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Oldest recorded transaction

avi.im

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Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#81

Post by kragen »

brazzy wrote: post #50
Waraqa wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume an integer field is sufficient since mostly it's only the year that they know not the exact date.

No, you need a lot more complexity if you really wanted to represent it semantically. The assumption that people in the past used calendars with sequentially numbered years you just need to offset, is simply wrong. You have things like "in the Xth year of the reign of King Y", where we can easily relate multiple entries with different values for X, but don't actually know which CE years they correspond to. Even weird…

Mostly true, but not absolutely:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varronian_chronology

> The Varronian chronology was adopted by the Roman state during the first century BC and gave rise to the traditional years ab urbe condita ("from the founding of the city"); most especially, those dates were used in monumental Augustan-era inscriptions, the fasti Capitolini and the fasti Triumphales.[40]

Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#82

Post by kragen »

prewett wrote: post #66
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.

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|…

That's mostly right.

Not 20%, more like 90%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...

In Japanese at this point most kanji have an onyomi (the sound of the Chinese word, which has been adopted into Chinese the way Latin words like "adopt" are adopted into English) and at least one kunyomi (the sound of a synonymous Japanese word not derived from Chinese). This does add difficulty but it is somewhat compensated for by the smaller repertoire of characters used in Japanese. A lot of the most common Japanese words, all loanwords from languages like English, and all the inflectional suffixes are normally written with one of two purely phonetic syllabaries.

Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#83

Post by kragen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #64
cyberax wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

图样图森破

Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#84

Post by kragen »

giveita wrote: post #58
keshavmr wrote: post #20

"Six thousand years ago, Sumarians invented writing for transaction processing."... is the first sentence of the "Transaction Processing" book... https://www.amazon.com/Transaction-Processing-Concepts-Techn...

Wow that is the book to read for legacy systems

No, it is proposing an ambitious rearchitecture of current systems on new principles which it argues were present in an incomplete form in many existing systems. Since it was written, some of its proposals have been implemented to generally good effect, but by no means all. It's a visionary manifesto for the future, though filled with practical information.

Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#86

Post by kehvyn »

brazzy wrote: post #50
Waraqa wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume an integer field is sufficient since mostly it's only the year that they know not the exact date.

No, you need a lot more complexity if you really wanted to represent it semantically. The assumption that people in the past used calendars with sequentially numbered years you just need to offset, is simply wrong. You have things like "in the Xth year of the reign of King Y", where we can easily relate multiple entries with different values for X, but don't actually know which CE years they correspond to. Even weird…

I actually looked at supporting dates like this, but if you go through the Met's open dataset (https://github.com/metmuseum/openaccess) that kind of "alternative calendar with no reference to the BCE/CE dates" is basically nonexistent.

There are references to the Islamic and Japanese calendar systems, but always next to the CE equivalent.

Data entry is fortunately being done by modern people, so the translation to CE/BCE is usually baked in, and all you need to support is every possible way somebody could say "the early half of" and "5th millenium B.C. to mid 1914"

Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#87

Post by kehvyn »

csomar wrote: post #72

> 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? Use some custom system? How do I get it to support all the custom operations that a typical TIMESTAMP supports? Think about how the museum physical text book store it, as simple text with processing offloaded to the reader (ie: circa 4000B…

Fortunately the Met's data is public, both via API and a 330MB CSV. https://github.com/metmuseum/openaccess

Essentially they have an "Object Date" field that's a human-readable string and could be anything, and then they include "Object Start Date" and "Object End Date" that are integer years so that it's machine readable and you can do those comparisons.

Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#88

Post by jeanlucas »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #37
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…

One of the theories of how writing was invented was via transactions and accounting. You start keeping items in clay jars. You eventually mark the jars with a depiction of what's in it. Those marks begin standing in for the items themselves when communicating across languages or keeping records of how many items and jars you have.

Impossible to truly know. Writing may well have started with doodles, notes, even jokes on materials like leaves or wood that didn’t survive.

What survives are the "important" texts because you would deliberately put them on durable material. That creates a bias where early writing looks purely transactional.

Same reason we think of pyramids when we think of ancient architecture: stone lasts, wood doesn’t.

Re: Oldest recorded transaction

#90

Post by ants_everywhere »

jeanlucas wrote: post #88
ants_everywhere wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the theories of how writing was invented was via transactions and accounting. You start keeping items in clay jars. You eventually mark the jars with a depiction of what's in it. Those marks begin standing in for the items themselves when communicating across languages or keeping records of how many items and jars you have.

Impossible to truly know. Writing may well have started with doodles, notes, even jokes on materials like leaves or wood that didn’t survive. What survives are the "important" texts because you would deliberately put them on durable material. That creates a bias where early writing looks purely transactional. Same reason we think of pyramids when we think of ancient architecture: stone lasts, wood doesn’t.

That's true we don't know anything about markings that were made on organic materials.

We do know that art and other markings date tens of thousands of years before the first proto-writing. Writing is specifically about markings that form a language. So doodles and visual jokes (e.g. phalluses) wouldn't count. I don't know what you mean by notes, but writing notes without a language would be difficult I suspect.

But there could early languages that were written on organic materials. The main problem is there's a bootstrapping problem where you need to account for how the first one developed at all. After that you can continuously improve over time.

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