I am a BaseX user and I really appreciate it! I actually do not mind XML at all. XQuery and BaseX makes searching large numbers of XML file or just one large XML file really easy.
I still have a Samsung Galaxy S8. It runs fine. I don't really need more from a phone. Maybe I am missing something but I really cannot see myself getting a new phone.
I find these articles both baffling and frustrating at the same time.
I find it frustrating because I spent recess after recess locked inside to practice cursive. After many months of this, my handwriting had not improved. The teachers finally relented and stopped punishing me because the punishment never actually improved my handwriting. My handwriting is now print only and is still horrible and has never improved. Additionally, I have only ever used cursive for signing my name to documents.
I find it baffling because I have an advanced degree in medieval Celtic Studies. I study manuscripts in depth and I have seen some of the worst handwriting that you could possibly imagine on the very expensive vellum manuscript page. In some cases worse than mine. Cursive is actually only a couple of hundred years old. Compared to the history of manuscript writing, cursive is very young so I am baffled that people are worried about it.
I find printing to be fine for almost all circumstances where I need to hand write something so I understand if we continue to teach that. Cursive, however, should only be done by those who want to use it. If you want to have an after school cursive club, great, have fun! Otherwise, leave the rest of us alone and let us have recess.
Cursive as taught in schools today is useless at best and dangerous for your health at worst.
The cursive that made the world run between 1850 and 1925 was called business penmanship and it lets you write at 40 words per minute for 14 hours every day for decades on end without pain or injury.
>following lessons will make of you a good penman, if you follow instructions implicitly. The average time to acquire such a handwriting is from four to six months, practicing an hour or so a day. Practice regularly every day, if you want the best results. Two practice periods of thirty minutes each are better than one period of sixty minutes.
After two months I can comfortably write at 20 words per minute for four hours without stopping.
Looking at this book, it seems very similar to how I was taught in the late 80s early 90s. We were forced to use fountain pens, and would get berated if we got ink on our hands.
I'm not sure if I can tell the difference between Tamblyn's business penmanship" and "looped cursive" and any other type of cursive to be honest. The difference in individual handwriting seems to be much larger than the difference in overarching styles?
The shape of the letters is largely irrelevant, the source of motion is the important part. In regular cursive it is the fingers that move the pen. In business penmanship it is the shoulder that moves the hand which is incidentally holding a pen.
The reason why the letters have the shape they do in business penmanship is for legibility and ease of motion. There are several variants of most letters you can choose from. The standard alphabet as given in that book is a very good compromise. The reason why newer cursive hands that use finger movement have a lot of the same shapes as business penmanship is cargo-culting.
>it is the shoulder that moves the hand which is incidentally holding a pen.
Yes, arms instead of fingers, thanks for the great ergonomic video link, this was the most surprising finding when I got into fountain pens and feels like a totally different skill from the school days of handwriting cursive: https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/372976-recomm...
No one is stopping you from using muscular movement to speed up your shorthand even more.
If you use finger movement for shorthand you still have a 30 minute writing limit before you start getting hand cramps and carpal tunnel syndrome after a few years.
Shorthand is (hopefully lossless) compression technique.
Cursive is a font optimized for continuous use by the human hand and a stylus, leveraging keeping the stylus point on the page between letters of the same word.
At their core, sensible shorthand systems are just another alphabet of shapes that are easy to form and string together.
They add various aabreviations and common short forms on top of that, but one easily gets something like 50 % of the benefit by only using them as an alternative alphabet.
As the sibling says, shorthand is a very different thing. Cursive seems much more a way to write with fewer finger movements. That is about it.
I'm tempted to say it is also about fewer pickups of the pen, but I think that is largely the same thing. Many of the finger movements you do when writing otherwise will be to pick the pen off the page.
The shorthand systems are mostly designed to be transcribed by the writer or someone very familiar with the writer's particular style, preferably while the information is still fresh in someone's mind to resolve ambiguity. Shorthand is mostly not a great system for long term information storage and it's not easy to quickly skim documents written in shorthand.
This is a common myth, but from what I understand of people who write in the more logical shorthand systems (without abusing custom abbreviations etc.) it's eminently skimmable, even long after the information is no longer fresh in mind.
