Where is a place?

Our upcoming redo of stats involves some maps, especially of nationalities of authors in your library. As many of you know, people put in nationalities like "Roman Empire," which don't map easily onto modern maps.

We are currently mulling two ways of showing them—bubbles, or "dots," sized according to how many books you have from the place, and current-country-fill-ins. We may do both.

So, question is: Where do we place the dot for a country? And if we use country fill-ins, how do we determined which country is the successor.

For example, here's my thinking:

1. Existing country's dot is the capital (e.g., France is Paris).
2. Past country's dot if the place that served as the capital for the longest percent of the time (e.g., Roman Empire is Rome, not Ravenna or Constantinople)
3. Past country's fill-in is the country in which #2 is now location (e.g., Roman Empire is Italy)

I could see other answers, such as:

1. Existing country's dot is the center of the main land area (e.g., US would be in Kansas, which is the center of the 18 contiguous states)
2. Past country's dot is the same. So, for example, the center of the Ottoman empire would be… IDK, somewhere in the middle of the eastern Med?

One might also consider the legal successor state--tricky, but possible for some states. Or we might encourage members to fill in a MODERN nationality for everyone as the first "Nationality" data point (e.g., Josephus would be Israel, the poet Martial would be from Spain, etc.)

I need to look at what data exists for some of this. It's probable Wikidata has centroids for the Ottoman Empire and etc.

>1 timspalding: 18 contiguous states

I think there might be a typo there...

Glad to see you're doing more with the place info.

Dots on the capital makes the most sense to me.

Fill-in on the capital... I'm less sure. That's a lot of land-area for Assyria and Rome and Burgundy that you're missing out on.

>2 amanda4242:

Moreover a number pad typo. :)

I’d prefer fill-ins, but if we go for dots I vote for dots in the centre of the country (when it’s a modern-day one). I don’t think a dot on the capital is a good idea considering that capitals are often “off to the side” and that can make it difficult to see which country it is. It’s fine if it’s a country like Spain, where the capital is in the middle of the country, or France where it’s very central, but that’s not the norm.
Say I have a book from Slovakia, the capital of which is Bratislava- located right on the border to Austria. It’ll take a very keen eye to spot which country is actually meant to be highlighted.

Wikidata:
Ottoman Empire: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q12560
Roman Empire: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2277 (not sure why center is in Picenum)

How would you handle authors from pre-unification Italy or Germany?

So does this mean the country (for map) field is going to become useless?

>7 Maddz: I think that in this case we should use the past capital (so for Savoy Dukedom it would be Turin, even if Chambéry could be a contender)

>7 Maddz: >9 .mau.: I did a spot-check of some obvious big-name German and Italian writers: most seemed to have the name of the modern country in the nationality field. The handful of exceptions have their own problems: Kleist is assigned to Brandenburg and Kant to Prussia, but they were arguably both citizens of the same state...

And what about all the discussions about people who moved around: would it make more sense to assign Goethe to Hesse or to Weimar? or Petrarch to Florence, Avignon or Padua? The Grimms to Hesse or to Prussia? Or the people who lived through political transitions and changed states without moving, like Manzoni? Or all the German writers born before 1949 who were still alive on the third of October 1990?

Didn't we have exactly this discussion some five or ten years ago? What were our conclusions then?

>6 timspalding: Surely the mid-point would move around as the empires waxed and waned?

>11 anglemark: Ah, yes, here it is:

New features: Nationalities graph

Our upcoming redo of stats involves some maps, especially of nationalities of authors in your library.

Wow. Thank you!

Where do we place the dot for a country? And if we use country fill-ins, how do we determined which country is the successor.

You do fill-ins. No question. Dots are ugly, overlap in cases for many authors from geographically small countries, and just look sloppy.

For no longer existing countries, you either use "Country for the map", which exists for this exact purpose despite not having had a map, or the best guess at successor country.

I do love that Tim is finally implementing this after years of pleading.

I do not love that he acts as though it was just an idea he had yesterday and not something we've been pleading for for years, and in some cases even implemented in a kludgy fashion ourselves.

