tanya

What kind of people are sufficiently aware of "linguistic methodology", and "how language actually works", if not linguistics scholars?

Can an ordinary bloke or gal claim proficiency in linguistics, without having studied the matter? If you have not studied the subject matter, why are you offering, as a platitude, the notion that Acharya S. had illustrated "ignorance" of linguistic methodology.

My position is simple: I am ignorant of linguistics (and many other things, too,), so, my feelings are not hurt, in the slightest, by your allegation of incompetence on my part, for anything I post.

Though I am ignorant, I would still hope, that in offering criticism of something I have written, you might illustrate that shortcoming of mine, with both a quote of my text, and a citation from the literature, or a web site, which disproves my contention.

Simply writing: Tanya is an ignorant goose, (which may be absolutely correct) doesn't cut it. We need data, on this forum.

tanya

Thank you for your comment.

I think there may be a typographical error in your second paragraph, and unlike some errors, this one precludes comprehension of your meaning. Can you please correct it?

Here is another problem: "I can't see any reasonable inference that it wasn't...."

What is the "it" ? Kurios?

I would sound a note of caution about your assertion that is bonafide.

Can you give a link to this version?

How do you know the provenance of this document, i.e. how do you know with confidence, that the extant document has not been corrupted by 2000 years of Christian meddling? Who preserved Philo's version, and why would they guard it so preciously, especially if it differed from the official version? Do we have a first century CE Coptic version of torah, recovered from the Egyptian sands?

How does Philo's version compare with DSS?

Then, allow me to contradict you, sir.

It is NOT what it appears to be.

The word, in English, or Greek, or Hebrew, "Lord", (kurios, adonai) is juxtaposed to the word YHWH, for one very particular reason: to claim legitimacy to the notion that Jesus of Nazareth, was either the son of God, or God himself. As a bit of extra confusion, to this polytheistic milieu, one must also add, that there is a disagreement among the Christians, whether or not YHWH was "theos", or simply one of the 70 sons of El, the "most high".

In other words, for some Christians, Jesus IS YHWH, while for others, Jesus is the son of YHWH (making EL, the grandfather of Jesus!)

It makes, and made, a very significant difference, with thousands of people murdered, defending one school or another in the conflict over interpretation.

Clarifying Clement's view would be very instructive to understanding this debate. Was he aware of the dispute? Did he contribute to the controversy? Did he support one side or the other, if so, upon which Hebrew text did he rely? From what little I know, (or understand), Clement was illiterate in Hebrew, but a scholar in Greek, with a thorough understanding of Plato. His student, Origen, however, was a master of Hebrew, so far as I understand, and accordingly, one imagines that either or both of them, knew of this distinction between the original text, and the LXX in common use in the late second, and early third century, CE. Did either of them clarify the heritage of Jesus, vis a vis YHWH and EL?

stephan huller

No I think Jesus was the god in the burning bush, the god that wrestled with Jacob etc.

ApostateAbe

miekko, welcome to the forum. You may be happy to learn that the only person who takes Acharya S seriously in this forum is Dave31 (aka freethinkaluva), though there are still plenty of bad ideas in need of critical analysis and hopelessly immune to it. Correcting all the claims of any book by Acharya S would require a second book twice as long. And of course the errors are not exclusive to Acharya S. I figure maybe the opponents of mythicists should set up an online database, like a Wikipedia, to correct mythicist errors. I am inspired by the Index to Creationist Claims on TalkOrigins.org. Another mythicist docuganda came out recently, and I think it is time the opponents of all ideological stripes organized and fought back.

ApostateAbe

I just found out that Android and iPhone apps are available for the Index to Creationist Claims. That is awesome. I just got myself an Android. I am going to church with this.

James The Least

I don't have anything to add. I just wanted to look at that pic again.

stephan huller

I know. I went through Google images looking for a picture I remember my Mom had in a Paris Match issue when I was a young boy but I couldn't find it. It was her on a beach, topless, holding her treasures in her arms. Couldn't find it. This was second best but still, it's Raquel.

Zwaarddijk

Scholars of linguistics also, for the sake of teaching a new generation of linguistics scholars, for the sake of making their findings widely available, and for the sake of educating others. Meanwhile, in their scholarly pursuits, they publish theses. In these theses they often provide a chapter early on in the book that elaborates on the method used. There also are veritable tomes whose only purpose is to explain the methods available, problems with them, their applicability, and so on.

Having read about three dozen tomes on the topic, having thought a lot in general about it and read a crazy amount of papers by bona-fide scholars, I am somewhat informed.

