I came across this chart over on wikipedia. That can't possibly be accurate with regards to literacy rates in the Roman Empire can it? :huh:
What do you guys think a reasonable estimate is?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Literacy_1-2000.jpg/800px-Literacy_1-2000.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education#Greece_and_Rome
QuoteIt has been argued that literacy rates in the Greco-Roman world were seldom more than 20 percent; averaging perhaps not much above 10 percent in the Roman empire, though with wide regional variations, probably never rising above 5 percent in the western provinces,[44] and that the literate in classical Greece did not much exceed 5 percent of the population.[45] The argument for these claims is that ancient governments did not invest in public education.
Sourced links:
Quote[44] ^ Harris W.V. "Ancient literacy", 1989, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
[45] ^ Scragg D. G.; "Textual and Material Culture in Anglo-Saxon England", 2003, DS Brewer, ISBN 0859917738, 9780859917735, at page 185: "The numbers of the literate .... even in classical Greece did not much exceed 5 percent of the population", citing Harris W. V.; "Ancient Literacy", 1989, Cambridge, at page 328
That chart seems to heavily exaggerate both the crest and the trough of the pre-Renaissance period. I'm not sure I buy it without some serious studies to back it.
Maybe its just citizens or somesuch?- but even there a lot of them would be illiterate and just hire slaves for that sort of thing I'd imagine.
Quote from: Habbaku on November 24, 2011, 01:38:30 AM
That chart seems to heavily exaggerate both the crest and the trough of the pre-Renaissance period. I'm not sure I buy it without some serious studies to back it.
Yeah, even in the stupidest time, I find it hard to believe that literacy declined to near-fucking-zero. Though if so, I suppose it would help explain why administration was so difficult and diffuse more than any other sociopolitical factor.
Functional literacy in the Roman republic was limited to aristocrats and greek paedogog slaves and freedmen. We have examples of graffiti which suggests that the plebeans did have some limited reading and writing ability and the Roman tradition of posting important information in stone or marble in public places (e.g. the Res Gestae or 12 Tablets) suggests that everybody had somebody they trusted that could read. There was a constant lack of litterate people in the system in general. The lack of literate people to run the administration is possibly what drove the generals in the crisis of the 3rd century to consider allying with christians, they could no longer rely on the aristocrats to do the administration. This is also possibly an explanation of why the Church attacked all sources of learning outside the church, who can replace the church if nobody else can read?
I, the radical atheist here, don't think the Church was a source of a drop in literacy in the early mideival period. I am not convinced that there was a drop in literacy. The trope is powerful, but that's all. Christianity had a book, they wanted people to be able to read the book. To the best of my knowledge it is not until after Canossa and a decline in lay Latin knowledge that the Church starts to claim that religion is what the church says it is and people sto reading the bible.
Quote from: Ideologue on November 24, 2011, 08:11:01 AM
Quote from: Habbaku on November 24, 2011, 01:38:30 AM
That chart seems to heavily exaggerate both the crest and the trough of the pre-Renaissance period. I'm not sure I buy it without some serious studies to back it.
Yeah, even in the stupidest time, I find it hard to believe that literacy declined to near-fucking-zero. Though if so, I suppose it would help explain why administration was so difficult and diffuse more than any other sociopolitical factor.
I can believe the troughs, if not the peaks. For example, King Alfred the Great had trouble finding enough people who could read to man his churches when he launched his civilization drive, and made literacy for churchmen & high nobles a deliberate part of his strategy - indicating that before him, these things were vanishingly rare, at least in Anglo-Saxon England prior to him.
Part of the problem was that, in order to understand any of the great works of scholarship and religion, not only did you have to read, but you had to read Latin, as very few works were availabe in the vernacular (Alfred himself is said to have translated several books into English!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_the_Great#Religion_and_culture
The result was that there were only a small percentage at times who could read ... but by the "high middle ages" I would have thought this would have increased considerably. Certainly, it is hard to believe that the situation in 1200, with monks and lawyers all over the place ( :D) is anything like the situation prior to Alfred in England.