I don't know what you'd consider the more "logical" systems - there are only a few non-machine English shorthand systems with any degree of popularity. My own experience with Teeeline shorthand (which is a bit easier to learn, and I'm by no means good) is that I simply can't read quickly because I don't get much reading practice. Think about it: most of us read much more than we write. With shorthand, I only end up transcribing what I myself have written. So I'm slow at it.
I was about to reply that that most people probably can't easily read this hand anymore, but after looking at the book examples they're pretty readable to me, despite always struggling to read cursive (e.g. in birthday cards from my grandparents).
As one would hope, for a system vaunted to allow hours-long recordings. I mean: if it's a book on shorthand, only legible to court recorders, that's one thing, but this is not that.
This book is quite a find. I'm tempted to give it a go, as it could make my writing portable anywhere. My only misgiving is later getting that writing into electronic form, which nowadays is a non-negotiable. The technology for handwriting recognition, long-form, seems to still be fairly poor.
I'm starting to appreciate not having digitised notes.
When you can sit down and write out 1,000 words in 30 minites making indexes which you update weekly becomes just another form of revision. This works well for both study and business planning. Less so for emails and instant messages, but each medium for its intended purpose.
It is amazing how much of our education system requires being able to write text by the wheelbarrow when no one today can write more than a thimbleful without hand cramps and wrist pain. Imagine how much people would want to use Facebook or reddit if every like and upvote came with an electric shock. Our education system does that to everyone from age 8 and up when it comes to writing anything down.
My children go to a charter school in AZ and they are only allowed to write in cursive (3rd grade and on). Public school families I have talked to are also learning cursive.
Hmm, turns out I’m the one living in a bubble. Looks like half of the US teaches it categorically and half of the rest are “it depends”. Only a couple states have gotten rid of it and not the ones I expected.
I was sternly told by a nun that, with my handwriting, I would never get a job.
The only thing in my entire career I've ever been asked to write something in cursive is my signature, which I reduced to a squiggle for efficiency reasons. (The history of signatures is fascinating, BTW. Illiterate Charlemagne "signed" documents with a single horizontal stroke of the pen, inside of a premade 99%-completed "signature".)
Signatures seem to be completely useless. Like you, my signature has devolved into a squiggle that is never the same, and it has never mattered.
I remember experimenting as a bored young adult with my first credit card, before tap to pay, when you often had to sign with a stylus on a terminal (in the US) - I would sign something different every time, sometimes nonsense, sometimes a little drawing, sometimes writing “Obama” or “Einstein” to see if I’d get a call from my bank or something - never did.
Maybe there was an era when actual matching signatures mattered, but it seems long gone.
I guess if you’re a celebrity signing autographs then it matters.
I've seen a suggestion that a signature is now nothing but a signal. An agreed-upon way of communicating "this is serious and binding". Being able to point out that a signature was faked in some cases is a rare side benefit at best.
If papers were signed, then something was agreed upon. A trade performed, a commitment made. If no papers were signed, then it's just idle talk.
That's all it ever has been; it was dressed up as a legible, personally-styled literal composition of one's name for a few centuries.
Many of the signatures throughout Europe's premodern era were crosses - anyone can make a "t" shape, everyone knew what it meant (and what it implied, morally), and it was as valid for this William as it was for that Henry because it was witnessed by state-recognized authorities (Notaries, if you will).
Egyptian signatures weren't written BY the person signing, but if you had your own cartouche, ain't nobody faking that... Wax seals only had names written in Latin print. Thumbprints were used in China, and handprints in paleolithic France.
Modern web interfaces give up on the "draw something like your signature with this janky software" bullshit, and fall to "just type your own name and we'll assume it's you."
All are societally-recognized authentic signatures.
I'm from Germany and you need to redo your signature if it doesn't match you official's, when for example opening a bank account. I needed to draw my signature on a tablet to get my ID, and was unable to do so properly, because my hand is just gliding on a glass surface. After several tries they gave me a paper to write my signature on.
I've heard stories from friends that their bank mails them whether a transaction is supposed to happen, because their signature was sloppy.
