Final Blog: Blurred

When studying a subject, it is often convenient to make categories and divisions of the knowledge. This helps us to understand and more easily remember what we have learned. At the same time, it is important to remember that our artificially-created divisions are just that--artificial. Real examples may fit into more than one category, or no category at all. While there may seem to be clear distinctions between folk, oral, written, and printed knowledge, the lines are really very blurred.

Blog for final: Part 1

"Notes for the final" is actually pretty vague, (like 'guess what it is we are thinking' vague), so hopefully this is what it is supposed to be. Also, why call it a "salon"? That is a really random word (like provocative). When I think of salons, I think of going to get my hair done. I looked up the word, but I still don't really see the connection, unless the Maiser building is really a house in disguise and we are secretly living in the 17th or 18th century. There has got to be a better word somewhere, like "graded discussion" or "workshop" or something else.

Unit 1: Folk Knowledge
Self-directed learning
For this unit I did two weekly-type blogs and two project-type blogs. I researched the burial and mummification practices of a group of people in Ancient America, mostly because I wanted to do something somewhat unique. I also just became more aware of the way that we teach things to each other, since we talked about it in class, and then I would see it in the world around me. It was weird to think that there are a lot of things I've learned that I don't at all remember learning.

Done!

I know that we still have two more blog posts and a final for this class, but I just wanted to celebrate with everyone the fact that we are done with all of our regular assignments, especially the essay. I dislike doing essays at the time I am doing them, but always afterwards it makes me feel like I have learned and accomplished something. I am glad I did it, and I am glad it is over, especially since it was pretty hectic in the end to get everything in.

First Response to the Essay

The first thing I noticed about this essay assignment was that in very many ways it is similar to the blog posts we've been doing every week all semester. For one thing, the length is similar. The blogs of my group members vary a bit on word count (Alyssa's tend to be the longest, for example), but I have been shooting for around 800 words per post, which fits securely into the 750-1000 word guideline for this essay. The other thing is that the essay has to have at least two sources. They are probably supposed to be a little more 'scholarly' than the one's I've been using on blogs, but I usually have at least four sources per blog post, so maybe that makes up a little for lack of 'scholarly-ness."

There are also differences, of course, or this wouldn't be a very good unit final. Essays are generally more formal than blog posts (although my rough draft doesn't show it. Hooray for writing last-minute essays at 2:00 in the morning). They are also more heavily edited (supposedly). I considered putting as a difference that the essay is supposed to be an argument, and the blogs are not, but I've had too many advertising units in English classes to believe that there is anything that isn't some sort of argument.

Acid Paper and Preservation

I decided I wanted to do a little more in the vein of preservation that I spoke about in my last post, so I decided to do my bibliography on the topic of paper history in general, and acid paper in specific. Wood pulp is naturally acidic, and if the pH of paper isn't neutralized, the paper will turn yellow when exposed to light. However, people only figured this out around 80 years ago, so everything printed before then was printed on acidic paper.

Preserving Bibles

I went to the King James Bible display this week. I wanted to go to the printing museum as well, but it didn’t work out, which was too bad. Last week, Alyssa did a lovely post on this same display and talked about the idea of putting books on display as a sort of sculpture. Her post has pictures of very many of the books that were shown, so look at it if you want to see them.

I would like to expand a little bit on her ideas by talking about the practical side of displaying books like this. When my Mother was in library science school, she took a class about book preservation, and so I learned a bunch about it (I swear, having a parent in grad school is like taking a college class. I learned so much). The thing about displaying a book, especially a historical book, is that books are very sensitive to light. Books are also very sensitive to temperature and humidity. Because of this, when someone sets up a display of books, preservation is a very important thing for them to think about.

Dictionaries!

I was one of those kids in elementary school who liked to read dictionaries. Not all the time, but every once in a while. My family had a big one open on a table in our living room, and I would look up words just for the fun of it (this is, incidentally, how I know the definitions of all the swear words I know, but that is beside the point). And it didn't just stop at Elementary school. I remember going to a party maybe a year ago, and being completely unsociable all evening simply because I found a Chinese character dictionary and just had to look through it and see which ones I could recognize. Just this last summer I discovered a new kind of dictionary--a usage dictionary. These things don't give simple definitions, they explain debates over words that have confused you for your entire life (affect/effect), or grammar "rules" that you learned in Junior High, then promptly forgot because they weren't important (I am firm in claiming my right to end a sentence in a preposition, and fortunately the usage dictionaries back me up).

Ogham Stone: Part 2

Translation: Mayan-English

(first of all, sorry group members that this is long. Feel free to only read as much as interests you)

Here is the writing that we received (image courtesy of group 6's blog):

It is written in ancient Mayan hieroglyphs. I volunteered to do the translation of the sentence for our group, so I got to learn a little bit about Mayan writing. Each of those symbols, as you can probably see, is made up of several different parts. Some of the parts are phonetic, while others of the parts contain meaning. This actually reminded me somewhat of the Chinese characters I have studied, which also are part phonetic and part meaning, although the two cultures put their meaning and phonetic parts together in a slightly different way. I think the term "Mayan characters" is probably more accurate than "hieroglyphs." Mayan characters are read left to right and top to bottom, but not in as simple of a way as English. The characters are organized in a grid, but you don't just go down the line. You first read the top left corner, then the one directly to the right of it, then the character below the first one, then the one directly to the right of that, then two below the first, and so on and so forth.