Past threads:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/104017 introducing the pie chart before it sucked (back when it came with lists of authors by nationality)
https://www.librarything.com/topic/144601 the successor thread including much discussion of the "country for the map" field Tim seems to have forgotten about
https://www.librarything.com/topic/189257 my long-standing plea to actually use the existing data, which Tim is now doing (thank you!) without acknowledging that it was something we'd been asking for for years

>15 lorax: Totally agree. (I'm not adamant on having them on a map, a list would work for me too - but that's another discussion).

I think an interactive historical map for dead authors would be awesome and educational. What I'm imagining is a series of maps that show (generally recognized) national boundaries over time. By selecting an author, we'd see where their country (as entered in LT) was in the world in their lifetime (or the point in their lifetime tied to their country record). By selecting a time period, we'd see where authors in LT were concentrated, indicated by color, maybe.

Of course, the effort into creating that seems as if it would be extremely intensive. I understand this is a unicorn.

>10 thorold: well, neither Avignon nor Padua were capitals :-)
Anyway, Lagrange was born in Turin, but flourished in France so I think Paris would be the best spot. Let's say that for each author the place to put him/her is the one he/she would have preferred.

I would vote that you only include things on the map if they have a modern country indicated (or, at minimum, a national identifier that postdates the current concept of a nation.) I'm trying to think of a circumstance in which having modern Italy filled in for, like, Ausonius, would be useful in any way, and coming up with nothing. Meanwhile if you superimpose dots for current and ancient countries you will just end up with an unreadable mess.

If you must map authors dead more than a hundred years, I vote for >17 aspirit:

Using "country for the map" as a separate field might still make the most sense; it would be obvious for cases where an ancient author is still strongly associated with a modern nation enough that they should be mapped.

I don't like dots for countries in general because there's no way for it not to be massively misleading (unless the specific idea you're trying to convey is the huge mismatch between land area and influence on global publishing!) If you want to use dots you effectively have to narrow it down to locations that are point-sources on your map (like, say, cities on a world map.) But I can't get LT getting useful city-level data for a reasonable proportion of authors (although I would adore "location written in" stats!)

People will, of course, still fight like caged rats over certain authors, which was one of the biggest problems before and certainly hasn't been solved. But putting a dot for Liliuokalani on Washington DC certainly wouldn't help matters.

I just realized a potential problem with dots. The UK is tiny compared to how many books it has coming from it. The UK currently publishes four times the amount of books per capita as the USA, and I doubt that production is almost entirely the Harry Potter series. Plus, it's been a powerhouse in English literature for a long time.

How much of the map would its dot take up?

ETA: Cross-posted with >19 melannen: regarding dots, because typing with an injury on a phone is slooow.

>19 melannen: Does that mean that Scots authors should have the UK in their Country for Map field, but if Scotland became independent in the future that members could change that field to Scotland?

>21 jjwilson61: See above about people inevitably fighting like caged rats no matter what.

I'm trying to come up with a way to get a "nationality map" that won't result in cannibalistic cage fights; not having re-read the previous threads the best I can come up with is going by "country of record of original publication" which while it will have its own problems is at least something that can have one correct answer for nearly all books in LT with original publication that postdates incunabula.

>20 aspirit: Yeah, the overlap is one of many problems with dots, although it can be done okay if you have translucent dots, a good zoom, and the ability to calculate which location points to use for a given zoom on the fly, most of which seems out of scope here in terms of efficient use of computer resources....

>19 melannen: Using "country for the map" as a separate field might still make the most sense
It already is a separate field, for exactly this purpose.

>23 r.orrison: Yep. And it still makes the most sense to use it!

So for the dots versus fill-ins, this doesn't have to be totally abstract. I grabbed a somewhat outdated version of the author-nationality data that I use for my short fiction account to make a map, and did a scaled-dot type (the Google API is centroids, so that's what it uses) to compare to the shaded-fillin type. (Ignore the fact that the UK is empty here - that's a naming issue for LT vs. Google's name for the country that I didn't bother to fix for this mock-up.)

Fill-in:



Scaled dots:



I find the fill-in more aesthetically pleasing as well as more informative, but we can at least base the discussion on actual examples.

