Maitani

Das erste Ei ist da! - Maitani

Spring! :) - Eivind

Yay! - Kirsten loves you

"Socotri's origins are close to the oldest written Semitic tongues that died out thousands of years ago" - Maitani

"Socotri is the most archaic and isolated of several archaic and isolated tongues spoken in Yemen and Oman known as "modern South Arabian languages". Its vocabulary is immensely rich - for example, there are distinct verbs for "to go" according to the time of the day, or for "to give birth" depending on the animal involved." - Maitani

"Socotri's roots are close to the oldest written Semitic tongues that died out thousands of years ago - and it has grammatical features that no longer exist in Arabic, Hebrew or Aramaic. The study of Socotri helps understand the deep, prehistoric past - and the subsequent evolution - of all Semitic tongues." - Maitani

For a second there I was like "eeewwww what do you mean 'depending on the animal involved'?!" before I was like "Oh :")" - Eivind

... and also: maitani on frenf.it! http://www.frenf.it/earlyad... - Maitani

"One of the regular frustrations of studying for this blog comes from the number of papers I read by people who argue as though, because language and mathematics both manipulate symbols, they can both be described by the same generalizations. They cannot. Take for example the differences that arise from the presence of verbs in language and their absence in mathematics." - Maitani

see you at twitter then, thanks - Alfonker Tapir

"In an interview with SPIEGEL, celebrated French economist Thomas Piketty speaks about Alexis Tsipras' election victory in Greece, Europe's inability to fix its financial woes and what EU leaders can learn from the United States." - Maitani

http://www.truthdig.com/report... - Maitani

"Classical Indian literary tradition is dizzyingly multicultural and multilingual. The vastness of the subcontinent and the number of peoples and languages it contains ensured this plurality. Administratively, too, a state of multum in parvo prevailed: successions of empires and dynasties only ever managed to rule limited (if large) parts, leaving autonomous regions under different powers. No one empire before the central Asian clan that came to be known in the 16th century as the Mughals managed to bring far-flung areas under a centralised administration and local societies continued to exist even under their expanding rule." - Maitani

"From around the beginning of the Common Era for a millennium, Sanskrit held a long, unbroken sway as the language of power and culture before being contested by vernacular languages. Knowledge of Sanskrit would certainly unlock a large quantity of classical Indian literature for modern readers but – as with Europe and Latin – it is possessed by only a select few. Yet Sanskrit allowed Prakrit languages, the “natural” or informal languages, to flourish in a way that, over time, gave them enough power, complexity and confidence to overthrow it as the language of literary production." - Maitani

"Today being World Book Day, I am publishing five extracts from my book The Quest for a Moral Compass, that explore five books from the ancient and medieval worlds, some well-known, some almost forgotten, but all of which have helped shape our thinking about right and wrong, good and evil – Homer’s Iliad, a foundation stone of Ancient Greek culture; the Mahabharata, the first of the two great epics of Hinduism; Mozi, the only work we have of ancient China’s forgotten philosopher Mo Tzu; the Book of Job from the Pentateuch (or the Old Testament in the Christian tradition); and Hayy Ibn Yaqan, an Islamic masterpiece from the twelfth century that today is almost unknown. (The extract on the Book of Job is not actually an extract – it is a section of The Quest for Moral Compass that I had to cut from the final version to keep the ms to length, so it’s a bonus here.)" - Maitani

I think I need to read that book :) - Eivind

"In this month’s border decoration, a roundel for the Feast of the Annunciation is suspended from a perpendicular gothic column. This elaborate architectural design itself encloses a scene showing the Mass of St Gregory, who died on 12th March 604. According to Paul the Deacon’s 8th-century biography of Gregory, the Man of Sorrows appeared as Gregory celebrated mass as Pope, in response to his prayers to convince someone of the doctrine of transubstantiation – that is, Christ’s physical presence in the consecrated host." - Maitani

"At the top of the page, there is the Zodiac sign for March: Aries the Ram. At the bottom, there is another scene of agricultural industriousness. Three peasants labour in a fenced-off garden: the men digging and planting fruit trees, the woman pulling up weeds. They are overseen by a gentlewoman, who is holding a small lapdog in her arms, and her female attendant. A large and imposing building, presumably the woman’s residence, stands in the background." - Maitani

