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December 16 Information
How does history, especially old history, develop?
The past is unchangeable and non-productive. Any period of history has left a finite number of events and sources. Even if researchers still unearth previously unknown sources, eventually everything out there will have been discovered. So how will history be developing? --
Qnowledge (
talk)
06:57, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
How do you know that "eventually everything out there will have been discovered"? How would anyone know that there's nothing left to discover? And don't forget that history is subject to interpretation. ←
Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→
07:10, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
It is possible that everything out there about, say, the Paleolithic Period in Britain, or even the Second World War, will one day be discovered, even if we won't know that. So if at some point nothing new comes up any longer, what happens to the respective branch of history then? --
Qnowledge (
talk)
10:23, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
What happens is that historians will happily spend eternity evaluating and re-evaluating the data, interpretating and reinterpretating it, and coming up with new ideas on what it all means.
Blueboar (
talk)
10:40, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
"Even if researchers still unearth previously unknown sources"
Besides written sources about the past (which often are of questionable quality), archaeologists discover human remains, remnants of buildings, fortifications, and settlements, artifacts from the
material culture of various periods, or (in
marine archaeology) sunken ships. There are many areas which have never been properly examined, and there are major and minor discoveries in every given year. These present new data for the historians, and in several cases past findings were re-examined with new methods.
Dimadick (
talk)
21:10, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
The OP's premise is fatally flawed. The
law of entropy guarantees that a full reconstruction of the past is impossible. This is easily demonstrable in the case of language. There is virtually no hope of
reconstructing even as well-attested an entity as the
Etruscan language where we have two numbers which we know must mean four and six, but are unsure of which is which. That says nothing of the relatives of the
Ainu language or the
Sumerian language whose existence implies whole continents full of forever dead tongues.
Even in the
Romance_languages#Lexicon we have many words that existed in Latin but whose exact form we could not recover from the modern ones if Latin texts had not been preserved. Our article
Vulgar_Latin_vocabulary cites the fact that "many classical [Latin words] have no reflex in Romance, such as an, at, autem, dōnec, enim, ergō, etiam, haud, igitur, ita, nam, postquam, quidem, quīn, quod, quoque, sed, utrum and vel. We have no idea how many words from
PIE died out with no trace, even though we can reconstruct a large vocabulary for it.
Think of all the fossils, all the recently extinct plants and animals, all the dead civilizations that have been destroyed by time. Even the history of Arabia and Korea before the first millenium AD is largely lost due to dynastic and religious
iconoclasm and
damnatio memoriae. See, for instance the highly divisive history of Korea, with the
Balhae#Fall_and_legacy as a sample. Look at the fates of
Beirut,
Palmyra, the
Bamiyan Buddhas and
The Twin Towers. The past is a foreign country, the most of which you can't get to from here.
μηδείς (
talk)
22:28, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
You misunderstand. I wasn't asking about EVERYTHING becoming KNOWN, but about a point when all that is discoverable is discovered and nothing new can emerge. What is undiscoverable will of course remain unknown. --
Qnowledge (
talk)
07:21, 17 December 2017 (UTC)reply
You already said that. And I already answered you. We don't have to know it when that time is reached. Surely it will be noticed if nothing does emerge any more, even if some might think something could still emerge. I appreciate Blueboar's reply because they clearly seem to have got my point, and I'm also grateful to Dimadick for their informative post though it's not a direct answer to what I asked. --
Qnowledge (
talk)
08:54, 17 December 2017 (UTC)reply
It's a pretty good question; Bugs never has anything relevant to add to questions like this, but as he says, history is "subject to interpretation", which means he thinks he can interpret it. A tip for the future: he can't, and you can ignore him.