>25 lorax: Thanks for the image. To me, this really emphasises the superiority of the fill-in. That map is still clearly legible, whereas the dot map is messy - Europe is completely unreadable, and that’s with multiple countries not having any dots.

I like the fill in map as well.

>25 lorax: The scaled dots are not very user friendly in places where there is a lot of small countries next to each other if someone has a library heavily populated by authors from these countries - figuring out which dot belongs to which country is going to be problematic. Color coding the map itself makes it a lot easier to see and interpret the data.

I agree about the filled in map looking better and being more legible. I have no idea what to do about places that no longer exist. Perhaps that could be a different map — one of that era? It is more work, but if we help, maybe it won't be too hard. After all, it is the users who have been begging for this for a long time. So there might be a different map for books written during the Roman Empire, compared to the modern world maps. Can we legally use Google maps to populate the author pages?

A huge thanks to Lorax for being our collective memory on this one.

I remember looking at this off and on for the past ten years and trying to get some sort of useful data out of my TSV export file. But that involves a lot of screen scraping since there's just author names in the export file so I'd need to code something going from work-id's to author pages and getting country names there and mapping those to whatever country names my graphics package use.
This looked too much like waste of time :-)

>17 aspirit:, >25 lorax:, >28 AnnieMod:, >29 krazy4katz:, >30 bnielsen:

I could imagine a system similar to that used for book covers and author pictures.
The users provide pictures or links which depict the state structure of the respective time. The most suitable for the reader (language version, etc.) can be selected from the available images.
A supplement (a pony), of which I don't know how it could be technically implemented, would be the setting of symbols, which e.g. the place of birth, whereabouts, Place of death or the burial place would show of the respective authors.
We as users could help with collecting or even breate the maps and placing the locations {1}.

It would be important for me to get a "rough" overview. I would get more precise information or more details elsewhere. Possibly this information could be linked to the map (page).
Of course, as with covers and author images, the usual copyright rules would have to be adhered to.

{1} Such maps are usually created in GIS systems (Geographical Information System) such as QGIS (Opensource). Under certain circumstances, this data could be integrated in open source maps such as Openstreetmap, which in turn could be linked in LibraryThing.

ETA
An example of an existing Website: https://www.atlas-europa.de/t05/t05-Index.htm

>29 krazy4katz:

"I agree about the filled in map looking better and being more legible."

No particular reason for quoting this message, BTW, except that it was quotable and I could agree with it. :-) Add me to that list who like the fill-ins.

Regarding countries that no longer exist (a substantial issue for me, given the amount of Greek and Roman and Middle English stuff I have) -- why can't we add "shadow countries" to the database? That would at least partly solve the historical problem, too: You could have (something along the lines of) "Roman Republic 97-63 BCE," "Roman Republic 63-31 BCE," "Roman Empire 31 BCE-43 CE" -- and for (say) Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul, which dates from around 46 BCE, you use the Roman Republic and pin it to the 63-31 BCE edition.

It would take some time to get it right, but people would help. And boundaries don't have to be precise.

Of course, that STILL leaves the problem of the Hebrew Bible and people arguing over where the Pentateuch was written....

Using the data in Country (for map) has the advantage that you don't need to worry about defunct nations and where to plot them, and you only need alter the map if current countries actually change, such as when South Sudan became independent or renaming of North Macedonia. Nationality is more of an open category fraught with problems "where do we map the Ottoman Empire?", "my author claims Atlantean nationality", bringing ongoing discussion/argument/maintenance. The (for map) field is outright designed for the purpose we want.

A chloropleth map (filled-in world map, lorax#1) has the problem of big and small countries. Consider in >25 lorax:
there are similar shadings in Russia and South Africa, yet Russia's size gives it a false emphasis.

The proportional symbols map (the circles on world map, lorax#2) has the problems of overlapping in crowded areas, but is good for tiny nations because a dot stands out (eg. the Caribbean in lorax#2 is easy to see there are four nations).

A cartogram can be visually striking because of its abstraction. Wikipedia has an article with examples of different types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram
I don't really like the fat-warped maps!, but the diagrammatic (Dorling) could be worth considering – the grey one with circles, halfway down the page.

Bear in mind that a lot of users will have a lot of 0 upon their map, so I hope you choose an option that works for this. Looking forward to seeing what you do with this feature.

