Recent comments in /f/todayilearned

mordenty t1_je489ad wrote

Reply to TIL the majority of ancient Greeks and Romans that were literate read out loud. Reasons for this include a lack of space between letters and no formalized system of punctuation that helped with pauses in reading. by Ask_Me_If_Im_A_Horse

When Augustine was writing his book Confessions he commented that Ambrose (Bishop of Milan in the late 4th century, later became a saint) read "his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud."

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jointheredditarmy t1_je47s6i wrote

Reply to comment by phobosmarsdeimos in TIL the majority of ancient Greeks and Romans that were literate read out loud. Reasons for this include a lack of space between letters and no formalized system of punctuation that helped with pauses in reading. by Ask_Me_If_Im_A_Horse

Come on, it’s gotta have heuristic word ordering even if the language doesn’t strictly require it. I guess it’s just so unimaginable that every time I said a sentence I’ll say it differently

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kelldricked t1_je45ip1 wrote

Reply to comment by Psych_Crisis in TIL the SL-1 was the only reactor accident in U.S. history which resulted in immediate fatalities, killing 3 military operators in 1961, pinning one of them to the ceiling. by rigorousthinker

I mean arent most graves cleared after a x amount of years? Idk how it works in the US but here its graves are protected “free” for 10-15 years. I think the average grave last about 50 years or something (ofcourse depending on a lot of factors).

But yeah disturbing graves is pretty normal because we need the space more other graves.

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Kaiisim t1_je42sky wrote

Reply to TIL the majority of ancient Greeks and Romans that were literate read out loud. Reasons for this include a lack of space between letters and no formalized system of punctuation that helped with pauses in reading. by Ask_Me_If_Im_A_Horse

Yeah we don't really realise that writing and reading is a technology . We learn spoken language automatically as kids - reading and writing then takes over a decade of intense training!

English language is an advanced technology!

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PsychoSushi27 t1_je42bmv wrote

Reply to TIL that in Chinese Folk Religion, a mortal human being could ascend into godhood not through the decisions of a clergy/church, but by the sheer number of people who believe that their extraordinary achievements led to apotheosis, which forced Confucian/Taoists clerics to canonize a person as a God. by Khysamgathys

There are some Chinese Malaysians who worship Datuk Gong in Malaysia. Some of the spirits worshipped are Malay Muslim. We have a Datuk Gong shrine near my house and you can only offer him halal food. A deceased Sikh Punjabi Malaysian politician who was very popular among Chinese Malaysians has his very own shrine too.

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zomboromcom t1_je4175z wrote

Reply to TIL there's a field of thousands of prehistoric stone jars in Laos by 500owls

I've been there. Read about it in Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World as a kid, then forgot all about it till I was traveling through the region and found myself there. Sadly, you have to be cautious about unexploded ordnance so you can't just go roving around, but it was neat to see the place I had marvelled about in my childhood

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p314159i t1_je411oq wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in TIL that in Chinese Folk Religion, a mortal human being could ascend into godhood not through the decisions of a clergy/church, but by the sheer number of people who believe that their extraordinary achievements led to apotheosis, which forced Confucian/Taoists clerics to canonize a person as a God. by Khysamgathys

When we talk about Chinese people, everyone knows who were are talking about. It is the common person. The Han. The other 55 are just groups who happen to have been in the territory China controlled at a particular date who had to be incorporated into the state to avoid revolts. Even then some (but not all) incarnations of the Chinese state would just try to eliminate them if they rebelled because that was viewed as if it would be easier in the long run than dealing with constant revolts in territory that was now deemed to be part of the "China" now.

Don't take this as a claim that china is this innately xenophobic society but they tend to oscillate between periods of extreme openness and extreme closedness, and the "bad" "prior" China might do something that eliminate a group and turns them into Han, and the "new" "good" China might condemn the prior China as having lost the mandate of heaven due to their crimes but the long term trend of these is that there is an ever expanding block of people who are regarded as Han, and it is that expanding block that people consider to be Chinese. Of course some of the old ways get preserved despite these state actions so the regional variation of the Han is extensive even if they are all regarded as Han (not all Han even speak in ways that are understandable to each other, although the Chinese state does not regard these as languages and instead calls them dialects. The Chinese dialects are however all derived from each other and fit into a language family, so it is a bit like with Dutch and English where you can tell they are kind of similar even if they are not understandable to one another and the Dutch have an easy time of learning English due to the similarities).

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