Isn't handwriting just the activity of writing by hand as opposed to typing a keyboard? Whether it's cursive or block/print, as long as it's written by hand it still has benefits. Many studies link handwriting to better brain connectivity and learning compared to typing.
The act of writing is the one that brings the benefits, not the looks of the result. I don't see a drawback to learning to write by hand even if nobody will ever read it or if it doesn't look good.
Writing by hand teaches fine motor skills that can bd transferred later to other tasks. When I was in school, we learned not only block print and cursive but also half-uncial script. Nobody expected us to get jobs copying medieval manuscripts: we learned better how to control our fingers and wrists.
The same goes for playing recorders or simple musical instruments: you don't teach that to kids hoping that they'll get jobs playing the recorder, but so that they learn finger control and maybe, if you're lucky, something about music.
People who think that early childhood education is job training probably don't have kids. Educating kids is not about direct utility but about cultivating muscles and thoughts and habits that lead to other development later. The word "cultivation" is an agricultural term that describes tilling the soil: that doesn't actually grow crops (it happens prior to planting), but it makes the growing season to come much more productive than simply casting seed on the unbroken earth. Education is the cultivation of human potential before adulthood, preparing the child for a richer adulthood in ways that are not obviously utilitarian.
Let’s be honest with ourselves here. Children are tortured in school through forced and constant rote memorisation and this makes most of them hate learning anything in later life.
I feel that your viewpoint on this is that of a naive beta bucks provider’s view of school. Childrens spirit is actually broken , school is a training program in as much so that they accept a life as cogs in the machine. The hours are unnecessarily long , they are forcefully socialised and manipulated to care about what people think of them with praise and shaming tactics (gold stars , 30 sets of eyes on them all day etc.).
In this hellish environment which they will be arrested if they do not submit to and attend - they must submit to authority all day and work. Wear a work uniform. Follow work hours. Do work that could easily be compressed to 1-3 hours per day if it was necessary. But the work they do is about conditioning and breaking them so it is not compressed it is stretched out as far as possible with all sorts of justifications (the parents can’t mind them during these hours because they themselves are trapped in this situation too). The children must also hope that whatever older cog is paid to abuse and manipulate them wont punish them with more home work. This squanders and contaminates the best years of their lives.
I love computer programming and working hard. However it’s undeniable to me that school as it currently exists is not anything close to what your post makes it out to be. I would be extremely hesitant about having children in the future - if they are going to be forced to suffer as I did in school.
This is one reason why I employ the Scriptorium language learning technique developed by Alexander Arguelles which focuses you on actively engaging with a text by reading it aloud, carefully writing it down while saying each word, and then rereading the written text aloud. I try my best to keep my my cursive consistent and looking nice, but despite my best efforts[0] it still gets a bit scraggly at times.
Teaching cursive seems like a weirdly American obsession, because during school in Australia it just...wasn't a thing. Like teachers did take you through what "running writing" was, but we were never required to actually master it the accomplishments level was just "can you write? Good let's move on to how sentences are structured".
It's also fun because every few decades there's a new fad in school penmanship so each generation learns a different cuesive and it's all a mess.
I had one teacher who wrote in cursive in University, and her penmanship seemed pretty good. But I always struggled to read it. We are just not used to seeing cursive writing on a daily basis.
For me, in Germany, it was always cursive from the beginning to the end of school. We learned to write in the first class of elementary school. I still only write cursive and cannot write any other style, by hand. And only with a fountain pen. The style I was taught is called "Lateinische Ausgangsschrift". At a catholic elementary school in NRW.
If you are interested here is an overview of the different cursive styles: https://www.schulschriften.de/html/schreibschrift.html
I'm now really confused. I've also been taught this type in german elementary school. But since after school cursive was thought of as children / school handwriting and not something adults should use in professional settings. Also the use of fountain pents was considered childish.
Well, I was never taught otherwise. However lots of the other kids later in high school had developed another way of writing. So me writing cursive, now, as a grown man, is a little strange. I still write with the fountain pen, because it is much nicer to write. You need almost no pressure and that is good for your fingers, if you need to write for a longer time.
