Tuesday, June 23, 2020
Racism has always been barbaric
Fugitive Slave Margaret
Garner
A
well-documented historical approach of this case of rebellion against slavery
by a mother who was presented as a modern Medea. We are in the South just
before the Civil War and slavery is at its peak and the slaveowners are going
to fight five years to keep their profitable business though slavery is just
finished because of the emergence of capitalism and free markets, particularly
the free labor market. Step by step toward the article on Beloved, the film. A
brilliant adventure in the past and its resonance in the present, if not in the
future. Even probably in November 2020.
2020, Medium.com, Amazon
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Cultural genocide in autodafe
Maya at heart and mind
I
just published Maya at heart and mind. A little trip in the future Maya Train
to go back to the 16th century. Don't hesitate. It is worthwhile and you will
come back convinced that cultural genocide is just as bad as any other
genocide, even and especially racist genocide. It is never too late to understand
the tremendous damage white civilization has done to the world and to step down
from that white pedestal of ours to join the march against cultural bigotry.
2020, Medium.com & Amazon
Black Women and Literature Matter
Eternal Toni Morrison
Just
go back to the source of today's anger and rage, and we have known it for
decades if not more. We have done too little about it. We have to catch up. We
saved Angela Davis from a frame-up FBI procedure. We have today to save the
whole non-white world and thus save the whole white world at the same time. Is
the world worth saving? In this present pandemic? Probably even more than ever
and that salvation can only come from the non-white communities and people in
the whole world and in each country. Will the whites stay on the shoulder of
the road, or will the whites walk along and march with the colored people of
the world? My answer is clear. Yes, indeed yes, and that feels so deeply
generated in our mind and body.
2020, Medium.com &
Amazon
Race
and Racism, * Posttraumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD), * History
of Slavery, * Black
Women's Studies, * Black
Lives Matter
Monday, June 15, 2020
Let's laugh
Bleeding Lead or QuickSilver
The
best introduction to your final and permanent confinement in farniente and
total idleness forever and ever, secula seculorum, In Excelsis Deo. No hope to
escape, no hope to remain active after this departure. Just hope you have done
many things before even if you paid every single one with one or two cadavers.
Morbid, gross, disquieting, frightening, horrible, fatal and unescapable.
2020, Amazon, Medium.com
Saturday, June 13, 2020
Sorry No Pictures
ELIZABETH P. BENSON, Editor,
MESOAMERICAN WRITING SYSTEMS,
A Conference at Dumbarton Oaks, October 30th
and 31st 1971,
TRUSTEES FOR HARVARD UNIVERSITY – 1973
Practically fifty years after the conference, it is high time to
evaluate the distance that has been journeyed since 1971-1973. The conference
occurred at the very end of Sir Eric Thompson’s era and the book came out two
years before his death in Cambridge, United Kingdom. His grip on the subject is
quite clear in the conference though he did not commit anything for it and the
editor speaks of him as a landmark in the field. At the same time, Knorosov is
quoted by Elizabeth P. Benson and Michael D. Coe in their preface and quite a
few contributions show their resistance at Thompson’s domination by for example
never using the T-numbers that had been devised by Thompson himself to list the
various Maya glyphs. Yet on the other hand some like Tatiana Proskouriakoff are
mostly satisfied with the T-number of a glyph that is not given in its glyph
form, and not even in its transliteration, the “hand-grasping-fish glyph
(hand-fish for short).” (page 165) Tatiana Proskouriakoff is a
compromise with at times the T-numbers, at times the italicized English
identification, at times the transliteration, and at times a few actual reproductions
of the glyph itself. If I give here this example, it is because this hand-fish
glyph is typical. She identifies it as T714 under the image of it and she does
not see that Thompson was wrong there. The glyph is a composite glyph. The hand
can be found in other glyphs, holding or not holding other items and this hand-fish
is, in fact, T714.[203] for the hand “tza” T714 and the fish “ka” T203, and the
composite glyph is “tzak.” The word and the glyph are referring to blood
self-sacrifice and human sacrifice as the request from the Gods for them to
bring prosperity and stability. Only one rule: to submit.
The first study is by H.B. Nicholson on “Phoneticism in the Late
Pre-Hispanic Central Mexican Writing System.”
The second study is by Mary Elizabeth Smith and concerns “The
relationship between Mixtec Manuscript Painting and the Mixtec Language: A
Study of Some Personal Names in Codices Muro and Sánchez Solís.”
The third study by Floyd G. Lounsbury concerns “The Derivation and
Reading of the ‘Ben-Ich’ Prefix.”
The fourth paper is by George Kubler and deals with “The Clauses of
Classic Maya Inscriptions.”
The fifth article is that of Tatiana Proskouriakoff on “The
Hand-grasping-fish on Classic Maya Monuments.”
The sixth contribution is by David H. Kelley and K. Ann Kerr on “Maya
Astronomy and Astronomical Glyphs.”
The seventh and last contribution is by Bodo Spranz on “Late Classic
Figurines from Tlaxcala, Mexico, and Their Possible Relation to the Codex
Borgia Group.”
Conclusion
The conclusion about this book nearly fifty years
after its publishing is that we have tremendously improved our knowledge about
the Mayas and their language or languages. Yet we still have to do a lot of
research along two lines.
The first line is linguistics and particularly
syntactic linguistics, not of the present Maya languages but the Maya languages
behind the glyphic writing system.
The second line is the historical, social, and
linguistic phylogeny of this culture and it is important to understand that the
three dimensions have to be treated as autonomous and yet at the same to
understand that the three dimensions developed and develop phylogenetically and
both simultaneously and reciprocally.
By phylogeny, we have to understand the development
is brought by the past and that present creations or future creations use means
and dynamics that are contained in the history, society, and languages any
people inherit from their ancestors.
That means that the concept of revolution is in
many ways ideological and hardly representative of reality, even when we line
up industrial revolutions one after another. Every single revolution is only
the fruit of what exists at the time of this revolution, and the most
sustainable and durable revolutions develop very slowly in time over long
periods.
English took nearly five centuries to emerge in its
modern form at the time of Shakespeare after the conquest of England by the Normans
and the bringing face to face of two languages or two sets of languages, the
Anglo-Saxon multiple palette of dialects and sibling languages, on one hand,
and Norman Oil Language, on the other hand, meaning several Oil dialects and
even Oc dialects later on.
“Beef,” “mutton,” “veal,” “pork,” and a few more
meats were not invented from scratch, and they did not erase the old Anglo-Saxon
“cú,” “sceáp,” “cealf,” “swín.” Just as much as the Sumerian writing system was
the result of commerce and the clay tablet medium with the particular stylus
used to impress one basic character in the clay that could be vertical or
horizontal. Then the development of the writing system was only the
multiplication of these two characters and their association in clusters
standing for words mostly on the basis of some syllabic understanding of
Sumerian that was a synthetic Indo-European ancestral language within the
Indo-European migration from the Irani plateau to Europe. This writing system
was adopted by the Akkadians, the scribes of the Sumerians, for their own
Afro-Asiatic or Semitic consonantal-root language.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
