If only history could speak up for the deaf

Noooo... Not exactly... When you do not have a written record of some sort all you can get is a reconstruction...That is significant; but not nearly so significant as some written expression...

True, and I will not deny that we can draw a meingfull distinction between pre- and post-written history. However to call it pre-history seems to me to be more about the historians prejudice in favour of writting over other forms of transmitting information. There is verbal history, remains, ruins, biological traces- earliar still there are the stones shifted by glaciation, the deep sea trenchs torn open by tectonic forces, the very shape of the continents telling us that once they were one, the structure of skeletons, the code of dna- all of this is a code, a cyper, a language as surely as any writting, telling us of a history greater and more ancient than our own.

It is not just prejudice...The use of writing as a form represents knowledge as judgement.... And we in turn judge it, but there simply is no substitute for an account that is fixed, testimonial, and possible to date... Some times it is possible for some myths to stay practically unchaanged from far back in time up until the present instant...They inform of a certain frame of mind, a psychology of primitive humanity, but because all primitives may have shared a certain outlook even while one was a thousand year separated from another, and in another hemisphere, what we can gather from them is limited....Look at Jack and the bean stalk and Jaccobs ladder... before science, which is before history, heaven was quite close and accessible to earth and earthlings...The use of forms for communication also means the use of form for reasoning... We see even today where people claim to have God in every part of their lives actually acting quite rationally and following rational laws, publicly rejecting science and privately using computers without a thought given to hypocracy...

Um...what? I'm sorry I fail to see what point you are trying to make.

The point is that writing means history because it represents a certain rational mind set... We can reconstruct what happened in the lead up to history...We can even reconstruct thought patterns through myths... History only works as a concept through which we can judge peoples of the past if we presume, and are able to presume, a certain rational framework to their behavior...We take a lesson from history...How would such a lesson be possible if all there were, was so many mad people running around acting out of their madness... I know why Achilles withheld his Myrmadons at troy... I know why Orestes killed his mother, and why she killed Agamemnon...They were not civilized, and they were not from our perspective strictly logical... Even the Ancient Greeks who were slightly more rational could not grasp the motives of those people only slightly removed from themselves... With one simple step the ancients left their entire past behind even while they were surrounded by its myths and rituals, and because they had changed paradigms they had at once changed themselves...

Look at my words...I have written them only moments ago, but their rational could be judged as long as they last... Each word is a bit of knowledge... I think I learned a new word today that I have known most of my life... The word in Greek is Oikos...It means house, from which we get house management Eco-nomy... But I read a word in Greek today, in English: Catholic... The universal Church.. But I think in Greek it is more Cathol oikos, because churches were originally some ones house, but also a great house signifies quite well a dwelling of a great family... Do I know this is true, that I am hearing right??? I suppose I could find out, but that man without writing could never know...

The achievment of writing, remarkable though it may be, is nothing compared to the acheivement of language- certainly a complex language indicates the ability of the human mind to reason, but this is somthing that is at least partially inherant. To claim that people before writing were less 'rational' has no basis, especially considering the sheer number of astonishingly illogical things people have written or done because they read somthing. I don't deny that it was an advance in human thought and reasoning, and allowed people to form larger and more advanced societys, transmit and preserve knowlage etc... but this hardly equates to more rational behaviour on an individual level; indeed it can lead to its opposite.

Uhha, and it seems most adults who didnt do that enough and EVOLVE, would go "Dont care?! Lazy attitude!" Which really helps a young mind to develop. Kudos.lol

Damn Kids!!!

If language is some abstract form of ourselves, then what makes it superior to written language? I dont see how you can stack one over another.

It is something compared to language... Language is an abstraction of reality.... Written language is an abstraction of an abstraction... It requires another level of intelligence, and adds another level of meaning, and gives us another form, which being static can form a true model of reality... It is one thing to shape a woman with ones hands, and another to shape a woman in stone... Once in stone, you have created a measure of truth, just as written language does... What one says soon passes from memory... What one creates with words last significantly longer...Some times longer than the life that created it....

I must disagree: The march against illogic began as never before with written language and abstract representation of numbers... So what if nonsense has long persisted, and is daily promulgated and broadcast... Such stuff, miscommunication, is always essential to ruling divided societies which is what civilizations are made of, and destroyed because of... Inevitably, the truth must be found and will be... You notice, that while we love the internet, it is more like writing on water than writing... We gain in speed, and it is immediate; but it falls so fast from memory that unless one wants to devote ones life to finding the truth of what people say, nonstop, the liars are always one step ahead of the truth....

Written language is the same as spoken language except in relation to the truth: What is written can be compared against reality for veracity...

Wait a moment, why can't spoken language?

I don't know... Perhaps I have had to many arguments with people over who said what...Its like comparing this years snow man to last years snowman.... When it is not done, set on a page, cut in stone; it is just so much impermanence...

I think i see what your saying. Meaning that speech is relative to present reality and tackles with reaction in that real time?

