21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 6, negatives

1.                  Negation of verbs coordinates with aspect to produce several effects that translators have failed to capture. Jowett, in particular, applies his negatives to the wrong thing in sentences.

2.                  Grammatical  descriptions are, as usual, inexact. They also suffer from examples which eliminate too much context and sometimes are not cited to “live” examples.

3.                  What is being negated takes careful inspection of context due to the rounding of periods. This is partly what causes Jowett’s problems; he does not understand this rhetorical feature.

Grammars claim a strict association between ou and its derivatives, or mi and its derivatives, with morphology, which does not exist.

How to use negatives:

1.                  Negations precede the word they apply to.

2.                  An expression can have multiple negations. Since English can’t, translators have to do extra work or they leave a false impression.

3.                  Negations can be categorical (ou) or partitive (mi).

4.                  Negation of an oblique defines something as not probable.

Negation of verbs by aspect:

1.                  Imperfective eventive: negation of an action.  Negation of a conceptual would be a promise not to do something if conjugated.

2.                  Progressive conceptual: negation of a situation. It will take inspection of context to determine whether authors negate progressive eventives.

3.                  Perfective eventive: negation of a result was identified in lesson 77.  I have not seen a negated perfective conceptual in the first book of Thucydides.

Notice that negations don’t work the same way as impersonal gerundives; in perfective the eventive can be negated to achieve the right effect but the conceptual can’t, as far as my observations show. You Greek geeks need to tell me if you find negations I don’t list here.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 5, imperatives

Classical Greek has three types of order-giving.

1.         Indirect, using an auxiliary verb like keleuo.

2.         Indirect using an impersonal gerundive to indicate an action that is due and owing.

3.         Imperatives which are rare and may have a nuance that relates them to Biblical Hebrew.

In Biblical Hebrew, true imperatives indicate whether the person who uses them has authority to do so or not, but it does so in the context of a narrative. Read the story of Avraham buying Machpelah: Efron uses multiple imperatives, but none of them work out. He is not authorized to issue imperatives to Avraham.

Thucydides seems to use imperatives more to emphasize how wrong-headed somebody is. The best examples are the ultimata issued by the Korinthians, supposedly in support of the treaty that existed during the events of Book I, but contradicted by the fact that treaty members get to vote on actions as explained in the same book. I hope that you Greek geeks can offer up examples and citations from your favorite author with evidence that the imperatives were carried out. This would be a demonstration that the person issuing the ultimatum had authority over the people he issued it to.

Or, you could tell us about examples where the imperative was carried out. It’s entirely possible that keleuo in particular is used in all of these contexts. I am in Book III of Thucydides and haven’t seen examples of this yet.

Imperatives are all indicative and show aspect:

1.                  Imperfective: perform an action.

2.                  Progressive: get into a situation or habit.

3.                  Perfective: produce a result. Periphrastic and very rare.

The fact that imperatives refer to an action that has not yet been carried out creates a cognitive dissonance in the old tense system, particularly for aorist, perfect and pluperfect. In our aspectual system, with imperfective being the default verb form, the cognitive dissonance disappears.

In Thucydides II 81.1 we have keleuontes with an impersonal gerundive, “ordering him to X”. Use of an impersonal gerundive gets us two things: one is that the action is due and owing upon receipt of the order; the other is that possibly it can’t be carried out immediately or the person issuing the order has no authority, thus it is indefinite. LSJ does not say that keleuo must take an impersonal gerundive, but all its examples work out that way.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 4, gerundives

Greek does not use a conjugated verb in every phrase or clause.

• --  Equational sentences can leave out the copula, a feature Greek has in common with other aspectual languages like Russian, Chinese, and the Semitic languages.
• ---When an author chooses not to be definite about an action, he uses a gerundive. The lack of definition may involve persons, places, and timing, but gerundives either describe or substantivize the action.

Every vector that applies to verbs applies to gerundives, except certainty; all gerundives are indicative modality.

Personal gerundives indicate person, number, and gender and agree with some antecedent. They act as adjectives, describing actions, or as substantives, usually with a definite article.

