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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

#91

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

bobthechef wrote: post #66
ChainOfFools wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well that and the entire Mayan corpus. what pittance of codices we have today come from Christianized Maya scribes, a massively condensed post-columbian highlight reel of their obliterated textual culture compiled at the behest of the Spanish crown and under the direction of their Catholic overseers.

Also, languages like Guarani survived because of the efforts of missionaries (the Jesuits in this case). (But I will say that the current policy of "protecting" the isolated tribes in the Amazon from human contact by categorically shutting them off is quite horrible and uncharitable. This is rooted in the preposterous myth of the noble savage. Tribal peoples are not innocent children.)

> the current policy of "protecting" the isolated tribes in the Amazon from human contact by categorically shutting them off is quite horrible and uncharitable

I dunno. If you make contact with them, most of them will die of diseases to which they have no immunity. This happens over and over. Amazon tribes. Pacific islands. On a huge scale in the Americas. For those that do survive, the event may be so traumatic that they develop a very understandable hostility to outsiders.

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

#92

Post by Apocryphon »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #90
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 mega…

The point is that this is evidence that scholar(s) on the other side of Europe, centuries after the Norse voyages, had heard of the lands they had discovered (Markland).

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

#93

Post by eloisius »

earksiinni wrote: post #53
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."

Fascinating. Is there a "new" foreign...?

No, GP heard some folsky etymology. Lǎowài does not mean ancient foreigner. One of 老 lǎo's meanings is an honorific like "old / venerable." 老伯 lǎobó uncle, 老闆 lǎobǎn boss, 老師 lǎoshī teacher, are all honorifics that don't mean really mean "old" (except for uncle, which you can use to address a man older than yourself, but doesn't mean he's from ancient times). 老人 lǎorén does mean "old people" but just regular old, not ancient old. 老外 lǎowài just means outsider.

古 gǔ means ancient, like 古人 gǔrén is ancient people. You could construct phrases to mean ancient foreigners, modern immigrants, modern foreign people, etc. but I don't know of any that would carry more special meaning than equivalent phrases in English.

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

#94

Post by edgyquant »

adolph wrote: post #38
hprotagonist wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite the opposite: you have copyist monks to thank for the survival of the vast majority of written material that remains from pre-christian antiquity.

How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe is a non-fiction historical book written by Thomas Cahill. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilizati...

Love this book it was the first time I came to here the story of St. Patrick

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

#95

Post by foobarbazbarfoo »

jbay808 wrote: post #30
hprotagonist wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite the opposite: you have copyist monks to thank for the survival of the vast majority of written material that remains from pre-christian antiquity.

I thought that was mostly due to Islamic scholars. Weren't the monks mostly erasing and repurposing old scrolls to make copies of the Bible?

A lot of those scholars were not "Islamic" or "Muslim", just happened to live in the area. Many of them were christians (Church of the East), Sabians, Jews, or local hellenistic inspired cults. Also some of those translations were translated to other local languages (eg. Assyrian, Hebrew...) then to Arabic.

Of course, in todays world, one could say Arabic/Islam becoming the dominant culture/religion minimized the work and exposure others get.

Here are some of the more famous ones

Christians: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunayn_ibn_Ishaq - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishaq_ibn_Hunayn - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergius_of_Reshaina - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masawaiyh

Sabians: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinan_ibn_Thabit

Cult of Sin: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thābit_ibn_Qurra

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

#96

Post by repiret »

hadlock wrote: post #70
interestica wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seems pointless I'm more wondering about the effects of seed/life transfer. Doesn't seem feasible to me.

Every year or two, people decide to fly from North America to Europe in a short range Cessna. They get the extra fuel tankage package, then hop from PEI to Greenland, Greenland to Iceland, then Iceland to.... Svalbard, or maybe somewhere in the Scotish Isles. From there it's pretty standard flight operations over local bodies of water. If a Cessna can do it, that's well within a bird's migratory travel distance.

I was under the impression that was still the standard way to move GA aircraft across the Atlantic, and happened regularly.

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

#97

Post by stkdump »

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…

> Hence medievalists' disdain for the "dark ages," which are basically an Italian Renaissance construct that got blown up by nationalist Germans in the nineteenth century.

Any more info on the last part? I am asking because in contemporary German the term 'dark ages' is almost unheard of, whereas in English it seems to be a fairly common term.

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

#99

Post by dash2 »

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…

It might also be fair to say that a lot of “global history” of the past 30 years has been written by living people with an agenda. And the rigour of their work has not always been that high.

From an English perspective it is hard to understand the disdain for the “dark ages” label. After the Romans left, people in Britain got several inches shorter and became illiterate.

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