philosophy. The chances of admission for these are in line with other courses such as English and history. But it is easier to get into Oxbridge to read the long-established classics courses, requiring an ancient language A-level, than any other subject: between 2012 and 2014, for the traditional classics “Course I” at Oxford, 51 students were accepted from the state sector and 233 from fee-paying schools. There is nothing like such a high percentage of privately educated students on any other course; there is no similarly high chance of admission – at around 45%. Classics applicants have a comparable chance of getting into Cambridge, at 45%; Cambridge has only a slightly better ratio of state-sector students.

To me, as a Greek scholar, educated in the 1970s and 80s entirely at the taxpayer’s expense at a direct grant school and at Oxford, this is profoundly embarrassing. Instead of Greek ideas expanding the minds of all young citizens, Greek denotes money and provides a queue-jumping ticket to privilege.

How can we eradicate the apartheid system in British classics? First, we need to support classical civilisation qualifications, campaign for their introduction in every school and recognise their excellence as intellectual preparation for adult life and university. Specifically, classical civilisation needs to be recognised in the English baccalaureate and given the same governmental support as Latin.

Second, we need to expand the tiny number of teachers trained to teach classical civilisation via classics-dedicated PGCE courses, and also, crucially, encourage qualified teachers of other subjects in schools – English, history, modern languages, religious studies – to add classical civilisation to their repertoire. Take Christ the King Sixth Form College in south London. A committed philosophy teacher there, Eddie Barnett, was inspired by the enthusiastic response elicited by the (small) Plato element on the A-level philosophy syllabus; he has recently secured an agreement that classical civilisation will be rolled out at all three campuses of the college. Classical civilisation qualifications are embraced by most universities already, and this is the first year in which it has been possible for Open University students to graduate with single honours in classical studies, even if they have had no contact with the Greeks and Romans previously. But Oxford and Cambridge, with their fame and brand, now need to lead by example and offer challenging classics courses that do not fetishise grammar and consequently repel state-sector students who have been excited by reading classics in English. This means engaging with literary texts fearlessly in translation plus increasing the importance of critical thinking and lowering that of language acquisition. Undergraduate degrees are supposed to produce competent citizens. Traditional classics courses are not making the most of those ancient authors on their curriculum who enhance civic as opposed to syntactical competence.

The film adaptation of Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, who was denied the opportunity to read classics at university. Photograph: Allstar/BBC

There is, however, an obstacle to such citizen-friendly proposals for the future of classics – the contempt directed from some upper echelons of the classics community against GCSEs and A-levels in classical civilisation. Some classics scholars and alumni happily maintain the exclusive private-school/Oxbridge monopoly on the Greeks. Almost all the energy currently expended by some classics-friendly charities on supporting a classical presence in the state system is directed towards Latin. I have, of course, no objection to Latin teaching, but focusing on it exclusively entails three dangers. First, plenty of talented young people with a great deal to offer society don’t particularly enjoy grammar and are put off the ancient world forever by being offered a diet that is too heavy on language, when they might be thrilled by other aspects of antiquity. Second, omitting the broader, more conceptually stretching study of the ancient world, and especially of Greek thought, implicitly suggests that Latin has a prior claim on our citizens’ attentions. Third, placing the emphasis on training in Latin grammar encourages classical Luddites (who would rather destroy the modern study of the ancient world than see any overhaul of pedagogical tradition) publicly to disparage classical civilisation’s in-depth study of ancient society.

One prominent Oxford-trained journalist, Harry Mount, in an article lamenting the decline of Greek in schools, recently described classical civilisation qualifications as “intellectual baby food” with which students are spoon-fed, and as “classics lite”. This was to insult the entire community of state-sector classicists and anyone who ever reads an ancient author in translation. He and his associates have forgotten Gilbert Murray’s injunction that it is the Greeks, not Greek, who are the true object of the humanist curriculum. They have forgotten Milton, who wrote in his treatise Of Education that language study “is but the instrument convaying to us things usefull to be known”. If a linguist has “not studied the solid things in them as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteem’d a learned man, as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only”. Jefferson said exactly the opposite to Mount: he proposed that impressionable minds of the ablest younger children, including the poor ones he wanted to be funded by the state, could be kept safely occupied with rote learning of the minutiae of ancient languages, until they acquired sufficient intellectual robustness in mid-adolescence to cope with truly rigorous education in argumentation. That is, he saw language learning as the intellectual baby food.

