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Oldest recorded transaction

avi.im

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Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#61

Post by divbzero »

tzury wrote: post #30

Quote: I wonder how people store dates older than this. Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep theft inventory details. How do I do it? As an epoch? Store it as text? The answer: Text. Many items in museums have no specific date but Circa X. I have spent a lot of time in the early 2000s to enable "Sort by date" in museum registrars software I was maintaining despite having it textual

> The answer: Text.

That was my immediate thought too and led to me wondering: How do you represent BCE dates in ISO 8601?

Apparently ISO 8601 always supports YYYY from 0000 (1 BCE) to 9999 (9999 CE). ISO 8601 can also extend beyond those limits if agreed upon by sender and receiver: e.g. -0001 (2 BCE), -0002 (3 BCE), etc.

Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#62

Post by OskarS »

cyberax wrote: post #47
thaumasiotes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Phonographic writing developed much later Well, the earliest signs are logographic. But phonographic writing didn't take long to develop. Once you've got a few logographs, it becomes apparent immediately that you can't extend that approach to everything you can say.

> But phonographic writing didn't take long to develop. But it did. It took around 1500 years from the first writing systems to fully phonetic systems. And we still have Chinese characters even now, or the Tibetan writing system. For some reason, writing systems tend to stay stuck on mixed logographic and phonetic systems.

There's always a sliding scale between "proto-writing" and fully developed writing systems, but just using symbols phonetically instead of semantically happens much faster than that. The very archaic forms of proto-cuneiform is from about 3400 BCE (though things like clay tokens are much older). It, like virtually all writing systems in the world, developed into a true writing system by use of the "rebus principle", where symbols came to acquire different meanings based on phonetics in the same way as in a rebus. Like, in English, if you had a symbol for "female sheep" (a "ewe"), you could start to use it to signify the word "you", even though there's no semantic connection.

The earliest evidence for this in cuneiform is from around 3200-3000 BCE. There is a famous tablet where the symbol for "reed" is used to represent the word "reimburse", because they're both pronounced like gi. By a few hundred years later, cuneiform was a fully fledged phonetic writing system.

Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#63

Post by cyberax »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #56
cyberax wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But phonographic writing didn't take long to develop. But it did. It took around 1500 years from the first writing systems to fully phonetic systems. And we still have Chinese characters even now, or the Tibetan writing system. For some reason, writing systems tend to stay stuck on mixed logographic and phonetic systems.

The modern Chinese writing system is fully phonetic, just with extremely complex spelling. There is no pretense that characters represent ideas or words. They represent syllables. Phonetic use of the characters was immediate. The go-to example here is 來, which depicts a stalk of wheat. It is the spelling of the verb "come", and the verb is spelled that way because the character for "wheat" was borrowed with no altera…

I speak Chinese :)

It's a mixed system with about 2 millennia of legacy. It started as logographic, then it got into phono-semantic compounds, with detours into the written-only official language (like Latin), and now it's messy mix of everything. There are true logographs (休，林，森), true phonosemantic compounds, and plenty purely phonetic characters that have no meaning by themselves ("bound morphemes").

Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#64

Post by thaumasiotes »

cyberax wrote: post #63
thaumasiotes wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The modern Chinese writing system is fully phonetic, just with extremely complex spelling. There is no pretense that characters represent ideas or words. They represent syllables. Phonetic use of the characters was immediate. The go-to example here is 來, which depicts a stalk of wheat. It is the spelling of the verb "come", and the verb is spelled that way because the character for "wheat" was borrowed with no altera…

I speak Chinese :) It's a mixed system with about 2 millennia of legacy. It started as logographic, then it got into phono-semantic compounds, with detours into the written-only official language (like Latin), and now it's messy mix of everything. There are true logographs (休，林，森), true phonosemantic compounds, and plenty purely phonetic characters that have no meaning by themselves ("bound morphemes").

> now it's messy mix of everything. There are true logographs

Don't confuse the origin of the system with what the system is now.

Using your example, what do you see as the difference between the "logographs" 森 and 林?

Neither can be a logograph, because neither one represents a word. But even if that weren't the case, on the assumption that they are simply pictures representing concepts, how would you know which one was which?

What does it mean, to you, that the word "forest" must be written 森林 and not 森?

> and [there are] plenty purely phonetic characters that have no meaning by themselves ("bound morphemes").

...yes. 森 and 林 both belong to that category. But you've specifically contrasted them with it. I can't tell what you're thinking of.

Characters can be classified by origin, so that 森 is "从林从木", 切 is "从刀七声", and 下 is "指事". You seem to be reaching for this, but "bound morpheme" is a classification of the current use of the linguistic element, not of the origin of the way it's spelled.

Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#65

Post by deaddodo »

dotancohen wrote: post #40
thaumasiotes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Phonographic writing developed much later Well, the earliest signs are logographic. But phonographic writing didn't take long to develop. Once you've got a few logographs, it becomes apparent immediately that you can't extend that approach to everything you can say.

> Once you've got a few logographs, it becomes apparent immediately that you can't extend that approach to everything you can say. The converse is just as true. Not all things you can think, you can say. I remember sometime in my teens realizing that my thoughts are constrained by my language, an epiphany that sparked a life long interest in language. Now some 30 years later, I feel that I can feel ideas that I don't…

Do you have an example? I can’t possibly think of a single idea that’s completely expressionless. Even drug-fueled hallucinations can eventually be given a description; albeit without being able to actually transfer the feeling/internalization of it.

You might have to be overly verbose and explicit in your language, but ultimately you can describe pretty much anything using “like”, “as”, and “akin to” with qualifiers.

Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#66

Post by prewett »

cyberax wrote: post #47
thaumasiotes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Phonographic writing developed much later Well, the earliest signs are logographic. But phonographic writing didn't take long to develop. Once you've got a few logographs, it becomes apparent immediately that you can't extend that approach to everything you can say.

> But phonographic writing didn't take long to develop. But it did. It took around 1500 years from the first writing systems to fully phonetic systems. And we still have Chinese characters even now, or the Tibetan writing system. For some reason, writing systems tend to stay stuck on mixed logographic and phonetic systems.

My understanding of the history of Chinese writing is that it kept trying to go phonetic, but each time they prevented it, because the writing had to be read across an empire with multiple languages. Even so, something like 20% of the characters are quasi-phonetic, with the radical giving the topic and the rest of the character giving the approximate pronunciation, so "the word for {a plant|a thing of metal|a person|etc} that is sounds similar to X".

When the Japanese imported it, they used the characters much more phonetically. They used the whole word when that worked, but the characters got assigned to the Japanese pronunciation of the word, as well as the pronunciation from the pieces of other words where that character appeared, as well as the Chinese pronunciations. Then six hundred years or so later they imported them again, by which point the characters had evolved in Chinese but not in Japanese. So its sort of phonetic, but it's a complete mess.

Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#67

Post by dotancohen »

deaddodo wrote: post #65
dotancohen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once you've got a few logographs, it becomes apparent immediately that you can't extend that approach to everything you can say. The converse is just as true. Not all things you can think, you can say. I remember sometime in my teens realizing that my thoughts are constrained by my language, an epiphany that sparked a life long interest in language. Now some 30 years later, I feel that I can feel ideas that I don't…

Do you have an example? I can’t possibly think of a single idea that’s completely expressionless. Even drug-fueled hallucinations can eventually be given a description; albeit without being able to actually transfer the feeling/internalization of it. You might have to be overly verbose and explicit in your language, but ultimately you can describe pretty much anything using “like”, “as”, and “akin to” with qualifiers…

I think that any parent holding their baby for the first time will give an example. There is a feeling of existing, of purpose, of continuity. But no "like", "as", or "akin to" suffices.

Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#69

Post by lazide »

maratc wrote: post #18
delichon wrote: post #8

This isn't just the oldest recorded transaction, it's nearly the oldest known recognizable sample of human writing. Not a love letter or a sermon or a story, but a receipt. This probably reflects their ubiquity rather than importance. There is one known older writing sample, the Kish Tablet of Jemet Nasr. Since that tablet represents lists and counts of goods (barley, oil, livestock), it may also be a receipt, or per…

> Not a love letter or a sermon or a story, but a receipt. This probably reflects their ubiquity rather than importance. We humans are pretty good at remembering sermons and stories and we can recreate them from memory and pass them down to the next generations. We however suck at remembering numbers, that's why we invented writing so we could write the numbers down and rely on these records, instead of on bad human…

Well, we especially suck at remembering numbers when it’s something like ‘how much I owe Bob’ hah. At least for many people.

I expect this writing was a way to help reduce civil unrest/murder by reducing he said/she said arguments about goods, services, money, etc.

Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#70

Post by scrollaway »

tzury wrote: post #30

Quote: I wonder how people store dates older than this. Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep theft inventory details. How do I do it? As an epoch? Store it as text? The answer: Text. Many items in museums have no specific date but Circa X. I have spent a lot of time in the early 2000s to enable "Sort by date" in museum registrars software I was maintaining despite having it textual

I think the world could use an “imprecise” data type, which would be a tuple (t, margin).

In your case: if you wanted a date plus minus 50yrs, that would be (date(d), range(years, 50)).

Some construction like this allows for I believe most use cases. You just need to be able to store: date, date time, date range, and the precise/imprecise versions of all of these.

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