178
votes
When did people decide that all caps means the writer is shouting?
SOMETIME AFTER 1984
BICAMERAL SCRIPT HAS BEEN AROUND FOR CENTURIES THOUGH THE RULES FOR ITS USE HAVE ONLY SOLIDIFIED IN THE LAST FEW HUNDRED YEARS. WHILE PRINTED MATERIAL WAS ABLE TO USE BOTH UPPER ...
- 55.5k
175
votes
Accepted
How do historians and linguists know how to pronounce the names from non-phonetic scripts?
By comparisons with known languages.
Let's take the example of Egyptian hieroglyphs. It is well known that the ancient Egyptian script was decoded thanks to the Rosetta Stone, which recorded an ...
- 97.5k
164
votes
Accepted
When did people decide that all caps means the writer is shouting?
The tradition of all caps denoting shouting arose from typesetting of printed publications.
The 6 September 1958 Bookseller: The Organ of the Book Trade says:
It [a 16 page list of books] picks out ...
- 3,444
106
votes
Accepted
Which culture used no personal names?
This would seem to be a piece of folklore.
Anthropologists have not found a single society which does not use
personal names in some form; they are a human universal. However, the
forms that ...
- 108k
98
votes
Accepted
What is the origin of 3 meals a day?
In "Millennium From Religion to Revolution: How Civilization
Has Changed Over a Thousand Years"*, Mortimer explains the origin of 3 meals a day:
As for mealtimes, few people in northern Europe ate ...
- 1,028
76
votes
How do we know baroque art depicted obese ladies because of a different ideal of beauty?
Art does not exist in a vacuum, but is rather only one part of the historical record. Just as people comment on our modern standard of beauty today, so does early modern writers on theirs. Fortunately,...
- 97.5k
74
votes
How do historians and linguists know how to pronounce the names from non-phonetic scripts?
The short answer is that we don't. The pronunciations we use today are our best guess at how the ancients pronounced their words.
For your two examples.
We know that Sumerian had an immense ...
- 77.2k
38
votes
Accepted
Why didn't Europeans before Gutenberg print with woodblocks?
First I would say that during the medieval period the demand for books was much lesser than after the books became comparatively cheap after Gutenberg. The key here is the expense a quickly worn out ...
- 80.7k
32
votes
Accepted
What are the hay effigies in this Japanese movie?
It's a scarecrow, but, in Japan, the setting up of the scarecrow is a ritualized process:
... the Scarecrow Festival or Kakashi Matsuri takes place in autumn, from 8th-16th September [Dates were ...
- 10.8k
27
votes
Accepted
Was touching your nose a greeting in second millenium Mesopotamia?
It seems like this was the 'polite' gesture of greeting in ancient Sumeria, and is actually the meaning of a Sumerian phrase for greeting:
She faces in the direction of the cultic activity, her ...
- 40.5k
26
votes
How do we know baroque art depicted obese ladies because of a different ideal of beauty?
A lot of the paintings were commissioned as portraits, why would people pay for themselves to be depicted in an ugly way?
Wealth nowadays is associated with a slim, tanned, and shaped body because ...
- 261
25
votes
Why do people say, "Alexander the Great conquered the world?"
Wikipedia tells us that Alexander did indeed set out to conquer the whole world.
His empire consisted of most of the world known to the ancient Greeks of his time, so for his compatriots, yes, he ...
- 14k
25
votes
Accepted
Any information about the photo with Army Uniforms
These are Polish Army Uniforms, starting around 1919.
Unfortunately the main wiki pages show no Uniforms of the times.
To my knowledge, these types of zig-zag collars (Polish only, but translates ...
- 9,686
25
votes
How and why was the boundary between West and East Berlin decided to be where it was?
The initial decision to divide Berlin into sectors was made around the 12th of September 1944 by the European Advisory Commission (EAC).
E.A.C. (44) 9th Meeting
Berlin Area (as shown on the annexed ...
