Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2021 May 3

= May 3 =

The Pencil of Nature
The article Pencil of Nature shows a reprint of an early print of the statutes of king Richard II. Do we know more about that book? --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 08:06, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
 * In The Pencil of Nature it is described as "Taken from a black-letter volume in the Author's library, containing the statutes of Richard the Second, written in Norman French". DuncanHill (talk) 08:08, 3 May 2021 (UTC)


 * The book from which Talbot cut out a page in order to reproduce it was a 15th-century exemplar of the Statuta Angliae: Nova statuta, an early printed volume of these statutes, from the print shop of William de Machlinia, of which several copies have been preserved intact.
 * Thank you both. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 20:12, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Academic journal article authors
Are the authors of journal articles listed in any particular order? It's not alphabetic so I wonder if the order has some other significance such as "main" author first and lesser contributors last? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 12:25, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
 * This seems to address your question. -- Jayron 32 13:34, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Discussed at Reference_desk/Archives/Science/2012 September 6 and Reference_desk/Archives/Science/2014 April 3. 95.148.229.85 (talk) 15:51, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

equivalence to Classical period music in other parts of the world
Did other parts of the world, like Africa, Middle East, Southern Asia and East Asia had their own Classical Music period and their own Mozart, Beethoven, Salieri, Liszt and others well-known composers? Donmust90 (talk) 15:59, 3 May 2021 (UTC)Donmust90Donmust90 (talk) 15:59, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Every culture has its own music traditions. Many of those places are rather broad in scope (Africa, after all, is a very large continent with very many diverse cultures).  A good starting place to read about the music of various cultures and places is in Wikipedia articles titled "Music of ", where you replace the with the place you are interested in.  For example, Wikipedia has articles on Music of Africa, Music of the Middle East, Music of Asia, etc. and then each of those will give you an overview and lead you to progressively more detailed articles on the music of more specific places.  -- Jayron 32 16:07, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
 * One specificity of western music is that composers' names are known and their lives are well documented (at least since the 1500s or so). This is not the case in most other musical traditions, so even if there were brilliant composers, their names and details of their lives have generally been lost. Second, there is a difference between what is known in the west as "classical music" in general and its Classical period, which includes the composers the OP names. Within the realm of classical music, there is also a Renaissance period, a Baroque period, a Romantic period, a Modernist period, etc. all the way to contemporary classical music. All of these periods and styles also have their major composers. Finally, Salieri's name may have become known thanks to his appearance in the movie Amadeus (and the play on which it is based), but he is not considered to be on the same level as the three other major figures named by the OP; he was largely forgotten until the 1980s. Xuxl (talk) 12:50, 4 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Only Mozart and Salieri represent the Classical period in the restricted sense; Beethoven and Liszt are, respectively, an early and a late representative of the Romantic period in music. --Lambiam 19:51, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

"Native American Culture"
I've seen the term "Native American Culture" used as a collective term. While I believe that all Native American cultures (as a plural) share the effects of being colonized (though the experiences vary widely), I have also seen it collectively apply to the Culture of the Peoples in 1500. Is there anything identifiable as representing a joint culture among the Iroquois and the Navajo (to pick two of the larger groups on different corners of the Contiguous United States) that would specifically apply to them as opposed to the Peoples of North Asia supplanted in the Russian push west, the Australian First Nations or Southern Africa?

Note, I've even seen it applied to all of the New World peoples, placing (for example, the Iroquois and the Inca) into the same "Cultural Group", anything stretch even close to that far?