No never. They taught us some type of preletters in cursive, in kindergarden, as a stepping stone to real cursive. We never wrote print in elementary school. However, the kindergarden and elementary school were catholic institutions. Most probably they are more conservative than the average in the country.
I find the discussion very weird. I'm from Germany, cursive is taught in class two. There were people in class who never got it, but mostly one or two. I don't get how people can stand writing in printing letters, doesn't it take too much time to essentially stop writing after each letter?
It takes too much time to write, period. I'm not really interested in incremental improvements in my handwriting when I can already type an order of magnitude faster.
I switched from Thuringia to Saxony and have younger siblings that were in Saxony and they don't differ in that regard. I thought "Schulausgangsschrift" was mandatory. Where do you went to school? What did you do in class two in German lessons? This was basically the main thing we learned there (I think).
That's interesting. That Wikipedia article claims, that the idea is in fact not to not get the children to use cursive, but let them develop their own cursive. So they are still supposed to write in cursive eventually.
Belgium: the only handwriting i can do properly is cursive (each word is a connected string of curly letters). I often cheated on the capitals because they are a bit grandose curly in cursive. We wrote notebooks full with cursive in different languages, that's how most languages were thought. My 12yo kid was thought exactly the same hand writing but he has to write less because the usage of fill-in books in stead of empty notebooks.
UK: I find all this fascination with "cursive" very odd. I was taught to write indivdual block letters before and in the first year of school, and then like every other pupil, was excited to move on to "joined up" writing, which was (is) very similar, with the letters having small extensions to link them to the adjoining letters in a word, thereby making writing much faster. The way I was taught to write block letters was cleary designed to lead to this - there really wasn't much difference. Reading and writing joined up letters seems pretty normal to me and to my kids.
My handwriting was, and still is, pretty awful but I soon learned to argue that the legibility of one's handwriting is in inverse proportion to one's intelligence, citing doctors as evidence and positing that higher intelligence leads to faster thinking leads to faster writing leads to decreased legibility. Never really had any problems in school (or since) and I will note that when I left secondary education my school still did not have a computer, even in the admin offices. My kids' experience has been very different but with similar outcomes in this regard.
But then again, Italy has something of a Catholic grade school mentality, but with more gelato and better shoes. /s (Sort of - do they still have a mandatory tax supporting the Vatican?)
Lol I have a friend whose handwriting was so bad, his mom found the leading expert in teaching how to write correctly (at the time / wherever he lived at the time), that eventually broke him and he gave up.
We are all very unique and different.
What's funny is I gave up on cursive as long as I hit the internet in the mid 2000s because I instinctively knew it was fruitless.
The fact that some people are totally unable to draw while others excel at it would alone imply that you should see similar variation in writing. And we do.
> What's funny is I gave up on cursive as long as I hit the internet in the mid 2000s because I instinctively knew it was fruitless.
Not exactly. Handwriting better reinforces information in our memories than typing or reading or listening alone. So, if we're going to be doing a lot of writing because we intend to do a lot of note taking (and reading of our scrawl later on), then effective writing is obviously useful, which is what cursive is supposed to be. Now, perhaps that doesn't necessarily mean you have to use cursive as you are familiar with it, but inevitably, all handwriting written quickly turns into some kind of cursive. Writing block letters is slow and tedious.
The point is that you almost never see text written in cursive anymore.
For me, I encounter things written in Chinese way more often than I see cursive. I don't know how to read Chinese, but I don't really worry about not being able to.
I could imagine a web page saying "you must be over 50." to enter this page. A capture saying Please read this cursive script and type in what it says...
I'd argue that if cursive was useful, it wouldn't be dying. It did used to be useful, but there's plenty of other skills that were too, died long ago and rightly are not taught to everyone anymore.
Typing at speed on a fully mechanical typewriter was an incredibly valuable skill that required a lot of physical and mental training.
It disappeared in a single generation and nobody looked back except for old typists that refused to learn the new skill. They eventually died and now that skill is basically extinct.
I don't remember being punished for bad handwriting, but I know I got chided for it a lot. And I know we spent a lot of time on it. It definitely sucked, at every level of the experience.