I will soon major in computer science. As a minor subject, I have general linguistics, which actually is what I started my studies in but switched to CS because I figured I might need to make some money too in case academia doesn't want me (which it turns out was a smart choice - the linguistics institutions here have both since been discontinued, so there are no research jobs in general linguistics in this town any more, and I am quite fond of this town).

An ordinary bloke can certainly learn enough of the matter to be able to see when there is something fishy about purported claims in a field.

As I said above, I have studied the matter, altho' I am probably never going to major in it. However, it is one of the three things I study in my free time these days, the other two being abstract music theory (applicable to music that is not tuned like western music usually is) and Judaic literature and history (for which reason I can read Biblical Hebrew, and am learning to read Talmudic Aramaic).

As there's been confusion on this matter on other fora, I may as well point out that I am not Jewish, nor do I intend to convert or anything. The fascination for Jewish culture is more related to the experiences of minority ethnicities and cultures in general, their interactions with their surroundings and adaptations to sometimes hostile surroundings and so on. Judaism providing one of the longest written records of such experiences.

See, ever since I was a small child, I've been asking questions. This is a thing a lot of people will tell you about themselves. Unlike many of them, though, I actually think about the answer I get until I realize whether it fits or not. Ever asked a musician why a major chord sounds so good? Why are there twelve tones?

The answers they give often don't really explain anything - some of them will admit to not knowing, some will just say 'that's just the way it is', some will say something along the lines of "well, major chords are a pleasing combination of tones". Some people would suffice with the last answer as an answer - but is it really? Let's rephrase the question a bit - "why is a major chord a pleasing combination of tones?" - "well, major chords are a pleasing combination of tones". Does not answer much.

I will append a short text on why there are twelve tones - it has nothing to do with the zodiac or the twelve disciples or the twelve months if you ever thought so, but is a purely mathematical result due to number theory and some properties of the exponential function (and the exponential function is relevant due to properties of our ears and of how our brain interprets sound). Other numbers of tones would be just as possible and have been used successfully in western and non-western musics (and in western music, they have not been used exclusively by modern avant-gardists, but by renaissance composers and theorists as well).

Duly note that I've never alleged that you are incompetent either. This kind of verging on misrepresenting me all the time is kind of ... annoying.

When it comes to Acharya S, her fact checking honestly sucks horse balls.

I actually ... unlike Acharya, opened an Irish dictionary on this. Krishna is not a word in Irish - as it turns out, Irish normally does not use the letter k.

To quote a not entirely trustworthy source, wikipedia:
"The alphabet now used for writing the Irish language consists of the following letters of the Latin script, whether written in Roman hand or Gaelic hand:

a á b c d e é f g h i í l m n o ó p r s t u ú;
he acute accent over the vowels is ignored for purposes of alphabetization. Modern loanwords also make use of j k q v w x y z. " (And I only use wikipedia as a source right now because I can't cut and paste out of this book I have sitting on my desk that I borrowed from the library yesterday,
I bet the Christian church went and distorted the spelling of the entire Irish language to hide this Krishna thing. Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? Well, turns out - Krishna is a word, insofar as it is a *modern loan*. Asking an internet-friend who speaks Irish and is majoring in Indo-European studies, he pointed out this:


If this is not fabrication on Acharya's or her sources' part, then what kind of evidence would suffice to convince you that she's a terrible scholar? I doubt even if she herself confessed to spurious claims you'd take that as evidence against her!

Further, when making claims like this, it is customary in linguistics-related fields that one should adhere to the orthography of the language one is quoting from or state which transliteration one is using - due to Acharya's refusal to adhere to anything like it, looking up claims in dictionaries is made almost impossible. What am I supposed to expect the letter k corresponds to? C? G? ... I ended up checking every possible word that involved any sound even remotely similar to k - including the mutated forms - which quickly ended up in the dozens of potential candidate words of which simply not a single one had the meaning of "sun" - except grian, which as anyone can see IS NOT KRISHNA.