>32 waltzmn: Not only where the Pentateuch was written, but when and by whom!

>33 Nevov: I had not thought about all these possibilities. It is a lot to consider. It seems that no one size fits all.
Perhaps a couple of choices that people could select depending on the overall contents of their library.

>34 krazy4katz:

Not only where the Pentateuch was written, but when and by whom!

The latter are substantial issues for a commentator, but not for the map. :-) Besides, they're implicit in my comment. If Moses wrote the Pentateuch (whenever, since there is argument about the date), then he presumably wrote it in Moab or Kadesh or some such place, since the Pentateuch says he was never in Israel+Yudah. But if Moses didn't write it, then it was presumably written somewhere in Israel+Yudah. So determining where would give at least a partial answer to when and by whom. :-)

>35 waltzmn: Presumably author *nationality* (to the extent that's even a relevant category for that time period...) is Israelite either way? We wouldn't say Les Miserables is British literature just because Victor Hugo wrote it in Guernsey. But some people might! Thus endless arguments. :D

>33 Nevov: Honestly, for this kind of data, any cartogram or map is going to be misleading in some way or another (thanks How To Lie With Maps!). I assumed Tim was going for it because it's a flashy toy and all the cool kids have them, which is fair enough!

I think if you wanted a map but also something that wasn't misleading, my vote would be a map that just colors countries as Yes (you have at least one book) or No (you don't), so you could have fun trying to fill in the whole map and get a graphic to show around, and then a ranked list or graph of countries to actually compare number of items for people who want that.

>36 melannen:

Presumably author *nationality* (to the extent that's even a relevant category for that time period...) is Israelite either way?

This is probably far, far too much off-topic :-), but there are scholars who would argue about this on several points. First, "Israelite" and "Judean" are not the same thing -- and the Pentateuch as we have it is Judean. The only book of the Hebrew Bible that is probably Israelite is Hosea, and it is very hard for Biblical scholars to understand -- possibly it's heavily corrupted, but possibly it's because Israeli Hebrew was significantly different from Judean Hebrew, or possibly it became corrupted because Israeli Hebrew was significantly different from Israeli Hebrew and the Judean scribes struggled with it. (That seems the most likely to me for textual reasons, but I am not competent to judge as a linguist.)

Second, there is substantial reason to think the Pentateuch reached its final (or near-final) form in Babylonia -- that Ezra the Scribe brought back the Pentateuch from Babylon and imposed it on Judea in the reign of Artaxerxes (I or II) of Persia. Much of it was assembled from Judean and Israeli documents, but the so-called "P" source was very possibly composed in Babylon and then combined with the others in Babylon. Indeed, many scholars hold that the creation story at the beginning of Genesis is a rewrite of the Babylonian Enuma Elish.

I am not saying that any of these speculations are true. (Well, other than that Israel and Judah were separate countries with separate religious and should be understood as such.) But if there were a debate over "Should we list the country responsible for the Pentateuch as Judah or Babylon," I could take the Babylonian side and make a pretty good case.

>35 waltzmn: I was reading The Bible: A Biography by Karen Armstrong, which suggests that different sections were written in different eras and places. Those were my thoughts. However, she was also talking about the other parts of the Old Testament, so I might be confused.

>37 waltzmn: That is really interesting! It never occurred to me to think that Judean and Israeli Hebrew might be different. How different? What about Aramaic?

OK, I think I might have answered my own question. According to Wikipedia, Aramaic was spoken by Jewish captives in Babylonia. It originated in Syria. This is fascinating!

>37 waltzmn: This is why assigning nationalities to ancient authors is a bad idea!!

The point I was groping toward was that a book written in Babylon by exiled Israelites (and/or Judeans) as an Israelite (and/or Judean) text would still be authored by Israelites (and/or Judeans), not Babylonians, just as much as if it were Moses who wrote it, since we're looking at author nationality, not location of publication, and being in political exile does not *automatically* change one's nationality.

