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Thyne Oldest Known Tech Manual
johnshirley writes "How old is the oldest known technical manual? About 613 years, it seems. Written in 1391 by Geoffrey Chaucer for his ten year old son Lewis (Lowys), the manual explains in great detail but very rough spelling and grammar, the intricate workings of the Astrolabe--the predecessor to the sextant. Read Chaucer's 'A Treatise on the Astrolabe here."
Unless I'm mistaken, the spelling and grammar is correct. The chronology here places this writing in Late Middle English, which had very different spelling and grammar rules than modern English.
Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around. - Stephen King
More or less a manual on how to technically run an army. C. 500BC
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Actually, it's Middle English. Old English is the language spoken prior to the Norman conquest, and thus prior to incorporation of many French words to the language. Middle English occupies an interesting position in the evolution of the language, before the Germanic and French rooted words were merged into a consistent pronunciation scheme (refered to as The Great Vowel Shift).
The Karma sutra was written by Vatsyayana sometime between the 1st and 6th century AD. If that's not a technical manual, I don't know what is. Oh wait.. this is Slashdot.
Kama Sutra.
Kama == Love (also the god of love, similar to Cupid)
Karma == Action and of course all the other things it means to us now.
It is indeed a technical manual on the art of love. I'm not sure it was the oldest of its type. However, this astrolabe manual describes the use of a technological device. I think this more closely relates to the connotation of a computer manual or man page than any "pillow book," but that is a matter of opinion.
That's not Old English. This:
HWAET, WE GAR-DEna in geardagum,
eodcyninga rym gefrunon,
hu da aeelingas ellen fremedon!
oft Scyld Scefing sceaena reatum,
monegum maegum meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas, syddanaerest weard
feasceaft funden; he aes frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum weordmyndum ah,
od aet him aeghwylc ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan; aet waes god cyning!
Daem eafera waes aefter cenned
geong in geardum, one God sende
folce to frofre; fyrendearfe ongeat,
e hie aer drugon aldorlease
lange hwile; him aes Liffrea,
wuldres Wealdend woroldare forgeaf,
Beowulf waes breme --- blaed wide sprang---
Scyldes eafera Scedelandum in.
Swa sceal geong guma gode gewyrcean,
fromum feohgiftumon faeder bearme,
(From Beowulf...) is Old English. You might consider going back to school....
Chauncer? CHAUNCER?! Does the author of this story mean Geoffrey Chaucer? I don't know a Geoffrey Chauncer, but in the same period, Chaucer did write a treatise on the Astrolabe for his son.
And beyond the poor editing, how is this news? The treatise is included in all of the most widely used compilations of his complete works. See The Riverside Chaucer if you don't want to take my word for it.
Finally, not to be redundant, but while this is arguably the oldest tech manual in english, it is certainly not the oldest technical manual period. For something older, just for example, see Vitruvius' book on architecture. There's an older tech manual for you.
Gosh. You people really need a humanities / social sciences editor here.
middle english. it wouldn't even make sense if it was old english. wes thu hal, folde. fira modor, beo thu blowende.. etc, etc, etc
"The absurd is clear reasoning recognizing its limits"
-Albert Camus
The text is in Old English and is presented without any transalation.
Nope, Chaucer isn't Old English (a language more closely related to Fresian), its actually Middle English. Once you get used to it, it isn't too difficult to understand. If you want to see some Old English, have a look at an untranslated version of Beowulf (the Epic, not the cluster).
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
The text is the oldest known "technical manual" in the English language.
From the bottom of the FA.
That should be "RTFP". The letter you've written as "Y" is a thorn (þ or &254; in iso-8859-1) and stands for "th". That letter is not present in Modern English, so it should be written out as "th". Unfortunately, slashdot won't pass through these character entities for rendering, so you'll have to imagine what it looks like, but its vague similarity to "Y", especially in older writing, along with the custom of substituting "Y" for thorn in early press printing (no thorns in the type collection), has perpetuated this confusion. The word you intended to use, "þe", is "the", and is pronounced that way. "Ye" is the plural of "you", not a definite article.