She didn't even open a dictionary to check this. IS that what scholarship is about? Lying about the vocabulary of a language?
I do admit dictionaries always are incomplete - language lives and changes over time, of course, and even for dead languages, words have been lost that cannot be included in the dictionary simply because they never have been recorded. Yet this doesn't give us carte blanche to make unsubstantiated claims about a language. I explained this in a blog post regarding words in a Mayan language already (of which, btw, there are dozens. She does not tell us which one the claimed word supposedly exists in. So, verifying her claim is basically impossible - even if I learned all of the Mayan languages, she could still maintain it's a word that's been lost or that just exists in a small dialect off on the other end of the Yucatan peninsula or whatever. We simply must draw the line here: UNVERIFIABLE STATEMENTS OF THIS KIND MUST BE REJECTED OUTRIGHT UNTIL CORROBORATING PRIMARY EVIDENCE IS PROVIDED, because if such a claim is a fabrication, she can never be called out on it! Science these days rests on the principle of falsifiability. Something Acharya seems to be in denial about.)

The only criticism I have offered previous to this post on this forum was an objection to a criticism of me. Criticism that seems based on assuming the worst about me and reading but the single post Toto quoted in full before I even joined. Generally, when I object to some claim, I try to explain my objection, the reasons I have for objecting, etc. I try to provide a reasonably easy to understand summary of the situation as far as I understand it. I like pointing out when I am in doubt about my own knowledge. In the blog this, I have elected not to point out things I suspect may be wrong but where my knowledge and understanding simply is insufficient to know how to go about to check it.

Often, things are complicated, or require a lecture-length explanation. Here's an example of that, and this is just for one of the many things everyone takes for granted in the entire western world. This is just an example of how things that may seem obvious or trivial can be relatively complicated matters. I didn't write this up for this post, it's a thing I have stored in a bunch of documents explaining matters that are of some interest to me:

Okay, I said something about why there are twelve tones and why major chords sound good. I might as well explain that in greater detail as well, see this as an appendix:
APPENDIX I: chords and the twelve tones
I.1 : tones in general, a bit about sound
A tone, in general, is a sound whose wave-form is repeating in some regular manner. For instance, A is usually defined as 440 hz. This means that, per second and roughly speaking relatively evenly distributed over the time-span of a second, the sound wave will reach a peak 440 times.

Sound is really an increase and decrease in pressure, so a soundwave doesn't behave like a wave on the surface of a lake or something, but is rather air getting denser, then getting less dense, then getting denser ... along every point the sound wave traverses, such that while it gets denser here, it thins out a bit onwards as well as back, and gets denser even further onwards and back. So, for A 440, it gets denser 440 times per second.

I.2 Timbre
When we play or sing A 440, there occur overtone vibrations as well. An overtone is a frequency that usually is something like a doubling, tripling, quadrupling, etc, of the frequency of the "fundamental" tone. There are physical reasons these occur. So, on most instruments, when we play A 440, there's also 880, 1320, 1760, ... (essentially, n*440, for integer n.) The different waves can have different amplitudes (how high or low they go if we plot them on paper - how dense or thin the air gets if we think of the physical phenomenon). Now, the amplitudes of the overtones determine, to some extent, what the instrument is going to sound like. (Also, in the case of pianos, the n tend to be just *off* from integers, so like 3.01, 4.005, etc, numbers like those). Overtones are important to understand dissonance and consonance.

I.3 Intervals
What we hear when we hear two or more tones played together is not their distance in hertz, we hear the *relative distance*. That is, if you take the higher tone's frequency, and divide it by the lower tone's frequency, and you take another pair of tones with the same ratio between them, the other pair of tones will in isolation sound a lot like the previous pair of tones in isolation.

So e.g. C and G in our scale ≃ 523,25hz and 783,99
A and E in our scale = 440 and ~659,25. Turns out if you divide these by each other, in both cases you get ~3/2, which is one of the more important intervals we have.

The most important interval, and one that is almost universal in human music, is the octave: 2/1. 440 and 880 hz form an octave. These waves will interlock (which up to something like 150 years ago was believed to be the explanation for consonance.) Notes that differ by this ratio are considered to be different ~copies of the same note, that's why there are several Cs on a piano, as well as several Ds, Es, etc. All Ds on a well-tuned piano differ by roughly this ratio (due to the weirdness of piano timbre, they sometimes are tuned slightly sharp on pianos.) When doing scale construction a bit ahead, if we obtain a note such as 5/2, this "octave equivalence" will be assumed, and we can multiply freely by 2/1 or its inversion 1/2 - so 5/2 = 5/1 = 5/4 = 5/8.

I.4 Stacking intervals
Say we obtain G from C by multiplying C's frequency by 3/2. To obtain a new note, we multiply G's frequency by 3/2. This way, every note we have will have a note above it that is "pleasing" the way C and G are pleasing together.
Because of octave equivalence, we also have a c above the G we obtained, which will differ from the G by (2/1) / (3/2) = 4/3. Turns out these two intervals sound a lot similar in some ways. 3/2 (and approximations thereof) are known as the perfect fifth.