Adam Bishop (
talk)
23:14, 17 December 2017 (UTC)reply
I never said I would be the one interpreting it. Where you got that notion is anyone's guess. Professional historians do that kind of work. And since you're not nearly as dumb as I am, maybe you can explain how one would know there was nothing left to discover. For example, has the last book about the American Civil War been written yet? ←
Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→
23:16, 17 December 2017 (UTC)reply
Even after a point when no new data is likely to be discovered, the process of interpretation can continue. History isn't just a bunch of facts, it's a bunch of facts tied together by a story created by the historian. Maybe the storytelling part never ends. Being a communist, I can't resist throwing in some Karl Marx. He thought that the flavour of story preferred by historians (or other producers of ideology) depends on the kind of economic relations prevailing during the time in which they write. They tend to see things in terms of the operating methods and prejudices of their time. See
Historical Materialism and
Ideology (Communpedia). -- Yours truly,
Communpedia Tribal (
talk)
03:14, 18 December 2017 (UTC)reply
I agree -- there are very few facts known to the 1960s
"neo-abolitionist" revisionist historians of U.S. Reconstruction (such as
Eric Foner) that weren't already known to the early 20th-century
Dunning School historians (or that the Dunning School historians couldn't have found out for themselves with a little research if they had wanted to). The radical differences between the conclusions of the two groups of historians has a lot more to do with values than with a mere accumulation of facts.
AnonMoos (
talk)
16:34, 18 December 2017 (UTC)reply
This is actually part of the driving forces behind
historical revisionism. New generations of historians re-examine the past and challenge or reject the views of their predecessors. In some cases, they examine areas of the past which their predecessors either overlooked or did not care about. One of our quotations on the article: "The result, as far as the study of history was concerned, was an awakened interest in subjects that historians had previously slighted. Indian history, black history, women’s history, family history, and a host of specializations arose."
Dimadick (
talk)
10:01, 20 December 2017 (UTC)reply
Five US states: OK, MN, WI, ND, and SD have provisions in law that allow a pregnant woman who is found to have abused alcohol to be forcibly committed (i.e. locked up) until after the child is born. Roughly 2/3 of states have laws requiring that health care workers contact child protective services if they suspect a pregnant woman has endangered her child by consuming alcohol. In general, such laws are usually not criminal, but rather civil issues. The difference being that the mother is not being punished for a crime (i.e. no fines or confinement after birth), but rather the state is taking actions intended to protect the baby.
Dragons flight (
talk)
12:14, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
A quick google of Wecelo shows it's a German first/given name. Is it possible that Vriedach is the surname? (And possibly a corruption of Frydag).
Nanonic (
talk)
20:27, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
This sort of variation in Slavic names of old provenance in Germanic versions is common. See Wenceslaus, which is Vaclav in Czech and Wenzel in German, or Vladimir which shows up as Waldemar or as
Valdemar II of Denmark, and parallels the name Wilmer in English.
μηδείς (
talk)
21:49, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
Wezilo (and variations) appears to be a variant of the German name
Werner. I’m no expert, but it seems to me that Vriedach is just a variant of Frydag (with v/u and f being used more or less interchangeably in older German texts, while the -ch appears to be a
pronunciation respelling). Slightly off topic, but the
interwiki links on Wikidata are, once again, a hopeless mess. Cheers
✦hugarheimur22:16, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
This
source gives Wessel as a nickname for Werner (<Proto-Ger. Warin- Hari- "Guard Army"). But I'd like to see that derived in an onomastic dictionary rather than a site that comes up when you search for baby names.
μηδείς (
talk)
02:55, 17 December 2017 (UTC)reply
Wecelo is unequivocally a Balto-Slavic name, coming from a root meaning, whole, kealthy, happy. See the sole reference of the Frydag dynasty, which says they are of Baltic origin, and the wiktionary entry
wikt:veselo. Equating this to Werner, when the family is Baltic and the name is transparent in Latvian violates Ockham's Razor twice in making it a German name based on a nickname lacking a final vowel.
μηδείς (
talk)
05:10, 18 December 2017 (UTC)reply
Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the
current reference desk pages.
