Why did Plato write??

Medieval portrayal of Socrates and his greatest pupil, Plato.

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them."

A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.39

    If you think about philosophy, it's about as dependent on writing as math. Formulating thoughts in the air is nearly impossible for me, and certainly impossible  for anyone else to understand (just think of how much harder it is to spell a word out loud than to write it down-- in a spelling bee I'd be thinking,"I could do this if i had a pen and paper..")

      However, we do know that Socrates didn't write a line of his thoughts, and he's considered the father of Greek philosophy and modern thought! We only know the things he said indirectly, kind of like how we have the teachings of Jesus Christ though we don't have his direct account--in this way the two have often been compared, because it has only been through the records of others that we know anything of them.  

     The written word, to Socrates, was as a child without a father: unable to protect itself. He said that writing is deceptive like a painting-- paintings portray things that are falsely living and can't answer questions, just as books can indicate things but cannot give further explanation or answers to questions. Once a man writes down his thoughts, he loses control of them, soon his words become a toy for everyone to play with--written words are vulnerable to having their true meaning lost to them. Socrates had no school, no books, he preferred to a "living" philosophy made of conversation with people he met on the streets. Philosophy was to be made in common with others, the research was made orally. So, even though in our minds philosophy is often represented by great literary works (Kant, Hegel, Descartes...), philosophy is not so clearly related to literacy.

     If Socrates was so opposed to writing, as we talked about in class, and he indoctrinated that belief into his greatest pupil, Plato, why, then, did Plato write?? 

An Apple a Day Keeps The Doctor Away

I think if I were to ask people or if you were to ask yourselves what are some of the things that you take for granted i'm we would get a plethora of answers. Anything from our homes, families, freedoms, knowledge of the gospel, schooling, to material things like cell phones, computers, etc. 

Why do we take things for granted? I think it often depends what type of object or thing it is, but it usually is something that we've had for a fair amount of time and has become or is extremely useful.

I have realized as I've entered my field of study here at school that one thing that I take for granted is Medicine. 

For that reason I wanted to explore how written knowledge has aided the progression of medicine and what difference it has made.

The Roman Calendar

Epigraphy: the study of inscriptions, found on buildings, altars, bricks, plaques or tablets of various materials, tiles, mosaics, pottery--anything you can think of that people write on

From the first three centuries of the Roman Republic (500-200 B.C.), relatively few inscriptions survive. There is no way of knowing what type of role and how big writing/inscribing things played in Romans' lives at that time, but we can assume that what we do have only represents a small fraction of what they used. Ancient literature we have today refers to other works of literature and inscriptions that no longer exist, so it's easy to imagine that we have a limited portion of what ancient people had.

"An impressive variety of texts," however, has survived from the centuries that followed (200-100 B.C.)1 . We have many more inscriptions from this particular time period in the Roman Republic, including calendars!

My Interview with a Library Scientist

     This week I interviewed Donna Cardon at the Provo City Library. Donna got her Master's degree in Library Sciences in 2005. And no, she and I are not related.

The Hittite Cuneiform

Anyone remember when the internet came into existence? Or perhaps your first encounter with the world wide web? Well that was quite a while ago and I think many of us feel as though it's just always been apart of our lives, but talk to those 15 years older and it's a different story. Just try and imagine how unique/unfathomable it was when it first started to become common....I think that's how many civilizations felt when written formats surfaced or became common.

Well i've been able to spend time searching out the roots of the Hittite language and specifically how it transitioned into a written form. This has been quite complex and confusing, but I think I finally have a fair idea of how things went! It really is quite interesting, especially when you try to put yourself in a Hittites shoes and imagine the awe that they would have been in as written text came into play.

Cyrillic

Probably all of you have seen the Cyrillic alphabet around somewhere, if only in badly-made eighties movies with Russian characters or on those signs in public places that are in about 20 languages . This is because, unlike many ancient writing systems, the Cyrillic alphabet survived and is currently used by over fifty languages, including Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Chechen, and Bulgarian. The map shows the countries in the world that use the Cyrillic alphabet. Dark green means Cyrillic is the only official alphabet, and the lighter green means that it is used along with others.

The Roman Writing System

(as a note before you begin, know that when I use "//" to set apart a letter or two letters, I'm using those slashes to indicate that you make the sound within the slashes: Don't say the name of the letter inside them. For example, when you see /ks/ think of  the ksssss sound that x makes , don't say "kay. esss." to yourself.)

 

  No offense to the letter C but.... I've always had a certain amount of disdain for it. Yah I respect it for what it does for my last name, I mean without it I'd be Alyssa Ardon, which is no where near as cute as Alyssa Cardon, but I could just as easily be Alyssa Kardon and I think the kuteness would be fairly komparable.  I guess my problem with the letter C stems from the fakt that we kould easily live without it and have a 25 letter alphabet rather than a 26 letter one-- who wouldn't go for that??? In all seriousness, though: C steals the sound from S and K and really the only new thing it kontributes to our writing system is the "CH" sound in "churro" and quite honestly I think that sounds a lot like a J anyway so I honestly don't know why we don't jhange it.

Gothic Alphabet, Religion, and Record Keeping

During the time in which the Battle of Adrianople was in full swing, the Gothic people were being converted to Arian Christianity by the half-gothic missionary, Wulfila, who developed a Gothic alphabet to translate the Bible. Before the development of the new Gothic alphabet, Goths wrote their language using their adaptation of the Futhark (Dr. Peterson mentioned this in class) alphabet—but it was considered to be of pagan origin. Wulfila combined the Greek, Latin, and Futhark alphabets to create a new Gothic language.

It is interesting to note that the Gothic written language (or alphabet I guess) was written as a result of the conversion to Christianity. Also, the only surviving documents that are written in Gothic are called the Codex Argenteus, Codex Ambrosianus, and Codex Gissensis, Codex Carolinus, and Codex Vaticanus Latinus, all written scripture.

Illustration of the Gothic people.

One of the reasons for the decline of the Gothic language is when it lost its function as a church language when the Visigoths (Capital One commercial) converted to Catholicism. Religion seems to have played a major role in the adoption and decline of the Gothic language (both written and spoken). Faith and religion tend to influence the majority of what was originally written down. The Christian religion was important to the Gothic people, and that is what they wrote down. Perhaps this is why there is not as much of information on the culture and customs of the Gothic people—as that was not something that they probably felt was important to write down.

This reminds me of an aspect of the LDS church that is embraced—record keeping through journaling. In my own journaling—I write down what is important to me—such as significant events (graduating high school, starting college, patriarchal blessing, etc…) but do I record things, even seemingly mundane things that could be a benefit to those who follow me? Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what our great-great-great grandparents did for fun? Or to learn about how different their education was from ours? Or how they first met their spouse? I think it would be very insightful. Written language/knowledge is the ultimate preservation of knowledge—however inconvenient to accomplish—it is the way in which we are able to recreate past events through words.

Ancient Hebrew Education

Since my civilization was the Semitic culture I thought I would focus on the Hebrew education. I mean, it should be pretty easy to find something on education and how they taught writing in particular. What I found was exactly the opposite. I found quite a few papers from professors from prestigious universities talking about the lack of information on ancient Hebrew education.

A passage from the Apocrypha, Wisdom 7:17-22, gives some idea of the curriculum:

For it is he who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists,
to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements;
the beginning and end and middle of times,
the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons,
the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars,
the natures of animals and the tempers of wild beasts,
the powers of spirits and the reasonings of men,
the varieties of plants and the virtues of roots;
I learned both what is secret and what is manifest,
for wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me.

From this we see that Hebrew education is broad. But we really don't know how the students were taught.

Reflections...

True or False??

