PSA + pop quiz

[pauraque_bk]

PSA

bowdlerized is someone whom many of you know and love. I am sure none of you would ever want to cause her harm. Therefore, it pains me to report that she is suffering from a brand of persecution I know all too well: Rampant misspelling of her LJ name.

"Bowdlerized" means "expurgated", and is an eponym of Thomas Bowdler, expurgator extraordinaire. The word should not be spelled in any other fashion, as there has never been any such person as Tohmas Bowlder.

To repeat:

B O W D L E R I Z E D

Now none of you has any excuse. Any further offenses will be punishable by spanking. Or withheld spankings, as the case may warrant.

---

Pop Quiz

I'm curious about something. Please fill out this poll with your current impression of what the answers are. DO NOT look up the answers first. That's not the point. I want to know what you THINK is true.

This will be skewed, since there are a lot of academics and linguistics geeks on my flist, but eh.

[Poll #388778]

Comments

[noblerot.livejournal.com]

I said yes to Egyptian hieroglyphs, no to Mayan and no to the Phaistos Disk.

......

To be honest, I don't even know what the Phaistos Disk is. BUT I have never misspelled "Bowdlerized."

[vaznetti]

I'm not sure I ought to fill this out, since I already know the answers and know who Bowdler was. There would be no "impression" about it.

[pauraque]

Knowing the answers isn't a disqualification. :)

[vaznetti]

Very well then--there you go. (I know that people claim to have deciphered the Phaistos disk, but I don't believe them.)

[thecoldacre.livejournal.com]

I'm a whore for the Minoans (greatest civilisation evah!) but I'm not 100% sure about the Phaistos Disk - an American guy claimed to have deciphered it in 2001 or 2002, but to the best of my knowledge his translation hasn't been accepted by the scientific community. I was in Crete in 2003 and every museum I went to (including Iraklio, where it is kept) was still saying it hadn't been deciphered. But personally I agree with the guy who claims to have translated Linear A, because he has a strong linguistics background and sound methodology, and the translation (basically a call to arms, warning of the approach of an attacking naval fleet) makes sense and could easily be explained within the culture of the Minoans at the time (incidences of attackers arriving in fleets are backed up by several sources of Linear B, and later by Greek historians).

So I voted yes. But I think its pretty well open to interpretation; whether you believe this guy (and for the life of me I can't recall his name) or not.

[pauraque]

Neither that translation of the Phaistos Disk nor that translation of Linear A is generally accepted. Whether those facts are "open to interpretation" is, well, open to interpretation! :)

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Ah, specialization. I'd never even heard of the Phaistos Disk, whereas I not only know the whole story of the Mayan glyphs, but have lectured on it many times in teaching Central American history. In other words -- I know a whole lot about just one thing.

Oh well. Have you ever seen any of those Andean-highlands "written" documents, where the alphabet is knots in strings? They're quite beautiful and verging on the deciphered, apparently. Very exciting.

[idlerat.livejournal.com]

Did you ever read _1066 and all That_ (and if not, why not?) Actually, we must have had this conversation before, and I bet you have. Anyway, it has this great motto:

"History is not what you thought, it is what you can remember." One of the things I love about this is how unambitious the best-case scenario is.

Anyway I was under the distinct post-5th grade impression that I knew the answer to 1, was pretty secure in the post-grad school impression that I knew the answer to 2, but took a wild stab at 3 thinking, "I've never heard of this, that's not that Aztec wheel is it," and then, upon looking it up, found that it was something I'd done a class presentation on in 8th grade.

Which was what I thought but not what I remembered. And proves that Western Civ I is indeed a waste of time. 8th graders should be taught social skills and physical fitness and sex ed and novel-reading, and that's it.

[pauraque]

You mean Incan quipu? I know next to nothing about the Inca, but was under the impression that the quipu were purely numerical and calendrical. Has the standard thinking changed on that?

I know a whole lot about just one thing.

"A lot about a little" certainly describes my knowledge too.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Nope -- or, at least, according to some Andean paleolinguist I was chatting up at a conference 18 months ago in Chile, the field of quipu studies is now evenly split. The older version is that quipu were purely tax records, so that they recorded mostly who gave how many potatoes to whom, when, and where they ended up. A newer interpretation suggests that they may have started out that way, but later developed into a form capable of containing more complex narratives. He offered a lot of evidence for the newer view, but the only one I really understood was that for almost 70 years, archeologists (et al) argued the same thing about Maya glyphs -- that they were only calendrical and numeric.

I saw a huge exhibit of them in Santiago; they're truly beautiful and full of details that might or might not signify (variations in distances between knots, color of thread, thickness of thread, type of knots, how many threads are attached to each other in what configurations.) A great puzzle.

Had you heard, too, that somewhere in inland lowland Yucatan there's a stele containing some Mayan prince's proad boast that he ate a lot of fresh seafood? In the Late Classic as now, I guess, fine dining was a status marker.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Just doing my part to lower the curve on this one.