I admit I do not have the expertise to argue whether all Hebrew-speaking scholars involved in the project during the Babylonian exile would have self-identified as Children of Israel, though the compilation is nationalistic enough that it seems unlikely the people who put it together considered themselves entirely Babylonian. This argument is pretty much irrelevant for LT, thank goodness, since we're attributing nationality to authors not books, so the fight over who wrote the bible can continue to happen in the authorship field, not the nationality one!

If you do want to discuss the question of writers in political exile though, we can go back to my simpler Victor Hugo example, since as far as I know he is only considered a holy prophet of God in one relatively obscure sect in Vietnam.

It's perfectly feasible to assign some sort of N/A to disputable/disputed authors in Country for Map field. Lets not have the project scratched because of the Bible or I'll start a crusade against Christians

>38 krazy4katz:

I was reading The Bible: A Biography by Karen Armstrong, which suggests that different sections were written in different eras and places. Those were my thoughts. However, she was also talking about the other parts of the Old Testament, so I might be confused.

There is no question, no matter who you ask, that different portions of the Hebrew Bible were written at different times and places, although there is disagreement about which different times and places. :-) I was referring specifically to the Pentateuch, that is, Genesis through Deuteronomy. The traditional view is that this is all by Moses (although that doesn't tell us where he wrote it). The view of those who read it without reference to tradition is that it is a composite of four sources, written probably in Judah (J), Israel (E), Babylon (P), and Judah (D), and compiled perhaps in Babylon. The other books of the Hebrew Bible were written over the span of perhaps 800 years, mostly but not entirely in Judah. And the New Testament came later, of course -- although not necessarily much later. There are books in the Greek Old Testament that are all but contemporary with the New Testament.

That is really interesting! It never occurred to me to think that Judean and Israeli Hebrew might be different. How different? What about Aramaic?

Aramaic, as you discovered, is substantially different. Judean and Israeli Hebrew... is harder to know. As I said above, the Hebrew Bible was written over a span of about 800 years. (That's true whether you're a traditionalist or a scholar; it's just that the 800 year span is offset by about 400 years!) There was a lot of change just in Judean Hebrew in that time! -- e.g. late books like Daniel and Ecclesiastes use Persian and Greek loanwords that aren't in the early books. There were also some grammatical change. So it's hard to know even what "Judean Hebrew" was at a particular time. We know that there were differences in dialect even before the Davidic monarchy (since Gileadites said "Shibboleth" and Epraemites "Sibboleth" in Judges 12), but how much the language diverged after David's time we can't really tell, since our only evidence is the Book of Hosea. But the nations were separated for about two centuries before Israel was destroyed; we know that in the time of Ahaziah, the kings of Israel and Judah understood each other easily, but there was probably some difference, and it would only have increased as time passed.

>39 melannen:

I admit I do not have the expertise to argue whether all Hebrew-speaking scholars involved in the project during the Babylonian exile would have self-identified as Children of Israel, though the compilation is nationalistic enough that it seems unlikely the people who put it together considered themselves entirely Babylonian.

At this point I'm just being a pedant, and I agree with your point that it doesn't matter to LibraryThing, but it's worth nothing that, in about 500 B.C.E., there were three Jewish communities in the world, not counting the Samaritans: In Babylon, in Judah, and in Egypt. The records of the Elephantine Papyri show that the Egyptian community had split from Judah: it became loyal to the local authorities and began to bring other gods into its pantheon. The Elephantine community did not survive -- but, three centuries later, the Jewish community of Alexandria (which was associated with the Greek, not the Persian, Empire), did leave its own literature and its own practices: the Septuagint, which ironically became the Christian Bible and was ignored by later Jews.

Babylonian Jewry is more complicated, but there are signs that it was splitting from Judean Jewry, too. For starters, not everyone went back with Ezra and Nehemiah -- in fact, it was hard to get most of them to go back! And there is a Babylonian Talmud, created by Jews who lived in the Parthian, not the Roman, Empire. The fact that they had been exiled didn't mean that they wanted to go home. :-)

I repeat, none of this is important from LibraryThing's standpoint, and I agree that I don't want any new features to break down over this issue. On the other hand, I don't personally see much point to a feature that applies only to modern authors, given the nature of my personal library. :-)

>41 waltzmn: There is little doubt that much of the OT was revised during or (shortly) after the Babylonian exile. Otherwise the pre-exilic part would have been in paleo-Hebrew, which it isn't. (I'm not an expert either though).

