Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Phylogeny of Writing

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/phylogeny-of-writing-6e9359fe2649

The author centers on writing seen both as a human ability and a transcription of oral language, and yet she very heavily refuses there to be any continuity from oral to written language, though once or twice what she says, like in her fifth step about “assigning sounds to signs,” is exactly the reverse of what Homo Sapiens did when he developed writing: he assigned signs to sounds. No matter what way it works for a decipherer and for Homo Sapiens, when he developed some writing system for his/her/their language, and his/her/their language alone in 6-8,000 BCE, the connection between an oral language and its written version are connected, but flexible so that it can be easily replaced by another written code for the very same oral utterances, like the Phoenicians developing the first real consonantal alphabet to replace, for Semitic languages, the Cuneiform writing of the Sumerians (Indo-Iranian) and Akkadians (Semitic), and later on the Greeks adding the vowels of Indo-European languages to the Phoenician alphabet that only had “alep” and only when it was the initial sound or letter of a word.

She alludes to signs in painted caves, hence going back to 45,000 BCE, and all over the world, but she does not exploit it. She acknowledges there were six cradles in the world and does not give them in chronological order, hence does not link them to the general evolution of the concerned human groups, and she neglects the fact that Egyptian writing and Sumerian writing developed at the same time or so but with a strong link between them: the Akkadians were the scribes of the Sumerians and they were Semitic like the Egyptians, whereas the Sumerians were Indo-Iranian coming down from the Iranian Plateau and settling in Mesopotamia before moving on. She mistakenly declares them Turkic, or speaking Turkish, an agglutinative language.

Writing was not an invention because there is no break from pure oral language to written language via representational drawings, and iconic first, totally abstract then signs used to transcribe the oral language into a durable (the media) and sustainable (to be learned by anyone and taught to anyone) script. We have to take the high road leading to discovering the phylogeny of language starting in 475,000 BCE and still developing.

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

Archaeology,  *  Anthropology,  *  Writing,  *  Written Language,  *  Oral Language

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:42 AM 0 comments

If David Wins, He Dies in Pain… OAC – On A Cross

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/if-david-wins-he-dies-in-pain-oac-on-a-cross-eb32e5e31656

1-♠ 2-♣

What's the final evaluation of this series? It is interesting as a social description of American society with the judicial system in the middle. As such it is worth watching but it will not bring you a lot of enlightenment on what is the next phase in American history. Just entertaining.

Quel est le bilan final de cette série ? C’est une description sociale intéressante de la société américaine avec le système judiciaire au centre. Pour cette raison, la série vaut la peine d’être regardée, mais cela ne vous apportera pas beaucoup de lumière sur la prochaine phase de l’histoire américaine. Juste divertissant.

3-♥

But interesting to show how politics, business, and everyday life are absolutely crooked and twisted and torsaded by the greed of those who have money, the appetite of politicians to get money from them, and the total neglect of individuals who suffer because of that. Dying becomes a supernatural hazard leading you to paradise.

Mais il est intéressant de montrer à quel point la politique, les affaires et la vie quotidienne sont absolument tordues, tortueuses et même toquées-zinzin par l’avidité de ceux qui ont de l’argent, l’appétit des politiciens pour en obtenir et la négligence totale, voire l’abandon, des individus qui en souffrent. Mourir devient un danger surnaturel qui vous mène au paradis.

4-♦ Requiem AEternam Deo†

The only humane side of US justice is to be found on the side of the victims and their defenders, but death and depravation are the general transfusions they get from courts.

La seule dimension humaine de la justice américaine se trouve du côté des victimes et de leurs défenseurs, mais la mort et la dépravation sont les seules transfusions qu'ils reçoivent des tribunaux, et encore une fois, pas deux.

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 5:03 AM 0 comments

VISIT ÇATALHÖYÜK IN ANATOLIA

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/visit-%C3%A7atal%C3%B6y%C3%BCk-in-anatolia-7e1b17f96320

The Indo-Europeans were just getting down from the Iranian Plateau, and they had still a long way to go to expand to the world, which was essentially for them Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Caucasus, and mainly Europe. The first Indo-Europeans to settle in Anatolia were the Hittites and that happened a couple of millennia later. Hence the only population in Anatolia were Turkic and had been there in Anatolia for a good 30-40,000 years. But after the Peak of the Ice Age, the climate was changing fast, water was rising fast, and during the 8-10 millennia of the Peak of the Ice Age Homo Sapiens had become very resilient and they learned a lot of ways to improve their lot, to resist and survive. They did better than taking care of the natural garden. They started cultivating it. They did more than just hunt animals. They started domesticating them, though apparently, the Gravettians had already started before the Peak of the Ice Age. The people in Anatolia then were only, speaking Turkic languages, like all the people in the whole of Europe.

