@Feeds @Shokhet That tweet needs more #WorldBookDay

@Randal'Thor I was actually intending on reading that book only to take a stab at an answer. I found it in my library... and something happened that changed my mind. I probably simply forgot.

Some fairy tales may be 6000 years old.

@BESW Wow, some European fairy tales as well.

Seeing the headline, I thought it might be about, say, Chinese or Russian or Native American fairy tales and was unsurprised. In an area that's had as much cultural flux as Europe ... that's pretty impressive.

Nah, these things pre-date our ability to digest milk, and possibly even our ability to evolve light skin.

@Randal'Thor "Chinese or Russian or Native American" cultures had as much "cultural flux", if not more, than Europe had.

Yeeah.

I thought China had remained reasonably culturally stable for thousands of years?

@Randal'Thor nooooooooo

And surely Russia's general unconquerability means there are parts of it at least that have had few cultural changes for a looooong time?

Though I was fascinated to learn about the history of Tuva quite by chance some months ago.

@Gallifreyan I know, right? :p

@Randal'Thor no nothing about Russia, but as a general rule, there's no such thing as an unchanging culture

I know more about China, and a lot about indigenous American history, and I can guarantee that definitely not true that they were unchanging.

Culture doesn't only change by violent upheaval.

@Hamlet Of course, but still, how many places have had such a high density of wars and conquests and changing borders over an extended period as Europe?

@Randal'Thor Central America?

North and Central Africa?

Probably North America, but it's hard to tell.

The Iroquois nation was explicitly created to stop generations of war between different tribes, in part so they could go fight other tribes.

China?

Probably most places in the world tbh

Europe isn't special, no matter how much it wants to be.

South America

hides behind cultural ignorance

It doesn't even have a monopoly on protracted internecine warfare.

That's an odd shape for a country.

I wonder what geographical feature runs along that thin strip.

@BESW hmmmm I wonder why Europe is unique for having lots of wars, rather than not having lots of wars...

Because one thing Europe has done especially well is embrace the idea of the zero-sum game, which makes warfare seem especially necessary and glorious?

[shrug]

@Hamlet Speaking of history shown well in Youtube videos:

Worth watching in full, if you haven't seen one of these already.

@Randal'Thor Don't worry, I feel like having to do that in here all the time. ;-)

[grin] There's nothing wrong with ignorance.

@NapoleonWilson It can be quite humbling at times, to hang out with people like @BESW and realise how little one really knows about the world.

Specific ignorance is a temporary state; awareness of ignorance is a shared human trait.

In a good sense, of course. I like to expand my mind.

@Randal'Thor Or that.

@BESW "The wise know they know nothing"?

You guys know and understand things I can't even begin to comprehend, professionally, experientially, linguistically.

There's an RPG chat going on right now about the advantages and pitfalls of multilingual reading, to which I can contribute nothing but a listening attitude.

In the context of RPGs?

No, actually.

It's a sort of free-roaming conversation about having English as a second language.

It's moved on now.

What does "multilingual reading" refer to there? Just reading stuff in different languages or reading the same stuff in multiple languages (or other even more mixed variations of that)?

I'm constantly ashamed of the fact that I'm only really fluent in one language.

Mostly the latter, like how it's easier for someone to read Terry Pratchett in German but they know they're probably missing a lot in the translations.

I've ALSO seen conversations about RPG translations; those are like a cross between translating a novel and translating a technical manual, and there's often a lot of confusion.

@BESW But isn't that more about the former?

@NapoleonWilson I suppose. It's not exactly either.

Or do they then seek out the other versions and do comparisons or filling of any lackage?

People do that sometimes, but not often.

I once read El león, la bruja, y el armário side-by-side with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I was only just barely fluent enough to make it possible.

My mother read Allende's Zorro in English and Spanish simultaneously.

I have an edition of The Song of Roland with German and Old French side-by-side, which...is of no particular use to me since I don't know any Old French. ;-)

(That one's interesting because Allende did the translation herself; apparently Spanish is her first language, but she writes in English and then translates it.)

I wish I knew Russian for many reasons, but one is so that I could read Boris Akunin novels in the original.

I wanted to do Russian in school, but my particular constellation didn't work because of a lack of participants, so I did Spanish instead.

But I'm sure I'd know as much about Russian as I do about Spanish now anyway, so I'm not sure it matters much. ;-)

I had a choice of Spanish and Japanese, and I went with the one that would be easier. Not sure I'm happy with that now.

Certainly Japanese would be more practical to know here.

Which might as well have contributed to an easier learning over the long run anyway.

Since when you don't use it, you don't really learn it anyway. Or at least that's how I am.

My entire education in French, Latin and Spanish was probably just wasted.

Yeah, without immersion it's nigh impossible to retain fluency.

@BESW @Hamlet So is this stupidly Eurocentric, or did most of the wars outside Europe either happen >1000 years ago or go unrecorded by surviving history?

@NapoleonWilson You learned Latin?

I thought it was just British public schools and Catholic monasteries that taught that any more :-P

@Randal'Thor that's why you can't trust youtube videos

@Randal'Thor Officially, yes. ;-)

Yeah, that video is incredibly Eurocentric

it pretty much only shows European wars.

@Randal'Thor No, it's quite common here. But I think we could choose between different things for our third language. I wasn't much interested in French, though.

I studied Latin and Greek roots in middle school...

I probably was just scared of French from elementary school. On the long run it would have been more useful than Latin, I guess. But well, afterthoughts.

On the long I should have dropped the fourth language anyway and taken mathematical specialization.

@NapoleonWilson Yessss.

@Randal'Thor Do I remember correctly that in Britain "public schools" actually refers to private schools?

@NapoleonWilson Yes, public schools are a particularly posh subclass of private schools.

The opposite of private school is state school.

@Randal'Thor Correlation doesn't imply causation, but toying with this map is rather suggestive.

For example, I'm not really seeing the Malian empire contributing much to that map.

That looks awfully Europe-dominated too.

(Also, very slow to load and respond.)

Exactly.

This is all the wars that map records for the duration of the Mali Empire:

And it's not like those wars are undocumented.

So to answer your question, no, wars outside of Europe are neither all extremely ancient nor unrecorded; they're just not considered noteworthy by the folks who give us that kind of information.

Bleh.

I don't suppose you happen to know a link to something which gives a reasonably balanced history of global war, in a reasonably quick pictorial form like that Youtube video rather than having to read a history book?

Not off the top of my head, no.

(cue @Napoleon teasing me for wanting something pictorial rather than reading a book ;-) )

It's a real problem; the information is available, but often not easily or accessibly.

@Randal'Thor I haven't even considered that at all (and amn't now either really).

Hmm.

For this sort of thing (historical information that challenges a euro-centric depiction of the world, presented for the everyman) I usually hit up MedievalPOC first, with tags like global-middle-ages, timelines, and interactive-map.

She may not have what I'm after, but that usually gives me a good idea of where else I can look and what terms would be useful to search.

@Randal'Thor Holy cow America!