>42 Nicole_VanK:

There is little doubt that much of the OT was revised during or (shortly) after the Babylonian exile. Otherwise the pre-exilic part would have been in paleo-Hebrew, which it isn't. (I'm not an expert either though).

Be careful of your terminology here. Paleo-Hebrew refers to a script, not a language. Hebrew these days is written with an Aramaic "square" script. Earlier writings, such as the Siloam Inscription, are in Paleo-Hebrew script.

Moving a text from script to script can happen at any time, and it can be retroverted. To give a very simple example, some manuscripts of Chaucer use the thorn (þ) and/or the yogh (ȝ); others use th and g/gh/y/whatever, respectively. It is quite likely that some Chaucer manuscripts which use thorn were copied from some that used th which were copied from some that used thorn.

The change to Aramaic script predates all our extant Biblical manuscripts, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, so yes, the texts had to be changed over. And it was probably influenced by the Babylonian Captivity, since that was also what pushed the Judeans from using Hebrew to using Aramaic. But that doesn't mean that the texts were revised in Babylon. (Though you'll note that I earlier cited the argument that the Pentateuch was completed, or at least revised, in Babylon.)

There is a very clear case to be made for the survival of some very old texts after the Babylonian Ecile, but it doesn't come from the Pentateuch, it comes from the book of Samuel (which is very likely older, in its near-final form, than the Pentateuch, and the oldest strands of which were probably written earlier).

If you look at the story of David and Goliath, in 1 Samuel 17-18, you'll notice something funny. Half the time, David is a member of Saul's court, come along for the battle; in the other half, David is a boy who is bringing supplies to his brothers, and Saul has never heard of him.

As has happened in many parts of the Bible, it appears there were two sources in use. Indeed, it is almost universally agreed that 1 Samuel is a compilation of at least two sources (I'd argue for more, but all that matters for the argument is that there were at least two).

But here's where it gets interesting (and here is where my expertise is genuinely relevant; I am not a Bible scholar or Hebraist, but I am both a folklorist and a textual critic). 1 Samuel is full of duplicated passages where two different sources tell the same story (we are given two instances of why it was said "Is Saul among the prophets?"; there are two accounts of David sparing Saul's life, etc.). But, with one exception, both versions every one of those parallels is found in all copies of 1 Samuel; the parallels were there from the beginning.

The exception is in the story of David and Goliath. There are two parallel stories woven together, but they weren't woven together from the beginning. The Greek translation of 1 Samuel (the Septuagint, or LXX, as represented by the Codex Vaticanus and several other old copies) omits half the story -- the half where David is the kid just off the sheep ranch. It has only the version where David is Saul's courtier.

Now you could argue that someone cut down the story to remove the inconsistencies. But this doesn't hold up. If you look at the material that has been cut out, it tells a complete and coherent story in itself. There is no way an editor could do that. The only way the accepted Hebrew version of the story could have arisen is if a second story was blended with the first. This second story was clearly a folktale (it has a very long list of folktale characteristics), and it was incorporated into the Hebrew after the exemplar of the Septuagint was copied. Thus we have, in the Septuagint, a witness to the Hebrew of 1 Samuel before the folktale was interpolated. (And before the text got hacked up by incompetent scribes, but that's another issue.)

So, in one sense, you are right: All portions of the Bible written before the Babylonian Exile (i.e. the former prophets plus some but not all of the later prophets, but not the Writings and arguably not the Pentateuch) had to go through a script change. That's not the same as a language change. No doubt scribes did periodically update their texts over the years (that always happens, unconsciously even if not consciously), but there is no reason to think there was a comprehensive change of language as opposed to a change of script.

And if this isn't the most non-germane post ever posted to Talk, it's not for lack of trying. :-) Fair warning, folks: I'm autistic, and if you challenge my sense of factual data, you will get a long-winded, nitpicky, completely irrelevant response. :-)

>43 waltzmn: As long as we are off topic (sorry, good people), one piece of information that I read which argues against the Pentateuch being written by Moses is that no archaeological evidence of the Jews crossing the Sinai has ever been found and also no Egyptian recording of the exodus of the Jews as far as I know. Surely, in 40 years, there must have been a bowl, a plate, people who died etc. buried under all that sand. Although not particularly religious anymore, this was a great disappointment to me.