The question then is what kind of changes did the end of the Ice Age bring to Homo Sapiens? Agriculture for one, the selection of plants and their “domestication.” Herding for two, the selection of some animal species, and their domestication. They learned, for three, how to live together in clustered communities with built houses or shelters. They also developed, for four, their rites, rituals, and spiritual minds, and that was to produce religions. They also went on and probably amplified the decoration of their living quarters with paintings, artifacts, and strange geometric patterns that I consider to be signs. These paintings and geometric Gestalten were of course accompanied by language, stories, rituals, prayers, and even orations directed at or to the supernatural beings they started to codify. They also started building some spiritual centers like Gobekli Tepe, and apparently, they started doing this before building shelters and cities for themselves. This spiritual dimension was not new, but the buildings it inspired were a new development. This implied some kind of collective organization and management, hence the cultivation of some recording system, essentially committed to the memory of some people who kept all sorts of discussions, decisions, and documents in their memory for them to be available anytime they were needed.

The main stake was to guarantee the rejuvenation and the expansion of the community and that was achieved as it had always been achieved since Homo Sapiens evolved into what they were, continuing more spiritually and abstractly what hominins had done before them: the control and management of pregnancies, deliveries, the raising of newborns, then infants, then children so that each woman in the community could at least bring three individuals to a full procreative life within their 29-year life-expectancy. That’s the question all anthropologists, archaeologists, and other historians and linguists working on these old times have always mostly neglected. In this field of the emergence and development of the human species, most research is biased and women are not captured at their real level, with their real value. They are devalued. Let’s start correcting this mistake.

 Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

Anatolian Archaeology,  *  Spirituality,  *  Plant domestication (Prehistoric Archaeology),  *  Animal domestication,  *  Cities

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:17 AM 0 comments

It Takes One Ass to Know One

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/it-takes-one-ass-to-know-one-68a3a5ac990b

In both films, in France in the 1960s and in Poland in the 2020s, animal work was abandoned to be replaced by machine work in the countryside, tractors, and all sorts of complex machines like harvesters or drones. Draught animals had to be gotten rid of as fast as possible. Millions of horses. In the more modern time of Poland, the horses are more or less gone but cows have replaced them in slaughterhouses to process the meat needed to feed an overcrowded planet.

Imagine a donkey recycled from pulling a cart to dancing in a circus and then roaming around more or less free, unable to stay in one meadow, pasture, or whatever. He will end up in the form and shape of salami for the voracious scapegoat-lovers who will become for the occasion scape-donkey lovers. The donkey is the devil himself and he brings bad luck. Imagine these scape-donkey lovers eating their hated donkey in the salami they bought for their Sunday sandwich. Literally, a vomiting offense.

Au Hasard Balthazar and Eo are films on animal welfare in an overcrowded world where animal work has to disappear and be replaced by machines. Among such animals, donkeys are the lumpenproletariat of the animal working class. A new chapter of Das Kapital that can be closed since all these animals will be or have been slaughtered.

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 3:10 AM 0 comments

WHITE SUPREMACY IN THE WEST

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/white-supremacy-in-the-west-7db33585feb8

If we believe David Batchelor, just five minutes, the West starting as far as Plato and Aristotle, and I am sure he could have found things in Chauvet Cave, has always claimed White was supreme, White had to be pure, and White could not be absolute if all colors, except black and greys, were not expelled from our culture. This is a biased view based on selected quotations referring most of them to the great (you know MAGA) period of colonialism and slavery for all people of color, even, despite what HG Wells claimed, the Jews, though H.G. Wells excluded them from his people of color to be eliminated because they accepted to interbreed. This claim stated by Batchelor as the “only” and “sole” dominant ideology of the West is, in fact, the motivation of the worst ever in human history crime against humanity and genocide. Strangely enough, the West started speaking of genocide when the Jews in Auschwitz were concerned, though some historians still ignore the fact that the Jews were about half the people who were genocidally killed in the Concentration Camps, or in the streets, or in villages, or in burning churches, or in stadiums, etc.