Personal gerundives have standard indications of voice:

1.                  -antes, -ontes, -untes for executive voice

2.                  -entes for passive voice

3.                  -men- for base voice

Impersonal gerundives have all the vectors of a verb except certainty or person/gender/number agreement. All impersonal gerundives are indicative modality.

There are four sets of endings for impersonal gerundives:

1.                  -sthai for all base voice i.g.s

2.                  -ein is the progressive conceptual i.g in executive voice. There is no progressive eventive i.g..

3.                  -sai is the imperfective conceptual in executive voice.

4.                  ­-ein is the imperfective eventive for executive voice.

5.                  -nai is the ending for the perfective conceptual executive voice. There seems to be no perfective eventive i.g..

Impersonal gerundives are used

1.                  To substitute for conjugated verbs as the name of an action.

2.                  Complement of:

a.                   Dunamai – able

b.                  Dei – possible

c.                   Khri – necessary

d.                  Dei or khri -- obligatory

3.                  Instead of an imperative when an action is due and owing based on specified considerations. Avoids issuing an ultimatum or giving a nuance of immediacy.

4.                  Reported speech and question in the same aspect as in the original question, sometimes using the imperfective conceptual for a promise.

5.                  In a result clause starting with hos[te].

6.                  In purpose clauses. The i.g. will be the complement of another verb. It may have what Hurrian calls an instrumental/ablative, which is an -on case expression, and be negated using mi to express “so that X does not happen”.

7.                  As the complement of a conjugated verb or personal gerundive in an anti-passive. There may be a subject for the impersonal gerundive; it will be in whatever case is needed either for verbal nuance or to connect the anti-passive to an antecedent.

In Book II.80 of Thucydides I came across the following structure:

βουλόμενοι [object] καταστρέψασθαι

It’s obvious why you have a base voice for the personal gerundive; the planning wasn’t undertaken just to do planning. It was undertaken for the sake of something else. But that is also in base voice, not executive voice, and it has a lower level of definiteness, an impersonal gerundive. So while the people involved might have deliberately performed the action of the complement, they weren’t there yet, they were only in the planning stages, and that’s also why it’s an i.g. not a p.g. In fact the planned action did not succeed. This may look like a place where Thucydides should have used an epistemic, but that is for not signing up to the truth of something which later does turn out to be false.

In this case, Thucydides is completely certain about the planning and its intended goal, and he knows with complete certainty that it did not pan out. So does his audience. He doesn’t have to mince words with them by using the epistemic.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 3, definitions

Last week I just listed the skeleton for defining verbs. This post gives brief definitions for terms in the verbal system.

1.                  Aspect – nuance of verbal meaning such as simple action, habit, or result.

2.                  Voice – also called diathesis, carries the nuance of deliberate decision or intransitivity, and base voice for everything else

3.                  Definiteness – stating the action, describing the action, or substantivizing the action

4.                  Certainty – knowledge of whether the action occurred or is likely to occur

5.                  Transitivity – whether the grammatical subject of the verb is the agent or the logical object

6.                  Verb class – ending of the dictionary entry and whether the verb root contracts during conjugation

Each of these vectors has three parts, although under aspect we have two flavors in each part.

1.                  Aspect

a.                   Imperfective – implies nothing about result, which may fade away or be reversed; used for motion in alternating directions and often for imperatives intended to produce an action.

b.                  Progressive – formation or existence of a habit or situation; used for imperatives intended to produce a state.

c.                   Perfective – action creating a permanent result. Imperative is periphrastic and very rare.

2.                  Voice

a.                   Executive – action deliberately undertaken to produce its ordinary outcome. Exists only for non-mai verbs

b.                  Passive – intransitive action in a specific structure. Exists only for -mai verbs and imperfective non-mai verbs.

c.                   Base – all other uses

3.                  Definiteness

a.                   Conjugation – statement of the action

b.                  Personal gerundive – description of the action

c.                   Impersonal gerundive – substantivized action or complement expressing purpose; used for actions that are due and owing, a quasi-imperative lacking the nuance of immediacy.