It's impossible to know. It's actually rather depressing how little we actually know about the classical world. The works that do survive don't give us much of an idea of the how the average person lived, and I sometimes wonder if some of the statements in the history are just lies. Take for example Nero. The History of Nero was written by his enemies after he was dead. It was said that Nero built a ship designed to sink to kill his mother. She escaped and he sent assassins to knife her then claimed it was a suicide. What if that's just a nasty rumor that was spread around by his enemies? It is an unlikely turn of events. People are willing to believe strange things about others they don't like. Here's an alternate scenario. Agrippina did take a trip on a pleasure ship. The boat sank accidentally, but she survived. She was so overcome with grief she actually killed herself. The rest was concocted by Neros enemies and the rumor became common currency amongst the senatorial class. When history was written by the same senatorial class those rumors made it in. There's no way to really know. I find it somewhat depressing.
We know much more about the middle ages then we do about the classical world. I don't think there is an equivalent to the Domesday book for Ancient Rome.
Quote from: Syt on November 24, 2011, 01:31:26 AM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education#Greece_and_Rome
QuoteIt has been argued that literacy rates in the Greco-Roman world were seldom more than 20 percent; averaging perhaps not much above 10 percent in the Roman empire, though with wide regional variations, probably never rising above 5 percent in the western provinces,[44] and that the literate in classical Greece did not much exceed 5 percent of the population.[45] The argument for these claims is that ancient governments did not invest in public education.
Sourced links:
Quote[44] ^ Harris W.V. "Ancient literacy", 1989, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
[45] ^ Scragg D. G.; "Textual and Material Culture in Anglo-Saxon England", 2003, DS Brewer, ISBN 0859917738, 9780859917735, at page 185: "The numbers of the literate .... even in classical Greece did not much exceed 5 percent of the population", citing Harris W. V.; "Ancient Literacy", 1989, Cambridge, at page 328
That seems too go to far in the other direction, there's way too much graffiti written by blue collar types from literacy to be that rare.
Difficult to tell. We don't know the policy of removal of graffiti. None knows how long it's been there. It's also likely that literacy was not uniform. Urban areas likely had more literacy rates then rural. If 40% of the urban population could read and 1% of the rural could you would naturally have more graffiti in urban areas but still have a very low over all literacy rate. In the late Roman empire Christians were considered more literate then the general public, probably because early Christianity was an urban phenomenon. We know this because the term "pagan", which the Christians used to described their more traditional opponents means something like "provincial", "rural" "hillbilly".
All education was private, and very expensive, in the Roman Empire. Not surprising that literacy was very low.
Quote from: Razgovory on November 24, 2011, 10:50:25 AM
Difficult to tell. We don't know the policy of removal of graffiti. None knows how long it's been there. It's also likely that literacy was not uniform. Urban areas likely had more literacy rates then rural. If 40% of the urban population could read and 1% of the rural could you would naturally have more graffiti in urban areas but still have a very low over all literacy rate. In the late Roman empire Christians were considered more literate then the general public, probably because early Christianity was an urban phenomenon. We know this because the term "pagan", which the Christians used to described their more traditional opponents means something like "provincial", "rural" "hillbilly".
It is hard to generalize. Christianity had a lot of early support within the population of slaves most of whom were illiterate. The early stories of artistocrats becoming Christian stand out because there were so few of them. Pagan probably did have the prejorative meaning you set out at one point but it probably was not in the early Church. During the early days Pagan probably meant "other than Christian".
As for literacy rates who knows really. Christianity was able to spread amongst the slave populations because some slaves were able to read and could so could preach from Christian writings and write themselves. However a good question is the degree to which reading form any text was as important as preaching from "divine revelation" since we know that was a basic conflict within Christiany early on.
Emperor Augustus, Lady Augustus and their pet tortoise, Alan.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on November 24, 2011, 12:23:17 PM
All education was private, and very expensive, in the Roman Empire. Not surprising that literacy was very low.
Source?
Quote from: The Brain on November 24, 2011, 01:12:06 PM
Source?
Rome and the Barbarian Invasions, or something like that.
Quote from: The Brain on November 24, 2011, 02:55:06 PM
Quote from: Solmyr on November 24, 2011, 02:51:44 PM
Quote from: The Brain on November 24, 2011, 02:50:04 PM
Quote from: Admiral Yi on November 24, 2011, 02:31:21 PM
Quote from: The Brain on November 24, 2011, 01:12:06 PM
Source?
Rome and the Barbarian Invasions, or something like that.
Total War games don't count.
EU: Rome?
No one played it.
I played it and went bankrupt when everybody and his dog added so many cohorts to my army I was both unable to pay them and unable to disband them as well as being unable to refuse more "volunteers".