He even goes as far as quoting Goethe in that white supremacy paranoia, a quote that is vastly questioned by Goethe himself and even more questioned by his 19th-century translator who added a note Batchelor does not refer to or quote. The book ignores Newton and the fact that “white” is not a color but the packing together of all the color wavelengths between ultraviolet and infrared. In the same way, the book ignores black is not a color but the absence of light. He refuses to take a scientific approach and by locking himself in this cultural, ideological, political, and segregational approach, he justifies the emergence of white supremacy in the West. He is, in 2000, the prophet of the number 1 white supremacist fighting to Make America Great Again.

I will say that the very deep bias of the United Kingdom, or Great Britain, or England that sets white on top of the political, ethnic, racial, artistic, religious, and many other sectarian approaches blocks any sensible and reasonable discussion. David Batchelor could have been more balanced and willfully denounced this crime against humanity, this genocide that had been going on since Antiquity, and even in Egypt or Mesopotamia where black slaves, castrated or not, were the big fad to compensate for the lack of technology to produce goods or to side-track and neglect existing inventions that could have saved the use of thousands and thousands of black slaves or colored slaves like the water mill invented and implemented but never used next to Marseilles by the Romans in the first century before Christ. It was only used by the Benedictines, starting in the 10th century after Charlemagne’s religious reform with 52 Sundays and three fundamental festive weeks (Nativity, Passion, Assumption), plus a few more holy days in local places, that is to say more than 73, yes SEVENTY-THREE days when work was banned, though it did not concern slaves who were not supposed to be Christian since they had no souls since they were colored people.

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

History,  *  Segregation,  *  Genocide Studies,  *  Colonialism,  *  History of Colors

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 3:56 AM 0 comments

Change Is Fictitiously Slow In The USA

Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) is going through a revival, thanks to her literary executor, Robert Nemiroff, or the daughter of the said executor, Jewell Gresham Nemiroff. She was the playwright who was dreaming of a world of change and justice for all people, all species, all races, all colors, all personalities, and even all genders and sexes, not to mention all religions, of course, though mostly Christian. Islam had still not reached the USA yet and the Twin Towers did not exist by then.

Her world on stage is a dream about a world that did not exist, and she expressed this desire before and at the same time as Martin Luther King Jr. who finally put it on the American dinner table in Washington DC from the Lincoln Monument in front of several hundred thousand demonstrators, and many million TV viewers and Radio listeners.

But fundamentally so little has changed that we can consider the dream is becoming a nightmare. Of course, the producer and the stage directors can influence the vision but they cannot really say that segregation has disappeared in the USA when we contemplate every morning the segregational figures of how the Black African Americans (segregated against for two reasons, the fact they are Black and the fact they are African) died more and suffered a lot more during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that is only one example. There might have been some improvement on the gender front but provided we do not consider the anti-trans-war from people like J. K. Rowling (you know, the lady who invented Harry Potter, the most locked-up closet whatever you may dream of, from gay to racist, despite all and everything; Hermione being a pleasant toy but little else, and she is white) who pretends the sex anyone is born in cannot change, or even be changed (Hell and Damnation), forgetting those who are born in-between, and anyway sex should be a choice, like marriage, religion and godlessness.

I am slightly sad when I consider this lack of evolution and progress, and unluckily the new generation is not coming up. Power remains in the hands of people around or beyond 80 years old, hence from before the Second World War, when the Blacks had the right to die for their country but had no right to go Number-1-or-2 in a non-segregated toilet in a bus station.

Academia.edu’s Comment

Jacques Coulardeau uploaded a paper

I am slightly sad when I consider this lack of evolution and progress, and unluckily the new generation is not coming up. Power remains in the hands of people around or beyond 80 years old, hence from before the Second World War, when the Blacks had the right to die for their country but had no right to go Number-1-or-2 in a non-segregated toilet in a bus station

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

Intellectual History,  *  Segregation,  *  Race and Racism,  *  Antisemitism (Prejudice),  *  Greenwich Village

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 3:51 AM 0 comments