Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2017 December 16

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December 16

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)

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 Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:10, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

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)

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)

You might also be interested in our articles on historiography and historical method (including further links there). ---Sluzzelin talk 11:07, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

"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)

Franklinia alatamaha, commonly called the Franklin tree, and native to the Altamaha River valley in Georgia has been extinct in the wild since the early 19th century, but survives as a cultivated ornamental tree.

• 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)

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)

Your premise is illogical. There is no way to determine when you have reached the point when "all that is discoverable is discovered and nothing new can emerge". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:21, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

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)

Yet you keep asking that illogical question. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:32, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

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)

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 Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:16, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

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)

An example are the ever-evolving and often contradictory views of various historians about Abraham Lincoln. There is no way for the OP, or the user Adam Bishop, or anyone else, to know when the "final" book on Lincoln will be published. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:22, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

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)

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)

Fetal alcohol syndrome

After reading the Fetal alcohol syndrome article, I was wondering is there any jurisdiction that criminalizes alcohol drinking by pregnant women? Mũeller (talk) 11:23, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

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)

A useful term to search with is "criminalization (or criminalisation) of pregnancy". A 2014 UK overview is here. An Amnesty International report on the situation in the USA is here. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 14:12, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

What does this mean.

What does the phrase Wecelo Vriedach mean, in the context of the Frydag noble family, German and possibly swedish languages.

I can't find a translation for it, so it could be a real challenge. Thank you. scope_creep (talk) 19:55, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

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)

Possibly just a coincidence, possibly not, but весело (veselo) in Russian and probably other Slavic tongues means "happily, joyfully, merrily". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:33, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

• 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)

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 ✦ _hugarheimur 22:16, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

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)

Aye, I see it now. I think I was reading it wrongly. Vriedach was the first version, the base name, of it, the initial version which would eventually become Frydag or one of its many variants. Thanks Nanonic, Jack of Oz, μηδείς, ✦. scope_creep (talk) 06:50, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

• 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)
• Wecelo was one of the more common first names in medieval Germany and is believed to be a diminutive form of the first name Wernher (see [1]), preserved in the German surnames :de:Wetzel and de:Wessel and in many names of towns like in :fr:Wasselonne (France). --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 18:32, 20 December 2017 (UTC)