December 16 Information
How does history, especially old history, develop?
The past is unchangeable and non-productive. Any period of history has left a finite number of events and sources. Even if researchers still unearth previously unknown sources, eventually everything out there will have been discovered. So how will history be developing? --
Qnowledge (
talk)
06:57, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
How do you know that "eventually everything out there will have been discovered"? How would anyone know that there's nothing left to discover? And don't forget that history is subject to interpretation. ←
Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→
07:10, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
It is possible that everything out there about, say, the Paleolithic Period in Britain, or even the Second World War, will one day be discovered, even if we won't know that. So if at some point nothing new comes up any longer, what happens to the respective branch of history then? --
Qnowledge (
talk)
10:23, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
What happens is that historians will happily spend eternity evaluating and re-evaluating the data, interpretating and reinterpretating it, and coming up with new ideas on what it all means.
Blueboar (
talk)
10:40, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
"Even if researchers still unearth previously unknown sources"
Besides written sources about the past (which often are of questionable quality), archaeologists discover human remains, remnants of buildings, fortifications, and settlements, artifacts from the
material culture of various periods, or (in
marine archaeology) sunken ships. There are many areas which have never been properly examined, and there are major and minor discoveries in every given year. These present new data for the historians, and in several cases past findings were re-examined with new methods.
Dimadick (
talk)
21:10, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
The OP's premise is fatally flawed. The
law of entropy guarantees that a full reconstruction of the past is impossible. This is easily demonstrable in the case of language. There is virtually no hope of
reconstructing even as well-attested an entity as the
Etruscan language where we have two numbers which we know must mean four and six, but are unsure of which is which. That says nothing of the relatives of the
Ainu language or the
Sumerian language whose existence implies whole continents full of forever dead tongues.
Even in the
Romance_languages#Lexicon we have many words that existed in Latin but whose exact form we could not recover from the modern ones if Latin texts had not been preserved. Our article
Vulgar_Latin_vocabulary cites the fact that "many classical [Latin words] have no reflex in Romance, such as an, at, autem, dōnec, enim, ergō, etiam, haud, igitur, ita, nam, postquam, quidem, quīn, quod, quoque, sed, utrum and vel. We have no idea how many words from
PIE died out with no trace, even though we can reconstruct a large vocabulary for it.
Think of all the fossils, all the recently extinct plants and animals, all the dead civilizations that have been destroyed by time. Even the history of Arabia and Korea before the first millenium AD is largely lost due to dynastic and religious
iconoclasm and
damnatio memoriae. See, for instance the highly divisive history of Korea, with the
Balhae#Fall_and_legacy as a sample. Look at the fates of
Beirut,
Palmyra, the
Bamiyan Buddhas and
The Twin Towers. The past is a foreign country, the most of which you can't get to from here.
μηδείς (
talk)
22:28, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
You misunderstand. I wasn't asking about EVERYTHING becoming KNOWN, but about a point when all that is discoverable is discovered and nothing new can emerge. What is undiscoverable will of course remain unknown. --
Qnowledge (
talk)
07:21, 17 December 2017 (UTC)reply
You already said that. And I already answered you. We don't have to know it when that time is reached. Surely it will be noticed if nothing does emerge any more, even if some might think something could still emerge. I appreciate Blueboar's reply because they clearly seem to have got my point, and I'm also grateful to Dimadick for their informative post though it's not a direct answer to what I asked. --
Qnowledge (
talk)
08:54, 17 December 2017 (UTC)reply
It's a pretty good question; Bugs never has anything relevant to add to questions like this, but as he says, history is "subject to interpretation", which means he thinks he can interpret it. A tip for the future: he can't, and you can ignore him.
