[HN Gopher] Canoes discovered northwest of Rome are oldest boats...
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Canoes discovered northwest of Rome are oldest boats ever found in
Mediterranean
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 110 points
Date : 2024-04-14 10:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| cosbgn wrote:
| I live here!
| ojo-rojo wrote:
| > now that a team of international researchers revisited the site
| and published their findings in English in the journal PLOS One,
| scientists around the world are learning about the boats for the
| first time
|
| It's regrettable that research had to be published in a specific
| language for scientists to leverage. Maybe recent advances with
| language models can change the game here and make knowledge more
| accessible across all fields.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| English is the new lingua francua.
|
| AI does a piss poor job translating nuance and context. If you
| cannot understand the language you are publishing an article
| in, you should not publish.
|
| Currently the language of the world is English. Maybe that
| won't always be true. Maybe English will gain so many loanwords
| that it will look completely foreign 1000 years from now. But
| learning a language isn't particularly hard, and the only real
| difficulty seems to be Korean/chinese/japanese <-> English.
| salviati wrote:
| > But learning a language isn't particularly hard
|
| I'm very curious about what makes you think that. I belive
| it's true only if you already speak one or two other
| similarly rooted languages, or if you learn the language
| before you're 10.
|
| Did you learn your first foreign language as an adult and
| found it "not particularly hard"?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I spoke absolutely fluent French, when I was a kid, living
| in Morocco. You could say a sentence; half in English, and
| half in French, and I'd not notice the difference.
|
| I've forgotten almost every word. It would be _quite_
| difficult for me to relearn, at 61, and I 'd likely not
| have anywhere near the efficacy, that I had, then.
|
| People say how easy it is to learn new programming
| languages. I've probably written in a half-dozen different
| ones, over the years.
|
| IME, learning the basics takes a week or two, but it takes
| _years_ to really grok the language, at the fundamental
| level.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I've forgotten almost every word. It would be _quite_
| difficult for me to relearn, at 61
|
| Have you tried? It would probably be a lot easier than
| you imagine.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Not really. Maybe you're right.
|
| It would not be useful, unless I lived in an area where I
| would use it. Maybe if I moved to Canada.
|
| Same goes for computer languages. At one time, I was
| quite fluent in C++, but I can hardly recognize it,
| anymore.
| saalweachter wrote:
| With both programming languages and spoken ones you also
| have the language moving on without you.
|
| If you remembered pre-C++0x, or god forbid, pre-Standard
| C++, it would probably hurt as much as it helped, as your
| old idioms would either be outdated by new std features,
| or outright dangerous by modern coding standards.
|
| At least with old spoken languages, you'll just either
| sound like a small child or a character from an old
| movie, using slang that no one uses anymore.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Chance is you haven't forgotten as much as you think and
| it would come back super fast if you had to use it daily
| again.
|
| Having said that, this is a thing to be able to learn a
| language enough to interact with people and live in a
| country where another language is spoken. It is a
| different thing to use that language to understand
| completely scientific/medical/law/tax forms and texts.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It is a different thing to use that language to
| understand completely scientific/medical/law/tax forms
| and texts.
|
| Jargon has to be learned independently. This is true of
| every kind of jargon, not just academic and legal stuff.
| If you want to talk to junkies and sound like one of
| them, you'll have to learn how first.
|
| The technical term for this kind of concern is usually
| "register", as in "writing in an academic register".
|
| A Chinese college student once asked me to review a paper
| of theirs for English quality, because their professor
| had criticized the English in a prior paper and they
| trusted me to be a native speaker (which I am). But being
| a native speaker didn't really help; once I saw the
| paper, I had to say "I'm sorry, but I don't have academic
| business training; I can't guarantee that anything I said
| would be phrased correctly."
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| people often move to places with a language that is needed
| to exist in that place and then manage to learn that
| language. I would say becoming proficient in a language
| with small effort and no especial facility in languages
| should take no more than 2 years. With a good deal of
| intensive effort, focus and natural 3-6 months.
|
| this also depends a lot on the language, many of the
| Romance languages are relatively easy to learn, many of the
| Nordic ones seem quite difficult.
|
| Difficulty of course may depend on what you are moving from
| to what you will be using.
| neffy wrote:
| Abilities to do this range widely with individuals.
|
| Leaving that aside, there is a concept of linguistic
| distance from people's first language, which makes it
| easier or harder to learn another language. French and
| English are very close to each other, as are Arabic and
| Hebrew, the Scandinavian languages are also all very
| close to each other (a little further from English),
| except for Finnish of course, which is kind of out there
| on its own. There is a nice recent paper looking at this
| in the academic context:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004873
| 332...
