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Topic	A Geektivus For The Rest Of Us
ParanoidObsessive 03/02/18 11:25:11 AM #272:	Zeus posted... Well, I'm not sure that any consistency today so much results from interactions with traders over time as much as it's been the product of government, the education system, and television (because you need a central influence for homogeny, otherwise you just get consistent regional practices). Well, I meant more in the sense that, originally if two adjacent cultures meet (usually via trade), it's where the beginnings of pidgin or "trade languages" start to take root, because you basically need to be able to communicate to make deals. And if someone says they need your product before January but someone else says they can't ship their goods until Kislev, but a third trader shows up who says he can ship as early as Brumaire, that's going to cause problems unless you can start to translate between the two systems (and that's even before competing systems of coinage come into play). And once you know what the other person's system is, it can at least facilitate the beginnings of that system becoming more dominant (especially if their system works better than yours does). The final step is usually a government saying "This is our official calendar now", but the first steps are usually on a much more grass roots level. In the same sense, written language as a whole only really exists because of trade in the first place. Sure, we use writing for so many other things now - it gave rise to the entire concept of keeping track of historical events, and it can be purely artistic or philosophical - but in the early days of its formation it was almost always used solely for keeping track of how much stuff you owned or what you were going to trade someone for. It's part of why writing didn't really come into being until after the Agricultural Revolution - because before that possessions weren't really all that important a concept, and trade didn't really exist on a large scale. Zeus posted... And, really, until the rise of dictionaries there was still a greater range of variation. Very true. This is also a significant part of the reason why Americans and Brits still fight to this day over which words to put Us into, or whether or not to use an S or a Z in certain words. --- "Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76 "POwned again." --- blight family <cite>ParanoidObsessive posted [p:897046940] in A Geektivu... [t:76102111]...</cite> <quote><cite>Zeus posted...</cite> <quote>Well, I'm not sure that any consistency today so much results from interactions with traders over time as much as it's been the product of government, the education system, and television (because you need a central influence for homogeny, otherwise you just get consistent regional practices).</quote> Well, I meant more in the sense that, originally if two adjacent cultures meet (usually via trade), it's where the beginnings of pidgin or "trade languages" start to take root, because you basically need to be able to communicate to make deals. And if someone says they need your product before January but someone else says they can't ship their goods until Kislev, but a third trader shows up who says he can ship as early as Brumaire, that's going to cause problems unless you can start to translate between the two systems (and that's even before competing systems of coinage come into play). And once you know what the other person's system is, it can at least facilitate the beginnings of that system becoming more dominant (especially if their system works better than yours does). The final step is usually a government saying "This is our official calendar now", but the first steps are usually on a much more grass roots level. In the same sense, written language as a whole only really exists because of trade in the first place. Sure, we use writing for so many other things now - it gave rise to the entire concept of keeping track of historical events, and it can be purely artistic or philosophical - but in the early days of its formation it was almost always used solely for keeping track of how much stuff you owned or what you were going to trade someone for. It's part of why writing didn't really come into being until after the Agricultural Revolution - because before that possessions weren't really all that important a concept, and trade didn't really exist on a large scale. <cite>Zeus posted...</cite> <quote>And, really, until the rise of dictionaries there was still a greater range of variation.</quote> Very true. This is also a significant part of the reason why Americans and Brits still fight to this day over which words to put Us into, or whether or not to use an S or a Z in certain words. --- "Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76 "POwned again." --- blight family</quote> ... Copied to Clipboard!
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