Conservapedia talk:World History Lecture Three

Correcting the Assfly
How do we set about correcting the glaring errors in Schlafly's history lectures? --Irrational Atheist 20:34, 11 February 2009 (EST)
 * Do a side-by side? TheoryOfPractice 20:35, 11 February 2009 (EST)
 * The page seems to be a copy of the one at CP. I should have made my question clearer: Should we do the error-checking on this page, or start a new page to correct the errors and leave this page for the archive? --Irrational Atheist 04:54, 12 February 2009 (EST)

Christianity not honouring age
So at the start of the Confucius section, the wiki rants about how Andy is saying Christianity doesn't honour the elderly. I don't think that's what Andy means. It's badly written, but it seems to me that what Andy is saying is that the Chinese honour age, and do not honour Christianity.

Andy is certainly deserving of scathing critique, but it reflects poorly on RationalWiki if we go after things he (probably) isn't actually saying. --Rhodoferax (talk) 15:40, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Undecipherable Languages
''Undecipherable languages are very, very rare - especially since the advent of computers, which are a godsend to cryptographers and paleolinguists. Even "Linear A", a writing system from Bronze Age Crete and a language popularly held to be undecipherable, can be partially read. The problem is not that linguists have no idea, but that in writing systems which use few symbols, we can't be sure exactly what is meant by the script. There's a difference between having no idea at all, and having a vague idea but being unsure.'' OK so this is, or at least appears to me, to be an error. It is very difficult if not nearly impossible to decipher logographic or ideographic scripts and hence the language written in said scripts, when we have no insider knowledge, as it were, about how the script works. For instance, the while superficially resembling Chinese characters can only be partly deciphered (which is being generous) and Khitan inscriptions are, for all intents and purposes, basically undecipherable, so until an archaeologist or antiquities dealer uncovers a Khitan-to-Chinese dictionary (like the one we found for the Tangut language), we will remain unable to read and understand Khitan. The other problem we run into when attempting to read and translate a dead language which uses a dead script is that even though we may know very well the structure of the writing system that dead language uses, we may not have any idea about how to actually understand the language itself. For instance, we have no trouble reading the Etruscan language, but because Etruscan is not related to any living language, and because we have not found any major bilingual text or inscription (though there is a minor one), we do not actually understand it. The problems we have in reading "Linear A" and inscriptions written in the are both somewhat similar (though this is much more true for the latter than the former which may be ideographic or logographic rather than syllabic) to the situation we have Etruscan. Alsto003 (talk) 06:35, 3 March 2015 (UTC) Alex