The Oldest Cookbook in Korean • Hacker News Board

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#31

Post by mindentropy » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:07 AM UTC

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #3

codezero wrote: post #2

It still blows my mind how recent in history humans have been able to pass information into the future or across great distances. It’s amazing we know anything.

And why oral history was such an important part of so many ancient cultures.

It was a very important part in the Indian culture.

From what I have experienced writing was important yes, but what they usually say is to have a teacher or a Guru. Whenever I read/recite the stotras/mantras the interpretation and the recital of it is so important that I feel a Guru is very important to understand the deeper meaning even though a description of it is present. In the modern world I listen to youtube to get the recitals/rythm right.

This is the same with cooking. My Grandmother had I think just one cookbook all her life. All that she learnt was practical by doing it from a very young age. All measurements and learning was from memory and if there were variations it would be derived from her already base cooking knowledge. Her memory of all these would be refreshed periodically because of the necessity to celebrate festivals with different types of dishes specific to the festival. For this it would not be one person slogging but a group of women get together to make the dish and information exchange would happen.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#32

Post by codezero » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:17 AM UTC

dontcarethrow2 wrote: post #10

codezero wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about that a lot lately (mostly in terms of my own memory) and a fun random thing I've been thinking of is that it's really impossible (at least to me) to visualize something with any meaningful fidelity. I can describe a scene, but that's just my description, it's so blurry. When I hear a song I like, I can pretty much repeat it note for note when I whistle, and it conveys really the same feeling…

I noticed that there is something there about vocal compared to visual. Some years ago while messing around memorizing/reciting pi, I always thought I imagined the numbers visually and recited from there. I'm bilingual and a friend asked if I can do it in my mother tongue. It was weird, I was surprised I was struggling. I definitely recite(in my head) in English, then I visualize the numbers than I translate. It was…

I wonder if it’s mostly about the cardinality of the options.

Songs are made up of only a few discrete notes, but strung together, but visual memory doesn’t really have a good analog. Pixels? That’s not how we think. Maybe there is a way to remember a visual scene, the closest I can think of is the memory palace technique, and it’s just damn hard to hone, but it really is effective.

I think the trickiest thing is error correction. In a song, a missed note is a riff, and likely close to the real note, in memory palace, there’s a risk it’s just way off and even that being way off fucks up the next step in recall, with no way to repair it.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#33

Post by codezero » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:20 AM UTC

HenryKissinger wrote: post #8

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why oral history was such an important part of so many ancient cultures.

And now we have discussion boards like this one which will be a goldmine for future historians.

Call me a cynic, but this is noisy garbage.

I immediately caught myself, because I worked on a project that made great use of noise to do science. Hmm.

I’m not convinced more because there is no public, long term effort to save this information outside of closed warehouses.

I have a hard time finding proof that I existed and worked in tech in the 90s, if Google is any standard for the persistence of data, and tbh, I’m not sure what else would be. Archive.org is not super accessible for exploring - I can’t find my old site because it was on a sub domain I forget. Anyways, I think humans will mine our convos, but won’t need the prior, maybe because the social context doesn’t apply in the future as well I dunno.

Shit, what if someone puts this comment into whatever they call textbooks in the future.

Check my soundcloud Adding emoji to make it more annoying to parse. Heéhë (HN didn’t include my multi-code point flexing arm emoji)

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#34

Post by samatman » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:21 AM UTC

awl130 wrote: post #17

gibolt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. Words can independently change and evolve over time, while still using the same base. As a Chinese speaker, Korean very much sounds closeish and Japanese is often similar enough to realize a distant split. It is important to remember that all branches of a tree grow. China has thousands of dialects all co-evolving and we don't know which the others could have split from a…

His conclusion is sound while yours is not. Korean is not a dialect of Chinese, which seems to be your implication. Neither is it a "branch" of a tree of which Chinese is the trunk. In linguistic terms it is called a "language isolate". In the past, linguists tended to group Korean and Japanese together; I believe largely for political reasons they have been separated--but that's another topic. Korean uses many Chine…

In fact, Greek and English, being both Indo-European languages, are more closely related than Korean and the various Chinese languages.

There is a controversial theory that Korean, Mongolian, and Machurian, are all a part of an Altaic superfamily — along with Japanese, Turkish, and a number of others. This was broadly accepted fifty years ago, and less so today.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#35

Post by samatman » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:25 AM UTC

gerdesj wrote: post #12

frutiger wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As per ginko, this is post Columbian Exchange. However there are older cookbooks, e.g. from 1390[1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury .

Perhaps, but this article is celebrating an ancient cookbook from Korea and not England. Not only that but: "Some historians even believe it could be the first cookbook written by a woman in all of East Asia." I am not familiar with the sexual politics/subtleties surrounding food, let alone writing about it, in East Asia. I suspect, given what I know from these parts (England), that women in East Asia had few opportu…

While what you say about opportunities may be true, The Tale of Genji was written by a Japanese woman. It's often considered the first novel.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#36

Post by jinwoo68 » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:32 AM UTC

xenihn wrote: post #26

>In one of Lady Jo’s many anecdotes about Lady Jang, she describes how the noblewoman would look down at the village during dinnertime, to see which homes did not have smoke rising from the kitchen, meaning the household had no rice to cook. She would then invite families in need to work on her land so she could feed them. “Even the term ‘superwoman’ is not enough to describe Grandma Jang,” Lady Jo says. I'm extremel…

You're assuming that Korean political/economic system was the same as the one of Europe. It was not.