Anyways, it turns out the original intention here - to have every note have such a pleasing upwards neighbour 3/2 above it is unattainable without having an infinite number of notes. (We will never hit an octave of a previously obtained note - this is because (3/2)^n will always have the denominator and enumerator indivisible by each other except for n=0. This is easy to test: (3/2)*(3/2) gives 9/4, 9/4 * 3/2 gives 27/8, 27/8*3/2 gives 81/16, and 81/16 * 3/2 gives 243/32. Now, observe how only the last digit in the enumerator affects the last digit of the next obtained ratio: we will always have it cycle along this line: 3-9-7-1-3-... whereas the denominator always will cycle 2-4-8-6-2-... and a number ending in an odd digit will never be divisible by a number ending in an even digit.

In medieval times, this was solved by simply picking a reasonable number of such steps and then calling it a day. Turns out we can get arbitrarily close to a tone we've previously obtained though. And the first time we get fairly close happens at the twelfth iteration. At this point, we are roughly an eighth-tone from our starting point. The last fifth is detuned by that whole amount, and we call the last fifth the "wolf fifth". It sounds like shit. But medieval music didn't change keys almost at all, but kept in the same keys fairly consistently, and you didn't have to fear the wolf fifth if you kept in the keys for which it was far off - so basically you had a few keys above C in the circle of fifths working very well, and the further off you got, the closer the wolf came.

Later, musicians recognized that the interval four fifths up (so, E from C - obtained by stacking C -> G -> D -> A -> E) can be made very sweet by flattening it a fair bit. But instead of creating a new wolf between A and E, the error was distributed on each of the fifths, so we flattened G about a quarter of that error, the distance between G and D was likewise flattened (so C-D was twice flattened), C-A was flattened, as as C-E. C-E was sweet. Turns out there are a few different ways of doing this, some of which also lead to wolves. And often, there were wolf thirds and fifths. (Note: when I say the distance C-G was flattened, I also mean *every other comparable interval* was flattened by the same amount.)

Some renaissance music seems to have assumed roughly 31 or 19 tones per octave, since then you get a reasonable circle of thirds as well as a circle of fifths that actually closes up. Quarter-comma meantone (as one of these versions is called) actually is pretty much indistinguishable from 31 tones equally distributed over the octave.

But keyboards still were generally built along the lines of the medieval scales, and even with a theoretical 31 or 19 pitches, most composers actually only had access to 12 of them - so basically, only a few keys were usable. In this time, changing keys in a song became increasingly popular.

Bach and a few others wanted to be able to use each key. This was solved by many theorists and organ-technicians by spreading the errors between 12 fifths and 7 octaves in a variety of ways all sharing the property that every key was useful (but the errors were differently distributed over them so they all sounded slightly different from each other - which probably is the reason some 18th and early 19th century composers and theorists discuss which minor keys are more sad than others, which major keys are more triumphant etc).

After this, the distribution of the errors was made increasingly uniform, such that today, each fifth is the same size as every other one, and 12 such fifths with an equally distributed error are very close to accurately tuned fifths. In fact, to get any more accurate fifths such that the chain of fifths closes up, you need at least 29 tones per octave. And those get a tad sharp instead of a tad flat, which means C-E gets sharper rather than flatter, which is bad, since it's already too sharp compared to what it tries to approximate. Any greater and you end up in areas of more than 50 tones per octave - which we, by the way, have some evidence that Mozart's father taught his violin students (viz. 55, a temperament with just a tiny sliver of a tad worse fifths than we have, and four slivers of a tad better thirds than we have.)

Now, chords:
Chords are sets of three or more pitches. The major chord sounds good because it's an approximation of 4/4, 5/4, 6/4 - a simple arithmetic progression. It turns out dissonance is the result of overtones that are somewhat close together, but not identical. With 4/4, 5/4 and 6/4, a very large number of overtones will be exactly identical. (The further explanation has to do with things about how our ears are constructed, but this is the point at which I decided I was satisfied with that part of the answer and didn't actually want to know any more!)

Now, as I said, our fifth is a bit low. Our scale is obtained by stacking fifths (modulo octaves), and the interval we are going to have representing 5/4 is also obtained that way. 4 fifths give 81/64, but ours are a bit flat. Because we can multiply the denominator and enumerator by the same factor freely, 5/4 is exactly the same as 80/64 - also flat of 81/64 - the difference between 81/64 and 80/64 being 81/80. This difference is one of the different commas that you may hear of in mathsy discussions of music.

