111–120 of 249 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's probably more records remaining than we realize because of the rampant recycling of old parchment.
Palimpsests are well understood and mostly accounted for, I'd have thought? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's even more complicated than that. The Byzantine Empire was conquered by a group of crusaders in the Fourth Crusade in 1204, with several rump states cropping up. The Empire of Nicaea reconquered Constantinople in 1261, so people usually call it the continuation of the Byzantine Empire. By the 1400s, this Byzantine Empire quite literally existed at the whim of the Ottomans, even if they only entered Constantinople…
so is "the one true UNIX" just history repeating itself?
Some time around the early 500's, the Roman-British people pushed back against the Saxon invasion. We know this from archaeological and numismatic finds. Yet we have no idea who the hell led this beyond the legends of King Arthur. Dark enough for me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not societal breakdown, that just means the inbred aristocracy doesn’t go back to antiquity. Society and its rulers are not the same thing.
Still, there were families in those days with unfathomable wealth. If memory serves me well, one was so wealthy that when they sold their land after becoming Christians they caused a real estate crisis across the Roman Empire. (Source: The inheritance of Rome, Chris Wickham, one of the early chapters.) And just a few centuries earlier, Julius Caesar arguably was one of the richest to have ever lived on earth. It's se…
Would you want to be related to Trump if the economy tanked and social services started breaking down?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's probably more records remaining than we realize because of the rampant recycling of old parchment.
Or they started using papyrus, which does not age well. AFAIK the 'Dark Ages' refer to our lack of records only, and the rest is misunderstanding.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having read the article, I disagree. What "style" of writing? The sentences aren't excessive, the language is all fairly common (the author even takes pleasure in simplifying "scramasax", clearly inviting us to take pleasure in it as well). What's wrong with it? It's not meant to be a list of purely literal facts. It's entertaining and a pleasure to read. As for Paul Graham's opinion piece; well, that's just silly. S…
Fossuser’s criticism was not directed at the article at all. It was directed at the Fulcanelli quote given by ohaideredevs. The Dwellings if Philosophers (as translated) starts out with “Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception.” This says so little with such absurd wording that it’s almost word s…
Now if you're going to argue all Latin-based and Romance languages are less straightforward than English, that's a riskier (and dismissive!) proposition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just mean that there's nothing inherently sincere about plainness and simplicity. Some people adopt a plain and simple style disingenuously, and others write in a more flowery style out of a genuine aesthetic motive. In French, 100 years ago, the kind of style you're advocating would have been the "marked" case. That is, readers would probably have attributed disingenuous motives to someone who chose to write a his…
> * That is, readers would probably have attributed disingenuous motives to someone who chose to write a history book in the style of spoken conversation.* Okay, but they'd also probably be able to understand it. So, tradeoffs.
You seem to think that it’s impossible for prose to be aesthetically pleasing and comprehensible at the same time. But in fact, the quoted text is both. If it had been written in a plainer style, I probably wouldn't have bothered reading all of it. So no trade off in this instance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fossuser’s criticism was not directed at the article at all. It was directed at the Fulcanelli quote given by ohaideredevs. The Dwellings if Philosophers (as translated) starts out with “Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception.” This says so little with such absurd wording that it’s almost word s…
The only phrase which really is "too French" here is "proposes to the sagacity of its admirers". (It's not wrong , but not many English speakers still use "propose" in its sense of "set before someone as a goal".) Other than that, I see a well-balanced sentence in which every word has a purpose – but "well-balanced" versus "straight-forward" is a matter of taste.
"The Dark Ages" is also a Eurocentric view of history. What was going on in the Islamic world? In China? The Dark Ages of Western Europe were the brilliant Tang dynasty in China; and the explosion of Islam across the Middle East and across to India, bringing with it tremendous scholarship and economic prosperity.
Yeah, the language of this website is English, which is a European language. Which means that most of the audience is European or live in a country that traces its cultural heritage to Europe. So of course the stuff on here is Eurocentric. Just like the view of history that you find in Chinese publications will be primarily Sinocentric, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> * That is, readers would probably have attributed disingenuous motives to someone who chose to write a history book in the style of spoken conversation.* Okay, but they'd also probably be able to understand it. So, tradeoffs.
I want my clothes to be practical. Some people want this and want everyone else to know it, so they buy really ugly clothes just to prove that they don’t care about aesthetics. You seem to think that it’s impossible for prose to be aesthetically pleasing and comprehensible at the same time. But in fact, the quoted text is both. If it had been written in a plainer style, I probably wouldn't have bothered reading all o…