|
| Essentially how far your native tongue is from the
| language you are attempting to learn will drastically
| affect how long it takes to learn it for most people.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| For the other direction, based on a couple of centuries
| of data: https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
|
| Some languages take english L1 speakers 3x as long to
| learn as others.
|
| I agree with GP's 2 years for Cat I-II languages
| (assuming you're mostly living there and learning the
| language in your spare time, not intensively).
| pvaldes wrote:
| Imagine a world where every piece of poetry, novel or
| literature would be forced to be written in English. Our
| literature would be much poor and many new points of view
| would be dismissed just because "not enough Anglo Saxon".
| This does not happen because editors take care of the
| translation, hire professional translators for that, and let
| the creator alone to keep creating while happily selling the
| novel in 40 different languages. That is the right way to do
| it.
|
| Science still lives in a previous, less sophisticated, age.
| We should be grateful for them not expecting us to knit our
| own tunics also.
|
| The idea that somebody somewhere could have a possible
| solution to our urgent problems but we'll need to wait until
| this people learns English and "earns the right to be heard",
| is a disaster.
| indymike wrote:
| > Imagine a world where every piece of poetry, novel or
| literature would be forced to be written in English.
|
| Nobody is wanting that world.
|
| > because "not enough Anglo Saxon"
|
| What is this, the year 1055? "Anglo Saxon" ceased to be a
| cultural group later that century. Now "Anglo-Saxon" is
| just a phony geopolitical spectre, mostly invoked by
| despotic governments as a scapegoat.
|
| > hire professional translators for that, and let the
| creator alone...that is the right thing to do.
|
| It would be if scientific publications had audiences where
| it made economic sense to do such a translation.
| Additionally, the cost of such translation for scientific
| literature is much more expensive owing to the need for
| great accuracy.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Most scientists work for free for the journals as
| reviewers, the same Journals earn also money obviously
| selling the product and they aren't cheap. They didn't
| spend a cent into the research done. Somebody else paid
| for it.
|
| How the cost of a translator could be too expensive when
| everybody is working for free for you?
|
| > What is this, the year 1055?
|
| If your surname is Brown your work will be treated
| clearly different by journals than if it is Gutierres or
| Coulibaly. The editors probably don't even perceive that
| there is a bias here.
|
| Including at least a member with an English name in your
| team is a known trick that eases to be accepted by
| publishers.
| cge wrote:
| >How the cost of a translator could be too expensive when
| everybody is working for free for you?
|
| I don't necessarily disagree that translation would be
| beneficial, but it isn't just a matter of cost. As an
| author, I would absolutely not be comfortable with a
| journal translating my research without my direct
| involvement. Translation would require too much expert
| knowledge of the specific fields involved. I'd even be
| uncomfortable myself with translation of specific terms,
| even for languages I might know in non-scholarly
| contexts: it would require knowing the literature of the
| specific field in the language.
|
| So it wouldn't be enough to have the journal hire a
| translator. It would be more work for the authors, and
| likely for others in their field who would need to be
| brought in.
| Someone wrote:
| > Imagine a world where every piece of poetry, novel or
| literature would be forced to be written in English. Our
| literature would be much poor and many new points of view
| would be dismissed just because "not enough Anglo Saxon"
|
| In such a world "written in English" wouldn't imply "Anglo
| Saxon", just as today, it doesn't imply "British" anymore.
|
| I think people would be better off if they all spoke the
| same language. Reason is that, statistically, the best
| literature is written in a language with many writers. So,
| if you grow up monolingual speaking a minority language,
| the best stuff you can read won't be as good as the best
| stuff written in English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, etc.
| The worst stuff you can read won't, either, but nobody
| reads that stuff (some may argue Hollywood is the exception
| that proves the rule)
|
| Getting there will have pain points, though. Going cold
| turkey would cut off people from their culture (imagine
| children not being able to read what their parents wrote).
| However, a few centuries of bilingual education would, IMO,
| be a fairly smooth way to get there. People would no longer
| be able to read what their forefathers wrote, but that
| already is the case with most languages (few people can
| read Middle English fluently, for example)
|
| That's all assuming the "English" people would speak would
| be universally intelligible, though. That's far from
| guaranteed to happen. Subcultures with their own words and
| grammar changes would still form.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I think people would be better off if they all spoke
| the same language.
|
| This has some problems related to the resulting
| intellectual monoculture.
| thfuran wrote:
| >some may argue Hollywood is the exception that proves
| the rule
|
| Anyone who argues that has no understanding of how proof
| works.
| DFHippie wrote:
| "The exception that proves the rule" is an idiom that
| depends on a different meaning of the word "prove" from
| what you have in mind.