Nobles didn't own all the lands or people around them. Some of non-noble people owned their own lands, others didn't and had to rent lands from landlords.

So the story that you quoted means that Grandma Jang was generous to poor people who have neither lands nor money to rent lands, and allowed them to work on her lands.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#37

Post by cyphar » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:37 AM UTC

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #18

supernova87a wrote: post #13

I think it took me a while to understand (after being told by native speakers) that Korean and Japanese are a bit of a linguistic evolutionary puzzle, especially if you thought that because their characters look like Chinese, their spoken languages are related to Chinese. They are not. The languages must have come first / evolved independent of China, and then a wave of foreign commerce / scholarly / government influ…

The modern Korean writing system (hangul) is unrelated to Chinese. Also, it's quite common for languages to be written in scripts originally developed for completely unrelated languages. Maltese is related to Arabic but written in the Latin (English) alphabet, Mongolian uses Cyrillic (Russian), Thai/Lao/Khmer derive from South Indian scripts, etc.

> The modern Korean writing system (hangul) is unrelated to Chinese.

This is true, though newspapers and some other written texts make use of mixed hanja-hangul script (hanja honyong) where Chinese characters (Hanja) are interspersed with Hangul in the same piece of Korean text in order to disambiguate homonyms.

Interestingly, you could argue this is attempting to solving the flip-side of the problem that Furigana in Japanese solve (where a reader may know the phonetic reading of a word but not the Kanji that are used to write it -- though native-level Japanese speakers don't need Furigana to read the vast majority of text since Kanji represent more conceptual information than Kana).

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#38

Post by smallnamespace » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:47 AM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #13

I think it took me a while to understand (after being told by native speakers) that Korean and Japanese are a bit of a linguistic evolutionary puzzle, especially if you thought that because their characters look like Chinese, their spoken languages are related to Chinese. They are not. The languages must have come first / evolved independent of China, and then a wave of foreign commerce / scholarly / government influ…

> but it may not necessarily have relation to what the sounds are in Chinese if someone were to read the characters as if Chinese

But they are quite similar for this example:

Korean: Eumsik dimibang (like 'Eyumsik dimeebong')

Mandarin pronunciation: Yinshi Zhiweifang (sort of like 'Yinshur Jurwayfong')

Cantonese pronunciation: Yamsik Jimeifong (like 'Yumsik jimayfong')

Korean Hanja (chinese character - 汉子) words mostly had their taken pronunciation taken from Middle Chinese. Modern Cantonese preserved more Middle Chinese pronunciation than modern Mandarin.

Also, Japanese kanji (汉子) often have both onyomi (foreign) and kunyomi (native) readings, where the onyomi pronunciation comes again from Middle Chinese.

For example, 电话 (telephone):

Japanese - denwa Mandarin - dian hua Cantonese - dinwa (like 'deenwa')

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#39

Post by cyphar » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:55 AM UTC

smallnamespace wrote: post #38

supernova87a wrote: post #13

I think it took me a while to understand (after being told by native speakers) that Korean and Japanese are a bit of a linguistic evolutionary puzzle, especially if you thought that because their characters look like Chinese, their spoken languages are related to Chinese. They are not. The languages must have come first / evolved independent of China, and then a wave of foreign commerce / scholarly / government influ…

> but it may not necessarily have relation to what the sounds are in Chinese if someone were to read the characters as if Chinese But they are quite similar for this example: Korean: Eumsik dimibang (like 'Eyumsik dimeebong') Mandarin pronunciation: Yinshi Zhiweifang (sort of like 'Yinshur Jurwayfong') Cantonese pronunciation: Yamsik Jimeifong (like 'Yumsik jimayfong') Korean Hanja (chinese character - 汉子) words most…

This is because the introduction of Chinese characters also brought with it the introduction of many Chinese loan words which were then adapted to the sound system of Korean (ditto for Japanese). However, words that already existed in native Korean and Japanese were simply assigned 漢字 (Hanzi/Kanji/Hanji) based on their meanings -- this is one of the reasons why in Japanese, Kanji usually have many more readings than the corresponding Chinese Hanzi (Japanese adopted the Chinese onyomi, but they also had to have their own kunyomi readings which were just reverse-engineered based on the existing Japanese word and the assigned Kanji writing).

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#40

Post by bane » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:59 AM UTC

hungryhobo wrote: post #23

supernova87a wrote: post #13

I think it took me a while to understand (after being told by native speakers) that Korean and Japanese are a bit of a linguistic evolutionary puzzle, especially if you thought that because their characters look like Chinese, their spoken languages are related to Chinese. They are not. The languages must have come first / evolved independent of China, and then a wave of foreign commerce / scholarly / government influ…

The Chinese characters in Korean are absolutely just Chinese, the old Korean dynasties modeled many things after the chinese imperial court, including the writing system. However chinese letters are largely inaccessible to the common folks, that's why Sejong invented Hangul, a phonetic writing system that's easier to learn.

Before hangul was invented, there were several uses of Chinese characters for written communication that differed significantly from Chinese imperial use, including a form that encoded Korean sounds and another one that used Chinese as a base symbology, but reworked the grammar to align with Korean. Both were quite unintelligible to the average literate Chinese reader.