[0] https://www.markkurlansky.com/books/salt-a-world-history/
Iron Age salt-mining complex found beneath Hallstatt in Austria (archaeologymag.com)
90 pointsby janandonly4 days ago27 comments
seemaze 9 hours ago
I just finished listening to the audiobook of Mark Kurlanskys Salt: A World History[0]. Fascinating and highly recommended.
thedrexster 5 hours ago
Can confirm, it's a fantastic book!
mikhailfranco 6 hours ago
The name Halstatt seems to mean Salt Town.
holgerschurig 6 hours ago
No, it means nothing. You shall not needlessly anglicize.
The name Hallstadt (not the two l letters) means Salt Town.
Or, actually "place". In a lot of location names of germanic origin "stadt" doesn't the current semantics, of being a town with > 10.000. More often than not it just means "place".
And "Hall" is an old term for salt. Many towns related to salt have it in their names, in many places of Germany and Austria. "Halle an der Saale" in Thüringen, Bad Reichenhall (Bayern), Hall im Tirol (Österreich), Schwäbisch-Hall (Baden-Württemberg) etc.
"Hall" is believed to be of celtic origin.
And the double l is important. German is a language where in the written form you look at the letters and you immediately see how it is spoken. A double vocal makes the speed slower, and a double consonant makes the speech faster. So "Halstadt" would be slow Hal (so more emphasize on the "a" instead), and "Hallstadt" would be a fast "Hall", similar in speed like the english "hell": little emphasize on the "a".
card_zero 5 hours ago
The not/note typo strikes again, it reverses the meaning of a phrase.
bugake 4 hours ago
Medieval German didn't have fixed rules for writing. The same word was written in different ways on the same page, so many words inherited from the Middle Ages cannot be taken literally under modern writing rules.
flohofwoe 3 hours ago
> German is a language where in the written form you look at the letters and you immediately see how it is spoken.
Lol, written vs spoken German is just as ambigious as any other language with too few letters in the alphabet. Just look at "ich" vs "ach" (and then of course there's dozens of local dialects that don't even have spelling rules and would need even bigger alphabets if "done right").
ahartmetz 2 hours ago
No, not all languages are the same about the correlation of spelling and pronunciation. Of European languages, English is the least predictable, Spanish is the most predictable, and German is (about equidistant) between them. Spanish had a spelling reform the shortest time ago, English never had one.
Source: Read it somewhere a long time ago, sorry.
schiffern 2 hours ago
English never had a spelling reform? Noah Webster might beg to differ...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/about-us/spelling-reform
Maybe you meant a "complete" spelling reform, but hardly any reform is 'complete' if you look at it closely.
ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago
The editors of major English dictionaries have certainly had significant impact on English as She is Spoke, but we cannot ignore the fact that the Spanish language is centrally codified and prescriptive (like the French language), while English is distinctly decentralized, and its dictionaries are correspondingly descriptive, more often than not.
Spanish has notably gone through some orthography reforms since I learned it in high school, in the 1980s, and so among other things, the idiosyncratic "sort order" which we learned doesn't really apply anymore. In school, we also learned to be aware of the vosotros first-person plural, but we didn't really learn all the forms, because we were chiefly learning Mexican/LatAm vernacular Spanish.
freehorse 2 hours ago
> He changed the –ce in words like defence, offence, and pretence to –se; abandoned the second, silent "l" in verbs such as travel and cancel when forming the past tense; dropped the "u" from words such as humour and colour; and dropped the "k" from words such as publick and musick.
Isn't most of it just the difference between british and american english? I was definitely taught the "old" style in my english education and still see it being used. So it does not seem to have been really universally acknowledged/adhered to as a reform?
Not that english language has not changed but it seems that there is not as much of a centralised, widely adopted and intentional reform to match the written form with the spoken one.
schiffern an hour ago
You're loudly agreeing with me. ;)
If they had said English has had no centralized or universally accepted spelling reform, then I'd have to agree with that statement! But they said English has had no spelling reforms, and that's clearly untrue.
nkrisc an hour ago
That’s still nothing like the reform other languages have had.
schiffern an hour ago
Who said all spelling reforms are the same? Nobody. My point is that saying English has had no spelling reforms is inaccurate.
ahartmetz an hour ago
I'd perhaps go for "major" spelling reform. German has had a small one around 2000 as well, but such reforms don't do much to change the overall situation (unless repeated every 10 years, I guess).
freehorse 2 hours ago
"You speak what you see" does not mean that every letter or combination of consonants is pronounced the same, but that there are clear rules that determine how every thing is spoken (with exceptions being rare). The fact that "ch" is pronounced differently depending on the vowel before is a consistent rule. In contrast in languages like english you do not have consistent rules like that for a big part of the language, to the extent that a native speaker encountering a new word (eg a street or town name) may not know how to speak or write it.
derkoe 5 hours ago
Hallstatt means salt stead - a place where you find salt.
Stadt (town) was derived from Statt - here's a good explanation of that: https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/Stadt-Statt...
solstice 4 hours ago
Thanks! Learned a lot
dghughes an hour ago
Words stead, stan, state all come from pro-Indo-European root *sta- that means land, country, place.
Rob Words on YouTube had a video on it recently https://youtu.be/iP6n2zTHtUQ?t=1018
atoav 6 hours ago
Hallstatt is one of these places to visit. It's topology alone is crazy, built on the edge of a mountain right above a lake. Nobody reasonable would build a city there, unless there was a really good reason for it. And the value of salt was that reason. But that topology is also the reason why a lot of the city is extremely old today.
Hallstatt as a town is also affected by overtourism, especially since some Asian soap opera used it as a film location. But it is one of the places that is still worth a visit.
wolfi1 4 hours ago
because of the overtourism problem I would advise against a visit
andrewstuart 8 hours ago
What did they do for light?
WalterBright 8 hours ago
I would expect oil lamps.
holgerschurig 5 hours ago
This is one of the problems with what the Celts did: they didn't write. And they used a lot of biological material (like leather, wood) which is all gone by now. AFAIK the celts were already "gone" (assimilated / diversified into local tribes) when the Romans (which were writers) arrived. So we don't even have roman writing about the celtic customs.
For example, there is are excavations around https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keltenwelt_am_Glauberg and AFAIK it's still not clear if that area is mostly a castle, or if it was mostly some cultic thing -> nothing written, not even in clay or chiseled into stone.
Similarly, in this article https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_(Arch%C3%A4ologie) that describes the salt mining in Hallstadt since the bronze age there is only so much that they know.
So, did they use torches? They have decayed over this time.
We know however that they had some kind of meat industry at Hallstein. They had plenty of salt, and so they used that to make meat durable. Animal skulls survived the times ...
nephihaha 3 hours ago
"This is one of the problems with what the Celts did: they didn't write."
That is a common misconception. We don't have much in the way of ancient Celtic writing, or even enough, but we do have some . The best known example is the Coligny Calendar. Some of the Celtic peoples used the Greek script and variants. There is also debate about how old Ogham is (although AFAIK there is no evidence of it from Hallstatt and La Tene).
I would not be surprised if some pre-Roman Celtic writing does turn up from this region at some point.
wolfi1 4 hours ago
IIRC it was torches there seem to be several archaeological finds
LordHeini 3 hours ago
They used wood splinters.
There is a german wikipedia article with pictures.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kienspan
Usually they used spruce wood because it does not create soot.