A section of the east frieze of the Parthenon showing Poseidon, Apollo and Artemis. Photograph: Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis

The instrumentality of ancient languages in social exclusion has an inglorious history which we surely do not want to perpetuate. In 1748, the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his son: “Classical knowledge, that is, Greek and Latin, is absolutely necessary for everybody … the word illiterate, in its common acceptance, means a man who is ignorant of these two languages.” Classical knowledge is here limited to linguistic knowledge, education to men, and literacy to reading competence in Greek and Latin. Greek was also handy when white people wanted to deride the intellectual abilities of black ones. In 1833-4, American pro-slavery thinkers were on the defensive. The senator for South Carolina, John C Calhoun, declared at a Washington dinner party that only when he could “find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax” could he be brought to “believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man”. This snipe motivated a free black errand boy, Alexander Crummell, to head for Cambridge University in England. There he indeed learned Greek as part of his studies, financed by abolitionist campaigners, in theology at Queens’ College (1851–3).

The best-known example is the hero of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Jude Fawley, a poor stonemason living in a Victorian village, is desperate to study Latin and Greek at university. He gazes on the spires and domes of the University of Christminster – they “gleamed” like topaz. The lustrous topaz shares its golden colour with the stone used to build Oxbridge colleges, but is one of the hardest minerals in nature. Jude’s fragile psyche and health inevitably collapse when he discovers just how unbreakable are the social barriers that exclude him from elite culture. Hardy was writing from personal experience: as the son of a stonemason himself, and apprenticed to an architect’s firm, he had been denied a public school and university education; like Fawley, he had struggled to learn enough Greek to read the Iliad as a teenager. Unlike Jude, Hardy rose through the social ranks to become a prosperous member of the literary establishment. But he never resolved his internal conflict between admiration for Greek and Latin authors and resentment of the supercilious attitude of some members of the upper classes who had been formally trained in them.

There is in fact a splendid history of the ancient authors being read by Britons far beyond the privileged elite, a history that has been ignored by those rich enough to be able to give their children the opportunity to learn ancient languages. Pope’s early 18th-century translations of the Iliad and Odyssey brought Homer to a far larger audience, including women, than ever had access to an elite education. Take Esther Easton, a Jedburgh gardener’s wife, visited by the poet Robert Burns in 1787. He recorded that “she can repeat by heart almost everything she has ever read, particularly Pope’s ‘Homer’ from end to end” and “is a woman of very extraordinary abilities”. Pope’s Homer also captured the childhood imagination of Hugh Miller, another Scot, a stonemason and a distinguished autodidact, who grew up to become a world-famous geologist. He saw the Iliad as incomparable, and wrote in My Schools and Schoolmasters (1854) that he had learned early “that no other writer could cast a javelin with half the force of Homer. The missiles went whizzing athwart his pages; and I could see the momentary gleam of the steel, ere it buried itself deep in brass and bull-hide.”

Lucanian red-figure volute krater (415-400BC). Photograph: Corbis

There is an alternative history of classical scholarship – the history of many individuals, brave, stubborn, naive, or all three – who, in the face of every kind of obstruction did succeed in “entering Minerva’s temple”, as the working-class imagination often framed the project of autodidacticism. The most prodigious of British autodidacts was Joseph Wright, a Victorian workhouse boy who became professor of comparative philology at Oxford. Illiterate at the age of 15, he discovered his aptitude for languages at a Wesleyan night school, funded a PhD in Greek at Heidelberg by teaching incessantly, and, before appointment to his chair, lectured for the Association for the Higher Education of Women.