"This week's Science includes in ancient sedimentary DNA study by Oliver Smith, Robin Allaby and colleagues from sediments from an archaeological site sealed beneath the English Channel, with evidence that wheat was decomposing on this Mesolithic site 8000 years ago. Such a claim is obvioulsy a big deal for archaeologists, it is counter to our accepted narrative of the introduction of cereals with Neolithic farming immigrants around 6000 years ago. No surprisingly it has received science media attention, both in Science and in New Scientist, as well as a learned commentary from Gregor Larson; and despite a busy teaching week I have been asked for comments. Here I give my full extended comment. While I agree that we really need more evidence to clinch this from additional sites, and I would prefer directly radiocarbon dated grains, I also don't think this requires a complete overhaul of what we know about the introduction of sustained farming around 4000 BC." - Maitani

"This report is sure to be heavily debated, and I guess many archaeologists will reject this out of hand. But that is perhaps like the ostrich with its head in the sand. I would certainly be happier with an AMS-dated cereal grain, but this new evidence tells us we need to be actively looking for those Pre-Neolithic traded grains." - Maitani

Related content here: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st... - Mark H

ABBOV - Alfonker Tapir

"New Online from the CHS - Shubha Pathak, Divine yet Human Epics: Reflections of Poetic Rulers from Ancient Greece and India" - Maitani

"Acknowledgments Note on Texts and Translations Introduction. Defining Epics through Comparison 1. The Epic Identity of the Iliad and Odyssey: Pindar and Herodotus’ Lofty Legacy 2. The Epic Metaphor of the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata: Ānandavardhana and Rājaśekhara’s Expedient Influence 3. Listening to Achilles and to Odysseus: Poetic Kings on the Ideal of Kléos in the Homeric Epics 4. Hearkening to Kuśa and Lava and to Nala: Poetic Monarchs on the Ideal of Dharma in the Hindu Epics Conclusion. Affirmative and Interrogative Epics Bibliography" - Maitani

"This collection of manuscript catalogues is derived almost entirely from the Digital Library of India.  Some come from the Archive.org and the Jain eLibrary.   A great debt of gratitude is due to all these resources for selflessly promoting scholarship." - Maitani

"The principle of arrangement follows: Subhas. C. Biswas Bibliographic Survey of Indian Manuscript Catalogues. Being a Union List of Manuscript Catalogues (Delhi: Eastern Book Linkers, 1998)." - Maitani

"In history we tend to look at the big things - the battles, the baddies, the plot and the intrigue - but sometimes it's the average and the everyday which impress most, giving us the tiniest of glimpses into the lives of the long dead." - Maitani

"Why 'Pass the Garum'? Garum was a fermented fish sauce which the Romans loved to put in EVERYTHING. So, much as we might say 'pass the salt', a Roman might ask their toga-clad chum to 'pass the garum'. Why food history? I love food, and enjoy cooking. I also love history - I did my degree in Ancient History, and now teach everything else. So, why not combine the two and make something of it? Besides that, I like the little extra insight it gives me into the people of the past. What food will you work with? I am going to start with primarily Roman cuisine - it was Roman food and Roman recipes which got me interested in the topic after all. Once I run out of Roman recipes, I'll set sail and explore the rest of the ancient Mediterranean." - Maitani

"Are big cities different from smaller cities mainly in their size? Or do they differ in other ways that go beyond simple population size? Recent research on urban scaling has answered this question definitively for contemporary cities. Large cities ARE different from smaller cities in ways that transcend their size. They aren't simply larger. Yet many of the changes that come with size turn out to be linked systematically to population size." - Maitani

"For example, large cities of course have more miles of roads and and electrical cables than smaller cities. But when we look at roads or cable per person (miles per capita), the quantities are smaller for the biggest cities. This makes sense: if you have twice as many people in a city, you don't need twice as many roads, since some of the new people can use existing roads. While this much is obvious, quantitative research in urban scaling reveals a surprising finding: the way that the miles of roads per person changes with city size is extremely regular. The same quantitative relationship holds if you are studying cities in the U.S., in Europe, or other parts of the world. There is a basic underlying regularity to the quantities of urban infrastructures that get built and used, in cities all over the world." - Maitani