I also find it odd that people have some off assertions on why we learn cursive. I'm sure there is a multitude of reasons, but I find it hard to think it has any strong advantage over other ways.
I do get a kick out of my kids being baffled that I write in cursive. At this point, I think I get as much fun out of that as I do anything else.
I was constantly chided as well, The teachers seem to have regarded my poor handwriting as moral failure,ike choosing to do something naughty, rather than as something that they needed to give me more tutoring on.
You said it in a more challenging way than I would but yeah I thought as i read that comment ‘it sure felt like punishment to me’ as I had similar public ‘chiding’ over my inability to improve my handwriting like it was some moral failure.
Almost the same here. Could read everything fluently before school, or even kindergarden, which I've skipped, because 'too playful'.
Whatever, I didn't learn it by reading cursive, but reading printed stuff. So that never really made sense to me, though depending on who is writing, it can look nice.
So I do a few fast strokes of lines and/or curves or dots to form a letter, and hop to the next. I wasn't slower than the cursive writers. Which works better with ball pens, than fountain pens, btw. Cursive is a fountain pen thing, IMO.
But my writing doesn't look bad at all. Just block letters leaning slightly to the right. I can even do "DIN-Schrift" like in technical drawings freehanded, slower though.
Cursive is wildly easier with a fountain pen. You don't know how much pressure a ball point requires and how much friction it has until you try a fountain pen. My "regular" handwriting is mostly legible but rather ugly. If I do cursive with a ball point it's nearly indecipherable (even to me). If I do cursive with a fountain pen it's legible and decent looking. If I take my time it'll almost look like the examples in the school books I had as a child.
It's a shame fountain pens are slightly too fiddly for every-day use since they still have some real advantages over more modern writing instruments. I've never had a fountain pen fail to produce a line unless out of ink. With ballpoints I feel like they don't work more often than they do.
I know that. I had to use fountain pens in early school. It just didn't make sense to me to write cursive with them, for my stated reasons. Regarding fiddlyness of FP vs. BP, I'm not sure. I had cheap GEHAs and Pelikans only, which I 'tuned' by exchanging the tip/feather, that helped with the fealing of 'scratching' when going over paper. Which may not be necessary at all with better FPs, and/or different paper. Never had a problem with leaking ink btw.
OTH all of that just went away with using ball pens. OFC there are cheap ones, with the thin, brassy pen refills, which often show what you describe. For me that went away with using Parker and Lamy. I guess that would go for whatever fits into Rotring and Montblanc too.
Or the endless options obsessively discussed in fora commited to stuff like this. I just couldn't be bothered so far. My stuff is good enough for me :-)
> I find printing to be fine for almost all circumstances where I need to hand write something
Agree 100%! I still regularly write things by hand, but I already stopped using cursive during high school, like most of my classmates. (I think cursive was only mandatory in elementary school and maybe also in junior high school.)
There are ancient (e.g., Roman) and medieval cursive scripts, so I'm not sure what you mean by it being a couple hundred years old. Unless you just mean the current script we use now? (As for whether it should still be taught or not I'm impartial.)
I'm partial to cursive italic, which dates at least to the Renaissance. You don't have to learn two sets of letter forms (printed and cursive italic use the same forms), and the joins are simple. It is easy to learn, and works well for both everyday handwriting and calligraphy.
I agree, and my handwriting also sucks. My brother could have been an architect; his handwriting is amazing without trying. Give me a keyboard and recess too.
My grandmother wrote me letters in cursive. They got more and more unreadable as she got older. I should have bought her a typewriter.
I had a similar experience with writing, in my case it included print exercises.
It was very frustrating and it took me a long time to gain an appreciation for writing after they finally caved and found a cheap old DOS PC for me to do work on.
Have you ever tried a drawing or even a calligraphy class?
I worry your teachers have ruined you by trying to make your writing more artistic when they should have perhaps made you more artistic and let you bring the fine motor control back on your own.
the article links the decline of cursive writing and the rise of the AI cheat happening at the same
time as a definitive moment, and suggests bieng locked in an exam room with blank(unlined) paper might be a good way to force peoples hand(accidental pun) and seperate the knowlegable from the rest.
my personal feeling, that as you so well illustrate, is that a significant number of academics and hobbiests will want to study and experience past practices as to keep the undestanding of cursive alive into the forseeble future
unlined, just for the extra test of focus
I think you are confused. Chaucer died in 1400. I often read perfectly readable (though with wild spelling) English from the 17th century. English was firmly established, though some formal documents still used Latin.