| thfuran wrote:
| No, that sense of the expression is just nonsense based
| on a misunderstanding of the actual expression.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Really? It's #4 on the list:
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prove#Verb
| adolph wrote:
| Irregardless, if the misunderstanding is widespread
| enough, it literally becomes the meaning.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| I sanction that even thought it's all moot now.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Imagine a world where every scientific articles from most
| regions of the world were written in the language that was
| only used by scientists and a few religious zealots.
|
| Then you get something historians call The age of
| enlightenment...
| peterfirefly wrote:
| > The idea that somebody somewhere could have a possible
| solution to our urgent problems but we'll need to wait
| until this people learns English and "earns the right to be
| heard", is a disaster.
|
| Gauss, Leibniz, Euler, and the Bernoullis (all of them)
| wrote their theses in Latin.
|
| Methinks you aren't so much against a lingua franca but
| want it to be Latin(ate) and not English.
| xandrius wrote:
| That's because you're only aware of the "popular" ones.
|
| Lots of less known not PIE-languages (Proto Indo-European)
| out there that will make you reconsider your opinion.
| rvense wrote:
| There are roughly 6,000 languages in the world. My own
| first language, Danish, has about 6 million native
| speakers, and it is something like the 50th most spoken
| language in the world. The world is a big place.
|
| Did you know that there are languages where you can't form
| a sentence without describing what direction something
| happens in? Like you can't just "see the house", you're
| either doing it up or down the mountain. And you know how
| in English you can't really say anything without saying if
| it's going on now or happened in the past. Other languages
| don't really care about that at all, you can speak all day
| with specifying if it "is" or "was".
| rvense wrote:
| > But learning a language isn't particularly hard
|
| Actually, it is probably one of the hardest things you can
| attempt. You can speak a language every day for 30 years, but
| if you start after you're maybe 14, native speakers will be
| able to spot you in (literally) less than a second.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| So? They can't hear your accent in a journal article.
| Unless you're an actor the goal of an adult learner
| probably shouldn't be a native accent. You can speak
| competently but with a non-native accent, it's fine.
| jajko wrote:
| Speaking (and thus cca thinking in) foreign languages
| massively stimulates your brain. You can't do much more for
| your (or child') mental development than make it learn and
| keep using multiple languages. Age doesn't matter, you
| arrive at the destination just a bit slower - Ie I am in my
| forties and learning french, slowly but surely.
|
| If they spot you, 2 things may happen - they will be nice
| like all normal people anywhere do and maybe even
| appreciate that other people are learning their non-trivial
| and probably a bit obscure language.
|
| Or you hit the rest, and they will either laugh at you,
| ignore you or just switch to english if they want/can. This
| is very common in France in my decade and a half experience
| of going there almost every weekend, also very frequent
| among young. Their own shame and mistake, instead of
| embracing the future and improving themselves, they choose
| the other direction and watch world slowly pass by. I think
| it comes from their deeply flawed education in this regard,
| not on languages per se but whole view on exceptionalism
| and what current world actually revolves around.
| gumby wrote:
| I know people say that, but I also know quite a few people
| who learned English after that age who sound "native". All
| of them now live in English-speaking countries.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Recent advances aren't even necessary; translation software has
| been a thing for two decades now, even back then it should be
| good enough to create a translation that can at least be
| indexed and interpreted as "this is relevant to my interests".
|
| But it's down to the scientists and their publishers to decide
| whether to publish the papers as readable text, feed them into
| translators and republish them in different languages, or at
| least the abstract / things that scientists use to find papers.
| Staple_Diet wrote:
| >It's regrettable that research had to be published in a
| specific language for scientists to leverage.
|
| Not really. ~70 million people read Italian. Billions read
| English. The biggest journals are English language. Most of
| Europe learn English. Chinese academics learn to write in
| English, and English is the official language of India.
|
| It'd be regrettable if they had to publish in Science/Nature to
| get noticed, but PLOS One is pretty open.
| swores wrote:
| I don't think they were complaining that the world didn't
| read the Italian research, just that it's a shame that people
| from non-English speaking countries have to either be good
| enough at a second language to write their research in
| English, or need to waste time waiting for someone else to
| translate. Along with hope that machine translation can fix
| this problem and remove hurdles for international
| collaboration.
| Staple_Diet wrote:
| It's near impossible to work as a professional academic
| without learning English well enough to publish in it.
| Furthermore, in many fields you need to move countries
| during your academic journey and learn a language. For
| example my previous PI was Spanish (Catalonian actually)
| but did his PhD in Paris, so he needed to learn three
| languages in addition to his native tongue. Other lab
| members were French, Italian and German, all again having
| to have learnt English so they could each communicate with
| each other but also publish. The international
| collaboration is already there, and it's aided, not
| hindered, by the use of English as a common tongue.
|
| It's a two way street as well, if an academic can't read
| English than they effectively cut themselves off from 95%
| of the research in their field, and most certainly the most
| impactful research. Lastly, most journals offer paid
| translation services and a lot of Universities will
| similarly offer a service, so it's almost a moot point.
