09:20 pm: A thought for Nanowrimo
I have had what may be an idea for Nanowrimo this year.
Supposing that a native of the 21st century were cast back fifteen hundred years or so: what, in all seriousness (if one was not a Connecticut Yankee) would constitute your superiority over the time locals?
Most modern education and training would be dependent on modern science and technology. A doctor trained in the 21st century who was landed back in the 6th would probably find most useful a basic knowledge of germ theory - not something you actually have to be a doctor to know. How many doctors could manufacture a general or a local anaesthetic from 6th century technology? How many people trained in modern surgery could operate when they had no anaesthetic to use on their patients? How much modern medicine is mostly about learning the modern pharmacology - and how many 21st-century doctors could recognise anything useful in 6th century materials?
I know how to make bread in a gas or electric and have an idea of how to raise a wild yeast so that the bread rises. (I've never made sourdough leaven from scratch, but in principle I know how that works.) But most 6th century people didn't eat much bread because it required an oven to bake it in, and in any case I know enough to know that baking bread in a wood-fired oven was a skill in itself - given the properly made oven I'd probably be able to learn how, but I have no notion how I'd make one. I can make the most basic kind of bread quite well - mix ground wheat or buckwheat or oatmeal or corn, cook over an even heat on a flat griddle - but even that I've only made on a gas flame and a (relatively) modern cast iron griddle, which provides a steady heat and an even surface. Virtually everything else I know how to make is much more dependent on modern gadgets or supplies.
Gardening? Well, given a modern iron spade and a supply of good earth and seeds from packets, I can grow things, sometimes.
I'm literate, which would be a useful skill in the 6th century, assuming anyone could get over my being female: but although I could probably learn to understand Old English, I would need to learn all over again how to
write it. And any other part of the world would be even worse. Being literate isn't much use if no one else can read what you can write. I could teach children how to read and write modern English, of course....
...but the one skill I have which could potentially be worldchanging (and would certainly be an highly-employable skill) is arithmetic. It's not that I'm that good at arithmetic by 21st-century standards: but being able to use (what we call) the Arabic system of numerals to do calculations, at a time when the invention of zero was still being discussed philosophically in Hindustan, would give me an advantage - and knowing the techniques of calculation which either no one did yet or only a few mathematical scholars, would be an advantage that no one could beat until, well... either I taught other people or they learned from me.
How fast would Arabic numerals catch on if one rather odd clerk was using them? It took two or three centuries for the system to filter into Europe via Arabia, and a couple of centuries before it got out of Hindustan. But everywhere it's gone, it's taken over eventually. How fast would it take over when it was just being
used?
Anyway. That's my thought. Hapless 21st-century-ist in 6th-century island, attempting to earn a living as a secular clerk... or possibly deciding to become a nun, atheist or not.
Current Mood: 
artistic
,
writing
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