The Reverend John Relly Beard was a crucial force behind the movement for popular education in Lancashire and never wavered in his zeal for universal education to the highest level. He wrote accessible works on classical and biblical subjects, Latin Made Easy and Cassell’s Lessons in Greek … Intended Especially for Those Who Are Desirous of Learning Greek Without the Assistance of a Master. In this teach-yourself manual he is explicit about the readership he assumes: “The wants of what may roughly be termed the uneducated, will be carefully borne in mind by me, while I prepare these lessons … My purpose is to simplify the study of Greek so as to throw open to all who are earnest the great work of self-culture.”Organised working-class libraries reveal a fascinating alternative canon of books relating to the ancient word, from the first workers’ libraries in Europe established in the 1750s at Leadhills and Wanlockhead in Dumfries and Galloway to the foundation of the Workers’ Educational Association. By the end of the 19th century, these libraries’ holdings were often influenced by “Lubbock’s List”, the 100 books in 1887 deemed “best worth reading” by John Lubbock, principal of the Working-Men’s College in London from 1883 to 1899. Lubbock, who became the first Baron Avebury, was himself from a privileged banking family, and educated at Eton. Although he did not attend university, he was a polymath, specialising in archaeology and biological sciences. The proportion of classical authors in his list is remarkable: Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Plutarch’s Lives, Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Aeschylus’s Prometheus and Oresteia, Sophocles’ Oedipus, Euripides’ Medea, Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and many more. In addition, two famous works on ancient history – Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Grote’s History of Greece – make it on to the list, along with the most popular novel set in antiquity, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii. More than a quarter of all the books are by classical authors, and more than a third addressed to classical antiquity.

The 109 libraries of the South Wales coalfield are a wonder of labour history, and the books really were taken out. At Ebbw Vale, each reader borrowed an average of 52 volumes a year. The “Condensed Accessions Book” of Bargoed Colliery Library details its holdings by 1921-2. Texts in Latin and Greek are absent: until 1918 almost all miners had left school on their 13th birthday. But the “alternative classical curriculum” of the miner was wide-ranging. He read translations and biographies such as JB Forbes’s Socrates (1905). He learned about the Greeks from HB Cotterill’s Ancient Greece (1913), the Egyptians from George Rawlinson’s Herodotean History of Ancient Egypt (1880), and mythology from several books by Andrew Lang.

This inspiring past of people’s Greek can help us to look forward. It is theoretically in our power as British citizens to create the curriculum we want. In my personal utopia, the ancient Greek language would be universally available free of charge to everyone who wants to learn it, at whatever age – as would, for that matter, Latin, classical civilisation, ancient history, philosophy, Anglo-Saxon, Basque, Coptic, Syriac and Hittite. But classical civilisation qualifications are the admirable, economically viable and attainable solution that has evolved organically in our state sector. Classicists who do not actively promote them will justifiably be perceived as elitist dinosaurs.”

Edith Hall gave the Gaisford Lecture at the University of Oxford. Her Introducing the Ancient Greeks is published by Bodley Head.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/20/classics-for-the-people-ancient-greeks

Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at Durham University and Fellow of the British Academy.

“I’m a classicist, originally focused on Ancient Greek theatre. I’ve spent most of my career blending data from ancient Greek literature with sociology, history, political theory and philosophy. I like to write about the ancient world in its holistic form, relating individuals and their ideas to important cultural, historical and political moments.”

Source: https://www.joinexpeditions.com/experts/1174

#classics #ancient greeks #edith hall

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local-boob · 2 years ago

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Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Eric Quayle's Early Children's Books: A Collector's Guide (1983)

FROM WILL SHAKESPEARE TO WILL WYCHERLEY, pp. 12-14

"The percentage of children who could read or look at picture books in the Middle Ages was minutely small, and even these favoured few could seldom have been allowed to handle personally the illuminated manuscripts which depicted, often in graphic and exciting form, the myths and legends of earlier days in religious history. One can imagine a kindly monk lifting up a wondering boy as he turned the vellum leaves and told the story they unfolded . . . A fanciful picture of a scene more likely to have been enacted between a pedagogue and his pupil in the latter half of the fifteenth century, the boy being taught his alphabet and figures by repeating the letters from his horn-book.

"Reading for pleasure was practically unknown for the young of those days, and, not surprisingly, few, if any, juvenile manuscripts that may have passed from hand to hand have survived. After the invention of printing with movable metal type about 1456, and the setting up of William Caxton's press at Westminster about twenty years later, there was still to be a long wait before any work remotely interesting to children made its appearance. Then, on 26 March 1484, 'in the first year of the reign of King Richard the Third,' Caxton finished his translation from the French of Aesop's Fables. The book of the subtyl hystoryes and Fables of Esope, with its woodcut illustrations, was not in any way intended by Caxton as a text for the young, but, since this first translation into English nearly five hundred years ago, the work in various forms and illustrated by scores of artists has remained in print almost exclusively for a juvenile audience.