Questo credo che succeda perché le regole della geometria euclidea si applicano a tutte le città. - L'Uomo con la Papera

"Readers may know that there is a split in Buddhist studies. On one side are religious traditionalists and mainly British scholars (particularly Richard Gombrich and Wynne at Oxford) who see the early Buddhist texts as a more or less accurate account of Buddhist history. On the other side are religious sceptics (yours truly) and mainly American scholars (particularly Greg Schopen and Don Lopez) who don't think there is anything authentically historical in the suttas." - Maitani

"We know this: there is a body of literature we associate with early Buddhism and the early phase of sectarian Buddhism. This literature is preserved, in a language we now call Pali, in major collections of manuscripts in Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand, with minor collections in Laos, Vietnam and perhaps other places. Substantial parts of several other recensions are preserved in Middle-Chinese in China, Japan and Korea (the most influential modern edition of the Chinese Canon, the Taishō, is based on a recension preserved in Korean) both in manuscript form and in printed editions. Fragments of several recensions are preserved in Gāndhārī, Buddhist Sanskrit, and Tibetan collections." - Maitani

"An attractive feature of the Bonnefont Herb Garden in winter and early spring is the distinctive wattle used in the raised beds. Medieval gardens, orchards, and property boundaries were enclosed in a variety of ways, including by hedges and wattle fences. In the Bonnefont Herb Garden, our wattle, or hurdles (pictured above), of various heights edge the beds and support the plants. The hurdles and supports are made from willow from the Somerset Levels (wetlands) in England; willow has been grown and woven in Somerset since the late Iron Age. Willow work is still commercially produced in the region and the same family has made our wattle elements for many years." - Maitani

"Medieval woodlands were carefully managed, producing so-called small wood by pollarding (pruning a tree from the top to promote growth well above ground level) and coppicing (cutting a tree back almost to the ground to foster new growth from the stump). Pollarding and coppicing were carried out on a regular rotation, and the resulting new growth provided a steady supply of wood for firewood, tool handles, building materials, wattle, baskets, and other purposes. The new, flexible willow shoots are known by a number of very old terms, including osiers and withies. Willow is one of several species of trees that can be hard pruned by pollarding or coppicing, and it was medieval custom to harvest willow and hazel in February. The topic of medieval woodlands and their management is a fascinating one, and I refer curious readers to the work of the late historical ecologist Oliver Rackham." - Maitani

"Reading Strange Parallels, Southeast Asian in a Global Context, I have begun to think about the differences between the eruption of Inner Asian nomads in the early modern period, and in prehistory. The author points out that the arrival of Mughals, and even to a greater extent the Manchu, to the ancient and dense civilizations of South and East Asia did not change the cultural substrate in the main." - Maitani

"Yes, Turco-Persian Islamic (“Islamicate”) culture became both prestigious and relatively popular in South Asia. But it was, and still is, a minority tradition set against the indigenous religious system, bracketed under the term Hindu today. In Ching China the Manchu had an even less obvious effect. Arguably they assimilated to the Neo-Confucian mores of the Han elite far more than the Mughals did in India in relation to indigenous South Asian gentry." - Maitani

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp... - Maitani

Late (not necessarily steppe) split of Proto-Indo-European http://dienekes.blogspot.de/2015... - Maitani

"British History Online (BHO) is pleased to launch version 5.0 of its website. Work on the website redevelopment began in January 2014 and involved a total rebuild of the BHO database and a complete redesign of the site. We hope our readers will find the new site easier to use than ever before." - Maitani

"Many volumes within the Corinth ("Red Book"), Athenian Agora ("Blue Book"), and Hesperia Supplement series are out of print, and there are no plans to reprint the volumes at least for the next few years. In 2014, the Publications Committee of the ASCSA's Managing Committee voted unanimously to allow PDFs of these out-of-print volumes to be posted to the ASCSA's website as Open Access. You may freely read, download, and share these files under the BY-NC-ND Creative Commons license (non-commercial use; you must cite the ASCSA as the source; you may not make derivatives). The scans were created by JSTOR, and through the ASCSA's Content Sharing Agreement with JSTOR, we can make these PDFs available to individuals at no charge." - Maitani

