Though linguistics had been an acknowledged and structured discipline for quite some time, most scholars believed that noted similarities among families of languages—specifically between the Romance languages, derived from Latin, and the Germanic languages—came about through borrowing and commerce with the Roman Empire.
Wednesday 5 November 2014
wanderwรถrter or all the tea in china
Tuesday 4 November 2014
it happened on the way to the forum: the end or i have come to bury caesar, not to praise him
Though Ancient Rome during its last days was a poor shadow of its former glory and the academics of the disintegration were less captivating, merely a guilty glance at misfortune, I experienced separation-anxieties at seeing the epic come to an end and was sad to hear of the final succession of emperors slip away. Ruminating on the causes of the fall were well established—and sufficiently legion and with transparent allusions to contemporary times: the lack of checks-and-balances, usurpations, the taxation-scheme that destroyed the middle-class (placing a bounty and incentive for the tax-man that usually only haunted the vital demographic), racism (Rome was relatively enlightened, ruling over a multi-ethnic empire, but although the services and the fealty of the Barbarians were serviceable enough, they were forever excluded from holding high office), a standing-army with undue political influence, religious schisms, invitations that turned migrations and then invasions, not to mention the sanitising of symbols of State expressly linked to Rome's survival.
For the haughty hegemony and revisionist history, often I found myself routing for the underdogs, but I did want Rome to linger a little longer before descending into melodrama and a soap-opera. Of course, the legacy did live on in the East for nearly a thousand years and the story could have gone on after the coup de grace at the hands of the Goths, the Huns, the Vandals and the Alans. The saga came to an end, with a flair that should not go unnoticed, with the elevation of the fourteen year old son of Orestes, a minister of Attila, named ironically Romulus Augustus. The boy ruler's namesakes were of course the founder of the Republic and the founder of the Empire and he reigned for ten months or so and made, probably, for an auspicious time to put this episode to bed. Romulus Augustus was sent into exile and claimant, the Germanic chieftain Odoacer, who announced himself merely King of the Italians and packed up and shipped whatever symbols of State that had survived successive raids to Constantinople, pronouncing that the Empire and the known-world now only required one leader. The exile of this teenager, however, is not a historic cul-de-sac as he finds himself connected to King Arthur and the Matter of Britain, as mythic heirs to the Roman continuum.
flash-mobbing
We have a regional radio station that’s called Radio Charivari and plays a mix of German pop from the 1950s and Schlager songs, the standards that usually accompany Volksfest.
I thought the name was one of those German redoublings, like Schickimicki or Stylo-Milo—which indicate something posh or extra-fancy, but charivari actually is a French-derived term for rough-music, encompassing a whole hatful of customs and traditions whereby community members serenade newlyweds and to signal their displeasure if the union strayed too far from social norms. These impromptu gatherings, banging pots and pans and making a general ruckus to celebrate an act that was too long in coming, could also be a form of censuring if the nuptials came prematurely or age-discrepancies too great, shaming would-be couples into respecting accepted standards. This mob-mentality, happily, disbanded and communal harassment was by turns outlawed as something cruel and infringement on the real moral authorities—a similar form of vigilante justice turned even more extreme was called ran-tanning or tin-kettling in Britain and conversely gives us the term for the containment tactics of crowd-control. It’s a bit of a strange choice for a station’s call-sign but I don’t think there’s an element of roughness or re-education, social coercion to be found in it. There are a lot of impenetrable customs associated with weddings and I think certain, maybe less judgmental aspects of charivari survive and are indulged and kept sacred.
feed-back loop
Aeon Magazine presents a compelling case for not unseating the double helix of DNA as the iconography of life but rather complementing our understanding of this blueprint with the experiments, adjusting to new demands or privations, that every organism conducts on a daily basis. The author’s examples are to some degree an interesting reframing of the Nature versus Nurture argument, as the body produces layers of tissues according to established protocols, written in one’s genes, but in novel and adaptive ways that cannot be contained nor predicted in said blueprint. What do you think? Diluting the supremacy of the genes—which are not exactly a vital spark but self-perpetuating chemistry after all—with what can be stretched, trained and spindled is a corollary to the obsession with family history and genetic testing, whose markers are not always as clear-cut as the way they’re marketed.
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ฑ, ๐, ๐งฌ, environment