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We also have an accidental memory hold once we've lost the reading method for previous digital records.

by yters 8y ago

thaumasiotes 8y ago
That's nothing new. We've been forgetting how to read old records since at least 1200 BC (when the Greeks forgot how to read and write). Interestingly, while Greek history from that period is lost, Mesopotamian/Assyrian/Persian/etc. records continue with cultural continuity from ~3000 BC right up to the Arab conquests, at which point they forgot how to read their old records too. This strongly suggests that that loss was intentional.
- aasasd 8y ago
  The most recent example in relation to written records is probably the switch of Germany, under the Nazi rule, from the traditional blackletter Fraktur script and its cursives Kurrentschrift and Sütterlin to the ‘Latin’ script. Soon enough, people didn't know how to read their grandparents' handwriting. Try for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sütterlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sütterlin But it seems that Hitler's rationalization of “if we're to trade with the rest of Europe, those nations must understand German writing” came to be fulfilled.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    This example is a little bit softer than the ones I mentioned. 'Latin' German is, I assume, letter-for-letter identical to blackletter German, just with noticeably different glyphs. Given, say, a box of correspondence, a German who'd never been trained to read blackletter could probably puzzle it out. Akkadian and Sumerian were thousands of years old (and, obviously, long dead) when they got wiped out. And while Mycenaean Greek is not much different from classical Greek (with a gap of only a few centuries), it is written using a writing system entirely unrelated to that of classical Greek, which we assume was originally developed for some other unknown language because it fits Greek so poorly. > “if we're to trade with the rest of Europe, those nations must understand German writing” I don't see why this would make any difference. We trade with Japan (and had been doing so for centuries before Hitler). Recognizing the letters in a German contract isn't much good if you can't understand the words.

We also have an accidental memory hold once we've lost the reading method for previous digital records.

by yters 8y ago

We also have an accidental memory hold once we've lost the reading method for previous digital records.

That's nothing new. We've been forgetting how to read old records since at least 1200 BC (when the Greeks forgot how to read and write). Interestingly, while Greek history from that period is lost, Mesopotamian/Assyrian/Persian/etc. records continue with cultural continuity from ~3000 BC right up to the Arab conquests, at which point they forgot how to read their old records too. This strongly suggests that that loss was intentional.

aasasd 8y ago
The most recent example in relation to written records is probably the switch of Germany, under the Nazi rule, from the traditional blackletter Fraktur script and its cursives Kurrentschrift and Sütterlin to the ‘Latin’ script. Soon enough, people didn't know how to read their grandparents' handwriting. Try for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sütterlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sütterlin But it seems that Hitler's rationalization of “if we're to trade with the rest of Europe, those nations must understand German writing” came to be fulfilled.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  This example is a little bit softer than the ones I mentioned. 'Latin' German is, I assume, letter-for-letter identical to blackletter German, just with noticeably different glyphs. Given, say, a box of correspondence, a German who'd never been trained to read blackletter could probably puzzle it out. Akkadian and Sumerian were thousands of years old (and, obviously, long dead) when they got wiped out. And while Mycenaean Greek is not much different from classical Greek (with a gap of only a few centuries), it is written using a writing system entirely unrelated to that of classical Greek, which we assume was originally developed for some other unknown language because it fits Greek so poorly. > “if we're to trade with the rest of Europe, those nations must understand German writing” I don't see why this would make any difference. We trade with Japan (and had been doing so for centuries before Hitler). Recognizing the letters in a German contract isn't much good if you can't understand the words.