This was in the 1990s so calculators were common. I was born at the worst time for math education, when calculators and Computer Algebra Systems were becoming common but math education hadn't adapted yet.
I am not an expert in any way, shape or form but I wonder how this squares with this other journal article in Nature: Molecular Psychiatry which came out in 2024? "11C-UCB-J PET imaging is consistent with lower synaptic density in autistic adults" https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02776-2
OP's article is about children, yours is about adults.
OP's article's conclusion states "Furthermore, our study highlights the importance of studying neurodevelopmental disorders closer to their onset, rather than in adulthood when a lifetime of compensatory mechanisms may have already taken place"
As I understand, autistic people often get negative reinforcement from authoritarian mindsets of society (follow the general norm and the power structures instead of thinking for yourself) and that can be kinda traumatizing for autistic people
So what we need is to value that every person's perspective is equally valid, and their ideas are plausible, and no one is inherently superior, whether NT or ASD etc...
> Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value
>
> -Baha'i Teaching
> OP's article is about children, yours is about adults.
Studies on biological causes of ASD are notorious for failing to replicate and reaching contradictory conclusions. It is just as likely that you’d reach the opposite conclusion with children too
Because “ASD” isn’t really a thing, it is a whole bunch of different things with different causes and different symptoms semi-arbitrarily squished together under the one label, simply because those symptoms have some overlap. And every research sample is a random mixture of these different underlying conditions, and two different samples are unlikely to have the same mix, which is why studies of the same thing with different samples (even defined on the same criteria) frequently produce opposite conclusions. “Heterogeneity” is the technical term for this
One of the lessons that I would hope that the world learns from the rise of the radical right world-wide is that platitudes about universalism, egalitarianism, empathy, and basically everything that the Baha'i faith teaches makes people hate you and want to kill you. This has been true historically (see treatment of Baha`i faith by like everyone) and is true today. These platitudes that you and the Baha`i faith (and jains) espoused seem to trigger a revulsion to "weakness" and "submissiveness" among others around them. Early Christians had to deal with the same extreme hatred.
Autistic people suffer the same fate. Dr. Hans Asperger could only say the "smart" autistic people from certain death by showing that they are useful to the war machine and could produce rockets so Nazis could continue gassing people longer.
Even today, "Autist" as a slur or insult is used even more than "Retard" 10 or 20 years ago, and the connotations around "Autist" are very similar to "Incel". Most people genuinely feel a level of horror that leads to "I wish you didn't exist" when they are around a chris-chan tier autistic person.
The world isn't ready to accept universalism, or love, or happieness, or peace or any of that hippy shit. The world wants a boot from a strongman on its face - forever!
Chris Chan is an abusive person and has been for a very long time (before the "internet found him", he was making rape threats against girls in his highschool.) He freaks people out for good reason. It's not fair to autistic people to use Chris Chan as some sort of archetype for autism.
Why not? Being a horrible person equaling people liking you is exactly my point! He famously now has a finnish girlfriend (Flutter) who is much more attractive than him. This has lead to hilarious 4chan threads where the incels of 4chan lament at how CHRIS CHAN is getting laid and they aren't.
He's more evidence that trying to be "ethically good" leads to bad life outcomes and the moment that he embraced his "dark" side, his life outcomes literally got way better. He's evidence that god hates the weak.
Your initial arguments are interesting, but I don't think any interpretation of the old or new testaments would allow for conflating a society and what it rewards with the will of their "God". Sodom and Gomorrah would be the most obvious example of a situation where dark personalities must have done well only to end up grouped in a fast track damnation.