(By comparison, in 1500, most of Europe shared the general concept of Jesus, even if the Kievan Rus and the Dutch (to pick two corners) disagreed on a good number of particulars)Naraht (talk) 21:50, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Within North America, there would have been a shared cultural exchange akin to what existed in Eurasia. We can see this because of the way that language families are distributed across North America; we can find mixes of Algonquian languages, Iroquoian languages, Athabaskan languages, etc. all over North America, indicating a lot of mobility and mixing of various cultural groups.  You can also tell from trade goods that there was widespread contact (even if not direct), for example there have been found samples of Alibates flint from near Amarillo, Texas in as far-flung places as Florida and Minnesota, indicating far-reaching and well organized trade networks.  There is, however, a rather hard divide in the Desert southwest of the modern U.S., there very little cultural mixture between the North American groups and Mesoamerica, which would include groups like the Aztec, the Maya, the Toltec, etc.  These groups shared linguistic and cultural (especially religious) practices that show little spread outside the region.  Likewise, the Andean civilizations and the Amazonian peoples probably also representing distinct broad cultural groups with little contact with the other groups.  -- Jayron 32 12:39, 4 May 2021 (UTC)
 * It's going to depend on your definition of "cultural group". If you mean, did the populations have any contact, possibly through multiple third parties, then, yes, they were part of the same cultural group. However, if you're going to lump everyone from the Inca to the Inuit into one group, almost all of Eurasia would be in another group. Breaking down areas into smaller cultural groups is also possible, but much easier to do in places like Europe and Asia where there are extensive written records, allowing you to get more detailed and subtle understanding. In the Americas, there were relatively fewer cultures with writing and a lot of what was written was deliberately destroyed, making the process much more difficult. On top of this, huge populations were also completely wiped out along with much of their cultural heritage. The archaeology can show us lots of information, but it's a very incomplete picture. Then, on top of that, there's the long entrenched problem of treating the indigenous peoples of the Americas as savages, children, or worse, which has left even well-meaning researchers with a lot of cultural baggage and preconceived notions. Matt Deres (talk) 14:35, 4 May 2021 (UTC)
 * . I appreciate trade. For Language, What is the range within the US/Canada of languages as closely related as the "Indo-European" and what is the range with languages as close related as the "Romance" tongues?
 * From your descriptions of the level of cultural mixture, how would the "Cultural distance" between France and Persia in 1550 compare to that of the Iroquois and the Navajo. It sounds like you are saying the "Cultural distance" between the Iroquois and the Inca is closer to that of France with Manchuria (or Kamchatka).Naraht (talk) 20:06, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
 * We have an article at List of language families that may give you some sense of it (especially the maps), but of course the idea of language families is a well considered but still artificial construct. In the case of the Americas, a huge amount of effort has been expended trying to understand the relationship between the languages and other forms of cultural exchange, but the history makes that extremely difficult. In terms of the actual exchange of information, it seems like it's easier to spread east-west than north-south, perhaps simply due to the way ecozones tend to follow lines of latitude. The general north-south orientation of the Americas inhibited travel and dispersion of ideas. This was a component of Jared Diamond's excellent Guns, Germs, and Steel, which I highly recommend. I'd also recommend Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus for an absolutely amazing overview of what we've managed to piece together regarding the real situation of the Americas before Columbus. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Matt Deres (talk • contribs) 02:14, May 8, 2021 (UTC)
 * I see no evidence of "a shared cultural exchange...akin to what existed in Eurasia" in the contiguous United States pre-Columbus. What form would this have taken? Navajos trading with Iroquois? That did not happen, although neighboring tribes interacted both in friendly, and unfriendly fashion. I don't believe any tribe north of the Mayas had written language that could have been used in cultural exchange. Neither was there any manner of rapid locomotion, as wheeled vehicles were not in use since there was no large, domesticated animal that could have pulled them. The horse wasn't reintroduced to the Americas until 1493, so trade and any other form of cultural exchange was carried out essentially on foot, and face-to-face via the spoken word, and went unrecorded, except for what memory, story-telling, and legend could manage. That is one of the reasons that we call the Wikipedia article, Native American cultures in the United States, and not "Native American culture in the United States", namely, because there wasn't one culture, there were lots of them.
 * As far as the idea of language families being "an artificial construct", linguists worldwide are pretty united on the usefulness of the concept of language families for explaining the relationships among different languages, but I'm not sure how any of that relates to the OP question. Mathglot (talk) 22:09, 9 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Your tone is one of opposition, but nothing you've said disagrees with anything I've written. The Americas had a rich and complex set of cultures of which we now can only obtain a dim shadow of understanding. Language families are useful, but they're artificial in the sense that there's no external sign that this area has four families or ten families - it's just our best interpretation. In the case of the Americas, our best interpretation is woefully less well informed than any similar sized area in the Old World because so much has been lost. The maps of the Americas in List of language families are about as complex and varied as the Old World; what I'm saying is that they should be treated as being a minimum; we don't know how much wealth of human culture was obliterated. Matt Deres (talk) 22:33, 9 May 2021 (UTC)