h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Monks and manuscripts - 'will they go there?', I thought.

well that answers that...

"The Name of The Rose by Umberto Eco." hd -5

Oh I say that's Quiet Interesting, an illuminating +6 bonus MMF

In fact, I'll give one to hd as well cos he also talked about velum preparation QI +6, but with his umberto eco klaxon that amounts to just a +1 bonus.

Ty.

MMF

I was just about to get huffy. Huffiness averted.

I am ruthless but fair.

So the Phoenician is a letter, then?


Geggs

Right you've got as long as it takes me to go clean my teeth to get your last round of guesses in before I switch of the comp.

So the Phoenician is a letter, then?

Yes. Correct +3

I really do need to read the backlog properly....

Phoenicians used a version of Cueniform.

If one letter was shrunk, ie. a three stroke letter was interpreted as a two stroke letter, then that would give a totally different letter that would lead to a completely new translation to the particular word in the text.

Wow!



GT

weren't the phonecians the sea peoples, the philistines???

anything to do with goliath, were his measurements exagerated and he ends up impossibly huge due to a mistranslation

Nothing to do with Goliath.

samson???

critically Phoenician was phonetic in nature (the one being named for the other) it meant it's sounds/letter combinations could be copied and adapted by others - often via the trading route - which is how come you get this synthesis between languages like Phoenician and Greek but unlike cuneiform or hieroglyphs which are pictorial essentially, that it came to replace for a time.

Nope, nothing to do with the stories in the bible.

re: "The one being named for the other" - I should have added a "presumably" in there becuase it also got the whole Greek "phone" as in "hearing" , which now that I come to think of it, makes more sense.

Anyway I'm rambling - so that's it for tonight.

Keep 'em coming I'll back tomorrow sometime...

G'night.

anything to do with the rossetta stone

would this happen to be the 11th century BC rather than the 11th century Anno Domini?

come to think of it wasn't it the 11th century when people first started using the concept BC
in a footnote to my h2g2 article on Anno Domini I said
In Latin this is Ante Christum. Perhaps Bede did not use AC because it was too much like AD or perhaps it resonated of Antichrist. As Bede was Anglo-Saxon, he may have thought it would save problems to use the Anglo Saxon abbreviation rather than the Latin.