The People - and the peoples.
From FM7373-1, posted last year. Thank you for your patience as we get the site up and running! If you like what you read, and you have an extra dollar or two a month, please help feed a Nerding Dog.
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At some point there was only one tribe of humans. At some point after that, an argument became a split, and there were two tribes. This did not happen once, but thousands of times; and there were many tribes, competing, each assuming their own knowledge-base to be correct in full. None of them were, but that never stopped them from warring over it. Two individuals of different traditions, speaking languages similar but for a sprinkling of very important differences, with differing views on historical events and the consequences of them, are more likely, in meeting, to come to violence or, at least, disagreement, than are two individuals raised from birth speaking the same language, learned from the same books and elders, living the same ethics. On the other hand, a minor difference in ethics can become intractable, leading cradle-mates to become strangers, leading over generations to divergent traditions and more difficulty between groups.
The path of this splitting and re-splitting can be followed in a few ways: by the languages, the legends, and the histories. Where one phoneme-string is defined in opposing or contradictory ways, we can posit a disagreement in terms. Where the same legend is told differently, we can posit a disagreement in interpretation, or a modification from the top of the hierarchy; and, in the histories such splits are laid out and often dated, though the researcher must find both sides of the split in order to properly understand the event - if one side's records were not destroyed by the other in the aftermath of the disagreement. This can't be done very easily from within one framework or another, and so it hasn't been done very often.
Language shifts occur for various reasons and in varying cycles. The discipline of linguistics focuses on the forces at play here. There is the generational muddling of language, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the resilience of tradition, as children attempt to hide their intention1s from their parents, and parents attempt to hide their own from their children, along with the shift in phonetics as children learn to speak and parents preserve childish mispronunciations, causing divergence between family-languages. There is the shift in complexity, either upward or downward, depending on the working or academic context in which the language is spoken, causing divergence in work-languages. There is the shift in meaning, as the group understanding of the world adapts to change, causing divergence in philosophical and religious language. There are shifts in pattern, as rival groups consciously and unconsciously differentiate their speech patterns from each other, to a degree determined partly by the level of rivalry. This is by no means an exhaustive list of these greater patterns, and each of these major forces is composed of many more minor patterns.
Most historians focus only on the histories available in their own native languages, and until recently translations of distant languages' histories were rare or entirely unavailable. This has led to a sense among the greater population that their own portion of history is the only history. In the case of European history, this effect has hidden the out-group sources of most knowledge and intellectual skills; the man who found the skill in another culture or received it from an out-group friend is given credit for the invention of a hundreds- or thousands-of-years-old tradition. This has only added to the mass sense of in-group superiority over the out-group; the average, monolingual workingman has no way, for example, to trace corporatism to Japan or the university system to Arabia, and so he thinks these elaborate abstractions were invented in English (for example) - and will fight you over it, often; it's a matter of pride, as all legends are.
Legend, like history, is a lens to the past. Unlike history, legend has less to do with what happened than it does with what was learned from the event. Details are smudged and massaged to illuminate the theme of the story, that the individual may learn a lesson from his people's efforts long before his birth. Given the necessity of moral and ethical agreement in the development and maintenance of social cohesion, legends are given higher and higher priority in teaching as a society's generations tick onward; at times, this can make legend very difficult to pull apart from history.
Again, this is by no means an exhaustive list of the ways humans split apart from each other, but all of them boil down to this; a disagreement, whether over the meaning of a word, the recording of an event, or a point of ethics, leads to the divergence of one group into two or more. After the split, the two groups begin to work against each other, deceiving, injuring, and taking, each from their rival - in general, the group most recently diverged, and thus most like themselves. War is a family affair. So is peace.
--
help feed a Nerding Dog.
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At some point there was only one tribe of humans. At some point after that, an argument became a split, and there were two tribes. This did not happen once, but thousands of times; and there were many tribes, competing, each assuming their own knowledge-base to be correct in full. None of them were, but that never stopped them from warring over it. Two individuals of different traditions, speaking languages similar but for a sprinkling of very important differences, with differing views on historical events and the consequences of them, are more likely, in meeting, to come to violence or, at least, disagreement, than are two individuals raised from birth speaking the same language, learned from the same books and elders, living the same ethics. On the other hand, a minor difference in ethics can become intractable, leading cradle-mates to become strangers, leading over generations to divergent traditions and more difficulty between groups.
The path of this splitting and re-splitting can be followed in a few ways: by the languages, the legends, and the histories. Where one phoneme-string is defined in opposing or contradictory ways, we can posit a disagreement in terms. Where the same legend is told differently, we can posit a disagreement in interpretation, or a modification from the top of the hierarchy; and, in the histories such splits are laid out and often dated, though the researcher must find both sides of the split in order to properly understand the event - if one side's records were not destroyed by the other in the aftermath of the disagreement. This can't be done very easily from within one framework or another, and so it hasn't been done very often.
Language shifts occur for various reasons and in varying cycles. The discipline of linguistics focuses on the forces at play here. There is the generational muddling of language, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the resilience of tradition, as children attempt to hide their intention1s from their parents, and parents attempt to hide their own from their children, along with the shift in phonetics as children learn to speak and parents preserve childish mispronunciations, causing divergence between family-languages. There is the shift in complexity, either upward or downward, depending on the working or academic context in which the language is spoken, causing divergence in work-languages. There is the shift in meaning, as the group understanding of the world adapts to change, causing divergence in philosophical and religious language. There are shifts in pattern, as rival groups consciously and unconsciously differentiate their speech patterns from each other, to a degree determined partly by the level of rivalry. This is by no means an exhaustive list of these greater patterns, and each of these major forces is composed of many more minor patterns.
Most historians focus only on the histories available in their own native languages, and until recently translations of distant languages' histories were rare or entirely unavailable. This has led to a sense among the greater population that their own portion of history is the only history. In the case of European history, this effect has hidden the out-group sources of most knowledge and intellectual skills; the man who found the skill in another culture or received it from an out-group friend is given credit for the invention of a hundreds- or thousands-of-years-old tradition. This has only added to the mass sense of in-group superiority over the out-group; the average, monolingual workingman has no way, for example, to trace corporatism to Japan or the university system to Arabia, and so he thinks these elaborate abstractions were invented in English (for example) - and will fight you over it, often; it's a matter of pride, as all legends are.
Legend, like history, is a lens to the past. Unlike history, legend has less to do with what happened than it does with what was learned from the event. Details are smudged and massaged to illuminate the theme of the story, that the individual may learn a lesson from his people's efforts long before his birth. Given the necessity of moral and ethical agreement in the development and maintenance of social cohesion, legends are given higher and higher priority in teaching as a society's generations tick onward; at times, this can make legend very difficult to pull apart from history.
Again, this is by no means an exhaustive list of the ways humans split apart from each other, but all of them boil down to this; a disagreement, whether over the meaning of a word, the recording of an event, or a point of ethics, leads to the divergence of one group into two or more. After the split, the two groups begin to work against each other, deceiving, injuring, and taking, each from their rival - in general, the group most recently diverged, and thus most like themselves. War is a family affair. So is peace.
--
help feed a Nerding Dog.
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