4.                  Certainty

a.                   Indicative – direct statement of action, including imperatives.

b.                  Oblique – statement of highly probable action or used in an attempt to persuade.

c.                   Epistemic – speaker is not heavily invested in the truth of what is said.

5.                  Transitivity

a.                   Transitive – agent and object are distinct and use different cases, often -oi and -ous cases respectively. Case of object affects meaning of the verb+predicate phrase.

b.                  Ergative (intransitive imperfective or perfective) structure – object in -oi case, agent in hupo plus genitive. verb has an “aor. 2” form but can be in any aspect as we saw in III 11.2.

c.                   Intransitive (passive voice) structure – a noun in -oi case which is both subject and object.

6.                  Verb class

a.                   -mi – high-frequency verbs like give, take, go, “be”; histimi and tithimi have intransitive imperfective and perfective morphology.

b.                  -mai – no executive voice; if there is a non-mai verb with the same meaning, the -mai verb will be used to evaluate the action. Formerly called “deponent”, some -mai dictionary entries actually belong to suppletive verbs.

c.                   non-mai verbs with all voices, except that progressive and perfective have no passive. Some like timao and poieo lose vowels in the 1^st or 2^nd syllable of the root

The flavors of aspect are eventive, which is often marked by augment, or conceptual.

Some verbal vectors require a specific structure, as well as specific morphology:

1.                  Ergative – a verbal plus hupo plus the agent in the -on case, where the verb is a specifically intransitive form (“2^nd aorist” or “2^nd perfect”), with an object in the -oi noun case

2.                  Passive – specific verbal morphology with a noun in the -oi case as both subject and object.

3.                  Anti-passive – a verbal plus an impersonal gerundive which is its complement; the object of the verbal is the subject of the i.g. and comes between them.

Mendel Beilis -- it's always something

One of the things I learned when I was translating the 1913 trial transcript, was something I brought up in my "murder mystery" version of the trial, The Anvil. Some of the things that came out at trial appeared to rely on forgeries in 1912, that failed to take into account calendar variations from 1911.

This would be understandable if the people creating the forgeries weren't literate. The illiterate witnesses who testified up to about day 10 lived in a subculture that didn't buy newspapers, which put the date on the front page. They didn't have bank accounts, although they might have postal accounts like the British. So they didn't get those nice checkbook calendar inserts to help date a check. 

They mostly associated events with seasons -- "it was still cold", "that was in the summer" -- or with religious feasts. But in the Russian Orthodox calendar there are a lot of movable feasts and at one point the judge had to verify that the Feast of the Forty Martyrs was March 9. 

So whenever the prosecution wanted to nail down a date, they were in trouble. They had to ask leading questions and you can almost see the witness shrug when he or she says "I don't know."

You can't forge trial documents if you're illiterate. You can, however, do it despite your ignorance.

So, for example, on Day 2, Alexey's teacher testifies sbout a register of his absences. It turns out that the dates given for the register a) are copied from February or b) only make sense for the same months in 1912. One example is reporting Andrey absent on March 27. There are two problems with that. One is that it was a Sunday in 1911; he didn't go to school on February 27, which was also a Sunday, but was reported absent on February 28, a Monday. The other is that of course Andrey was absent on March 27; that was the date of his funeral. In 1912, March 27 was a Tuesday. Looking up from his writing, the forger might see this, but obviously he never thought to look at the 1911 dates -- or the history of the case which would have showed it was the funeral date. I talk about this in my "murder mystery" version of my translation, The Anvil.

Last week I was looking over a posting about the Day 8 testimony of Lyuda Cheberyak, which was cooked up by the government to try to get a conviction. And I stopped and stared at the part where I showed that Passover was weeks after Andrey's murder. 

In 1911, Passover was April 12, one month after Andrey's death. There was no way to keep blood liquid for a month, let alone the fact that the blood libel is exactly that, a lie. In fact blood won't stay liquid for more than a few hours. Jewish law knows this perfectly well; Mishnah Yoma 4:2 discusses the actions taken to keep blood from congealing during the Yom Kippur service. 