Ogham Stone: Part 1

Background Information

I happen to be in the miscellaneous group, meaning we had several different languages to choose from when making our artifact. I'll admit, I was in favor of choosing a simpler option, but was outvoted. We ended up choosing to write in Ogham (pronounced oh-um. The "g" is silent for some reason). I had not studied this writing system previously, so I did a little bit of research on it before meeting with my group to make our artifact.

Woodblock Printing

We briefly discussed the history of movable type in class today, but, in celebration of our new unit, I would like to dedicate my post to a different piece of the history of printing, known as woodblock printing.

Although the idea of movable type is relatively new, the idea of printing isn't. Some of the very first types of writing that we have found are stamps and seals that were designed to make an imprint on clay tablets. People used these all over the world from China to Mesopotamia. Stamps started out small, but larger brick-stamps were also developed for marking things. It is a natural transition from making stamps in clay to making stamps that work on fabric (paper came later). The earliest printing of this sort is from China before 220 AD, and was in the form of fabrics printed with designs, rather than words. The designs were carved onto wooden blocks and transferred onto the fabric. Later, the designs were passed onto paper and became a great art form all over the world, most especially in China and Japan, but also in Europe. (The following picture is from the 1800s, so it isn't ancient, but it shows woodblock pictures as an art form. And I like it.)

To my dearest...

To my Dearest and most illustrious group members and readers, my fondest affection and greetings.

Like many other people who have grown up in the age of computers, I can probably count on both hands the number of handwritten letters I've written and sent. Of course I write things to people, but it is all over email or facebook. When I all of a sudden had friends on missions who I am not allowed to email, I had to delve into the strange world of lick-and-seal envelopes and the US postal system, on the way asking my mother many questions that for some reason she found incredibly funny (It turns out that one of the things that a return address on an envelope is good for is it lets you know the other person's address in case you want to write them back. I always just assumed it was so that the postal service could return it to you in case they couldn't reach the recipient or something). Last week I had to ask a girl sitting next to me whether the stamp went on the upper right or upper left corner of an envelope. It made me feel very smart and educated.

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 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.

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.

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.

Slavic/Russian Epics

I don't believe I have ever studied the Slavic peoples in school, other than the people from 20th century Russia. For those of you who are also unfamiliar with this group, it includes not only Russian people, but Ukranian, Czech, and Polish people as well as a variety of other groups. Russia appears in the school curriculum briefly at the beginning of the 20th century and disappears at the end of it. No one else shows up ever, because apparently none of them ever did anything important, except helping us in WWII, and coming up with communism:

I say this ironically, of course (meaning, don't get mad at me). Slavic culture, like any culture, is a rich tradition full of interesting things, which is why I was excited to learn about it, and am sad I don't know more about it to start with. Turns out, though, that it is dang hard to research about, partially because so many Americans don't care, and partially because the Slavs didn't really write much down until the 1700s-1800s. Still, I was able to find out a few things.

Response: Dactylic Hexameter

I already commented on Alyssa's post yesterday, but I also wrote this and was going to post it as another comment, but it got a bit long, so I thought I would put it here. As Alyssa mentioned, Dactylic Hexameter is certainly the meter of epics--Homer, Virgil, and Ovid all wrote in it, as well as many not-as-famous people. I've studied it before (with my mother--I think I've mentioned before that she likes ancient Greek and Roman stuff), but I didn't really remember what it was, so I wanted to look it up. I think it is interesting information, so I am posting it.

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles

Since we are starting our unit on oral knowledge soon, it made me think of maybe one of the most famous examples of literature that used to be oral, namely, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The epic poems, believed to date to around 800BC, were orally performed, possibly for hundreds of years before they were finally written down. Bards memorized the basic stories for the poems, but probably composed a lot of it as they went, using a variety of stock phrases in order to get the correct meter. This is why the Odyssey so often uses the phrases "grey-eyed Athene," and the Iliad tells the whole putting-on-armor process many times. Repetition like this is often seen as a bad thing in current written work, but it wasn't when poems were performed orally. Repetition helped the listener to keep track of what was going on with the poem.

After researching the history of these epics, I wondered how to relate it to my experience today. The poems are still popular today, but only seem to have influence in college classrooms and a few scattered cultural idioms. I personally have read the Odyssey and much of the Iliad, but people nowadays do not go to performances of bards singing their own individual, memorized version of these stories. Then I realized that, for me at least, the connection is a different, much less structured kind of oral knowledge. I read the Odyssey for the first time when I was fourteen, but it was not the first time I had heard the stories contained in it. I already knew the story of when Odysseus had his men tie himself to the mast of his ship so he could listen to the sirens, and the story about the cyclops and how Odysseus escaped by holding onto the belly of a sheep. I knew that at the end of the Iliad, Achilles is shot in the heel, and Hector, the truest hero, is killed and his body dragged behind a horse around the city of Troy. I knew this because when I was a child, my mother told me these stories. She studied Latin and Greek in college, so it makes sense that when she thought of things to tell her children, the stories she had enjoyed and studied not too many years before came out. I don't know how many of you had the oral tradition of ancient Greece passed to you along with stories of Santa Claus and the three little pigs, but it was passed to me, and although I have never listened to a full recitation of Homer in Ancient Greek, the stories are still part of my personal oral heritage.

Hiragana

Since I utilized my mother and my younger brother in order to do my last post, I figured it would be a good idea to use one of my two remaining family members for the teaching experience. Actually, it was mostly because all of my friends and roommates are crazy busy and never there to teach, but my older brother seemed like a good choice anyway.

This is Joseph. He got back from a mission the Saturday before school started. He also doesn't like having his picture taken, so yes, that is a mission picture that I stole from the facebook account of one of his companions.

I had a hard time thinking of something to teach. Joseph has done pretty much all of the same things I have done, which would make sense since we grew up together. We also did many of the same activities in school, had many of the same friends, and the reason I took the ACT for the third time was in order to beat his score. We are like that. He has, however, been talking a lot to me recently about how he wants to learn Japanese so he can talk to me when I speak Japanese. I decided that I would begin his Japanese studies by teaching him a little bit about the Japanese written language.

Honestly, I'm not sure if this really counts as folk knowledge. I learned it almost entirely from tutorials on the internet, so it obviously can be learned without being taught in person. Then again, so can most of the things people have been blogging about. I have learned how to do a surprisingly large amount of things from the internet. My roommate claims to have learned most of what she knows about doing hair from the internet, and she's obviously good at it, since her hair looks perfect all the time.

But when I taught my brother, I did teach like I would teach folk knowledge. I gave an explanation. I demonstrated to him how to write the symbols, and what they are supposed to look like when they are done. I watched him try writing them himself, and gave instructions on how to do it better. The rest of the work may be simply memorization, but he will do that by himself.

Japanese has 3 different "alphabets" so to speak. One consists of formerly-Chinese characters that have meaning and can be pronounced one of about 4 or 5 ways depending on context. The other two are phonetic, meaning the symbols stand for sounds. One, called katakana, is exclusively for foreign words. The other, hiragana, is the one I taught my brother. It originated in about the 5th century AD, and was a simplified form of certain cursive-style Chinese characters used for pronunciation (The picture is of this kind of Chinese character). Hiragana was mostly used by women at first--men used all Chinese characters--so it was called "women's writing." Modern Japanese script uses all three systems mixed together.

Oh, and here is a (partial) list of my skills, because it is apparently important:

I can sew clothes, design patterns for clothes, quilt, crochet, knit (almost), cross Stitch, play the violin, play the piano, read music, sing in parts, follow a recipe, make up a recipe (but only if there are only about 4 ingredients), cook a darn good apple pie, read Japanese, read English, speak English, tell where commas are supposed to go in a sentence, take a test well, etc.

Hair

Earlier this evening, the learning opportunity that I had set up fell through. Then my backup plan fell through. I didn't have a second backup plan. This made an already troublesome assignment even more troublesome, so I called up my conveniently located mother to see if she had any of the brilliant ideas that she generally has.
Hesitation on the other side of the line... "Do you want to cut your brother's hair?"

So I ended up with a lesson in cutting boys' hair, which I had never done before, but will probably end up doing a lot more times in the future if I ever end up having sons.

This is a my brother. He is fourteen and a freshman at Timpview high school. He was very cooperative, although he could not resist sharing a handful of insights about just how frightening it is to have your older sister waving scissors around your ears.

So we sat him down and wrapped a towel around his neck to theoretically prevent the hair from getting all over his clothes. Then my mother got out the buzzer and the scissors and the comb and we set to work. We wanted a spray bottle to keep his hair wet, but we couldn't find one so we did without.

My mother showed me how to first take a section from the top of the head and cut it to the desired length, then use that section as a guide to know how long to cut the rest of the sections. She then let me try it, helping me when necessary, which was a lot of the time. My brother's hair is thick and wavy and utterly does not do what is told. I used the buzzer to clip the back of his head, then finished up the sides with the scissors. I evened the whole thing out, then she showed me how to make the neck, sideburns, and bangs look neat and straight.

When I was done, we looked at the finished product. My mother informed me that I should probably go do my blog while she fixed what I had done. I agreed this was probably the best course of action. In my defense, it really was my first time. I didn't even have that awkward experience as a child when I tried to cut my own hair. While the demonstration was infinitely useful, I still need a great deal of practice, which I think is true of most types of folk knowledge. You can be taught things, but a lot of the time, a big component of learning things is doing something and figuring it out for yourself.
He is probably laughing in the picture because he also thinks I didn't do a very good job.
Maybe when if I have sons, they will have hair that is easier to work with. Or I will marry someone rich enough to pay for professional haircuts on three-year-olds. That would be nice.