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A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

economist.com

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Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#81

Post by Andrex »

buescher wrote: post #35
jmchuster wrote: post #19

> But it could help explain why Columbus, a Genoese, was prepared to set off across what most contemporaries considered a landless void. I had always thought that Columbus made the trip because he miscalculated the distance around the globe, while everyone else was saying they'd starve before reaching Asia. He was just lucky enough there happened to be land halfway there, and then mistakenly assumed he made it, since…

Educated people already knew the circumference of the globe. Columbus’ miscalculation was… hopeful. There’s a sort of conspiracy theory that it was deliberate - how else was he going to get funding?

I believe in current parlance that is called "hustle."

(Or in less generous terms, "fraud.")

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#82

Post by mc32 »

prewett wrote: post #58
ummwhat wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The informal Chinese word for white people is "Lao Wai" which literally translates as "old foreign" (the formal word for foreigners is Wai gou Ren (foreign country person)). The explanation I was given for the informal word is that it means "the old foreigners, as in the ones we've known about since antiquity."

Lao is often use as a colloquial form of respect. So “ba” means “father”, so “lao ba” is kind of like “my old man”. “Lao ban” (ban meaning business owner / boss) is “boss”. Wives might call their husband “lao gong”. I think “jiu4” is old as in the opposite of new (xin1), as in Jiujinshan (San Francisco, literal, old gold mountain).

For SF there are two translations, jio jin shan and san fan shi. It depends on the origin of the speaker.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#83

Post by slater »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #80
joecot wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Columbus thought India was closer than it was because birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere . Portugal, Spain and anyone else he asked thought he was wrong because that would've required the Earth to be around 20k miles in circumference, when the Ancient Greeks had calculated it to be 24k miles in circumference (and they were very close in their calculations).…

Isn't the land west of England just...Ireland?

Wales?

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#85

Post by bserge »

Andrex wrote: post #81
buescher wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Educated people already knew the circumference of the globe. Columbus’ miscalculation was… hopeful. There’s a sort of conspiracy theory that it was deliberate - how else was he going to get funding?

I believe in current parlance that is called "hustle." (Or in less generous terms, "fraud.")

"Startup."

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#86

Post by dr_dshiv »

jhgb wrote: post #72
joshuaissac wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The works of Aristotle were translated from Greek to Arabic by Islamic scholars in the early Middle Ages, mostly pre-dating the Latin translations, and they were sometimes the source from which the Latin translations were made. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_of_Aristotle 2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-influence/

But people never forgot Greek. It was, and still is, a living language. (Not to mention the undesirability of second-hand translations...)

Greek Orthodox; Roman Catholics forgot Greek. Until Marsilio Ficino translated Plato to Latin around 1450, Plato had been effectively lost in the west for 1000 years.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#87

Post by ncmncm »

Andrex wrote: post #81
buescher wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Educated people already knew the circumference of the globe. Columbus’ miscalculation was… hopeful. There’s a sort of conspiracy theory that it was deliberate - how else was he going to get funding?

I believe in current parlance that is called "hustle." (Or in less generous terms, "fraud.")

"Conspiracy" would mean somebody else was in on it. By definition.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#88

Post by dang »

exdsq wrote: post #15

And even if they were written down, the Catholic church sure did love to burn books back then!

Please don't post religious flamebait to HN. It leads to religious flamewar, the most avoidable of all flamewar, which we do want to avoid here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28649134.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#89

Post by sebws »

tootie wrote: post #44
blfr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a bubonic plague pandemic (1346-1353) right after the time this book was wrtten (1339-1345 according to OP).

Sure, but the topic was pandemics we don't know about because they weren't written down. The bubonic plague was written about pretty extensively. Even earlier disease outbreaks were written about.

I think the topic was how pandemics would cause word of mouth stories to be lost, not the story of pandemics.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#90

Post by dr_dshiv »

earksiinni wrote: post #46

This find is not as surprising as the Economist article would have you believe. First, what was written about areas beyond Europe's periphery tended to lag behind actual common knowledge of those areas by hundreds of years. An example would be the concept of "the torrid zone," part of an ancient Greek climatic theory that divided the world into two habitable temperate zones, two uninhabitable frigid zones (at the pol…

From the article: "...one of the students, Giulia Greco, found a passage in which Galvano, after describing Iceland and Greenland, writes: “Farther westwards there is another land, named Marckalada, where giants live; in this land, there are buildings with such huge slabs of stone that nobody could build them, except huge giants. There are also green trees, animals and a great quantity of birds.”

Where are there megalithic cultures in Northern America? Or is this evidence of a visit to Mexico?

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