| swores wrote:
| I appreciate that a lot of people successfully get round
| the issue of learning English, but isn't this submission
| a direct example that there are still cases where
| language is barrier? And it's not like it's a one off
| case, surely there's huge amounts of research published
| in languages like Chinese, and probably smaller amounts
| in various fields published in the languages of pretty
| much any country by people who want to work on science
| even if they don't want to learn English?
|
| I'm not arguing that it's high on the list of things that
| could be improved in the world of research, just that
| it's something that would be worth improving if and when
| computers are good enough to remove this friction.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > ~70 million people read Italian. Billions read English.
|
| It does not matter. Researchers interested in old Rome or in
| old canoes will be able to find it. All articles have
| abstracts in English and academics do an extensive use of
| keywords and publishing databases.
|
| I had to translate a very old paper from Dutch once, before
| to cite it, and it didn't was an unsurmountable problem with
| the correct motivation. Dictionaries were made for this.
| nradov wrote:
| A dictionary is only one small piece of translation. Dutch
| is linguistically very similar to English so it's
| relatively easy to learn and translate. Something like
| Russian is far more difficult because it comes from a
| different language family and uses a different writing
| system. There is a treasure trove of Russian journal
| articles which have never been properly translated and
| represent something like "scientific dark matter". LLM
| translation tools can help a lot to make those more
| accessible.
| dekhn wrote:
| The dutch were in an excellent position at the beginning of
| the quantum revolution- they could read and translate
| english and german, and played a key role in sharing ideas
| between the two centers (Berlin and London) which were not
| highly aware of the other's progress.
| overstay8930 wrote:
| Erm, what? English is literally the most important language in
| the world. You're a nobody if you can't speak English in most
| of the world.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yet another datapoint that shows people were more sophisticated
| than previously assumed; this is likely not isolated, it's just
| that there's nothing left.
|
| I had to look up the definitions, but these canoes are from what
| we know as the stone age. I don't believe the type of metal used
| was indicative of people's craftsmanship to be honest.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > Yet another datapoint that shows people were more
| sophisticated than previously assumed
|
| Not really, simple boats and canoes predate this find by at
| least 5-6k years. The earliest depiction of a boat under sail
| predates this canoe by maybe 1-2 thousand years. The
| Austronesian peoples were setting sail around the time this
| canoe was built.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| > Because the original discovery of La Marmotta had only ever
| been published in the Italian language, widespread study of the
| canoes and their place in history remained limited. But now that
| a team of international researchers revisited the site and
| published their findings in English in the journal PLOS One,
| scientists around the world are learning about the boats for the
| first time--and the bustling, sophisticated Mediterranean trade
| they suggest.
|
| Wow, we have reached meta-archaeology already: we have to do
| research to "discover" our own research from 35 years ago.
| gtmitchell wrote:
| This is far more common that you would think. Just a generation
| ago, science degrees required students to learn foreign
| languages (Russian, German, French, etc.) so they could read
| journals to be kept up to date on the latest scientific
| findings. There are still a significant number of 'lost'
| research out there waiting to be rediscovered and publicized.
| interactivecode wrote:
| Now that would be a good use of high quality translation
| tech: make research available and searchable across
| languages.
| irrational wrote:
| I have a Bachelors degree in Ancient Near Eastern Studies. I
| was told that if I wanted to do a graduate degree, I would
| have to learn to read French and German since the majority of
| research was written in those languages.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| 'twas ever thus. When I was at university we were told "two
| years in the laboratory can save you an hour in the library".
| You always need to research your research.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Makes all the sci-fi plots about lost tech and such sound a
| little less nutty.
|
| We actually do this, just not in the way movies and such
| typically present it.
| gumby wrote:
| Looks like boats date back about 12 Ky:
| https://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~vaucher/History/Ships/Prehisto...
|
| Seems odd that a technical revolution of some profound
| technologies (e.g. ships, agriculture, stable settlements,
| apparently novel social structures) seems to have started that
| millennium, leading to relatively rapid technological development
| up to today. The first ~260 Ky of human development seems to have
| resulted in less technological development then that single
| millennium.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human#Anatomical_...
|
| Anatomically modern humans didn't have much of a chance to
| develop until we got some decent weather.
| gumby wrote:
| Hmm, I'm not sure I agree with that. Even during the last
| glacial maximum there was a lot of inhabitable terrain.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Indeed evidence points to the west coast of North America
| being colonized by boats while glaciers were still covering
| much of the continent.
|
| And that likely predates this find probably by at least 3-4
| thousand years. Still no smoking gun in terms of firm
| archaeological finds but that's because that coastline is
| all dozens of feet underwater now.
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