That was silly. Those guys were illiterate, I wrote each one of them a note saying (in latin), we have enough soldiers and we don't have enough money to pay you, please go home.
Tell me about the dog.
Quote from: The Brain on November 24, 2011, 01:12:06 PM
Quote from: Admiral Yi on November 24, 2011, 12:23:17 PM
All education was private, and very expensive, in the Roman Empire. Not surprising that literacy was very low.
Source?
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.
Why would literacy rates crumble after the adoption of Christianity and not after, say, the crisis of the Third Century? Why would there be such high literacy rates in the largely rural west? That graph strikes me as full of shit.
Quote from: Queequeg on November 24, 2011, 05:12:00 PM
Why would literacy rates crumble after the adoption of Christianity and not after, say, the crisis of the Third Century? Why would there be such high literacy rates in the largely rural west? That graph strikes me as full of shit.
Agreed.
The figure for "Christian Europe" for 600.....0.01%...........has got to be utter bollocks given that half the Byzantine Empire was in Europe and Christian.
Quote from: Queequeg on November 24, 2011, 05:12:00 PM
Why would literacy rates crumble after the adoption of Christianity and not after, say, the crisis of the Third Century? Why would there be such high literacy rates in the largely rural west? That graph strikes me as full of shit.
Oh yeah, that's bullshit. I've seen similar graphs about "scientific advances".
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg830.imageshack.us%2Fimg830%2F3091%2Fchristianityandscience.jpg&hash=58023295f2478164e4c188a1032f4133f8eff367) (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/830/christianityandscience.jpg/)
Uploaded with ImageShack.us (http://imageshack.us)
The origin of the Graph seems to come from here http://www.nobeliefs.com/comments10.htm
As far as I can tell there are no number behind the graph. It's simply arbitrary lines and colors. Of course it also implies that only Europeans can do things. What about the Chinese or Japanese, or any East Asia country. What about Africa or India? If Christianity actually caused a massive gap like this you would expect other cultures to jump a head.
Quote from: Razgovory on November 24, 2011, 05:25:48 PM
Quote from: Queequeg on November 24, 2011, 05:12:00 PM
Why would literacy rates crumble after the adoption of Christianity and not after, say, the crisis of the Third Century? Why would there be such high literacy rates in the largely rural west? That graph strikes me as full of shit.
Oh yeah, that's bullshit. I've seen similar graphs about "scientific advances".
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg830.imageshack.us%2Fimg830%2F3091%2Fchristianityandscience.jpg&hash=58023295f2478164e4c188a1032f4133f8eff367) (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/830/christianityandscience.jpg/)
Uploaded with ImageShack.us (http://imageshack.us)
The origin of the Graph seems to come from here http://www.nobeliefs.com/comments10.htm
As far as I can tell there are no number behind the graph. It's simply arbitrary lines and colors. Of course it also implies that only Europeans can do things. What about the Chinese or Japanese, or any East Asia country. What about Africa or India? If Christianity actually caused a massive gap like this you would expect other cultures to jump a head.
Even on its face it is silly, since the Dark Ages were hardly *caused* by Christianity.
Also - anyone *really* want to see Roman Emperors armed with nukes? Facing off against multiple rivals? :lol: Instead of "exploring the galaxy" we could easily now be "bombed back into the stone age" ...
Quote from: Malthus on November 24, 2011, 05:29:27 PM
Also - anyone *really* want to see Roman Emperors armed with nukes? Facing off against multiple rivals? :lol:
Somewhere in Korea, Tim just got a boner.
It also implies that Romans had a level technology on par with the European Renaissance. I guess I missed the part about Roman cannons, printing, trans-Atlantic voyages, etc.
Quote from: Malthus on November 24, 2011, 05:29:27 PM
Even on its face it is silly, since the Dark Ages were hardly *caused* by Christianity.
Also - anyone *really* want to see Roman Emperors armed with nukes? Facing off against multiple rivals? :lol: Instead of "exploring the galaxy" we could easily now be "bombed back into the stone age" ...
It is a pretty silly argument that Christianity caused such a stagnation in progress. You have exactly the same sort of stagnation happening in the muslim world with the end of itjihad and the emergence of Al Gazali which ended the Muslim Golden Age of Science and you have the Mongol Conquest of China ending the Sung Enlightenment both of which happen in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Scholastics emerge in Europe at that time and over the next 300 years they embrace all the Muslim and Chinese advancements that they had ignored during the Dark Ages. So it's not like if we had not gone christian Colombus would have gone to the Moon not America. The other issue is that cultural and economic conditions decide how far science can advance in a society as well. So what if you could have had much more progress, if you don't need a technology it's not going to be invented and if the society around you works in such a manner that you can't get paid for the technology it's also not going to be invented.
