Këkkytir wrote: ↑Mon Mar 02, 2020 4:43 pm
...
I've got a question you can probably help me with: how can I make a conlang appear archaic?
...
So I'm an expert on Human and Hominid Prehistory, actually, but a non-professional one with a BA in Linguistics and years of intense research without publication.
And my ideas contrast a lot with what's in the academic literature.
...
Myths and folklore contain traditions of uncertain but sometimes probably vast antiquity regarding humans of the past. I value these a lot.
Otherwise, I think humans before 2,500 BC were a lot like us, mostly, but also not like us.
The world of most of the past, maybe before 1500 AD, was just one big jungle and forest filled with tons of very large and unfriendly wild animals. The oldest writings reflect this. In many ways, the world we know is very very different.
World population was low and population densities were also low. Archaeologists say that generally prehistory was filled with groups of maybe 10 people each, most of the time, outside of yearly festival gatherings, until agriculture and civilization. They ate better than us and had much more free time.
...
Then the other big thing to know about prehistory is that we have evidence from the earliest writings starting about 2500 BC and then from as recent as myths told by Native Americans in the 1920s, we have evidence that in prehistory there was "mythic thinking". Where myths and folklore match up for worldview approaches between, say, Native Americans and Sumerians probably is a reflection of what worldviews were like in 20,000 BC. And then compare Australian Aboriginal myths with those of Africa and guess how far back that might take you.
The problem with this is that myths are hard to understand well without extensive study. I've done that but it's taken many years and a lot of good fortune. And the people that write books about it, even professional scholars? They often get it really wrong because they lack a dedication to comparative anthropology and sufficient wide-reading and university- and self- training.
So I can't convey that in a few sentences. I try in the writings I put on my websites and in my facebook posts to convey what I find in the old myths.
But if I could do a little toward it, I would say that the old myths portray the whole world as known to their ancient peoples, and their ancestors, in analogies and symbols. Everything is just all wrapped together. And there's also "random" elements like inspirations from dreams and "visions". To start to untangle it, then, you need to read a ton of ethnography and a ton of myths and all sorts of things like this. "What might this part of the myth be talking about?"
All the interpersonal and community problems we had today, they had back then, but maybe paid a lot more attention to, and drew on traditions of doing so. They also paid a ton more attention to the vast jungle world around them and how all nature changed during the course of the year, the decade, the century, the millenia, etc. See, this is how they got their food, avoided getting bitten by poisonous animals, or eaten by giant monsters, and attented to the loftier things of existence.
And their average life expectancy is a thing of great speculation. But if I had to present a serious guess, I would say that on average humans and hominids lasted until about 80. But maybe all the ancient writings are influenced by the effects of agriculture or being written by the richest. A lot of Third World people today, though, live to about 30.
In Herodotus, clever and dear readers, hearers, he relates that the King of Egypt once received an oracle from the gods that he was to live only one more year. So, to defy the oracle he spent the next year, day and night, in hunting and merry-making with his friends, that the year might be as two years. Yet within a year, he died and the oracle was fulfilled.
I don't remember what I think was Herodotus' point but his work has a theme that oracles cannot be defied. Perhaps Herodotus implied that the King of Egypt there was being impious.
And the ancients are unanimous that it is not the long life, necessarily, but the good life to which we ought apply ourselves.
...
But then, when mythologies are compared from all the furthest corners of the planet, what was human and or hominid thought like before that? And what variations might have existed? Only by vast and careful research can we merely speculate and hope to be able to esteem our speculations as we ought.
And there is much that can be known just from what is available in writing in the world's modern and historic languages. And more yet to be discovered through travel.
And still, the vast bulk of human and hominid thought and beliefs are just lost and irretrievable. Which makes surviving myths that much more the valueable, yet also misleading.
...
And the great Sphinx presiding over all this is actually Writing and its limitations and abilities. To study what is written and compare it with what might be reality, I have done much of this over the decades. It is a most necessary, yet rare, yet troublesome undertaking.
But to all who say that we'd all be better off without writing or that I have wasted my life in studying in-depth all 48 or so known logographic writing systems and their writings, or that ignorance really is bliss, I would say that they are quite wrong. "You get what you put in." The world should be so happy that I have done all this work for them and should want there always to be scholars of this topic.
But there still is the sobering thought that it is really only because of recent advances in technology and other things, probably, that anyone can study in-depth and make detailed mechanical comparisons of all known logographic writing systems. The Romans let Egyptian Hieroglyphic and Cuneiform sink into oblivion and the Chinese likewise had let Oracle Bone Script Chinese and Bronze Script Chinese sink into oblivion. And by the 500s AD, China had printing. And maybe no one will do similar studies as I have done or I will not see "my equal" in my lifetime. But I realized all this sort of thing might happen when I decided on this specialization as a scholar of language science, and I chose it anyway. I even likewise have ended up not yet going into a career in academia.