Adam Bishop (
talk)
23:14, 17 December 2017 (UTC)reply
I never said I would be the one interpreting it. Where you got that notion is anyone's guess. Professional historians do that kind of work. And since you're not nearly as dumb as I am, maybe you can explain how one would know there was nothing left to discover. For example, has the last book about the American Civil War been written yet? ←
Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→
23:16, 17 December 2017 (UTC)reply
Even after a point when no new data is likely to be discovered, the process of interpretation can continue. History isn't just a bunch of facts, it's a bunch of facts tied together by a story created by the historian. Maybe the storytelling part never ends. Being a communist, I can't resist throwing in some Karl Marx. He thought that the flavour of story preferred by historians (or other producers of ideology) depends on the kind of economic relations prevailing during the time in which they write. They tend to see things in terms of the operating methods and prejudices of their time. See
Historical Materialism and
Ideology (Communpedia). -- Yours truly,
Communpedia Tribal (
talk)
03:14, 18 December 2017 (UTC)reply
I agree -- there are very few facts known to the 1960s
"neo-abolitionist" revisionist historians of U.S. Reconstruction (such as
Eric Foner) that weren't already known to the early 20th-century
Dunning School historians (or that the Dunning School historians couldn't have found out for themselves with a little research if they had wanted to). The radical differences between the conclusions of the two groups of historians has a lot more to do with values than with a mere accumulation of facts.
AnonMoos (
talk)
16:34, 18 December 2017 (UTC)reply
This is actually part of the driving forces behind
historical revisionism. New generations of historians re-examine the past and challenge or reject the views of their predecessors. In some cases, they examine areas of the past which their predecessors either overlooked or did not care about. One of our quotations on the article: "The result, as far as the study of history was concerned, was an awakened interest in subjects that historians had previously slighted. Indian history, black history, women’s history, family history, and a host of specializations arose."
Dimadick (
talk)
10:01, 20 December 2017 (UTC)reply
Five US states: OK, MN, WI, ND, and SD have provisions in law that allow a pregnant woman who is found to have abused alcohol to be forcibly committed (i.e. locked up) until after the child is born. Roughly 2/3 of states have laws requiring that health care workers contact child protective services if they suspect a pregnant woman has endangered her child by consuming alcohol. In general, such laws are usually not criminal, but rather civil issues. The difference being that the mother is not being punished for a crime (i.e. no fines or confinement after birth), but rather the state is taking actions intended to protect the baby.
Dragons flight (
talk)
12:14, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
A quick google of Wecelo shows it's a German first/given name. Is it possible that Vriedach is the surname? (And possibly a corruption of Frydag).
Nanonic (
talk)
20:27, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
This sort of variation in Slavic names of old provenance in Germanic versions is common. See Wenceslaus, which is Vaclav in Czech and Wenzel in German, or Vladimir which shows up as Waldemar or as
Valdemar II of Denmark, and parallels the name Wilmer in English.
μηδείς (
talk)
21:49, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
Wezilo (and variations) appears to be a variant of the German name
Werner. I’m no expert, but it seems to me that Vriedach is just a variant of Frydag (with v/u and f being used more or less interchangeably in older German texts, while the -ch appears to be a
pronunciation respelling). Slightly off topic, but the
interwiki links on Wikidata are, once again, a hopeless mess. Cheers
✦hugarheimur22:16, 16 December 2017 (UTC)reply
This
source gives Wessel as a nickname for Werner (<Proto-Ger. Warin- Hari- "Guard Army"). But I'd like to see that derived in an onomastic dictionary rather than a site that comes up when you search for baby names.
μηδείς (
talk)
02:55, 17 December 2017 (UTC)reply
Wecelo is unequivocally a Balto-Slavic name, coming from a root meaning, whole, kealthy, happy. See the sole reference of the Frydag dynasty, which says they are of Baltic origin, and the wiktionary entry
wikt:veselo. Equating this to Werner, when the family is Baltic and the name is transparent in Latvian violates Ockham's Razor twice in making it a German name based on a nickname lacking a final vowel.
μηδείς (
talk)
05:10, 18 December 2017 (UTC)reply