Again, I apologize for being off topic. Would love to have maps but not sure, with all the possibilities, what would be best. I guess I still think maps from different eras could be used to satisfy the differences in nationality at different times in history.

>44 krazy4katz:
Again, I apologize for being off topic. Would love to have maps but not sure, with all the possibilities, what would be best. I guess I still think maps from different eras could be used to satisfy the differences in nationality at different times in history.

Thats what I tryed to say in >31 birder4106: ;-)

>43 waltzmn: I stand corrected. I often thought I spotted some linguistic differences too, but every language I'm aware of changes gradually all the time. And I'm way out of my depth on ancient Hebrew - so I shouldn't have made that comment.

>46 Nicole_VanK: As an observer to the side conversation, I'm grateful you did. We wouldn't have >43 waltzmn: (waltzmn's response) otherwise.

>45 birder4106: Great! Thank you!

Sorry I was distracted (which is rather obvious) and not reading very carefully.

>43 waltzmn: Again off-topic: do you know why Hebrew doesn't seem to have markings for vowels except in prayer books for us non-native Hebrew speaking people? I can't even imagine how that works. I guess you have to memorize all the words without vowels. Are other languages like that? Arabic? Others?

>49 krazy4katz: Yes, Arabic has that too.

>49 krazy4katz:

Yep it is called an abjad. Hebrew is an impure abjad, some of the letters have a secondary use to indicate vowels and modern Hebrew does use diacritical marks. Abjads sprang up qute early in the development of written language. Yep other abjads are in use - Arabic, Syriac, Tifinagh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet is your friend

>48 krazy4katz:
Nothing to excuse!
You took it to the point.
And thank you for your support.

I'm despairing, because we've gone thoroughly off-topic and Tim has gone silent, meaning that once again he's teased us with an awesome feature only to decide against it once we start quibbling over details.

Tim, I don't even need a map. Just give me a list of authors by nationality and I can make my own damn map.

>53 lorax: Yes, pretty please. The original list with pie chart was fine too.

>53 lorax: I doubt the side conversation is why Tim and his team are silent. It's only keeping the topic thread in view during what some people in the USA treat as a holiday week.

To be clear, I don't think the side conversation scared Tim away. I think the lack of universal agreement on which map mode was preferable, and the lack of a good way of handling non-current countries, did. Which is why I'm hoping to get a list out of it. Maps are nice but 99% of the work of getting a map when you're primarily concerned with currently extant countries is in getting the list.

>56 lorax: I will agree with anything that is better than what we have.

Let's have a headcount, then:

WARNING: MORE OFF-TOPICNESS!

>47 aspirit:

As an observer to the side conversation, I'm grateful you did. We wouldn't have >43 waltzmn: waltzmn: (waltzmn's response) otherwise.

Be careful. Don't encourage me. :-) I'm a fact-transmission machine; it's something of a compulsion. It's hard for me to not answer a question if I know the answer.

>49 krazy4katz:

Again off-topic: do you know why Hebrew doesn't seem to have markings for vowels except in prayer books for us non-native Hebrew speaking people? I can't even imagine how that works. I guess you have to memorize all the words without vowels. Are other languages like that? Arabic? Others?

Poster andyl already answered this, but I'm going to take my own crack at it.

The basic answer is, Tradition. :-) (Yes, I'm cueing "Fiddler on the Roof" in my head. :-)

Understand that the Phoenician alphabet -- the origin of all Western alphabets -- was used for a Semitic language. Most words are identified by a combination of three consonants. The vowels matter, but you can usually identify the words without them. So the Phoenician alphabet didn't have vowels. Eventually, as andyl pointed out, some consonants came to be used to indicate vowels, but it isn't original. And Hebrew took that over. The Biblical books were written without pointing; the points were added later. The consonantal text is highly sacred; the vowel points are... interpretation. So a Torah scroll is written with just the consonants, no vowel points.