But in cooking up the murder case, the government never stopped to think about whether the blood should be liquid or not. The blood libel doesn't say. It was cooked up hundreds of years ago by Christians with slander on their minds, not by people interested in dotting i's and crossing t's.

The government never produced evidence of catching Andrey's blood. They had no receptacle for capturing it as evidence. The Christian medical experts showed that only the head wounds produced a flow of blood, which was caught in the boy's hair and shirt. And in fact most of Andrey's blood remained in his body; the liver was not exsanguinated and the positions of the wounds on his body would not have allowed a heavy flow of blood. The heart was not autopsied but turned into a preserved specimen and no conclusion could be drawn from it.

Nobody has commented on this that I know of, but then hardly anybody has read the entire transcript, let alone associated documentation like the work of Tager. The point is that the government started with a theory of the case and forged or planted or suborned the evidence they thought would make twelve muzhiks vote to convict. They never stopped to examine whether their theory COULD be proven; they weren't competent to do that. This ought to sound familiar after the dozens of US lawyers who have filed court cases without evidence and even without logic as a basis -- and been caught, and been sanctioned. And maybe watching these lawyers get sanctioned over the last two years is what made the timing on the Beilis case leap out at me.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 2, strictly verbs

To recap. I describe the Greek verb system by multiple vectors:

1.                  Aspect

2.                  Voice

3.                  Definiteness

4.                  Certainty

5.                  Transitivity

6.                  Verb class

Each of these vectors has three parts, although under aspect we have two flavors in each part.

1.                  Aspect

a.                   Imperfective

b.                  Progressive

c.                   Perfective

2.                  Voice

a.                   Executive

b.                  Passive

c.                   Base

3.                  Definiteness

a.                   Conjugation

b.                  Personal gerundive

c.                   Impersonal gerundive

4.                  Certainty

a.                   Indicative

b.                  Oblique

c.                   Epistemic

5.                  Transitivity

a.                   Transitive

b.                  Ergative (intransitive imperfective or perfective in executive or base voice)

c.                   Intransitive (passive voice)

6.                  Verb class

a.                   -mi

b.                  -mai

c.                   non-mai, some of which drop vowels (either 1^st or 2^nd syllable of root), and -mai verbs that are actually suppletives

The flavors of aspect are eventive and conceptual.

Some verbal vectors require a specific structure, as well as specific morphology:

1.                  Ergative

2.                  Passive

3.                  Anti-passive

Knitting -- another Norwegian tradition?

I can't remember how I found the first Valldal pattern I ever saw, but so far I've found five patterns.

Most of them are cardigans but here is a child's jumper. It's pattern #3 by Sandnes Garn, owners of the copyright for the Mariusgenser. Here are search results on their site

https://www.sandnes-garn.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=valldal

Sandnes also has a pattern called Myrdal, but it's very much like the Valldal pattern, see below. I found three other patterns, apparently quite old, and very much like each other, all cardigans, and all very much like some of the Valldal patterns. I was able to give you specific things to watch for so that you would know if you were looking at a Setesdal or a Fana; I can't do that 

with these two styles. If they really are separate. 

I sent a link to some of the patterns to Arne and Carlos. These aren't shown on any of their videos.

At any rate, if you weren't turned on by any of the traditional Norwegian patterns I showed you, maybe this one will get you started. You can find some at the archive where I found Carlos' grandmother's Dovre kofte pattern; you have to take out a membership to get anything beyond the photo. It's 189 kroner or just under $20 for a membership. 

https://koftearkivet.no/suf-1163-valldal/

This link goes to a cardigan that is tagged as 1960-1979, which doesn't sound as if it's a tradition-- but there's a video about the Icelandic lopapeysa jumper which says that tradition goes back to the -- 1950s! But that's for another post.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 1, verbs

Friday I went through the 44 or so posts I had written for this thread but not posted. I found 11 with fairly new information, but they mostly had to do with conditionals. So I decided to go straight to the summaries of the grammar I've been giving you. It's 20 posts, so we're near the end. 

