A good day for all the good folks in D.C. Met area. The District of Columbia and its suburbs in Virginia and Maryland are a living example of a global melting pot of ideologies, races, ethnicities and mental capabilities.

One of the best examples of this are the Washington Nationals baseball team, World Champions of a game basically only played in one hemisphere of the world. They come from a variety of backgrounds. To me the most interesting factoid (I think), that two of the players for the Nationals are named after two of the sons of Hamilcar Barca, the famous Carthagenian General of the 1st Punic War. His sons were named Hannibal and Hasdrubal (Mago, was the name of the 3rd) and they fought the Romans (Latins), for supremacy of the Mediterranean. They were descendants of the Phoenicians, who thousands of years before Rome ruled through trade and war, like US, a vast territory and introduced a method of assigning repeatable sounds to create meaning through various combinations to the objects and things of the world. In the ancient world a “Lingua Phonetica”, was used across many cultures for trade.

They originally had 28 sounds and later the Greeks took those up and dropped two of them, leaving most of Western culture with the Phonetic (Phoenecian) alphabet.

So, here are two modern Hispanic (Latin) baseball players with names from ancient Carthagenian Generals, whose language was Punic. Rome destroyed all of Carthage, plowed it under with salt so nothing could grow there and killed all who spoke the Punic language, so I find it interesting that those names have cropped up in the 21st century through mostly Latin/Native ancestral lines.

Asdrubal Cabrera and Anibal Sanchez, are world champion baseball players and their first names go back over 6,000 years to the once mighty traders of the Mediterranean, Eastern and Norther Atlantic and Indian Oceans who brought language to the Greeks and much of the Mediterranean while the dominant (ish), Europeans were still learning how to sew furs together for warmth, so they could spread out since the ice age was still slowly receding northward.

I love seeing these patterns of how humans spread and evolved and converted those sound making capabilities into forming the various minds that process the information of the senses in quite different ways.

Each one insisting that their way of processing is the best. I think somewhere along the line we sort of dropped the ball.

Speaking of which, there’s the Nationals who dropped fewer balls, but had more “…bals” than the Astros (another name to conjure with:)