"One of the most popular collection of of tales of the Middle Ages was Gesta Romanorum, compiled in Latin, almost certainly in England, around 1300, which appeared in manuscript in English during the fifteenth century. The Acts of the Romans, as it was usually called, is believed to have been written in order to supply a series of entertaining stories for regaling the brothers of an unidentified abbey and was probably compiled by one of their number to lighten the long nights of winter. The earliest manuscript versions differ widely in the tales they tell, but all are romances of chivalry and legends of saintly deeds, and to each of the stories a moral is attached. They supplied material for many subsequent authors, and in modified form provided the sort of adventure story reading beloved of children. Long before the invention of printing the youth of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries must have thrilled to the accounts of Roman heroes dressed as they were in the garb of early medieval knights, slaying Greeks and dragons with equal impunity. Caxton's successor, Wynkyn de Worde, who had joined the master in London in 1477, and who inherited Caxton's press on his death in 1491, was the first to print Gesta Romanorum. Versions of his text, in abbreviated form and illustrated with crude little woodcuts, were read by children for their own amusement throughout the next four centuries, many carrying little homilies on their title-pages, such as:

"The Story's pleasant, and the moral good, If read with Care, and rightly understood.

"Another favourite with children must have been the various Bestiaries, described by M. R. James in his treatise on the subject, The Bestiary, 1928, as 'one of the leading picture-books of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in this country.' These were early natural history, with many of the animals depicted being fabulous, but none the less fearsome for that. The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundevile, Kt, a purely fictitious work written originally in French, purported to be a guide to pilgrims to the Holy Land, and must have proved extremely entertaining to youth from the middle of the fourteenth century onwards with its tales of ant-hills of gold dust; tribes of one-footed men 'and the foot so large that it shadeth all the Body against the Sonne when they lye down and raze it'; of wells whose water changes colour at the stroke of every hour; trees which bear honey and whose sap is wine; a one-eyed tribe, with the orb in the centre of their foreheads; and much more in the same vein with pictures to prove the statements true.

"None of these works was in any way intended for children, either in manuscript or in later book form, and we have to wait until the final quarter of the sixteenth century, to a time when William Shakespeare was a boy of sixteen, before the first purpose-made picture book for children made its appearance.

"Kunst und Lehrbüchlein was first published in Germany in 1578, but this issue was merely a hotch-potch of illustrations culled from a variety of works which the publisher, Sigmund Feyerabend (1528-1590), had commissioned during the previous decade. Book of Art and Instruction for Young People, to give the work its English title, was re-issued in 1580 as a book specially prepared for the youth of the day."

#Wynkyn de Worde #children's books #books #history of books #book collecting #middle ages #medieval #legends #romances #woodcuts #illustrations #William Caxton #picture books #The Travels of Sir John Mandeville #the bestiary #bestiaries #m. r. james #aesop's fables

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blindbeta · 3 years ago

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I have a question! Thank you for existing I deeply appreciate it. I was wondering if it is possible for a blind person to be able to read by learning the shape of raised letters, rather than braille. I ask because I have a situation in which it is reasonable that the blind character would know this, if possible, and the person they are travelling with is completely illiterate.I thought it might be interesting if the seeing character could describe the letters, or find a way to texture them so the blind character could tell them what something says. I have done a great deal of research for this character, but this is the one part I can't find a clear answer for. Thank you very much.

Good question, nonnie.

The short answer is, maybe? It would depend on the time period and location of your characters.

Since you want both characters to read, I’ll assume this culture has a formal writing system in place and values written communication.

A Brief History

In order to address this, allow me to offer a brief history of Braille. Because what you’re describing is exactly what happened in France before Braille was invented. This informative video summarizes it pretty well. Here is the text version of the video. The video mentions the embossed letter or raised type method of reading that was used at the time. It was difficult to read and the letters had to be very large in order to be understood, making it harder to read words and sentences. Reading must have been very slow.

According to this page on the National Braille Press website, reading this way required slowly tracing raised print letters. To write, one had to memorize the shapes and try to create them on paper, although they could not read the results.

Creating books was even more difficult. According to this page, [quote] “teacher Valentin Haüy made books with raised letters by soaking paper in water, pressing it into a form and allowing it to dry. Books made using this method were enormous and heavy, and the process was so time-consuming that l'Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles, or the Royal Institution for Blind Youth, had fewer than 100 of them when Louis Braille was a student there.” [End quote]

Braille books are already notorious for taking up several volumes. Large print books are only a little better. Textbooks used in schools take up several shelves to translate one print textbook.

Individual use and traveling with these things must have been impossible for the everyday person, even if you were a student.