However, what is special about the dark ages is that in the western roman empire kept western europe at a higher technological level than it's social and economic structures would suggest. After the plagues, climate change and socioeconomic factors which depopulated the western roman empire the loss of connection with the east that germanic conquests caused the west to regress to the level of tech it would have maintained had it not been part of rome.
I don't think there really was that much "Stagnation" in the world at the time. Not much more then there was during the Roman Empire. It's not like people "forgot" how to make Iron or ride horses. The biggest loss were cultural. Philosophic tracts, literature etc. Math did take a big hit though and likely engineering. But the I think that can be attributed more to depopulation then anything else. If the number of cities declines dramatically the need to build aqueducts to them isn't that important. So it may have been lost due to lack of use. Much is made of of the loss of medical knowledge, but that's really kind of a wash. Roman and Greek medicine wasn't that effective. It was based on principles that had no relation to actual health (and many procedures were injurious to human health). Sometimes they did the right thing but based it on incorrect assumptions. The Roman knew that people got malaria around swamps and made great efforts to drain those swamps. They concluded that it was caused by bad smells (which is where the word Malaria comes from. It means "bad air". Medicine didn't really become that effective until the enlightenment. And they didn't actually understand what caused disease until the 19th.
So Viking, what was that word you used for a religious apologist who's so out there that it might be a parody? "Poe" was it? Perhaps we can apply it to the Atheist who came up with that graph.
I'm iliterate.
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.
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!]
Paul of Tarsus did the same thing.
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.]
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.]
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hottcrop.com%2Fphotos%2Felisha-cuthbert.jpg&hash=6031487900d546c016a620eec13bcede89932088)
Looks like a porno actress. :hmm:
Quote from: Peter Wiggin on November 24, 2011, 08:28:15 PM
Looks like a porno actress. :hmm:
nonono... It's The Girl Next Door (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Next_Door_%282004_film%29), eh, oh, yes, pron... :blush:
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.
English isn't phonetic.
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?
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.
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.
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."
letter look easy to you becasue you know them. if you don't have a basic understanding it's harder then you'd think.
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.
As an example, i know portuguese and can read it. same letter as english, and most letters sound (relatively) the same, but every once ina while i'll look at some writing and it'll take a while to click. it's just a jumble of letters. representative symbols are hard to make out if you don't understand them. stringing them together makes it even harder. i think of it like math. most illiterates can read simple words (cat for example) and most people can do simple math (1+1=2) but start adding those simple things together and it gets complicated. A mathematician might look at what he considers an easy equation and solve it in a few seconds in his head. however you and i can look at the same equation and have no idea where to start. it's not that we don't have the intelligences, just that we don't have the experience and understanding. Now specifically words are abundant and everywhere. it's easier to get practise and exposure. that was not so in the past.
Alt-Math?
Quote from: HVC on November 24, 2011, 11:08:03 PM
As an example, i know portuguese and can read it. same letter as english, and most letters sound (relatively) the same, but every once ina while i'll look at some writing and it'll take a while to click. it's just a jumble of letters. representative symbols are hard to make out if you don't understand them. stringing them together makes it even harder. i think of it like math. most illiterates can read simple words (cat for example) and most people can do simple math (1+1=2) but start adding those simple things together and it gets complicated. A mathematician might look at what he considers an easy equation and solve it in a few seconds in his head. however you and i can look at the same equation and have no idea where to start. it's not that we don't have the intelligences, just that we don't have the experience and understanding. Now specifically words are abundant and everywhere. it's easier to get practise and exposure. that was not so in the past.
Fair enough. I think we actually read familiar words as ideograms, not individual symbols, which may point to the dividing line between barely literate ("c... a... t...") and actually literate ("cat"). We've all seen this:
QuoteAoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Thing is, as an Eggplant whose first language is not English, this might not be at all parsable to you, but as a native Anglophone I read it with hardly a pause; the ideograms are simply crudely rendered.
(And vice versa: do the same thing with Spanish, I'd probably have a very hard time.)