"It’s a piece of cake. You can’t put lipstick on a pig. Why add fuel to the fire? Idioms are those phrases that mean more than the sum of their words. As our Open Translation Project volunteers translate TED Talks into 105 languages, they’re often challenged to translate English idioms into their language. Which made us wonder: what are their favorite idioms in their own tongue?" - Maitani

"Below, we asked translators to share their favorite idioms and how they would translate literally. The results are laugh-out-loud funny." - Maitani

Does "Die Katze im Sack kaufen" also imply that you've been tricked and didn't get what you thought you bought (which is the Norwegian meaning), or is it just any "blind" purchase? - Eivind

In italian we say "saltare di palo in frasca", similar to the french "Sauter du coq à l’âne" (from pole to leaf), we also have "costare un occhio nella testa" exactly as in spanish “me costó un ojo de la cara” and of course many others. The one I like the most is "sono andato nel pallone", literally "I went into the ball" or "into the big ball". It's up to you to guess the meaning. :-) - miki

"On Tuesday, New Yorkers will get their last chance to see the Museum of Modern Art's "Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs," a show that gathers about 100 of the artist's painted-paper works — the largest and most extensive presentation of these works ever assembled. The exhibition begins in the 1930s, covering work Matisse started producing toward the end of his life. Can't make it to the museum? Here is the wall-to-wall experience." - Maitani

"I am at the 10-day-long Scottish Storytelling Festival in a cramped attic room on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. And that was “Deacon Brodie Unmasked,” an hour-long investigation of Edinburgh’s 18th century city councillor-cum-boozing-bank robber, William Brodie." - Maitani

"The festival is based on the Scottish Ceilidh—a traditional social gathering—and celebrates and investigates Scottish culture through storytelling. The organizers put on events throughout Scotland, but the festival’s home is Edinburgh, where the country’s most famous stories were born." - Maitani

"WALTER LIEDTKE (1945 - 2015)" - Maitani

"Walter Liedtke, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's curator of Dutch and Flemish painting, was killed in the crash of a Metro-North train Tuesday evening. Liedtke commuted from the Upper East Side to his home in Westchester County, where he lived on a farm with his wife Nancy." - Maitani

http://www.wsj.com/article... - Maitani

On 3quarksdaily you find a beautiful video on "Vermeer's Masterpiece The Milkmaid: Discreet Object of Desire" by Walter Liedtke. It is quite long, more than 1 hour, but to me it is worth it. :-) - Maitani

"The portraits here are of men and women in their 80s and 90s, rich in the rewards of substantial and celebrated careers, and although I know none of them except by name and reputation, I’m asked why their love’s labor is not lost but still to be found. Why do they persist, the old masters? To what end the unceasing effort to discover or create something new? Why not rest on the laurels and the oars?" - Maitani

"The short answer is Dr. Samuel Johnson’s, in a letter to James Boswell in 1777: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” A longer answer is that of the 19th-century Japanese artist Hokusai, who at 75 added a postscript to the first printing of his “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji”:" - Maitani

"I’ve written enough books at this point to notice trends about the process. Case in point, while many stages of pulling together a book end up going slower than expected, there’s one stage, in particular, that typically goes quicker: polishing the manuscript." - Maitani

"The magic ingredient, I suspect, is the analog nature of the process. A computer is a portal to near endless distraction. Because we use these machines for so much of our efforts, the staccato rhythm of broken concentration they generate begins to feel natural — as if this is the necessary experience of work." - Maitani

""Atesi" - what sounds like a word from the Elven language of Lord of the Rings is actually a Vimmish word meaning "thought". Scientists have used Vimmish, an artificial language specifically developed for scientific research, to study how people can best memorize foreign-language terms. According to the researchers, it is easier to learn vocabulary if the brain can link a given word with different sensory perceptions. The motor system in the brain appears to be especially important: When someone not only hears vocabulary in a foreign language, but expresses it using gestures, they will be more likely to remember it. Also helpful, although to a slightly lesser extent, is learning with images that correspond to the word. Learning methods that involve several senses, and in particular those that use gestures, are therefore superior to those based only on listening or reading." - Maitani