The Classical Greek verbal system as used in Thucydides' Peloponnesian War is aspectual, not tense based.

1.                  Aspect – nuance of verbal meaning such as simple action, habit, or result.

2.                  Voice – also called diathesis, carries the nuance of deliberate decision or intransitivity, and base voice for everything else

3.                  Definiteness – stating the action, describing the action, or substantivizing the action

4.                  Certainty – knowledge of whether the action occurred or is likely to occur

5.                  Transitivity – whether the grammatical subject of the verb is the agent or the logical object

6.                  Verb class – ending of the dictionary entry and whether the verb root contracts during conjugation

Each of these vectors has three parts, although under aspect we have two flavors in each part.

1.                  Aspect

a.                   Imperfective – implies nothing about result, which may fade away or be reversed; used for motion in alternating directions and often for imperatives intended to produce an action.

b.                  Progressive – formation or existence of a habit or situation; used for imperatives intended to produce a state.

c.                   Perfective – action creating a permanent result. Imperative is periphrastic and very rare.

2.                  Voice

a.                   Executive – action deliberately undertaken to produce its ordinary outcome. Exists only for non-mai verbs

b.                  Passive – intransitive action in a specific structure. Exists only for -mai verbs and imperfective non-mai verbs.

c.                   Base – all other uses

3.                  Definiteness

a.                   Conjugation – statement of the action

b.                  Personal gerundive – description of the action

c.                   Impersonal gerundive – substantivized action or complement expressing purpose; used for actions that are due and owing, a quasi-imperative lacking the nuance of immediacy.

4.                  Certainty

a.                   Indicative – direct statement of action, including imperatives.

b.                  Oblique – statement of highly probable action or used in an attempt to persuade.

c.                   Epistemic – speaker is not heavily invested in the truth of what is said.

5.                  Transitivity

a.                   Transitive – agent and object are distinct and use different cases, often -oi and -ous cases respectively. Case of object affects meaning of the verb+predicate phrase.

b.                  Ergative (intransitive imperfective or perfective) structure – object in -oi case, agent in hupo plus genitive. verb has an “aor. 2” form but can be in any aspect as we saw in III 11.2.

c.                   Intransitive (passive voice) structure – a noun in -oi case which is both subject and object.

6.                  Verb class

a.                   -mi – high-frequency verbs like give, take, go, “be”; a number of -mi verbs like histimi and tithimi have intransitive imperfective and perfective morphology.

b.                  -mai – no executive voice; if there is a non-mai verb with the same meaning, the -mai verb will be used to evaluate the action. Formerly called “deponent”, some -mai dictionary entries actually belong to suppletive verbs.

c.                   non-mai verbs with all voices, except that progressive and perfective have no passive. Some like timao and poieo lose vowels in the 1^st or 2^nd syllable of the root.

The flavors of aspect are eventive, which is often marked by augment, or conceptual.

Some verbal vectors require a specific structure, as well as specific morphology:

1.                  Ergative – a verbal plus hupo plus the agent in the -on case, where the verb is a specifically intransitive form (“2^nd aorist” or “2^nd perfect”), with an object in the -oi noun case

2.                  Passive – specific verbal morphology with a noun in the -oi case as both subject and object.

3.                  Anti-passive – a verbal plus an impersonal gerundive which is its complement; the object of the verbal is the subject of the i.g. and comes between them.

Knitting -- ain't technology grand!

Did you ever see knitwear in a historical movie on Youtube -- you might even be able to do this with your pay-per-view streaming service -- and want to weep because it made your fingers itch to knit a copy?

Well, technology can help. I did this with three things from Arne and Carlos videos.

I pulled up the video with the Dovrekofta leaflet that had the grandmother's notes on it; this was in Youtube on my laptop.

I halted the video at the point where Carlos holds up the leaflet.

I used Google Lens to get an image of it with my camera on my Pixel 4.

And voila! the search function gave me the name of the leaflet, Dovrekofta 493.