Also, in this video by blind YouTuber Molly Burke, at the 9:05 time-stamp she answers the question: why don’t we raise print letters for blind people? She explains that it took too long to read and is not as efficient as Braille.

In the interest of time, I’ll try to keep this brief. The transition from the raised print letters to Braille was not a smooth one.

In 1826, first embossed letters published in English was James Gall’s triangular alphabet. Read about it and other systems here.

Another source says Gall’s writing system was introduced in 1831. The system did not gain much popularity outside of Endinburgh.

According to this page: [quote] “In 1832 The Society of Arts for Scotland held a competition for the best embossed type. There were 15 entries but Edmund Fry’s alphabetical system of roman capitals triumphed. Shortly afterwards John Alston began printing at the Glasgow Asylum for the Blind using a slightly modified version of Fry’s design. “Alston type” proved popular and inspired similar forms across Europe and North America.” [end quote]

None of these really caught on outside of certain areas.

In 1821, Charles Barbier was invited to the Royal National Institute For Blind Youth in Paris to demonstrate his Night Writing invention, which was developed for soldiers to read in the dark. It was too difficult to read and so was not used by soldiers, nor did it end up being used by the blind schools. However, a young Louis Braille was in the audience and was inspired.

In 1825, Braille thought he had figured out a good system of writing.

In 1829, he published the first Braille alphabet.

1834 - Braille is invited to Exposition of Industry in Paris, which extended the popularity of the Braille system.

1846- a school for the blind in Amsterdam starts using Braille’s system.

In 1852, Louis Braille dies.

1854- Royal National Institute For Blind Youth officially adopt Braille as official system after fighting it for years.

Because Braille didn’t take hold as quickly in Britain, the British and Foreign Blind Association, all of whom were blind, voted in 1870. They decided Braille was the best system. Braille quickly fell into use all over the world with the exception of the United States. By 1882, the embossed letter system was over.

In the U.S, from 1868-1918, the New York Point system was used. American Braille (developed by a blind teacher named Joel W. Smith) was also used from 1878 to 1918, when the U.S switched the standardized English Braille.

Would Your Character Know Raised Type?

Remember how I said you might be able to do this depending on the time period and place?

If you have French characters, you can used the raised type method as you described in your ask if the story takes place before, probably, 1825. It would be reasonable for your character to know the raised type method if they had attended a blind school before the Braille method was adopted in 1854. Between roughly 1829 and 1854, the French blind character attending school would know about the Braille system and probably complain about their school not teaching it despite Braille himself teaching there.

Similarly, they could used raised type depending on where the story is set, when the character attended school, and what system was in place at the time. If the story is a fantasy, you could make up a history similar to what I described above, although it would be important to have schools for the blind and have Braille or the equivalent be created by a blind character.

Remember that your blind character needs to learn the raised type method if you want them to use it.

If Braille would be available in real life (such as a more modern setting), I would prefer a blind character use Braille instead. Which is why I tried to offer alternatives that were historically justified.

I don’t feel very comfortable with a blind character having to use a raised type method rather than another system, because Braille literacy is declining nowadays and something about learning a raised type method over Braille (or other system, depending on where you set the story and what they were using at the time) doesn’t sit right with me. Your character doesn’t have to use Braille specifically, but I would rather they use the system that is available to blind people at that time. For example, if your story is set in the United States, it would be fine to use American Braille or the New York Point, depending on the time period.

If your story is modern, blind people can usually read raised print letters on signs, such as for the bathroom. In fact, a lot of people who can’t read Braille get by this way. However, keep in mind that we have screen-readers and audiobooks now. People aren’t reading entire texts or even many words with this method.

As for other countries, I tried my best to research what places, such as Japan, used before Braille. For several reasons, including the European-centric search results that keep coming up over and over again, finding the correct information is proving difficult. In some cases, previous methods may have unfortunately been lost due to colonization. It is important that we acknowledge that.

I feel that it would be easier to leave the research up to you since you know where you want to set your story and your own personal background, historical knowledge, etc.

Keep in mind that not all blind people in the world had access to formal education, depending on the place, time, their social class, etc. If you want your blind character to know how to read, you’ll need to find or create a setting that allows for it.

Generally, I would prefer blind characters use methods designed for blind people, whatever that happens to be in that time or culture. Prioritizing the other characters’ needs and having a blind character learn raised type over Braille when Braille actually exists in the story doesn’t work for me.