Maybe that's the missing piece of the puzzle for me? Without foundational instruction at a young age in the phonogrammatic rendering of words, leading to me being able to read thousands of different words and memorize their appearance, usual context, and ordinary meaning, perhaps it becomes much more difficult to reach that "ideogrammatic" stage where I can read properly rendered words quickly and read shit that's all fucked up without much additional effort.
Whatever.
You don't need to be literate to be succesful in life.
Quote from: Siege on November 25, 2011, 12:02:06 AM
Whatever.
You don't need to be literate to be succesful in life.
Yes you do... but sure the military is always an option yeah.
Quote from: Ideologue on November 24, 2011, 09:37:44 PM
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?
I don't know if that's actually true. English is pretty screwy. You have silent letters and all kinds occasions where letters make a sound other then the one typically. So a lot of rote memorization is required. Words like "Enough" or "Thought". Or looking at a word like "toe" and compared it to "tow". English is a language that has been stitched together from the parts of other, better organized languages.
What's the discussion about? Learning to read and write multiple languages is so easy that little kids do it.
About the cost of basic education in Rome: there is no hard reason why it would be expensive. You need to support one guy who can read and write, and he can teach hundreds of kids. And as soon as guys who can read and write become common they'll be fairly cheap.
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.
Learning a skill like literacy is relatively easy for young children and once learned, learning literacy in a similar-type language is not all that hard even for adults.
However, I have heard that learning literacy for the first time as an adult is reasonably difficult.
Quote from: Malthus on November 25, 2011, 09:50:26 AM
However, I have heard that learning literacy for the first time as an adult is reasonably difficult.
Yeah, there is definitely a critical window of opportunity theory for literacy. If one language is learned during that time then the ability to learn a second language lasts a life time but if that windo is missed then obtaining literacy in just one language becomes very difficult.
The theory could explain widespread illteracy in cultures where children were not taught literacy during that critical period.
Quote from: Ideologue on November 24, 2011, 10:44:57 PM
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."
Pretty much this. Dirt-farming peasants don't need to read anything. Hell, even nobles don't need to read anything, only tell one coat of arms from another. So you pretty much have only the clergy and merchants who learn it.
Quote from: Solmyr on November 25, 2011, 05:00:45 PM
Quote from: Ideologue on November 24, 2011, 10:44:57 PM
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."
Pretty much this. Dirt-farming peasants don't need to read anything. Hell, even nobles don't need to read anything, only tell one coat of arms from another. So you pretty much have only the clergy and merchants who learn it.
You guys are forgetting that the main use of literacy aside from religion is to do
accounting, basically so that nobles can extract their share from the peasants, higer nobles from lower, and the king from everyone; and that this task is more complex and not simpler in cash-poor economies.
Hense such Medieval documents as the "Domesday Book" - the whole point of which was to make sure William the Bastard got what he was owed.
Illiterate nobles there may have been, but that put them at the mercy of their clerks, a major disadvantage.
Quote from: Malthus on November 25, 2011, 06:17:36 PM
You guys are forgetting that the main use of literacy aside from religion is to do accounting, basically so that nobles can extract their share from the peasants, higer nobles from lower, and the king from everyone; and that this task is more complex and not simpler in cash-poor economies.
When calculating how many cows someone owes me do I carry the remainder with chickens or pigs? :hmm:
Quote from: jimmy olsen on November 25, 2011, 07:20:43 PM
Quote from: Malthus on November 25, 2011, 06:17:36 PM
You guys are forgetting that the main use of literacy aside from religion is to do accounting, basically so that nobles can extract their share from the peasants, higer nobles from lower, and the king from everyone; and that this task is more complex and not simpler in cash-poor economies.
When calculating how many cows someone owes me do I carry the remainder with chickens or pigs? :hmm:
How much grain to store and how much to plant is sort of important. Also calenders are important and are a function of literacy.
Quote from: jimmy olsen on November 25, 2011, 07:20:43 PM
Quote from: Malthus on November 25, 2011, 06:17:36 PM
You guys are forgetting that the main use of literacy aside from religion is to do accounting, basically so that nobles can extract their share from the peasants, higer nobles from lower, and the king from everyone; and that this task is more complex and not simpler in cash-poor economies.
When calculating how many cows someone owes me do I carry the remainder with chickens or pigs? :hmm:
Actually, it's a pretty well respected theory in anthropology that civilization arises out of the need to organize irrigation and cultivation. Literacy would seem to be the next step from that.
