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Literacy in the Roman Empire

Started by jimmy olsen, November 24, 2011, 01:23:37 AM

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Eddie Teach

Quote from: Siege on November 24, 2011, 06:22:03 PM
I'm iliterate.

So you've got your computer reading posts to you and entering your replies? Cool.
To sleep, perchance to dream. But in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?

Siege

Quote from: Peter Wiggin on November 24, 2011, 06:57:28 PM
Quote from: Siege on November 24, 2011, 06:22:03 PM
I'm iliterate.

So you've got your computer reading posts to you and entering your replies? Cool.

Nah, I got an slave reading and writing for me.
[Hello everyone, I am Siege's slave!]




"All men are created equal, then some become infantry."

"Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who don't."

"Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui même!"


Razgovory

Paul of Tarsus did the same thing.
I've given it serious thought. I must scorn the ways of my family, and seek a Japanese woman to yield me my progeny. He shall live in the lands of the east, and be well tutored in his sacred trust to weave the best traditions of Japan and the Sacred South together, until such time as he (or, indeed his house, which will periodically require infusion of both Southern and Japanese bloodlines of note) can deliver to the South it's independence, either in this world or in space.  -Lettow April of 2011

Raz is right. -MadImmortalMan March of 2017

Eddie Teach

Quote from: Siege on November 24, 2011, 07:21:15 PM
Nah, I got an slave reading and writing for me.
[Hello everyone, I am Siege's slave!]

[Slavery is illegal you know. You should report Siege to his CO.]
To sleep, perchance to dream. But in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?

Siege

#34
Quote from: Peter Wiggin on November 24, 2011, 07:43:09 PM
Quote from: Siege on November 24, 2011, 07:21:15 PM
Nah, I got an slave reading and writing for me.
[Hello everyone, I am Siege's slave!]

[Slavery is illegal you know. You should report Siege to his CO.]


[But I enjoy doing things for Siege!]

[Here is a picture of me.]




"All men are created equal, then some become infantry."

"Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who don't."

"Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui même!"


Eddie Teach

To sleep, perchance to dream. But in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?

Viking

First Maxim - "There are only two amounts, too few and enough."
First Corollary - "You cannot have too many soldiers, only too few supplies."
Second Maxim - "Be willing to exchange a bad idea for a good one."
Second Corollary - "You can only be wrong or agree with me."

A terrorist which starts a slaughter quoting Locke, Burke and Mill has completely missed the point.
The fact remains that the only person or group to applaud the Norway massacre are random Islamists.

Ideologue

Can someone answer a question for me: why has widespread literacy been so hard to achieve, anyway?  Like, if you're in China, sure, I can see being functionally illiterate without a formal course, but the shit seems pretty simple for a phonetic language.  26 symbols in the modern Roman alphabet, few more in Greek or Cyrillic.  I mean, I dunno how long it took me to learn my native script, but even as an adult I learned Cyrillic an hour and most of Hangul in a morning.  I can't read either very fast but I can read them well enough that, if I understood the respective languages, it would present no difficulty amounting to illiteracy.
Kinemalogue
Current reviews: The 'Burbs (9/10); Gremlins 2: The New Batch (9/10); John Wick: Chapter 2 (9/10); A Cure For Wellness (4/10)

Razgovory

I've given it serious thought. I must scorn the ways of my family, and seek a Japanese woman to yield me my progeny. He shall live in the lands of the east, and be well tutored in his sacred trust to weave the best traditions of Japan and the Sacred South together, until such time as he (or, indeed his house, which will periodically require infusion of both Southern and Japanese bloodlines of note) can deliver to the South it's independence, either in this world or in space.  -Lettow April of 2011

Raz is right. -MadImmortalMan March of 2017

Ideologue

#39
Quote from: Razgovory on November 24, 2011, 09:17:10 PM
English isn't phonetic.

Most English phonemes map pretty closely to their graphemes--or at least it seems that way to me.  If you know English, and you can learn the letters, the varying values for and combinations of vowels, and the dipthongs, you're going to be able to understand most written material.  The words you'd get wrong are likely to be foreign anyway (and thus are unlikely to be important; I've met exactly zero people who pronounce Latin terms correctly, for example, but then again that's because one, it's pretentious, and two, it tends to be spelled incorrectly in the first place, like these motherfuckers have never even seen the Last Crusade).

I'm not talking about learning English as a foreign language here, though, I'm talking about someone with a preexisting fluency in English but cannot read or write.  Why can he not learn to read or write?
Kinemalogue
Current reviews: The 'Burbs (9/10); Gremlins 2: The New Batch (9/10); John Wick: Chapter 2 (9/10); A Cure For Wellness (4/10)

Admiral Yi

Quote from: dps on November 24, 2011, 05:02:36 PM
AFAIK, he's right about the private part, but who knows about the expensive part.  Sure, probably it was expensive to acquire a full classical education, but basic literacy?  I'm not so sure.

Fair enough.

And that OP graph tosses my elites-only education theory right out the window anyway.

Barrister

Quote from: Ideologue on November 24, 2011, 09:02:10 PM
Can someone answer a question for me: why has widespread literacy been so hard to achieve, anyway?  Like, if you're in China, sure, I can see being functionally illiterate without a formal course, but the shit seems pretty simple for a phonetic language.  26 symbols in the modern Roman alphabet, few more in Greek or Cyrillic.  I mean, I dunno how long it took me to learn my native script, but even as an adult I learned Cyrillic an hour and most of Hangul in a morning.  I can't read either very fast but I can read them well enough that, if I understood the respective languages, it would present no difficulty amounting to illiteracy.

I learned the phoenetics of cyrillic in a few days.

It may have had something to do with the fact I was already literate in latin though.
Posts here are my own private opinions.  I do not speak for my employer.

Ideologue

#42
Yeah, I suppose once you already have a "orthographical" worldview, it's just simply adding entries to an already established category.  "Y" is now a close back rounded vowel as well as a palatal approximate and analogue for various real vowels.  "X" is now a voiceless velar fricative instead of a useless redundancy.

That's the explanation I've been given before, but it seems strange.  Like, even a dumb person--and in the olden days, you'd have plenty of smart people who were still illiterate--should be able to piece together a functionality with written language with little more than the alphabet song and a list of example words.  My guess is that it was more to do with the perception, and probably the reality, that literacy would add very little value to one's life if one were of crummy social status, as most were.  "Great, I can read.  Of course, I have no money so I can't buy books, no time to read them because I work dawn to sunset, and the Bible frankly seems kind of boring anyway."
Kinemalogue
Current reviews: The 'Burbs (9/10); Gremlins 2: The New Batch (9/10); John Wick: Chapter 2 (9/10); A Cure For Wellness (4/10)

HVC

letter look easy to you becasue you know them. if you don't have a basic understanding it's harder then you'd think.
Being lazy is bad; unless you still get what you want, then it's called "patience".
Hubris must be punished. Severely.

Ideologue

I dunno, I've never said learning the English language was easy, or learning to draw a representational picture was easy, even though I know how to do these things.  I admit the possibility, but I'm not sure it's just my own bias.
Kinemalogue
Current reviews: The 'Burbs (9/10); Gremlins 2: The New Batch (9/10); John Wick: Chapter 2 (9/10); A Cure For Wellness (4/10)