[arwencordelia.livejournal.com]

I'm with everyone above who said they've never even heard of the Phaistos disk, so my last answer was a complete guess (I bloody well should have heard of it, too, being Greek and everything...)
For the record, I'm a biologist, who knows very little of linguistics.

[idlerat.livejournal.com]

*grieves* *beats brow with large dictionary*

I really should know how to spell "bowdlerized." But evidently I don't. Or didn't. Sorry, B!

I am relieved to see, however, that Ellen gave the same answers as I to you quiz--even though I couldn't remember what the third thing was.

Education--bah!

[bowdlerized.livejournal.com]

It's okay, I still think you're swell! Put that dictionary down before you do yourself a harm. :)

[paz-.livejournal.com]

I was in doubt about the Egyptian hieroglyphs, but I chose yes anyway. I know the Mayan hieroglyphs have been deciphered because just yesterday a friend told me about this conference he went to in which they spoke of the meanings of these hieroglyphs (something about the 'end of the world', as people usually refer to it, being on December of 2012).

I have no clue what the Phaistos Disk is either, but now that I've taken the poll, I'll do some research.

[bowdlerized.livejournal.com]

AHAHAHAHAHA :*

Did I ever teeeeeeeeell you you're my heeeeeeeeeeeeeero
You're everything IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII wish I coooooould beeeeeeeeeeeeee...

[pauraque]

:*

[aubrem.livejournal.com]

Are we going to get the answers and links and essays and discussion and all that? : )

Between Pepysdiary (friended), this and all the other cool stuff you post you are one of the most valuable people on my flist.

[pauraque]

Yes, you'll find out the purpose of the poll. :)

And aw. You're too kind.

[deslea.livejournal.com]

Dude. I'm hanging out for that, too.

*random hugs for pauraque, just because I haven't done it for a while*

[pauraque]

No kidding! *hugsback*

And the answers and so on are here.

[wootsauce.livejournal.com]

I accidentally filled out thepoll as jigofspite. She's a friend of mine and she likes to log me out of LJ when she comes over, which pisses me off. So sorry about that :p

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Egyptian yes, Mayan yes, and I guessed yes for the Phaistos Disk, because isn't it Linear B or related to Linear B? Which has definitely been deciphered.

Or is it Linear A, which I think has not?

Mer, now I will have to go look it up.

Pop quiz back atcha: What about Etruscan? And the Vinca marks?

Pepysdiary is the best thing since Sumerian Word of the Day stopped posting.

[pauraque]

It is neither Linear B, which is deciphered, nor is it Linear A, which is not.

Etruscan is not deciphered (I actually considered it for "the one people are supposed to know hasn't been"). Vinca, don't know.

[jakobaz.livejournal.com]

Etruscan's not deciphered? The language or the alphabet? 'Cause I had a key to the Etruscan alphabet lying around here somewhere...

[pauraque]

I meant the language, and assumed Malsperanza did too, since the alphabet is pretty clearly Greek-related.

[undeadgoat.livejournal.com]

We can read the names on the tombstones, but we don't know what anything else means, basically.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Etruscan is not deciphered (I actually considered it for "the one people are supposed to know hasn't been").

Well, partly, I think.

http://www.longitudebooks.com/find/p/13766/mcms.html


Vinca, don't know.

Not. From the Danube valley. Really early, & therefore not even known if it's a writing system or not, so I was cheating ;-) but if it is, then it's older than Sumerian.

[sedesdraconis.livejournal.com]

Yay for the Phaistos Disk! Printing was invented 3000 years before it caught on!

That was one of my inspirations for my printed script, Imirn. Eep, which I have still not gotten around to putting up a page for on sedesdraconis.com

Vinca seems highly unlikely to be a linguistic writing system to me, though it may be a system of proto-writing, like the long line of proto-writing leading up to cuneiform and dating back to 8000 BCE.

It looks like proto-writing to me because, if its meaningful at all, it appears to be number dominated, inscriptions are very short, and many of them appear on the bottom of clay vessels. This seems more likely to be saying "4 units of wheat" than to be any kind of representation of a language, much like the clay tokens and envelopes the Sumerians had been using for the past few thousand years.

It'd certainly be interesting to find a new form of proto-writing in the Danube, but not earth-shaking, I think.

[asphodeline.livejournal.com]

I have to suppose the poll doesn't account for people like me being difficult for the sake of it but although I know people say these things have been deciphered, my cynical side can't help feeling that mistakes amy have been made!!

I can just see somewhere up (?) above us some Egytian scholars ROFLing all over the place because of some daft translation of ours.
I get the same feeling when archaeologists dig up some unrecognisable piece of dirty, muddy metal and tell us without any hesitiation that it is soem form of vessel used to worship some form or other of deity.
wonder what they'll make of mobile phones in years to come??!!

[pauraque]

I understand the cynicism -- there have certainly been decipherments that were later discovered to be totally wrong-headed. But while I'm sure there are off-base readings in our current understanding of Egyptian, I'm also pretty sure that on the whole, we know what we're talking about. Don't forget that there's a surviving relative of the Egyptian language -- liturgical Coptic -- which has been very useful for checking and aiding in decipherment. Not to mention lengthy bilingual Greek-Egyptian inscriptions such as the Rosetta Stone.

