Yeah, so far almost all of our storage media are extremely ephemeral compared to papyrus, stone tablets or even just paper. I seriously doubt whether a normal harddrive will still be readable in 100 years. So far our solution is to just keep copying, but it’s not hard to imagine that at some point, some calamity will wipe it all out (global natural disaster, computer virus, world gets taken over by authoritarian governments who want to rewrite history) or maybe future people just stop caring for a while and stop copying. It basically happened after the fall of the roman empire, paper books don’t last millenia - you needed to keep copying them, by hand, to preserve them, and in that time they didn’t have the resources for preserving the large body of books that existed in Rome. Plus, literacy in general declined considerably.

Understandable!

Royal family is “decimated”, yet only one heir remains? Curious. Must have had a lot of daughters.

commonly repeated claim that classic Greece and Rome was scientifically and technologically stagnant

First time I’ve heard about this TBH …

What if it’s fucking stupid, though?

chops off your lower right leg while sobbing

The figurative definition is about as stupid as saying “literally” when it’s not literal IMO.

which was actively decimating the region’s population.

Fun fact: Being decimated means that 10% die, and originally, it’s a punishment that the 90% are forced to carry out against their comrades. Pretty sure that’s a lot less bad than what the native americans suffered.

Milano, maybe, but Firenze? No chance.

Always weirds me out how even the Germans have their own names for most of the bigger cities in northern and middle Italy, even though most of those names are perfectly easy to pronounce using German spelling rules. Native English speakers (who didn’t spend years learning a romance language (other than French) or Germanic language) literally cannot pronounce most Italian city names, but if you grew up with German you can definitely say “Firenze” or “Milano” without deviating too much from how Italians would pronounce these - even the “z” is the same!

Probably some French shit. Köln was founded as Colonia Agrippina something something, so “Cologne” isn’t complete nonsense.

Nevermind the USSR, they’re equally rampant about current-day Russia and mainland China, and fucking North Korea. gEoPoLiTiCs

The English word “fascinate” ultimately derives from Latin fascinum and the related verb fascinare, “to use the power of the fascinus”, that is, “to practice magic” and hence “to enchant, bewitch”.

Fascinating.

I pretty much ignore any of the claims in this thread that hinge on someone being really old. There’s just no way to tell if that’s really true, the older the people supposedly get the more likely it is that they faked (or just didn’t know) their real age, e.g. by using a relative’s paperwork or telling an official that they’re 40 instead of 50. BTW the “blue areas” are probably fake, too.

Context? How is this a meme, or historical?

imagine where we’d be now if the Industrial Revolution had happened in Ancient Rome.

Considering how much we destroyed the biosphere since the Industrial Revolution …

The oldest Old French we have is from 842AD, but old English fragments are as old as the 5th century.

I bet those Old English fragments were way easier to understand for speakers of Old Saxon that for a 1500s English speaker.

Wish they’d at least stick with “New [place in Europe]”. In effect it tends to end up as “[place in Europe], [US state]” anyway. Though I guess you end up with the latter anyway if reuse some names 20+ times.

What … what exactly does “The Angels” describe

That seems pretty standard for a “great power”, especially the dead.