Just browse to www.puzzlering.net/astrolabe.html
I'm not certain, but I have a nagging suspicion that the oldest known tech manual actually belongs to another instrument entirely, in the origins of the modern computer. Counting boards, or abacuses (abaci?) have been used for a loooong time.
A quicky google on the history of the abacus yielded the following spiffy (or not) abacus history information, including a mention of the "ancient Chinese abacus imagined from a description given in a book titled Mathematical Treatises by Ancients written by Hsu Yo towards the end of the Later Han Dynasty, about 1700 years ago"
On the plus side (couldn't resist) I'm pretty sure that Chaucer would have written the first English (Englyshe?) tech manual, since he was, after all, a bit of a pioneer in English literature of all kinds...
Any generalization is a stupid one.
Check out the first five books of the Old testament (especially Exodus) for detailed descriptions of how to construct a shrine (the Mikdash) from materials that fit together beautifully and are easily assembled and disasembled.
Yes, but you'd expect that whatever Chaucer made up for "treatise", be it "tretys" or "trytis", he'd use the same thing throughout the text.
Actually, this was pretty typical of medieval spelling.. Things weren't spelled consistently, and the same author would often vary his spelling to not have to repeat himself.
Remember, this was way before dictionaries, and the idea that there would be one 'correct' spelling, making all others 'wrong' hadn't yet quite entered.
It was later, during the reformation, the Bible was translated, and often ended up serving as the 'offical' way of writing and spelling.
As far as I know, anyway.. IANAEM (An English Major)
There's a big mistake here that needs correction: Chaucer's spelling and grammar are not "rough". He was, and is, considered one of the greatest writers ever to use the English language. The problem is that English has changed a bit in 600 years. And a writer couldn't look up "correct" spelling: dictionaries hadn't been invented yet.
In a strict sense, Chaucer's language is not Modern English but a different language called Middle English. They're as different as Classical Latin and Church Latin. (Huh?) OK, they're as different as Cantonese and Mandarin. (WTF are those?) Sigh. It's even more different thatn C++ and Java!
The concept of "bad speller" wasn't yet relevant. Standardized spelling didn't come until later.
A little OT here, but how many here were forced to read Chaucer's _Cantebury Tales_ in highschool/grammar school?
I was, and found nothing warrant any excitement... until, years later, I stumbled upon a copy that had it in both modern English and middle English. Reading it in the original form was fun and interesting! Having the modern version to refer to for odd words helped me enjoy it even more.
If you could understand it, it wouldn't be a technical manual, it would be documentation.
:)
/. -- even if not clear how this is news exactly! :-P
... they left out the bit where Chaucer reminds littel Lowys that he gave him one that he made earlier, and it's suitable for use at their own particular 'horizon' (latitude), Ox[en]ford, where the wording starts in again. So the web version may be a bit harder to understand than it needed to be. :) )
After making allowances for the language translation needed, or for those that have read other stuff from Chaucer, it doesn't look too bad to understand at all.
I like it that this has been put on the web and even made it to
(Btw, someone skipped on proofreading the web transcription. A significant line or so went missing even in the very first paragraph
-wb-
Well, according to our good friends at dictionary.com:
Old English
n.
The English language from the middle of the 5th to the beginning of the 12th century. Also called Anglo-Saxon.
From OED: According to the nomenclature now generally adopted in this country, the Old English period ends about 1100-1150...
So the Anglo-Saxon language *is* Old English. And since Chaucer is late 14th century, I think he qualifies as Middle English. Thanks for playing though...
There existed no English dictionary at the time, and most formal documents (and nearly all scholarly texts) were written in Latin or Greek. In the second paragraph Chaucer states that the reason he was writing in English was that his young son for whom he's allegedly writing this didn't know Latin yet. Paragraphs two and three are basically a long justification (excuse?) for writing this whole thing in English, because literate people of the time were all expected to know Latin and Greek. One of the reasons many of Chaucer's works survived and are read to this day (e.g. Canterbury Tales) is that he was willing to write in English- unusual for the time.