Well after the Oral Knowledge final that we had on Tuesday, I feel as though I would be amiss if I didn't centre my thoughts on the great thing which we all participated in. If I had been asked beforehand whether I thought this would actually help me understand the value of oral knowledge, i'm pretty positive that my answer would have been along the lines of NO. There's always a first for everything and I was proven wrong in this case.
It's been great to see the different blog posts from all the all the many different civilizations and see the connections that have been found as they pertain to oral knowledge. One thing that has been hard for  personally, is to find a way in which I can relate things to my own life when learning about something that existed 3 thousand years ago. I believe that because of that aspect there, the presentation of King Benjamin's speech taught me many things because of how personal it is to me and my life.
So from the final that we took, there are a few things that jumped out at me as we were all doing our recitations as to why I think Oral Knowledge is unique. I'll try and share a few.

The Joy of Writing

Since I am thoroughly ready to be done with oral language, at least as it has to do with antiquity (modern language is a different story), I thought I would do a little introduction to written language along with some of my experiences with it, even though I am sure we will get a more throrough introduction in class on Thursday. I had more pictures, but my internet is being frustrating, so I will skip them for today.

We are surrounded by written language every day, all the time, basically wherever we are. Think you escape it when you go fishing up in the mountains? Not a chance. You can escape oral language, but in our modern day it is much, much harder to escape written language. Your car has writing on it. Your fishing pole has writing on it. The packages for your food have writing on them. The tags of your clothes have writing on them. I read a book once that had a scene where the main character had to remove all of the bits of his clothes that had writing on them (it makes sense in context). He was not left with a lot (okay, this sounds skechy. It totally isn't). Point is, there is writing everywhere, and if you are like most people, you don't really notice it.

Origin of Language

"The dominant contemporary theory of the origin of language proposes that genetic change produced genetic instructions for building a special module for grammar in the human brain. Before genetic specialization for grammar, people had no grammar at all: no grammatical speech, no parsing for grammar, no concept of grammar. To be sure, they communicated (birds and bees communicate) but their communication was totally ungrammatical. It was not language." 

Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (140)

   

    In The Literary Mind, Mark Turner explains a theory held by many scholars (including Noam Chomsky and Paul Bloom) that the development of language is genetic. The idea is that each child is born with special instructions in their genes that code for an autonomous grammar module. When a baby is learning language, then, it is really just learning which parts of its language module to leave on and which parts to turn off. 

Mark Turner comes right out and says "I think this theory of the historical origin of language is wrong."

Dr. Petersen brought up Turner's proposal in the seed post about language, that language came about as a result of story. I was looking at what he had to say and I think it's kind of interesting!

Psalms- Remembering Jehovah through Song

When I was looking for some ancient Hebrew oral subjects I thought I wouldn't be able to find anything. Then I realized that it was staring me in the face. Probably the most famous songs in Christian history the book of Psalms are a perfect example of oral expression in Hebrew culture.

Psalm 8 sung in Hebrew

It is important to recognize that the psalms are not doctrinal statements, creeds, or history but that they are both poetry and prayer, poetry intended to be set to music and prayed in worship. In ancient Israel, no less than in the modern world, poetry and music were the means by which people expressed the deepest of human feelings and emotions, the most profound of insights, and the most tragic and joyous of human experiences. It is no accident that after Israel’s deliverance from Egypt on the banks of the Reed Sea the people sang (Exod. 15:1-18)! Or that Hannah lapses into song at the dedication of Samuel (1 Sam. 2:1-10; note Lk. 1:46-55)! Or that David mourns Saul and Jonathan in a beautiful poetic elegy (2 Sam. 2:19-27). Much of the language of the Psalms is metaphorical and symbolic, the language of the poet.

The Psalter, as the Book of Psalms is often called, is actually a collection of different kinds of poetry spanning many centuries of history (from c. 1100 BC, Pss. 29, 68, to c. 400 BC, Ps. 119) and reaching essentially its present form around 300 BC. Evidences of the collective nature of the Psalter are seen in its division into five 'books' (for example, Ps. 72:20), the references to various authors (for example, Psalm 89), as well as the different time periods represented (Ps. 137 is clearly from the period of Exile, c. 550 BC).

In biblical worship, the psalms were chanted or declaimed. We do not know exactly how this music sounded, though recent research has confirmed the similarity between Hebraic music and ancient forms of Christian chant. (See the article on Music and Worship in the Bible on this web site.) The psalms formed part of the developing liturgy of the Eastern and Western churches, along with Greek and Latin hymnody. In the Western church, the psalms found more regular usage within the "offices" or daily periodic worship of the monastic communities. The Catholic heritage of chant, often called Gregorian chant because of the influence of Pope Gregory the Great (540-604), includes the use of the psalms sung to standard "tones" or melodies according to conventional rules. This music was performed by choirs of clergy or members of monastic orders, who had developed the necessary skills. Originally the psalms were sung monophonically, i.e. with one unharmonized melody, or "plain chant." In the later Middle Ages additional voices were introduced, with such devices as counterpoint (a different simultaneous melody) or organum (a sustained tone over which others sang the melody). The departure from the simpler form of chanting was opposed by those who believed that more elaborate musical detail called attention to the performance and thus degraded the worship of God.

This early psalmody was exclusively vocal. It is paradoxical that the psalms, which so often mention the use of musical instruments in the praise of God, were sung for centuries in the church without any instrumental accompaniment. Today both the Eastern Orthodox churches and some Reformed and other Protestant groups exclude musical instruments from use in worship.

Cited works:

http://www.crivoice.org/psalmsintro.html

http://www.laudemont.org/a-stp.htm

Center and Edge--

This is just a response to the last couple posts about oral knowledge. As I've been commenting on everybody's posts I realized I was writing the same things as I have a couple times before ("it's interesting that cultures rise and fade, why do they do this?" sort of thing), then realized why I was on that one-track train.  As I've read these posts, I can't help but think back to Orson Scott Card's Children of the Mind. In the afterward of the story, he comments on an idea sparked by a Japanese writer, Kenzaburo Oe: some nations are at the center of the world, while most fall into the hole of being an edge nation.

The Gothic Language Continued...

I attempted to find an "expert" on the gothic language by turning to german professors at various institutions. But in turns out that the gothic language is extinct so there aren't too many experts on the language...(or no one wants to help out a poor freshman).

However, I did find this video where a man is speaking (or at least attempting to speak gothic-- as no one really knows what it sounds like) gothic. He is reading the story of the prodigal son in Luke. All of the written gothic language is from the copies we have of the bible. Start at 4:17.

From how the guy in the video is speaking the gothic language, it sounds quite a bit different from the German language as we know it today. Since I don't have insight from a gothic language expert, my brother-in-law (who I've referenced before... he's a German literature major) let me film him reading the story of the prodigal son, Luke 15:11-17...

(pretend this is a video of Chris speaking German....it's taking eons to upload...it will be on soon!)

As I watched the first video in Gothic and the second in modern German, it made me think how languages can evolve and branch off-without any deliberate effort. Why didn't humans start speaking the same language? It started me thinking. I did some research on it and I thought these quotes are interesting...

"In 1866, a ban on the topic was incorporated into the founding statutes of the Linguistic Society of Paris, perhaps the foremost academic linguistic institution of the time: ‘The Society does not accept papers on either the origin of language or the invention of a universal language."

Evolutionist Carl Zimmer said this on the origin on language:

"No one knows the exact chronology of this evolution, because language leaves precious few traces on the human skeleton.  The voice box is a flimsy piece of cartilage that rots away.  It is suspended from a slender C-shaped bone called a hyoid, but the ravages of time usually destroy the hyoid too."

Just as we have no information on the sounds of the Gothic language, we really don't have that much information on the topic of oral language itself. There is no physical evidence of language-once said, it disappears- unless written down. There is this sort of mysteriousness with oral language as we never really know the exact way it came to be and how there can be many different languages, and how languages can die off.

Sources: 1, 2

In Defense of Written Language

I appreciated Kody's post, and I thought that his views on the difference between written and oral knowledge were very interesting. I have, however, had a rather different experience on some of the points, which I thought I would share.