"Thus, we learn with all our senses. Taste and smell also have a role in learning, and feelings play an important part too. But does multisensory learning work according to the principle: the more senses, the better? "That could well be so," says von Kriegstein, "but we don't know how much the learning outcomes improve with the addition of more senses. Ideally, however, the individual sensory impressions should match one another. In other words, to learn the Spanish word for apple, the subject should make an apple gesture, taste an apple or look at a picture of an apple."" - Maitani

"The Reformation was a seismic event in history, whose consequences are still working themselves out in Europe and across the world. The protests against the marketing of indulgences staged by the German monk Martin Luther in 1517 belonged to a long-standing pattern of calls for internal reform and renewal in the Christian Church. But they rapidly took a radical and unexpected turn, engulfing first Germany and then Europe as a whole in furious arguments about how God’s will was to be discerned, and how humans were to be ‘saved’. However, these debates did not remain confined to a narrow sphere of theology. They came to reshape politics and international relations; social, cultural, and artistic developments; relations between the sexes; and the patterns and performances of everyday life." - Maitani

"Below we take a look at some of the key events that shaped the Reformation. In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation Peter Marshall and a team of experts tell the story of how a multitude of rival groups and individuals, with or without the support of political power, strove after visions of ‘reform’." - Maitani

"When it comes to origins, we know as little about the word home as about the word house. Distinguished American linguist Winfred P. Lehmann noted that no Indo-European terminology for even small settlements has been preserved in Germanic. Here an important distinction should be made. Etymologists have spent centuries searching for the ancient roots that spawned the vocabulary of our old and modern languages. To be sure, the reconstructed roots of the ancient Indo-Europeans never floated independently of whole nouns and verbs; they are only the common part of the words that according to our theories are related, but the established relations are probably real. Fierce debates about minutiae only show that modern scholars don’t know how to deal with the embarrassment of riches; yet one of the variants they have proposed may be correct—no small achievement. This is where Lehmann’s conclusion comes in. Let us suppose that the ancient root of the word house meant “to hide” (this is an example from the previous post). There were many non-Germanic words having this root, but none of them meant “house.” Although the requisite stock in trade was present, different languages produced different words from it." - Maitani

"Here is a short list that illustrates Lehmann’s point: burg, thorp (its German cognate Dorf “village” has much greater currency than Engl. thorp), yard, and the nouns that interest us most of all: house and home. One example to make the situation clear will suffice. Let us agree for the sake of argument that thorp is akin to a Hittite verb meaning “to collect.” If so, thorp was coined to designate a collection of houses. This makes good sense (regardless of whether the etymology is correct or wrong), but outside Germanic no word related to thorp means “village.” The development is local." - Maitani

#arsivori - Ori

heidegger'in yazilarina da baksaymis keske. - seyif

"Archaeological evidence and linguistic evidence converge in support of an origin of Indo-European languages on the Pontic-Caspian steppes around 4,000 years BCE. The evidence is so strong that arguments in support of other hypotheses should be reexamined." - Maitani

"For two centuries, the identification of the “homeland” of the Indo-European (IE) languages and the details of the family’s diversification and expansion have remained unsolved problems. One reason is the difficulty of linking linguistic evidence with archaeological evidence in the absence of archaeological finds of writing; another is that the problem’s solution requires an interdisciplinary effort in an age of increasing specialization. We were trained in European archaeology (Anthony) and IE historical linguistics (Ringe), and we have both had to educate ourselves in related disciplines in order to pursue our work. However, collaboration between specialists eventually becomes necessary. It is not just a matter of avoiding elementary errors; in a case such as the IE homeland problem, a broadly satisfying solution must be global, applying methods from all relevant disciplines to act as checks on solutions that satisfy only a selected range of data. We believe that such an integrated solution is finally attainable." - Maitani

via Dienekes http://dienekes.blogspot.de/2015... - Maitani

"Annual Reviews is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide the worldwide scientific community with a useful and intelligent synthesis of the primary research literature for a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines. Annual Reviews publications are among the most highly cited in scientific literature as indexed by the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports® (JCR)." - Maitani

"The Annual Review of Linguistics, publishing in 2015, will cover significant developments in the field of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces. Reviews will synthesize advances in linguistic theory, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, language change, biology and evolution of language, typology, as well as applications of linguistics in many domains." - Maitani