In the absence of any good estimation of Roman literacy based on hard evidence from their time I think that your best bet may be to simply compare the general level of organization to later eras, find an era that seems to match, and look at the literacy at this later date (where much more evidence is available). I would guess that as a first approximation this is as good as it gets.
After thinking about this for 30 seconds my impression is that Western Europe reached Roman levels of societal organization very roughly around 1700. Of course you can also look at possible smaller areas that reached the level earlier and so on, the more data points the merrier. Especially interesting to compare eras before and after printing.
Quote from: The Brain on November 26, 2011, 02:28:09 AM
In the absence of any good estimation of Roman literacy based on hard evidence from their time I think that your best bet may be to simply compare the general level of organization to later eras, find an era that seems to match, and look at the literacy at this later date (where much more evidence is available). I would guess that as a first approximation this is as good as it gets.
After thinking about this for 30 seconds my impression is that Western Europe reached Roman levels of societal organization very roughly around 1700. Of course you can also look at possible smaller areas that reached the level earlier and so on, the more data points the merrier. Especially interesting to compare eras before and after printing.
I would have guessed around 1300 also, before the black death.
Quote from: Malthus on November 25, 2011, 06:17:36 PM
You guys are forgetting that the main use of literacy aside from religion is to do accounting, basically so that nobles can extract their share from the peasants, higer nobles from lower, and the king from everyone; and that this task is more complex and not simpler in cash-poor economies.
Hense such Medieval documents as the "Domesday Book" - the whole point of which was to make sure William the Bastard got what he was owed.
Illiterate nobles there may have been, but that put them at the mercy of their clerks, a major disadvantage.
The flaw in this argument is that literacy for accounting purposes is relatively simple; in no way does it rule out functional illiteracy. There's the (likely, IMO) possibility that nobles were taught what they needed to know for accountancy, but still needed an advisor to read off letters from other nobles, likely prepared by a similar advisor. The whole concept of the wax seal would suggest this- the seals functioned as a signature; given literacy and the uniqueness of handwriting, seals would have been unnecessary and redundant.
Quote from: DontSayBanana on November 26, 2011, 09:46:50 AM
Quote from: Malthus on November 25, 2011, 06:17:36 PM
You guys are forgetting that the main use of literacy aside from religion is to do accounting, basically so that nobles can extract their share from the peasants, higer nobles from lower, and the king from everyone; and that this task is more complex and not simpler in cash-poor economies.
Hense such Medieval documents as the "Domesday Book" - the whole point of which was to make sure William the Bastard got what he was owed.
Illiterate nobles there may have been, but that put them at the mercy of their clerks, a major disadvantage.
The flaw in this argument is that literacy for accounting purposes is relatively simple; in no way does it rule out functional illiteracy. There's the (likely, IMO) possibility that nobles were taught what they needed to know for accountancy, but still needed an advisor to read off letters from other nobles, likely prepared by a similar advisor. The whole concept of the wax seal would suggest this- the seals functioned as a signature; given literacy and the uniqueness of handwriting, seals would have been unnecessary and redundant.
The concept of seals is still in use in the form of official stamps and such, seals are not only a signature.
Quote from: Threviel on November 26, 2011, 08:39:27 AM
Quote from: The Brain on November 26, 2011, 02:28:09 AM
In the absence of any good estimation of Roman literacy based on hard evidence from their time I think that your best bet may be to simply compare the general level of organization to later eras, find an era that seems to match, and look at the literacy at this later date (where much more evidence is available). I would guess that as a first approximation this is as good as it gets.
After thinking about this for 30 seconds my impression is that Western Europe reached Roman levels of societal organization very roughly around 1700. Of course you can also look at possible smaller areas that reached the level earlier and so on, the more data points the merrier. Especially interesting to compare eras before and after printing.
I would have guessed around 1300 also, before the black death.
I was thinking 1200 BC.
Quote from: DontSayBanana on November 26, 2011, 09:46:50 AM
Quote from: Malthus on November 25, 2011, 06:17:36 PM
You guys are forgetting that the main use of literacy aside from religion is to do accounting, basically so that nobles can extract their share from the peasants, higer nobles from lower, and the king from everyone; and that this task is more complex and not simpler in cash-poor economies.
Hense such Medieval documents as the "Domesday Book" - the whole point of which was to make sure William the Bastard got what he was owed.
Illiterate nobles there may have been, but that put them at the mercy of their clerks, a major disadvantage.