The lack of vowels is characteristic of all Semitic languages -- Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic. All are close enough to Phoenician that they could get by without vowels.

Not so Greek. Greek needs its vowels, and so it invented them. And the Etruscans adapted the Greek alphabet and gave it to the Romans, and the Slavs created the Cyrillic alphabet based on Greek inspiration, and so forth. As a result, most Indo-European languages have an alphabet that has vowels.

It's not universal for Indo-European, though. Sanskrit, and hence Hindi, is written in Devanagari, which is a syllabic script, not in any way related to the Greek alphabet. (Syllabic scripts generally precede alphabets -- e.g. Linear B, in which Mycenaean Greek was written, is a syllabic script.) A syllabic character generally encodes a consonant followed by a vowel. For a language like English that has approximately (depending on dialect) 27 consonants and nine vowels, that means you would need 243 different glyphs -- plus potentially 36 more for words that start with a vowel or end with a consonant. Most syllabaries have 80-100 glyphs, meaning that there are several hundred possible syllables that cannot be correctly represented in that script. So you get some funny spelling -- a word like "therefore" might come out as "the-ra-fur."

Incidentally, even languages that have vowels may not be complete with just consonants and vowels. Greek -- the first language with vowels -- is an example, and in fact it partially parallels the Hebrew with its lack of vowels. There are things that are missing in its early written forms, too. Greek has always had an "h" sound, but it doesn't have a letter for that sound, so it had to create "breathings," which were like curled quotes above vowels, to indicate whether there is an h at the beginning. So ἀ and ἁ are different words -- "a" and "ha," if I read my screen right (it's really hard to tell in this font). Greek also has two different accents, ` and ´. Usually those are just arbitrary, but there are a few cases where it makes a difference (e.g. τίς is not the same as τὶς).

And just as the early Hebrew did not include vowel points, the earliest Greek copies of the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) and of the New Testament didn't include accents or breathings (or word divisions). The Codex Vaticanus -- the manuscript that has 1 Samuel without the folktale version of David and Goliath -- was written in the fourth century, and it didn't get its accents and breathings written in until five or six hundred years later. Other early manuscripts, like those famous British Museum manuscripts Siniaticus and Alexandrinus, never got accents and breathings at all. So the beginning of John 1:1 ("In the beginning was the word" -- except that Greek doesn't use a definite article before "beginning"; the Greek properly says "In beginning was the word") is now written ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος. In Vaticanus, Siniaticus, and Alexandrinus, it's written ΕΝΑΡΧΗΗΝΟΛΟΓΟC. In that case, the meaning is obvious. There are instances where it is not -- where the Greek text, like the Hebrew, is susceptible to different meanings based on different word division or use of accents/breathings.

All right, I'll stop now. :-)

>66 waltzmn:

Technically Devanagari is an abujida or alpha-syllabary. Linear B and Japanese kana are true syllabaries. The difference is in Devanagari you can see the root consonant shape and a vowel shape - so there is some similarity between pa and po. The consonant shape is consistent. The vowel shape/position is consistent. That isn't the case for a true syllabary. In Linear B and Japanese kana there are completely different shapes for pa and po with no commonality, and no commonality between pa and ka either.

Wow! Thank you everyone! This is a fascinating side conversation.

>53 lorax: I would happily take a list.

And if Tim wants a map for shiny/marketing purposes, a map that just shows solid fill-in colors for any modern country from which you have at least one modern author should be enough to be fun a toy people can share on Facebook.

So, most of a month after this tease, we're still back where we were when I started asking for something like this seven years ago - with everyone agreeing it would be great, disagreeing about details, and Tim losing interest and wandering off because he can't find good shapefiles for the Byzantine Empire.

>70 lorax: Sigh. (The old version with the list and the pie chart was fine with me, by the way)

>70 lorax:
>71 Nicole_VanK:
Oh, goody. Now we have two threads to bump.

Nicole_VanK (#71):

The old version with the list and the pie chart was fine with me, by the way

Same.

If it helps there's a possible dataset from https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/. Genealogists often need historical place names. There's an API available though I don't have direct experience: https://www.familysearch.org/developers/docs/guides/places. I would imagine that the best coverage is early modern to modern time periods.