Quarter-comma meantone divides that error in four equal parts and reduces the fifth by it. However, our tuning divides another (almost similar-sized) comma by 11 equal bits, and we only get to deduct four of those from our thirds. So our 5/4-approximation is fairly sharp. However, it's close enough for government work, and that's what most music of today does. (Slide guitarists tend to use perfectly tuned 5/4s, as do good barbershop quartets. Up until the 19th century, many composers were actively involved with tuning theory, a thing that seems to have been forgotten about in these days.)

No weird number-magic involved, just actual practical numbers. The 12 tones are justified by mathematical properties of sound. This doesn't mean other selections of pitches are not justified, though.

The minor chord, by the way, can be seen as a kind of inversion of this: recall that 4/4 = 6/6. The minor chord approximates 6/6, 6/5, 6/4. So where one has the denominator shrinking, the other has the enumerator growing, and the end points are shared, 1/1 and 6/4.


Our ear has some tolerance for mistuning, and in most registers, the error our approximation to 5/4 has does not cause much in ways of audible dissonance - most overtones will be out of what's called "the critical bandwidth" for dissonance.

Apparently I cannot post links at the time, because my post count being too low, so I cannot provide sources for this stuff. That's lovely.

tanya

I believe that truism applies to every single member of this forum, including Acharya S.

Then you ought to understand something about logic.

Did Niklaus Wirth criticize COBOL because the author was stupid? Did he receive the ACM Turing award because of his claim that whoever invented FORTRAN was clumsy and inept?

If you want to write to this forum, submitting a critique of an author who has put in the effort to CREATE something, then it is insufficient to simply claim that she (or he) is ignorant of linquistics.

I deny that she is inept. I disagree with those who claim lack of scholarship on her part. I find fault with those who focus on banal, childish errors, which ALL of us commit from time to time, including Acharya S.

Her work is not perfect. Her accomplishments are not superb. Her claim to fame is not universally acknowledged. She has not won the Turing award. But, she has written books. She has published them. They are readable. They are not perfect, few books are. They are a hell of a lot better than anything I could write on the subject. They are superior, in my opinion, to most of the trash out there, on the same subject. Like most scholarship, a revised edition will be very much improved.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is simply to put together a manuscript, apply for an ISBN number, and locate a publisher?

Memorizing Kernighan and Richie is childsplay, by comparison to mastering Greek or Hebrew.

I have no idea which courses in "Artificial Intelligence" you may have studied in Finland, but, if you wasted your time learning LISP, thinking that you were thereby understanding better how to write a fast "QuickSort", then you were engaged not only in a foolish waste of time and money, but also engaged in supporting irrational thinking.

Yes, LISP came from MIT, and was used at Stanford. We understand that, holy grail crap.

Get your head out of the sand, and into the library. Study ancient Egypt, including Hieroglyphics, and Coptic, and then come back and criticize Acharya S.

Dave31

First of all, 'Miekko' / 'Zwaarddijk', there is a rule here against calling members "lying," "fabrication" etc. and Acharya S is a member here so moderator action is apparently necessary here.

Just as I predicted: "I'm sure some here will drool over another Acharya hit-piece."

ApostateAbe is certainly one who would drool over such a tirade against Acharya and there are others here who are obsessed with anything anti-Acharya who will trip over themselves to pile on. The Acharya S 'well' is certainly poisoned here at this forum as a mature, objective and honest discussion of her work is impossible here.

ApostateAbe has never read 'Suns of God' but, intellectual honesty has never been any standard for the anti-Acharya obsessed. They don't even care who this 'Miekko' / 'Zwaarddijk' is as nobody has asked any questions of this guy at all - they don't care so-long as he's anti-Acharya and spews hatred at her, he's instantly credible no matter how many errors he makes.

So, who is this guy really and what are his qualifications and credentials and why the obsession to create a blog that is an endless stream of anti-Acharya blogs? Jealousy much? Where's his inerrant peer reviewed scholarly books from a highly respected publisher? Is his name even real - what is he hiding?

Acharya S has been around for a long time; she has survived all the malicious attacks and smear campaigns from far more qualified peeps and she will survive you and your little scooter blog too, 'Miekko' / 'Zwaarddijk' or whoever you are.

In your blog: Suns of God, Chapter 1: Astrotheology of the Ancients