Group Video Presentation

Here's our group presentation on Functions and Systems. You can also access the video here. Hope you enjoy!

Written vs Oral- The Hittites

To go along with the Functions and Systems of Oral knowledge that we have been assigned to study I want to focus on ways that oral knowledge differs from written knowledge and how these distinctions make it unique.
We have talked in class how there is a hybrid between these two systems and that there's quite a large cross over, but in the same light there are also many things that make them both unique and important in their own ways.

Old Church Slavonic

The oldest texts written in Slavic languages are actually not Slavic at all, but translations of the Bible and other religious material into a language that was called Old Church Slavonic. This language was primarily a written language, developed by missionaries in the 9th century expressly to translate the bible. A somewhat updated version is still used by the modern church today in Slavic areas of the world.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, and High School Musical

Ovid nomen meum!  My name is Ovid!

      The Roman Republic was on it's last leg when Ovid, creator of the epic poem Metamorphoses, was born. One year before Ovid's birth, Julius Caesar was assassinated in the Roman Senate as problems withe the now 500-year-old Roman Republic were coming to a head. An intense struggle for the control of Rome between Julius Caesar's former friend/supporter Mark Antony and Julius Caesar's grandnephew/heir Octavian began, eventually ending with Octavian taking power, becoming Rome's first emperor-- Octavian would rule for almost all of Ovid's life. 

       Ancient Rome, as most ancient cultures, revolved around oral tradition. ("Hey Ovid, wanna memorize and recite some Homeric epics with me??" "Curabitur ut tortor dude!") Unfortunately, Ovid wasn't as good at oratory as was his older brother. Like most younger siblings who simply choose to explore another skill rather than live in the shadow of their stellar older brother/sister, Ovid developed a love for poetry.....

          Ovid joined a circle of poets, working with the best of the best in Rome. He attended poetry readings by Propertius and Macer, reported that the group was enthralled by Horace, and said he even saw Virgil once. He read his own poems in public by the time he was eighteen, and was soon recognized as a rising star. 

             Metamorphoses is Ovid's best known work, a twelve-thousand-line poem divided into 15 books. This Latin epic draws on Greek Mythology and Roman legend, telling of "transformations" from the creation of the world to the time of Octavian. At the end of his poem, Ovid prophecies that "I shall be the one whom people hear and read. And if poets truly can foretell, in all centuries to come, I shall live." Considering the survival and widespread popularity of his work throughout the ages, Ovid's right!

Semites- More Than Just Jews

A stylised T and O map, depicting Asia as the home of the descendents of Shem (Sem). Africa is ascribed to Ham and Europe to Japheth

Map showing the distribution of Semitic languages

When I first learned that my blogs were to be on the Semitic civilization I thought that it would be pretty easy. I mean, when a person thinks of Semites they think of Jews don't they? But when I did a google search I was surprised what I found. Semites not only refer to Jews but to they whole region of Mesopotamia and Arabia. It turns out that the stereotype of only Jews being Semites is very recent.

The term Semitic was first suggested by German scholar Ludwig Schlozer, to signify languages that were closely related to Hebrew. The word "Semitic" is an adjective derived from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Bible. The idea of "Semitic: peoples is derived from Biblical accounts of teh origins of the clutrues known to the ancient Hebrews. Those closest to them in culture and language were generally deemed to be descended from their forefather Shem. Enemeis were often said to be descendants of his cursed nephew, Canaan. In Genesis 10: 21-31, Shem is described as the father of Aram, Asshur, and Arpachshad: the Biblical ancestors of the Arabs, Arameans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Sabaeans, and Hebrews, etc., all of whose languages are closely related. (Try saying this list out loud, you run out of breath pretty fast.)

The term "anti-Semitic" pretty much refers to Jews only. It was first used in 1879 by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in a pamphlet called, "The Victory of Germandom over Jewry." Marr argued that Jews who had Judaized Geramans beyond salvation. In 1879 marr founded the "League for Anti-Semitism".