essays and ideas from Eliza Sarobhasa
The 20 Best Books for Language Lovers | Online College Tips – Online Colleges.
Language pervades everything, building and destroying as time marches ever forward.
And while even the most learned scholars can’t even begin to fully explain its physiology, origins, structures and pretty much every other component, they’ve certainly done a pretty lovely job scratching the surface.
he Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man is a book by Marshall McLuhan, in which he analyzes the effects of mass media, especially the printing press, on European culture and human consciousness.
It popularized the term global village,[1] which refers to the idea that mass communication allows a village-like mindset to apply to the entire world; and Gutenberg Galaxy,[2] which we may regard today to refer to the accumulated body of recorded works of human art and knowledge, especially books.
McLuhan studies the emergence of what he calls Gutenberg Man, the subject produced by the change of consciousness wrought by the advent of the printed book. Apropos of his axiom, “The medium is the message,” McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. He also argued that the development of the printing press led to the creation of nationalism, dualism, domination of rationalism, automatisation of scientific research, uniformation and standardisation of culture and alienation of individuals.
Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single “point of view”. He writes:
via The Gutenberg Galaxy – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The fixed text was preserved with unparalleled fidelity for more than a millennium by oral tradition alone.
Rigveda – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Philological and linguistic evidence indicate that the Rigveda was composed in the north-western region of the Indian subcontinent, roughly between 1700–1100 BC[4] (the early Vedic period).
The surviving form of the Rigveda is based on an early Iron Age (c. 10th c. BC) collection that established the core ‘family books’ (mandalas 2–7, ordered by author, deity and meter [5]) and a later redaction, co-eval with the redaction of the other Vedas, dating several centuries after the hymns were composed. This redaction also included some additions (contradicting the strict ordering scheme) and orthoepic changes to the Vedic Sanskrit such as the regularization of sandhi (termed orthoepische Diaskeuase by Oldenberg, 1888).
As with the other Vedas, the redacted text has been handed down in several versions, most importantly the Padapatha that has each word isolated in pausa form and is used for just one way of memorization; and the Samhitapatha that combines words according to the rules of sandhi (the process being described in the Pratisakhya) and is the memorized text used for recitation.
The Padapatha and the Pratisakhya anchor the text’s fidelity and meaning[6] and the fixed text was preserved with unparalleled fidelity for more than a millennium by oral tradition alone.
In order to achieve this the oral tradition prescribed very structured enunciation, involving breaking down the Sanskrit compounds into stems and inflections, as well as certain permutations. This interplay with sounds gave rise to a scholarly tradition of morphology and phonetics.
The Rigveda was probably not written down until the Gupta period (4th to 6th century AD), by which time the Brahmi script had become widespread (the oldest surviving manuscripts date to the Late Middle Ages).[7] The oral tradition still continued into recent times.
The original text (as authored by the Rishis) is close to but not identical to the extant Samhitapatha, but metrical and other observations allow to reconstruct (in part at least) the original text from the extant one, as printed in the Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 50 (1994).[8]
Isaac Asimov – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Asimov believed that his most enduring contributions would be his “Three Laws of Robotics” and the Foundation Series (see Yours, Isaac Asimov, p. 329).
Furthermore, the Oxford English Dictionary credits his science fiction for introducing the words positronic (an entirely fictional technology), psychohistory (which is also used for a different study on historical motivations) and robotics into the English language.
Asimov coined the term robotics without suspecting that it might be an original word; at the time, he believed it was simply the natural analogue of words such as mechanics and hydraulics, but for robots. Unlike his word psychohistory, the word robotics continues in mainstream technical use with Asimov’s original definition.
Star Trek: The Next Generation featured androids with “positronic brains” giving Asimov full credit for “inventing” this fictional technology. His fictional writings for space and time are similar to the writings of Brian W Aldiss, Poul Anderson and Gregory Benford.
The Silmarillion – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The first section of The Silmarillion, Ainulindalë (“The Music of the Ainur”[5]), takes the form of a primary creation narrative. Eru (“The One”[6]), also called Ilúvatar (“Father of All”), first created the Ainur, a group of eternal spirits or demiurges, called “the offspring of his thought”.
The Shape of Things to Come – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Shape of Things to Come is a work of science fiction by H. G. Wells, published in 1933, which speculates on future events from 1933 until the year 2106. The book is dominated by Wells’s belief in a world state as the solution to mankind’s problems.
Future history – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A future history is a postulated history of the future and is used by authors in the subgenre of speculative fiction (or science fiction) to construct a common background for fiction. Sometimes the author publishes a timeline of events in the history, while other times the reader can reconstruct the order of the stories from information provided therein.