Like always, I suggest having more than one blind character in the story to avoid tokenism. Also, since your character is going to teach another character, be sure to show your blind character’s needs and goals as well.

I hope this helps. Feel free to message me or send another ask. I am not a historian and so if anyone wants to correct anything, such as dates, or provide any relevant knowledge, please feel free. I tried my best with this question. I would be grateful for help if anyone has more information!

-BlindBeta

#blind #disability #braille #ask #anon ask

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minnesotadruids · 3 years ago

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Hello there! If it s not too much trouble, how do you feel about media/pop-culture portrayal of druids?

Since the word “Druid” is used a lot to mean “Nature Wizard” would you prefer if people used/make up their own different words for their stories or find it ok to use the term as long as they’re respectful or accurate to Druidism to some degree?

In terms of the "best" media depiction of druids, I think the BBC series Merlin with Colin Morgan is probably the closest we can get to a positive portrayal of the Celtic priestly caste. I still hesitate to describe it as accurate, but at the very least I wasn't balking at the show as much as I did when watching an episode of The Librarians. We'll get to them in a moment.

There's also the fun Australian miniseries Roar that starred a young Heath Ledger. It was full of historical inaccuracies (the premise being about a Roman-occupied Ireland for one thing). But it portrayed the druids in a positive light despite being at a time when they were in decline.

In the TV show The Librarians: And the Rise of Chaos (season 3 episode 1) they have a very brief (2-3 minute) run-in with some angry druids. The mob only shouts and growls but don't seem to speak, all while wearing tattered robes and brandishing wooden farm implements of various functions. They were also wearing cringey cast-resin masks of animal skulls that miraculously fit perfectly on their faces and just looked fake. I should point out this show takes place in the present.

The librarians have to climb a wicker man and solve a puzzle to steal a rune-covered stone artifact. The puzzle is based on a Celtic board game gwyddbwyll AKA fidchell. In the episode, the game pieces are Norse runes (Elder Futhark). Historically, the Iron Age Celts would not have used those runes. The game pieces should be carved figures of warriors instead. Then things get a bit personal with the tree stump inscription.

One librarian translates the markings on the stump which he says are "ancient Gaulish mixed with third century astrological symbols," and somehow reads "when the king reaches the north, the light will reveal itself."

*FACEPALM*

Well the three symbols on the left side are more Norse Elder Futhark (i.e. not even Celtic), the symbol cluster in the upper right corner looks like it could be vaguely Lepontic script (i.e. yes, “ancient Gaulish”) but that specific one is not in the Lepontic alphabet at all. Just for fun they have the symbol for Aries (the aforementioned (but singular) Greek astrological symbol). The Celtic triskele is in the upper middle of the stump and variations of it go back thousands of years, but it doesn't really have a universally accepted meaning.

What upset me the most was the incorporation of the Druid Sigil (bottom center of the stump). It is the official symbol of the Reformed Druids of North America (RDNA). The RDNA invented the Druid Sigil in 1963 to be a geometrically simple symbol, yet at the same time - unique. They went through books of symbols to make sure it didn't already exist. The RDNA founders described the Druid Sigil as a symbol for the Earth-Mother, but it is truly devoid of a specific meaning or powers.

In the RDNA, the individual imparts their own meaning into the Sigil, and whatever powers they want it to have if need be. To me the Druid Sigil is a sun wheel, and the two vertical lines represent the Two Tenets of Reformed Druidism. It means something different to everyone, and it is neither ancient Gaulish nor third century anything. The show producers obviously googled “Druid symbols” and that was the extent of their research.

I guess if someone was to make a new show, movie, or other media about druids, I would prefer that it would at least clearly be in the high-fantasy genre if they're going to make them all fanciful magic users, and especially if they're going to be portrayed as bad guys. If the show is trying to be more historically accurate, I'd much prefer that they stick to what's verifiable (though admittedly that's not much). Otherwise yeah, it would be nice sometimes if they used a different term, like sorcerers or warlocks if they're bad guys.

Oh gosh, Warlock! That was a 1989 supernatural horror movie that started a trilogy of gory films. The warlock was a bad guy, and a secret bloodline of druids were the only ones who had a chance of stopping him. The depiction of druids was okay I suppose, and on the plus side they wore plain everyday clothes in the 20th century, 'cause you know it's important to blend in.