On my laptop I used Google search and found an archive of Norwegian knitting patterns, and here is the actual leaflet (minus the notes of course).

https://koftegruppa.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/SE-493-Dovrekofta.pdf

I did this with a couple of the jumpers that Arne and Carolos wore. One is the Knut pattern designed for Rowan yarns. It is basically an Icelandic pattern, with the round yoke that goes over the shoulders and has rays of motifs. If you have a Ravelry account you can find it there, too.

https://knitrowan.com/products/knut

The other is the Redd Barna Knit for Ukraine pattern on the Arne and Carlos site.

https://shop.arnecarlos.com/product/reddbarna-unisex-sweater/

Now that I have this technology, I can go back to where I got interested in British traditional designs. When I was watching the Time Team videos on Youtube, I wanted to weep over the great British jumpers the archaeologists wore, and I couldn't imagine getting down literally in the trenches with those things on. Maybe they took them off for the work and put them on for the camera. But maybe they knew where to buy replacements. 

Anyway, Arne and Carlos have a Twitter account and I tweeted to them the link to the sweater leaflet.

Just cos we like traditional hand-knitting doesn't mean we're Luddites, now does it?

21st Century Classical Greek -- more miscellany

Book I section 53. I’m going to kill off another old concept and point out more of Jowett’s transpositions and other failings.

ἔδοξεν οὖν αὐτοῖς ἄνδρας ἐς κελήτιον ἐσβιβάσαντας ἄνευ κηρυκείου προσπέμψαι τοῖς Ἀθηναίοις καὶ πεῖραν ποιήσασθαι. πέμψαντές τε ἔλεγον τοιάδε.

[2] ‘ἀδικεῖτε, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, πολέμου ἄρχοντες καὶ σπονδὰς λύοντες: ἡμῖν γὰρ πολεμίους τοὺς ἡμετέρους τιμωρουμένοις ἐμποδὼν ἵστασθε ὅπλα ἀνταιρόμενοι. εἰ δ᾽ ὑμῖν γνώμη ἐστὶ κωλύειν τε ἡμᾶς ἐπὶ Κέρκυραν ἢ ἄλλοσε εἴ ποι βουλόμεθα πλεῖν καὶ τὰς σπονδὰς λύετε, ἡμᾶς τούσδε πρώτους λαβόντες χρήσασθε ὡς πολεμίοις.’

[3] οἱ μὲν δὴ τοιαῦτα εἶπον: τῶν δὲ Κερκυραίων τὸ μὲν στρατόπεδον ὅσον ἐπήκουσεν ἀνεβόησεν εὐθὺς λαβεῖν τε αὐτοὺς καὶ ἀποκτεῖναι, οἱ δὲ Ἀθηναῖοι τοιάδε ἀπεκρίναντο.

[4] ‘οὔτε ἄρχομεν πολέμου, ὦ ἄνδρες Πελοποννήσιοι, οὔτε τὰς σπονδὰς λύομεν, Κερκυραίοις δὲ τοῖσδε ξυμμάχοις οὖσι βοηθοὶ ἤλθομεν. εἰ μὲν οὖν ἄλλοσέ ποι βούλεσθε πλεῖν, οὐ κωλύομεν: εἰ δὲ ἐπὶ Κέρκυραν πλευσεῖσθε ἢ ἐς τῶν ἐκείνων τι χωρίων, οὐ περιοψόμεθα κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν.’

Learn κῆρυξ in Wiktionary. Also see White, page 222, section 743 for similar declensions.

Heralds were under the protection of Hermes and carried a caduceus to show it. Sending these people out without a caduceus made whatever they said suspect since they had no symbol of being official messengers.

At the start of subsection 2, what flavor of progressive is adikeite? Is it a habit or does it imply a series of actions? Give me your comments with why you picked the flavor you did. Do they also apply to istasthe later in the subsection?

And why is this labeled causal in Word Tool? There’s a history behind that. In old grammars you will find the term factitive which straddles the boundary between transitive and causal. It’s totally useless in this situation, however, for the use of isasthe can be translated reflexively. So I am never going to use the term factitive again. You understand that causal is a meaningless category because every verb has uses which are not causal, just as every verb which can be translated in the sense of fearing may have other meanings that don’t fall into that category.

