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0 pointsthaumasiotes5y ago0 comments

> Ancient graffiti in Rome tells you more about ancient Rome than privileged writings of the era.

This just isn't true, for the simplest possible reason: there's more preserved literature than there is preserved graffiti. It also isn't true for the slightly less simple reason that the literature covers a much wider range of topics.

What historians desire most is driven by what they don't have now. Cuneiform tablets are so numerous that they mostly just sit around untranslated. Would they be informative if we did translate them? Of course, but the manpower isn't there. Identical documents from 3rd-century Germany would be an epic, multiple-career-making find. Those would be translated immediately.

We value things the same way. Yahoo Answers is worthless to us because we have infinite amounts of similar material, so there's no cost to destroying this subset of it.

You could try to argue that Yahoo Answers has great future value, and we should therefore preserve it, but if we followed that advice, Yahoo Answers would have no future value, because so much content like it would have been preserved. This approach fails to be logically coherent.

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simias5y ago· 5 in thread

They're both valuable. In linguistics for instance graffiti can tell you things about the language and its evolution that the formal language won't communicate, like how certain letters stop being pronounced or become pronounced differently. Or how some grammatical constructions shift for instance.

thaumasiotesOP5y ago

Of course they're both valuable. But you cannot reasonably contend that the graffiti is more valuable; it is much less valuable.

> In linguistics for instance graffiti can tell you things about the language and its evolution that the formal language won't communicate, like how certain letters stop being pronounced or become pronounced differently.

This certainly doesn't apply to Latin, which survives today as several robust living languages. We can easily determine how the sounds of Latin changed without making reference to graffiti.

(And of course, the formal literature has quite a bit to say on the sounds of the language, too.)

Mediterraneo105y ago

One reason Pompeii graffiti is valuable, is that it provides some absolute dating of Vulgar Latin features, while the modern Romance languages show only the final outcome without those exact dates.

I think you underestimate just how grateful historical linguists are for popular texts beyond literary ones. Another example is the Novgorod birchbark letters, which not only shed light on old Russian but some of their features (found in no other source) required scholars to completely revise their reconstruction of Slavic historical phonology in general.

dehrmann5y ago

Romanes eunt domus.

dsr_5y ago

ite domum, unless you're already in Rome, in which case sunt domum.

0xbadcafebee5y ago

how is babby formed?

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