I'd have to write at least several pages to answer these issues I'm afraid, thus what follows is inherently lacking.
It is impossible to deal with Roman culture and not take into account Greek culture. The Latin alphabet is a concatenation of the Eutruscan and the Greek. However, some of the Eutruscan letters have have corespondence with the Greek.
Greek was developed from Phonecian starting sometime about 1000 BC. Phoenecian writing itself was in a prototypical form at the time (they hadn't even settled on which direction to write it yet, for instance) and the Greeks were psychologically free to adapt it as they pleased.
However, a point of interest, the Greek vowels corespond to the Semetic, the Latin vowels follow the Greek and the English follows the Latin.
But English has 20 vowels. Not five.
Spanish is a lovely language. Very Latinate, and it's actually difficult to misspell words in Spanish. The sounds simply corespond to the letters. You can make simple mistakes and typos easily enough but you really have to work at it to just plain get it wrong. The same is true of Latin and Greek. There's really no equivilant of spelling "fish" as "ghoti" in Spanish. In those instances where the pronuciation of a letter differs somewhat in a word from the standard alphabetic representation it uses an accent mark to note the correct pronuciation.
English, with its 20 vowel sounds as opposed to the 5 of Hebrew, has completely dropped the use of accent marks, and thus the use of vowels in the written word is often completely arbitrary, picking from perhaps as many as three "close fits." If one has not learned the "correct" vowel to use by rote and falls back on phonetics one is just as likely to pick any one of those three vowel letters as any of the others.
Greek and Latin evolved in a small world. Basically the Mediteranian basin. There was a good deal of trade and contact, but only with a limited number of fairly close neighbors. This resulted in well developed and very closely related languages that could easily share alphabets without any undue twisting of things.
In the case of the German language Luther had the advantage, although there were many distinct dialects of German, in that German was at least German.
English is a language of the globe. It always has been. It's completely polyglot. It's sounds and grammer are hammered together of bits and pieces from simply everywhere. It's Norse, German, French, Latin, Angle, etc. Its evolution follows the evolution of world voyaging and conquest. This makes it a wonderful language for prose.
It makes it unbearable (unbaribal/unbareubil) to spell with the Latin alphabet.
There have been a few phonetic alphabets proposed that would make the written English language nearly as phonetic as the Spanish. They've existed for over 100 years. Nobody cares.
Culture is very powerful.
And so we write our words as if they were Hebrew.
It's also interesting to note that modern English evolved in close relationship with the printing press and the fact that much of our spelling is a matter of convienience to the printer and has nothing to do with linguistics at all is not to be discounted.
Along that note I'll also point out that the Greek and Latin texts that have come down to us are not casual writing. Such as this spelling error laden post is. They are formal writings of professionals, and have had the benefit of careful proof reading and editing. Sometimes over the course of centuries before they became the version we know. Of course there are relatively few errors.
English writing in the time of Chaucer was a casual language, even though only a certain class of the educated would be expeted to read and write in it.
If one wished to write formally and "correctly" one wrote in Latin.
KFG
Arguably, some writers would have learned to spell in school (if they were so lucky to attend). But what constituted "Standard English" would vary from town to town. Many people never travelled to other towns, so much of English spelling developed in pockets.
Until the rise of mercantilism in the 1500s and 1700s, variations in spelling and grammar were of minor importance. In time, the move from guilds to mercantalism required precision in business dealings, and the language had to be standardized. For example, English speakers dropped "they" as a singular, finding agreement in number more important than gender neutrality.
Much of "standard English" grammar is based on Latin rules of grammar. The reason we avoid splitting infinitives is that you can't split a Latin infinitive -- it's one word!
Well, that about sums up my English degree. :) I knew I'd use it again one day.
-- SYS 64738 --
No, that's Middle English, Late Middle English in fact. Ye True Olde English is not at all understandable today. It's more like a variant of German, Frisian is probably the closest modern analogue, but even that is heavily influenced by Modern German.
Here's an example of *OLD* English:
ealdres scyldig; ond nu other cwom
mihtig man scatha, wold hyre maeg wrecan
etc.