I think a lot of Chris-Chan’s issues aren’t due to autistic traits in themselves, they are due to being surrounded by a subculture of stalkers obsessed with doing all in their power to make those issues worse
I would say "Happy dappy dumbp dipshits" is not what I get from the Baha'i ideals
Some people are born leaders, thats their inherent personality tendencies. Often they are psychopathic, which is a congential thing, and hence not their fault in any ways. Rather, just like anyone else, they are also mines rich in gems of inestimable value
So how can you get someone like Stalin or whatnot, who can mesmerize the populace, make brave, bold and rational decisions in the face intense crisis, but at the same time help them somehow understand and internalize foundational principles of justice and equity so that their strengths can be manifest without tormenting people and thereby extinguishing so much human potential?
There are also two axis of deficit in autostic individuals. Social and cognitive. Its not uncommon for individuals to present without cognitive deficit, however social deficits can still be severe e.g. A 5 year old who cannot participate in class due to meltdowns and inability to follow social norms such as sharing/turn taking/listening.
I haven't read these studies, but it seems natural that there would need to be control for the type and severity of autism.
Reading this, I am increasing my belief that this is very, if not exactly, like XSLT. You are searching a tree looking for parents, siblings, children, etc nodes then analysing or transforming them.
Your comment very much reminds me of the Isaac Asimov story "The Feeling of Power" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power). I think it might be worth the time read or, in my case, re-read it.
I am glad to see this as well. I decided to use RDF for my personal project because it was well specified, has many implementations, and a human readable syntax. In the end, it is just data but I wanted to make it as accessible as possible. Does this mean that RDF is always the right choice? No, but it worked for my use case. I wish there were more choices in the open source Triplestore space with good OWL2 support but my project works with what is out there and if someone wants to transform it into something else, that is entirely possible to do.
My impression is that the trade off when choosing RDF vs a property graph when trying to model graph data is between maximal schema flexibility and the ability to infinitely break apart the data model down to the smallest atomic structures because literally everything is a node that is either an IRI(as unique identifier) or a primitive. Vs the convenience of having more complex nodes and edges with some structure built in where you can collapse some fields down and call them properties to describe individual nodes and edges. In RDF you have to create all of that yourself with triples which can lead to some large structures for relatively common tasks like referencing edges and for reification of statements.
I have a degree in "Celtic Studies" and while I tend to study the Irish early medieval period rather than the ancient period, I would highly recommend reconsidering the entire idea of "Celtic". A couple of books that might be good to read if you have time are: John Collis, The Celts : origins, myths & inventions (https://www.worldcat.org/title/921219683) and Simon James, The Atlantic Celts : ancient people or modern invention? (https://www.worldcat.org/title/249450858). I have not had the time lately to read up on the state of the question so I will read the recommended article: Rachel Pope, Re-approaching Celts: Origins, Society, and Social Change (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-021-09157-1) with keen interest.
From somewhere near the middle of the linked article:
> All of that is to make the point that any treatment of ‘Celtic’ warfare is immediately begging an enormous question because ‘who were the Celts?’ is at best an unanswered question and to be frank, probably an unanswerable question.
That's not the middle - that's pretty near the beginning (look at your scroll bar).
But yeah, the author spends a great deal of time on the question and it's really interesting. I got maybe 20 paragraphs in before I realized "this is fascinating, but I need to be doing other things".
I intend to return later though, the author's style is great and this is a really interesting article.
I will try. I tend to think of "The Celts" linguistically as a set of related languages. However, that is an artefact of my own training and background. How the people who spoke those related languages lived can differ radically wherever you find them. For me, to define Celtic is: did they speak a language that is related to those that we have labelled as Celtic? That means that "Celtic" is a convenient shorthand for talking about these languages and does not necessarily have a meaning outside of that.
I have not yet finished reading the linked article so I will see if it may alter my thinking any.
Lorient in Brittany hosts an Interceltique festival; it's a cross-cultural festival that celebrates art, food, language, but it's centered around music and features the best bands from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, The Isle of Man, Cornwall, Brittany, Galicia, Cape Breton, PEI, and New Brunswick.
