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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2024 August 5

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August 5

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Volkstedt porcelain

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Am I right in linking Werkstätten für Porzellankunst (on Arthur Storch (sculptor)) to Volkstedt porcelain? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:02, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think that's wrong. de:Arthur Storch links to de:Unterweißbacher Werkstätten für Porzellankunst, which, although geographically close, was another institution. The article only mentions a brief connection to the Volkstedt manufactory after 1930. --Wrongfilter (talk) 11:49, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. In any case, I now have a more authoritative source which gives his employer at that time as ""Triebner, Ens & Eckert". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:13, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

British peers killed in action

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James IV of Scotland was the last British monarch to be killed in action, dying at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. But who was the last British peer to be killed in action? I ask because I just came across Archibald Wavell, 2nd Earl Wavell, who (as a Major in the Black Watch) was killed during the Mau Mau rebellion in 1953, and wondered if there was anyone after him. If not, we should probably record that in his article - a dark honour but an historically significant one. Proteus (Talk) 14:48, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You may well be right, but Wikipedia:When to cite suggests that you would need a reliable source that says he was. A brief Google search failed to find anything for me. Alansplodge (talk) 16:42, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Would the death of Lord Mountbatten (27 August 1979) during the Troubles count? -- Verbarson  talkedits 21:29, 7 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, because the Troubles were not a war. --Viennese Waltz 13:15, 8 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's not about whether it was a war, it's about whether he was in action. He wasn't. He was an old man on holiday. DuncanHill (talk) 20:55, 8 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) And not really "in action", he was on a fishing trip. Alansplodge (talk) 20:56, 8 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Shasu Yahweh inscriptions

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What's the common name of these? The Soleb inscription and the Amarah-West inscription? They're hugely important, but we don't have photos up. We need close up photos and transcriptions to match of the spelling of the name there. We probably need specific pages for them, since the focus on them is specific in our zeitgeist but Wikipedia's articles about the Shasu and the tetragrammaton attestations are scattered. Everybody including laymen refer to them, but we need to make them very easy to look up and see. I don't want to download Fleming's flaccid and drudging 2020 book again to check this again, but I am. Temerarius (talk) 18:51, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

We should also find a way to make the clarifying redundancies in hieroglyphic clear on pages like Shasu. That table, people are going to read it and wonder how 8 or 9 glyphs correspond "very precisely" to the Tetragrammaton.
Temerarius (talk) 18:54, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There are a number of difficulties and issues and emendations on these things that Fleming 2020 and the others don't bother passing on. I didn't realize the common intpretation had so many dependencies. on pages 97-100 of The Origins of Yahwism.
"See Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions II (see n. 37), 217 (10). The assumed change from the sign
wA to the sign actually read as rwD/Ar/Aj can be easily explained as a copy error from a hieratic
template, see Görg, “Jahwe – ein Toponym?” (see n. 7), 185. The Soleb-list shows a quail chick
(read w) at the end of the name instead of a vulture (read A) but an alike emendation seems easi-
ly possible. Görg, “Jahwe – ein Toponym?” (see n. 7), 185, considered this as unlikely since the
scribe of the Amarah-list otherwise displays no difficulties in discriminating between the Aleph-
sign and the w-quail chicken. In Görg, “YHWH – ein Toponym?” (see n. 7 and 16), 11 Görg refers
to an opinion expressed by Elmar Edel: Edel transferred his analysis of the scribal mistakes in
the list of African place names of Thutmosis III. to our list and concluded that “natürliche Le-
sung Y-h-wA-A anzusetzen sei” (the natural reading should be Y-h-wA-A)."
This is note 36 on pg 98.
There's more problems than quoted listed.
Here's my copy of Adrom and Mueller's of the Amara West reference: https://i.postimg.cc/bvkRNPpN/image.png
And Soleb: https://i.postimg.cc/q7bKBGgq/image.png
Both of which they transcribe as tA SAsw y-h-w. (I hope y'all don't mind this easier way of transcribing without special characters, the author uses special characters.)
Temerarius (talk) 01:01, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Now I see how well Daniel Fleming[1] obscures his source material.[2]
"The readings of the Egyptian text here follow the text presented by Adrom and Müller (97), with the vowel marker after the last sign, as wȝ."
Get that? That's not clear? It means Adrom and Mueller gave a trigrammaton, and Fleming added ȝ, making a tetragrammaton. This is one of the most deceptive and most difficult to perceive details in an already harmful-to-scholarship book. I think it's a quite legitimate interpretation, but a wrong one, and presented misleadingly instead of argued for. Sneaky operations like this shouldn't be allowed on topics as consequential and controversial as the tetragram. I hope I'm making some mistake, because this is really poor work on Fleming's part. Temerarius (talk) 01:28, 6 August 2024 (UTC) Temerarius (talk) 01:28, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Fleming, Daniel E. (2020-12-03). Yahweh before Israel: Glimpses of History in a Divine Name. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108875479. ISBN 978-1-108-87547-9.
  2. ^ The origins of Yahwism. Berlin ; Boston: Walter De Gruyter. 2017. ISBN 978-3-11-042538-3.

Blind man playing cards in the 18th century

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Did John Metcalf (civil engineer) use a Braille deck of cards? No, he couldn't have, because Braille hadn't been invented yet. But his article says he played cards. Well, how, then? 2601:18A:C500:E830:526A:B17D:E5EF:4ACD (talk) 20:36, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In his memoir, originally published in 1795, Metcalf writes, using the third person, "Cards, too, began to engage his attention; all of which he could soon distinguish, unassisted;"[1] without further explanation how this remarkable feat was achieved.  --Lambiam 01:44, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If the printed ink on the cards was sufficiently thick, he might have been able to tell by feel. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:03, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Seems unlikely - probably, since he lost his sight through a disease at 6, he was partially sighted (like a high proportion of "blind" people), and could see the cards if held close to his face. Johnbod (talk) 04:00, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
However, Metcalf writes, "He was then seized with the small-pox, which rendered him totally blind".[2]  --Lambiam 12:32, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think Baseball Bugs is correct, although I don't believe the cards' inks needed to be thick. For an example see Achim Leistner. He is a researcher that can find defects in extraordinarily smooth objects with his hands. Also: "Many studies have shown that passive tactile spatial acuity is enhanced among blind individuals...", from Somatosensory system, due to compensatory neural adaptations called "cross modal plasticity". Hence it seems possible that thick or even thin inks subtly changed the cards' surfaces' coefficients of friction due to its fibers enough for Metcalf to have felt its variation, especially if the cards were unvarnished and not waxed. Such extraordinary acuity is certainly a testable hypothesis, for instance blind subjects can better discern the orientation of fine gratings [3]: "Despite large intragroup variability, the difference between blind and sighted subjects was highly significant: the average blind subject had the acuity of an average sighted subject of the same gender but 23 years younger. The results suggest that crossmodal plasticity may underlie tactile acuity enhancement in blindness." It seems plausible too that some individuals like Leistner can significantly enhance their acuity by improving their fine motor skills and touch awareness given sufficient corrective feedback mechanisms and training. Modocc (talk) 01:09, 9 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This may be a question for Richard Turner (magician). 75.136.148.8 (talk) 13:01, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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