from Hacker News

Lost languages discovered in the oldest continuously run libraries (2017)

by ALee on 1/3/22, 8:20 PM with 80 comments

• by dhosek on 1/4/22, 5:35 PM

  Pre-modern manuscript practices are remarkably alien to us today. A single codex might contain multiple works in it with no external indication of its contents. It's entirely possible that many lost works are sitting in manuscript libraries because nobody has been able to catalog everything in them. Add in the palimpsest practice (which would not only impact situations like Saint Catherine's but would also cause a manuscript containing some pagan text to be overwritten with a Christian text—or in later centuries for a Christian text to be overwritten with an Islamic text) and it's entirely possible that somewhere there's a copy of Aristotle's Second book of Poetics or more of Sappho than we currently have. It kind of excites me to consider the possibilities (and wonder if the alternate universe version of me who majored in classics might be combing through the Vatican archives right now).

• by choeger on 1/4/22, 12:53 PM

  > with the rise of Islam in the 7th century, Christian sites in the Sinai Desert began to disappear, and Saint Catherine’s found itself in relative isolation. Monks turned to reusing older parchments when supplies at the monastery ran scarce.

  That sounds ... odd. If the monks were isolated then why should they copy books, especially when they had to delete older material to do so? At the very least this implies that the monks had a supply of books to copy and also had to return the originals to someone somehow.

  I think the more logical explanation is that the deleted texts were considered worthless.

• by newsbinator on 1/4/22, 1:56 PM

  As someone who makes a hobby of learning languages, I am of the highly unpopular opinion that the world would be a better place if we could pick one easy-to-learn language (e.g. Malay) and one super-simple writing system (e.g. South Korean Hangul) and get our species out of the dark ages of having thousands of mutually unintelligible languages.

  No-one in their right mind would create an ethical, functioning modern society with thousands of languages, some with 100% global power and some with 0%, and have children born into it at random.

  Maybe it's because I'm not a historian, but statements like this:

  > Michael Phelps, director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, tells Gray of the Atlantic that the discovery of Caucasian Albanian writings at Saint Catherine’s library has helped scholars increase their knowledge of the language’s vocabulary, giving them words for things like “net” and “fish.”

  ... make me sad, not happy. This isn't exciting or fascinating, it's a testament to how pointless it is that we put so much value in languages, like we're still murmuring incantations around a fire and we just learned a new old one to murmur.

  Let's pick a word for "net" and "fish" and finally, as a species, be done with it.

  Make a program of keeping the new global language alive and equally accessible, just like we currently do with essential medicines.

  Everybody has their own local medicines, even traditional witch-doctor medicines, but at the same time everybody gets the exact same doxycycline and training on when to use it. Likewise whatever word we end up choosing for "fish" and "net": use whatever word you want in your village, but when you want the one that works in the rest of the world, we made sure you're already armed with it.

  Sure, languages evolve and you can't fight that, but with a global internet and a concerted effort to finally solve the Tower of Babel problem, languages can evolve everywhere at once into a single global language that every child gets brought up speaking.

• by billpg on 1/4/22, 1:15 PM

  Glibc contains COBOL code?