I've gone several times as an accompanist attached to Irish bands, and it's remarkable to me how I can sit in with other musicians from any of those regions and the idioms, base tunes, time signatures, and ornamentation are so similar. I grew up speaking Irish, and while I can understand Scottish Gaelic, I can't follow anything but a word or two of other other Celtic languages. But with music and dance, things seem much much closer. I have to listen and learn much much more to play with other regional folk music, like Eastern European or even French Canadian (which is sort of close to Celtic and shares many tunes), but with the Celtic countries, I've literally sat in on main stages with no rehearsal and we just all know what to do. It does feel like there is quite a deep shared history there.
Where would the origin of the Celts be according to current archeological finds if you approached it from this linguistic point of view? Atlantic or central Europe?
I like this answer because it's relatable to today's English. English is spoken by many people around the world, but it's not one group of people, it's many many different people and cultures who have come to use English for one reason or another.
But you can still point out who the original English were or at least trace almost 100% of English speakers today as originating from 1600s England's conquest of the world.
The debate about 'The Celts' is that we can't point out where the original language emerged, and the potential range of where it emerged is quite huge stretching from Ireland through central Europe with some claiming it emerged in Turkey even.
What a strange hill to die on. English is the colonial language, and its global success was singularly due to imperialist hegemony. This is taught at the university system level and is in every textbook on the subject. I love a good myth about capitalism just as much as the next exploited worker, but attributing the success of English to trade is equivalent to teaching children myths about Thanksgiving and Washington chopping down a cherry tree.
English is widely spoken because it was the colonial language enforced at the highest levels of society. This is still true today and is currently a primary plank in the political platform of US conservatives.
There are libraries of books written solely on this subject. Your bizarre hypothesis ignores this and instead points to slavery and trade. More to the point, there are new articles on how English was enforced on subjugated people published on an almost weekly basis. Last week, the article I read on this topic was about how indigenous orphans were prohibited from using their native language and forced to use only English. But let’s talk about glowing myths about trade and slavery instead which have literally nothing to do with it.
"During the period of colonization…Maori were banned from speaking their native language in public places including schools, and forced to speak the foreign language of English…Maori were deprived…of their language, but also of the dimensions of culture and history inherent in language customers and worldview."
That was true of indigenous people all over the world who were forced to learn English to trade. It doesn’t change the fact that English went global because of colonization, not because of trade. The trading happened because of colonization. This is the subject of numerous studies. William Cronon’s "Changes in the Land" documents exactly this scenario with the indigenous population of New England and painstakingly recounts how colonization led to trade, decade by decade, century by century. Your argument makes zero sense and is one of the strangest claims I’ve ever seen. The Māori of New Zealand primarily learned to read and write English not from trade, but from Christian settlements. (Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand) Christian missionaries were the leading edge and primary agents of European colonialism. Attributing the wide adoption of the English language to trade is historical revisionism on a grand scale.
> English as we know it today came to be exported to other parts of the world through British colonisation…The efforts of English-speaking Christian missionaries have resulted in English becoming a second language for many other groups.
It’s interesting that English only became the primary global language after British empire had already collapsed…
Also the British subjugation native populations and forcing to speak English doesn’t really explain its prominence outside of a some areas like Indian and parts of Africa.
Why do you think an irreversible binomial employed as a thought-terminating cliché in the form of an argumentum ergo decedo is an appropriate response?
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle and ignoring our request to stop. Regardless of what you're battling for or against, this is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
1. Could be worse, could be constant false accusations (as per your responses). You are more than welcome to paste any denial of colonialism.
2. You have not offered anything close to a reasoned argument, and then you complain that you haven't received one back.
3. I have said before, and I am quite happy to reiterate, because you have nothing to offer here, and I am very VERY happy if I never hear from you again. (Although I doubt you will stop, you are getting the attention you seem to want)
4. Finally, also, please fix your state of denial, and, can I strongly recommend that you stop looking to books for the effects of colonialism, when you are dealing with people that have actually experienced it, and continue to experience its effects.
Please stop posting flamewar comments and/or using HN for ideological battle. Regardless of what you're battling for or against, this is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.
I'm not going to ban you right now because this doesn't seem to be what you've primarily been using HN for, but your comments in this thread were not ok.
If you are interested in cats in Early Medieval Ireland, I would recommend reading "Catṡlechta and other medieval legal material relating to cats" by Kevin Murray in Celtica 25, pp. 143–159.