Pretty much... Written language is simply more tangible and considering that it is tangible it sort of locked language in place... Some of the personal names and object names are nearly identical in the Dorean Greek of the Bible after two thousand years... Because stories like the Illiad were written down we have a record of events out of time... We have something of Hebrew... Hard to tell exactly what it may have sounded like without vowels; but better than nothing... Because some one some where was writiing stuff down, we know how similar many common words like mother and water were right back to Indo European...The story of language is the story of mankind, but without writing all would have been wiped away by each new conquest, or invasion... In spite of that, to learn some history is to get some sense of the tragedy of all we have lost... You must learn to laugh at the security of our nations to think they will not become decrpid and be burnt away with fire and sword... Confidence is the last thing any society should have, and you see it every day, where the wealthy and powerful count on law and civil society when they undercut the meaning of each... They act like these forms stand alone... They stand as forms of relationship...They have to have meaning to people... Cash in the meaning; trade it for wealth, and the whole society crumbles...It has happened many times...It will happen at least one more time...That is the lesson of history, that change is not only inevitable, but is made so by those most ignorant of its working....

I am the last person in the world to knock the written word, nor do I misunderstand its significance, I assure you. But I feel denigrating great verbal traditions is a mistake- many societies have storytellers, elders, mystics and bards who memorise, repeat and pass down the history, values, myths and widom of their society. This has its own advantages. Despite common historical assumptions, the written word is only somewhat less vunreable to bias, less morphable, less changable based on circumstance. It is only when we find it buried in the sand we can be sure of some accuracy- sometimes not even then.

What you are talking about is another branch of philosophy, either anthropology or sociology... And I have read a lot of it because I wanted once to be a writer, and there is something in common with all forms of liturature... We only have the stories that have stuck with people... Why??? Why do we have so few forms of Anti hero??? Even counting ones who were Gods like Promaethius, or demi Gods like Achilles, or perhaps even Jesus, we still have few out of which all our tragic types are types... I agree that they tell us much, but since the myth cannot be compared to reality, where does that leave us... The Bible was once oral... When it came back from Babylon written, clearly, some behavior written there was glossed... The way the written Bible treats the introduction of wives as sisters is with a little shame... At one time it may have been a mark of respect that gave the wife inheritance rights, but it smelled like incest to later generations... And the same with human sacrifice...

At some point some one wrote the legends of the past down... What you get is their moral framwork... Plato did not understand much of anthropology even while the Greeks showed a lot of interest in foreign cultures... They did not understand their own society so they ran down the democracy which made it strong because they did not realize it, democracy was already doomed and unable to deal with individuality and individual wealth... Much as I disagree with Nietzsche, he did make a relevent statement on this point...I'll try to find it to share it...

We have better vision than the Greeks or even Nietzsche when it comes to anthropology... We use concepts all the time, the names of which bring to mind, and we do not realize that for ancient people the name was the thing, so now we tell stories like Rumpulstiltskin, or say don't speak of the devil without grasping that we were like all people of the past and fundamentally different... We have always progressed by way of forms/concepts; but we do not always see in the same sense that primitives saw the world through their concepts... It is fun, and fascinating, and educational to look at reality through the eyes of the past... If you do not understand the whole picture you do not really get a part of it...You can't count on anything, certainly not on anything being literal... You get a story... What is really happening in the story??? How much is real and how much is symbol...Do you have the love of knowledge to take years without reaching any sort of conclusion, because from my perspective you need a whole range of knowledge to understand stories from the past, and sometimes when you are done all you have is a handful of shadows... But then, it is a part of the story of man, and history will never make sense if you cannot grasp hamanity in some fashion...

I don't know how old you are...I am fifty five, and have one year in college as an English Major... Essentially I am uneducated...But I have and have read a lot of Greek history and tragedy, a lot of Anthroplogy, and by way of understanding that, a lot of Freud and some Jung, a lot on Magic and religion as well as much of history, lots on native Americans...Do I know anything??? Can I say anything of certainty of pre history...Only that I have a sense of it.. And some times that is enough, because children still think of reality as primitives, and their stories are as reliable...Ontogeny recapituates philogeny, how do they say that???...Many people are still trapped in the past...

I think that history would say the same thing that a critical historian would . . . "these people are ******* crazy".

I would make his middle name ten-thousand-before-common-era, because that marks the beginning of the Neolithic revolution.

and in any case, there is no clear point where one can say 'ah ha! this is the written word, the first one of its kind!' Written language begins as either numbers, or pictures- scratchs in the rock to indicate numbers, which become somthing more- or paintings of events, pictures are then reduced to symbols, which combined with other symbols convey meaning, and these symbols become an alphabet, and the symbols are further reduced, becoming mroe and more basic, faster to put down, until they are become what we recognise today. At what point can you clearly say we have writing? You can't, and that is because speech, writing , picutres, sculptures- all are language, all convey meaning, and this meaning takes those many shapes. But language is older than us, and our modes of expression are attempting to enunciate clealy what is already there, a language written in dna, in geology, in electronmagnetic radiation, in our bodies and our very souls. Truth imparted from the past- call it history, which seems easiest to me, or language which is no less apropriate, call it antrapology if you must, though that is hardly so, or better yet call it memory. Which do you prefer? Or if you object to the meaning, then object to that, and move on from the choice of words.