Notice luete later in this subsection which is progressive of some flavor: Jowett translates it as a future tense even though it doesn’t have the sigma imperfective infix. One of Goodwin’s uses for progressive is “attempt”, and that may have been what Jowett was thinking. But earlier in the subsection Jowett says that the Korinthians think the Athinaians have already violated the treaty. The only way luete could be taken in a future sense is as a progressive eventive, repeated actions violating the treaty. This comes pretty close to the imperfective use that I talked about some time ago, the one that mirrors Hebrew ehyeh asher ehyeh, but choosing an eventive designation covers all different actions that violate the treaty.

Jowett fails to translate euthus in subsection 3: the Kerkyraeans immediately cried out kill them.

He also reverses the conditionals at the end of subsection 4. The Athinaians offer the carrot “we won’t touch you if you sail anywhere else” and then say “but if you attack our allies we won’t suffer it to the extent possible.” Jowett also fails to translate this as a negative.

I'm just saying -- intelligence is not the same as information

So I found a bunch of science books on Openstax and I've been refreshing what I know about science. I think I have finally memorized acid/base, ox/redox. But I also found cases of scientists making statements that fall outside their fields, never imagining they could be wrong and not thinking about the consequences of what they say.

First up was a statement in a text on geology about mammals dominating the earth. Never happened. Can't happen. First, the bottom of the food pyramid on dry land is not animals. It's plants. There's a 10% reduction in available energy as you work your way up the food pyramid. The mammals may be on the top but they get less than 50% of the available energy in any ecosystem. As well as being far less numerous than plants. And also far less numerous in both species and individuals compared to insects and one-celled life. 

The second was an astronomy text claiming that the Cretaceous extinction wiped out plant life. Can't happen and let life on dry land survive. Two things. While some mammals hibernate now, where's the evidence that their Cretaceous ancestors hibernated? (or estivated) Second, as soon as mammals come out of lockdown, they have to find food within a couple of days. Not just any food but what they are adapted to eating. A carnivorous mammal that eats all the re-awakened mammals it finds will die, if the re-awakened mammals don't have their food -- which is plants. If they are adapted to fruit, there has to be fruit. If all plant life on dry land was wiped out, there could be buried seeds. But the other problem is they have to be buried near the re-awakened mammals or the mammals die before they can find the food.

Part two, acid rain. By the time mammals re-awakened -- if any of them went dormant, which the text does not discuss -- they needed water that wouldn't poison them. Their ancestors drank sweet water, not salt water or acid water. And dry land life dies of thirst faster than starvation. So while I don't doubt there was acid rain, there was at worst a gradient: some areas escaped acid rain and the acidity was lower around them and so on up the gradient to places wiped out by acid rain. If there were any.

Part three, birds. Birds cannot survive without eating more than their body weight most days, and some are food specific. While bug-eating birds are opportunistic and will eat berries or suet when bugs are dead (in the winter), seed and nut birds are not opportunistic. If plants were completely destroyed, these birds would die out pretty quickly. The claim that plant life was destroyed is tantamount to saying that Archaeopteryx and Hesperornis and so on left no descendants among modern birds. That is NOT what this website says.

https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/birds/birdfr.html

I realize that most of our familiar songbirds developed at the same time as humans emerged from the apes. However, the ancestry of ostriches goes back further than the Cretaceous disaster. That's impossible if they had no food to eat or all the water was poisoned with acid.

So when you are writing about your specialty field and you come to the point where it crosses boundaries with something you know nothing about, 1) stop and consult an expert in that field; 2) think hard before you set finger to key or speak into your recorder app; and 3) have that expert read what you wrote and tell you "no, it can't work like that because..."

It ought to be pretty embarrassing for Openstax that a non-specialist can pick up on the impracticality of what their experts wrote. They ought to pull their texts and edit them for more such mistakes. As long as people are allowed to publish texts that show they don't know what they're talking about but nevertheless talked about it, stupid ideas are going to persist. Kind of like what I said on my Gibbon page.

I'm just saying...