:)

[undeadgoat.livejournal.com]

. . . I feel so speshul for knowing all that off the top of my head.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Said "yes" to Egyptian, "no" to Mayan, and promptly kicked myself about two seconds after the click. "No" to the Phaistos Disk because I'd never heard of it before.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Said "yes" to Egyptian because, Champollion? French National Hero. Bonaparte's 1798 Egypt expedition, in which he took historians, museum curators & art specialists (and how I would recommend such an approach to warfare to the Pentagon in the future!) started an Egyptian craze in France that affected furniture, art, novels, dress, etc. for half a century. I was weaned on Romantic novels like Théophile Gautier's The Romance of the Mummy.

Said "no" to Mayans because I was unaware that there were new discoveries on that front. However, I had read stuff about the Phaistos Disk so said "yes", and apparently that's wildly optimistic.

[pauraque]

Champollion is one of my heroes too! Quite a brilliant man. One can only imagine what else he might have accomplished if he'd lived longer.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

What new discoveries? First translations of Mayan numbering are almost a century old; translation of the glyphs began 30+ years ago, and were generally accepted by Mayanists almost immediately. Are you referring to anything more recent than that?

[pauraque]

As it happens, public ignorance of Mayan decipherment is exactly what I was trying to gauge with this poll. My follow-up post is going to comment on that ignorance and why it exists.

There's nothing inaccurate about what you said, it just sounded a little accusatory. :)

EDIT: Actually, the "accepted almost immediately" I would question.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Ah-hah! I'll be very interested to see how you explain this phenomenon. There's some interesting anthropology-of-tourism and history-of-anthropology stuff out there that talks about how people from rich countries perceive Mayans, present-day and otherwise, and why we do; some of that scholarship raises (but does not, to my mind, fully answer) this question. It's so interesting!

I wonder when the decipherment got into high-school social studies texts? Do you suppose that there's an age difference in how people (other than Latin America and language obsessives) tended to answer the question? (Nothing wrong with being an obsessive about things worth obsessing over, of course.)

...

I didn't mean to sound accusatory. I just was worried, seriously, that I'd missed something really new. I live in fear of getting it wrong on topics well outside my range of expertise, about which I have to lecture anyhow.

...

"accepted almost immediately" I would question.

Depends on your POV.*g* I think, in Maya studies, any new major new idea that gets accepted (or even just understood and deemed worth arguing about) in less than 20 years is quite zippy. Look at the loooonnnngggg debate over Rigoberta Menchu's autobiography for instance.

I am so glad not to be a Mayanist!

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

What is the debate about Menchu's autobiography? Or is that one of those questions where the answer begins with a shudder and "Don't even ask!"

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Well, it begins with a shudder, at least, six or seven years ago. An anthropologist named David Stoll wrote a book called Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans in which he factchecked her autobiography. Unsurprisingly, he discovered that she had omitted some major details (she was literate after all thanks to high-school training from Belgian nuns, frex, which implies that her family's social position was a little better than she claimed) and borrowed others from other people's lives (it wasn't her own brother, but a neighbor, who she saw burned alive by soldiers in the town plaza) and done odd things with the chronology (partly to avoid talking about her own connections to a guerrilla group, perhaps) etc.

If you view the autobiography as literary memoir rather than sworn legal testimony this isn't too surprising -- and if you read the book closely the chronological gaps are clear enough, at least -- but because she'd already won her Nobel, there was a huge uproar. Front page of the NY Times and so on. Big mess. People not speaking to people at conferences. People denouncing people from the podium at conferences. Accusations tossed around of the ugliest kind, both about the pro-Stoll and anti-Stoll factions.

By now the argument seems to be settling into a longterm series of misunderstandings across disciplinary lines -- political scientists vs literary scholars, etc -- and a political debate between people who believe that the problem in Guatemala is class-based vs those who think it's race-based. Oh, and a debate between those who favored violence in response to the military dictatorship of 1954-1986, and those who argue that armed resistance not only made things worse, but that those who supported knew it had and would continue to make things worse.

Sorry. That's a lot. But yeah, anyway, long argument that is not going to go away in the near future.

[aubrem.livejournal.com]

Age may very well be a component. I was very interested in archaeology around the ages of 11-13 and I'm pretty sure ancient american glyphs were presented as a big mystery at that time. That was 30 years ago. Wow. 30 years ago. : /

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

i taught world history two years ago and our text book actually talked about the deciphering and the way it changed general perceptions and scholarship...

we've talked about the menchu/binjamin wilkomirski analofies before, haven't we? identity politics rule!!!

[nimori.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, Mayan was the one I wasn't sure of. I'm an Egyptian semi-buff (so like, I know the cool stuff but don't want to do any actual work), and my art history prof adored stuff like the Phaistos disk and Linear A and Woodhenge and Skara Brae (dude, we barely touched on the Renaissance but we had lectures on crop circles. oO Not that I'm complaining, mind...).