The flaw in this argument is that literacy for accounting purposes is relatively simple; in no way does it rule out functional illiteracy. There's the (likely, IMO) possibility that nobles were taught what they needed to know for accountancy, but still needed an advisor to read off letters from other nobles, likely prepared by a similar advisor. The whole concept of the wax seal would suggest this- the seals functioned as a signature; given literacy and the uniqueness of handwriting, seals would have been unnecessary and redundant.
Feudal accounting was done via notches on sticks or somesuch (called tally sticks, hence the modern term "to tally"). No need to be literate for that.
Quote from: Solmyr on November 26, 2011, 02:32:15 PM
Feudal accounting was done via notches on sticks or somesuch (called tally sticks, hence the modern term "to tally"). No need to be literate for that.
History of England Podcast?
Quote from: Solmyr on November 26, 2011, 02:32:15 PM
Quote from: DontSayBanana on November 26, 2011, 09:46:50 AM
Quote from: Malthus on November 25, 2011, 06:17:36 PM
You guys are forgetting that the main use of literacy aside from religion is to do accounting, basically so that nobles can extract their share from the peasants, higer nobles from lower, and the king from everyone; and that this task is more complex and not simpler in cash-poor economies.
Hense such Medieval documents as the "Domesday Book" - the whole point of which was to make sure William the Bastard got what he was owed.
Illiterate nobles there may have been, but that put them at the mercy of their clerks, a major disadvantage.
The flaw in this argument is that literacy for accounting purposes is relatively simple; in no way does it rule out functional illiteracy. There's the (likely, IMO) possibility that nobles were taught what they needed to know for accountancy, but still needed an advisor to read off letters from other nobles, likely prepared by a similar advisor. The whole concept of the wax seal would suggest this- the seals functioned as a signature; given literacy and the uniqueness of handwriting, seals would have been unnecessary and redundant.
Feudal accounting was done via notches on sticks or somesuch (called tally sticks, hence the modern term "to tally"). No need to be literate for that.
When the bushels of grain your owed comes into the hundreds or thousands, tally sticks just don't cut it.
Quote from: Solmyr on November 26, 2011, 02:32:15 PM
Feudal accounting was done via notches on sticks or somesuch (called tally sticks, hence the modern term "to tally"). No need to be literate for that.
Well, the Normans who ruled England used a checker piece of cloth. Hence the office of the exchequer.
Quote from: Razgovory on November 26, 2011, 06:25:13 PM
Well, the Normans who ruled England used a checker piece of cloth. Hence the office of the exchequer.
And they held council meetings in the toilet. Hence the office of Lord Privy Seal.
Your joke is unfunny. :(
It was all right, as an intentional groaner. Raz, you need to get off Yi's case.
Raz, join me in harassing Tim.
I didn't know I stopped.
Quote from: Ideologue on November 26, 2011, 09:34:48 PM
It was all right, as an intentional groaner. Raz, you need to get off Yi's case.
I'm not really on Yi's case lately. Though it may seem that way. Yi is so nebulous on things I have to bark questions to pin down what exactly he's saying. It may be simply because our assumptions are just so far from one another it's difficult to understand one another.
Quote from: Viking on November 26, 2011, 02:38:23 PM
Quote from: Solmyr on November 26, 2011, 02:32:15 PM
Feudal accounting was done via notches on sticks or somesuch (called tally sticks, hence the modern term "to tally"). No need to be literate for that.
History of England Podcast?
Man I love that podcast.
Quote from: Razgovory on November 26, 2011, 11:55:15 PM
I'm not really on Yi's case lately. Though it may seem that way. Yi is so nebulous on things I have to bark questions to pin down what exactly he's saying. It may be simply because our assumptions are just so far from one another it's difficult to understand one another.
You don't bark questions at me pin me down on a nebulous statement, you try to catch me out in an inconsistency. Which is a fine thing to do, except that often you're gimmicky on the inconsistency.
Quote from: Razgovory on November 26, 2011, 07:56:48 PM
Your joke is unfunny. :(
Depends on what they're doing with that seal.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on November 27, 2011, 02:32:37 AM
Quote from: Razgovory on November 26, 2011, 11:55:15 PM
I'm not really on Yi's case lately. Though it may seem that way. Yi is so nebulous on things I have to bark questions to pin down what exactly he's saying. It may be simply because our assumptions are just so far from one another it's difficult to understand one another.
You don't bark questions at me pin me down on a nebulous statement, you try to catch me out in an inconsistency. Which is a fine thing to do, except that often you're gimmicky on the inconsistency.
Your use of the Yicratic method makes hard to know exactly what you are arguing. I do respect that to a point, but I've learned not to unveil a counterargument until I get you to commit.
Quote from: DontSayBanana on November 26, 2011, 09:46:50 AM
Quote from: Malthus on November 25, 2011, 06:17:36 PM
You guys are forgetting that the main use of literacy aside from religion is to do accounting, basically so that nobles can extract their share from the peasants, higer nobles from lower, and the king from everyone; and that this task is more complex and not simpler in cash-poor economies.
Hense such Medieval documents as the "Domesday Book" - the whole point of which was to make sure William the Bastard got what he was owed.
Illiterate nobles there may have been, but that put them at the mercy of their clerks, a major disadvantage.
The flaw in this argument is that literacy for accounting purposes is relatively simple; in no way does it rule out functional illiteracy. There's the (likely, IMO) possibility that nobles were taught what they needed to know for accountancy, but still needed an advisor to read off letters from other nobles, likely prepared by a similar advisor. The whole concept of the wax seal would suggest this- the seals functioned as a signature; given literacy and the uniqueness of handwriting, seals would have been unnecessary and redundant.
As I said, it ain't so simple when you are working with a buch of variables - which is one of the reasons literacy developed in the first place.
The Sumerians did their accounting by making little counters out of clay to represent what was owed - little cows and pigs, that sort of thing. They soon realized it was easier to simply draw a picture of cows or pigs, and viola! Ideograms.
Quote from: Solmyr on November 26, 2011, 02:32:15 PM
Quote from: DontSayBanana on November 26, 2011, 09:46:50 AM
Quote from: Malthus on November 25, 2011, 06:17:36 PM
You guys are forgetting that the main use of literacy aside from religion is to do accounting, basically so that nobles can extract their share from the peasants, higer nobles from lower, and the king from everyone; and that this task is more complex and not simpler in cash-poor economies.
Hense such Medieval documents as the "Domesday Book" - the whole point of which was to make sure William the Bastard got what he was owed.
Illiterate nobles there may have been, but that put them at the mercy of their clerks, a major disadvantage.
The flaw in this argument is that literacy for accounting purposes is relatively simple; in no way does it rule out functional illiteracy. There's the (likely, IMO) possibility that nobles were taught what they needed to know for accountancy, but still needed an advisor to read off letters from other nobles, likely prepared by a similar advisor. The whole concept of the wax seal would suggest this- the seals functioned as a signature; given literacy and the uniqueness of handwriting, seals would have been unnecessary and redundant.
Feudal accounting was done via notches on sticks or somesuch (called tally sticks, hence the modern term "to tally"). No need to be literate for that.
Want to guess the date on which England ceased to use tally sticks?
Okay, I'll tell you: it was 1826.
QuoteThe Bank of England, being a sensible
and conservative institution naturally
suspicious of new technologies, continued
to use wooden tally sticks until
1826: some 500 years after the invention
of double-entry bookkeeping and
400 years after Johann Gutenburg's
invention of printing. The tally sticks
were then taken out of circulation and
stored in the Houses of Parliament until
1834, when the authorities decided
that the tallies were no longer required
and that they should be burned. As it
happened, they were burned rather
too enthusiastically and in the resulting
conflagration the Houses of Parliament
were razed to the ground
Cite: http://www.bus.lsu.edu/accounting/faculty/lcrumbley/tally%20stick%20article.pdf
Presumably, you are not going to tell me that the use of tally sticks
of necessity correlates with illiteracy! :lol:
No doubt the use of sticks such as this initially gained popularity as a simple device for illiterates, but it was, just as obviously, used as a storage device by people who were clearly literate-- as were wax seals and the like appended to documents.
In short, the use of such devices is worthless for determining how literate people were, as they were very obviously used by quite literate people.
Common sense ought to tell you that it is one thing to make a scratched mark on a stick to reord a simple quantity list, and quite another to organize a great mass of such sticks to keep track of the income from a whole manorial estate, province or kingdom. Any illiterate peasant can keep track of how many sheep he has with a tally stick, but the royal government of England - though it used tall sticks into modern times - required literacy to function, which is why such very early monarchs as Alfred the Great put such emphasis on his nobles being literate.
Now, there were no doubt illiterate nobles, but this was a big disadvantage for them, as it enabled them to be easily cheated by their clerks.