- 9,686
25
votes
When did the acceptance of diversity become such an important social goal in Western countries?
Embracing diversity (as well as the contrary, wanting more uniformity) might be a bit of a historical constant. You can find it at the very beginning of Confucius' Analects.
Is it not delightful to ...
- 9,346
23
votes
Accepted
Where does this hairstyle originate from?
Of course this hair style is found in a cartoon and thus not really bound to any reality either historically or as mart pointed out in comments physical reality:
I envy the sheer volume of hair ...
- 80.7k
20
votes
When did people decide that all caps means the writer is shouting?
In the computer world, the use of ALL CAPS to mean yelling or shouting goes back to the days of Bulletin board system (BBS). The use seems to go back to at least 1984, and was one of three ways of ...
- 77.2k
20
votes
What is the origin of 3 meals a day?
Wondering if it's like this in all cultures currently, and if not, how variable it is
Well, it certainly isn't like that in all cultures.
In Spain we have 5 meals:
Desayuno
Similar to breakfast. 7-...
- 381
20
votes
Accepted
Who are these red flag worshipers from these early maps?
See Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus / auctore Olao Magno ... Magnus, Olaus, 1490-1558 (click here for full Hathi Trust catalog entry for the 1562 edition) or here for Wikipedia's description. ...
- 6,307
18
votes
Accepted
Can someone explain the joke that killed Chrysippus of Soli?
You asked if anyone could explain the joke that killed Chrysippus. I doubt that anyone can; humor is very difficult to translate across cultures. (My second language was German, and I spent far too ...
MCW♦
- 33.8k
17
votes
Accepted
Which company offered this aircraft interior in the 60s?
It seems that it's a mock-up image produced as publicity for the passenger model of the 747 aircraft by Boeing/Pan-American Airways.
It would have to have been from the late 1960s, since the 747 ...
- 77.2k
17
votes
When did people decide that all caps means the writer is shouting?
There's a comment at https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21msg/net.flame/VbghoeOfwyI/E2mClWj2GV8J :
Capitalizing whole words gives the impression that you're shouting.
So the usage was already ...
- 171
16
votes
Can someone explain the joke that killed Chrysippus of Soli?
Figs were extremely expensive and a status symbol at the time in Athens, the equivalent of good caviar now. To give someone the "sign of the fig" is still an obscene or rude gesture, as "fig" is ...
- 161
16
votes
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How much did the culture of Anatolian Gallic settlers differ from their kin in Gaul?
Those Galatians, or tribes in Anatolia of Celtic origin, sometimes even Gallic origin, were part of the south-eastern migration of Celts. This migration might also be called an invasion of the Balkans ...
- 80.7k
16
votes
Accepted
Earliest story?
Hieroglyphic writing systems generally were all initially used to record the accomplishments of kings in a very simple way. The problem they have is that true literature requires using a lot of the ...
- 121k
15
votes
What is the origin of 3 meals a day?
It is not like that in all countries.
In the Portuguese culture (Portugal, Brazil) there are typically 4 meals a day:
Breakfast (pequeno-almoço);
Lunch (almoço);
"Afternoon snack" (lanche) (similar ...
- 393
15
votes
Accepted
Why did Athenian philosophers praise Spartan culture and laws, which would preclude philosophers like themselves?
This question probably can't produce anything but opinion-based answers, but I'll take my shot. I would say two factors are at play here:
First, the lauding of extravagant praise on an "alien" ...
- 1,158
15
votes
Accepted
Where did prejudice against left-handed people originate from?
Although this is an enormously broad question in that we are talking about thousands of cultures across thousands of years, the prejudice against left-handers has been fairly widespread. If the answer ...
- 108k
14
votes
Accepted
Did the medieval Europe have an active "lowbrow" culture?
Lowbrow culture have always existed in human society, they're just not necessarily that well preserved in the historical record, or in modern popular consciousness. Jokes about sex, farts, penises, ...
- 97.5k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible