ArchangeI posted:

You don't want to be known as a regiment that is difficult to work with (incidentially, do Oberisten etc. get some sort of reputation on the mercenary market? "Thats Hans von Goonenstein, he's got an eye for cavalry work that one, but dear God does he overcharge you for one measly regiment ").

quote:

But bitching about culture is very much a thing in different circles - I remember reading a letter from a French aristocrat visiting extended family in Germany and complaining that German dinner etiquette was so horrible because there was toast after toast after toast and you always had to stand up and the food was poo poo and the wine sucked and oh it was horrible, they are barbarians, barbarians I tell you...

Trin Tragula posted:

How did your regiments get their blokes? Volunteers? Impressment? Bit of both? Did they have any kind of inherent regional identity? ^^^

feedmegin posted:

I could be totally wrong, but I'm guessing the guys from your period who are rocking the multiple languages are more likely to be management/officers/etc? While presumably the rank and file might only speak German but that's ok because they only need to speak German since they're only talking to each other and maybe whichever peasant they're looting at the time, their bosses are the ones who deal with everyone else, and it's the same with the poilus in WW1.

Cyrano4747 posted:

I think Archangel is on to something but to elaborate a bit:

With the construction of the modern nation state in the 18th-19th century (especially the 19th) you also have a major push towards creating a monolingual society. When central government becomes that important having everything in a single language of governance becomes a big deal. Eventually this gets swept up in increasingly strong national identities. The French are a perfect example of this. What we consider French today is really just the dialect that was dominant in central France and Paris. In the 19th century there was a huge push in the educational system to force children to learn that version of French to the detriment of Provencal/Savoyard/Bretan/etc. You have additional pressures as the bureaucracy becomes more and more important as a source of employment and income for the rising middle class. If you're a man from Gascony that wants his son to grow up and get a good job in government you sure as poo poo want him speaking Parisian French perfectly and really don't give two shits if he can understand 100% of what his grandmother is saying.

In Hegel's time? Even languages that we consider extremely consolidated today were dialectic as gently caress and entire sub-regions had distinctly different languages. This is an era when you could drive from London to Cardiff and hear people speaking English, Cornish, and Welsh, and that's ignoring dialects of each. I have no proof of this, but I strongly suspect that being at least somewhat multi-lingual was much more common, even for your average John, Johann, or Jacques, than it was today simply because it was much more necessary and people grew up hearing a lot more of them. Think less people speaking in perfect foreign tongues about complex topics and more the roughly functional breed of multilingualism that you can hear in a lot of working class first generation immigrants.

As an aside, it strikes me that the countries that still retain the strongest dialects are those where that process of centralization in the 19th century was either imperfect or started really late. Germany is the prime example of this in my mind and to this day it's extremely common to find Germans who speak both perfect High German but also a strong regional dialect that they grew up with - and anyone who says dialects are easy has never tried to understand an Ost Frissian.

quote:

...and anyone who says dialects are easy has never tried to understand an Ost Frissian.

nothing to seehere posted:

How did this process evolve in England? Like, in Wales/Cornwall/Scotland there were attempts to marginalize native languages, but was there any effort in England to get people in the South East/West country/North to speak more like londoners?

Jobbo_Fett posted:

WW2 Data

Back with another Japanese update, the 20mm Projectiles! What types did the IJN use? Which projectile is called the "Bag-Breaker" and why? Click to find out!

HEY GAL posted:

Also in my time the language of administration doesn't have to have anything to do with "ethnic identity" because nobody thinks your language should be organically related to your ethnicity in the same way 19th century Romantics do. (Some Czechs get mad about having to speak or listen to German, though, and resent the fact that most emperors never bother to learn Czech.)

For instance, the language of Imperial administration and a bunch of Spanish government stuff in this century is Italian. Yeah, there are tons of Italians in the HRE's/Spain's army or civil service, but not nearly enough that that would have been everyone's first language.

Not only do I study in Saxony, I reenact with a bunch of Saxons, at least one of which is monolingual in Saxon. His word for "also"/"too", which is "auch" in Standard German, sounds exactly like "oh." Now imagine we're all tired and he's yelling at us to maintain our formation and go stab some Imperialists or whatever.

Trin Tragula posted:

^^^ A big part of it is also that the guys who struggled the most are either conscripts or volunteers who'd signed up to fight in an explicitly local thing like a Pals battalion (and the vast majority certainly of British regiments had strong local ties to their recruiting areas). How did your regiments get their blokes? Volunteers? Impressment? Bit of both? Did they have any kind of inherent regional identity? ^^^

Apologies for the break. I was getting excited about politics; that's what happens when you've always said "I'd get involved if my MP was the party leader but they'll never let him" and it comes to pass.

100 Years Ago

Gallipoli is still reassuringly, hopelessly awful, which gives us an easy topic for a day with no new developments. Sir Ian Hamilton is trying to dodge an increasing number of political bullets heading his way (you ain't seen nothing yet, mate), medical officers are struggling with the moral dilemma of wanting to invalid everyone out of the trenches but needing to leave some men there to hold them, privates are just getting very depressed about the whole thing. Meanwhile, Herbert Sulzbach is usually a good candidate to provide balance on a depressing day, and today is no different as he enjoys a nice visit from a friend.

Sir Ian Hamilton posted:

Napoleon is the only man who has waged a world war in the world as we know it to-day. Napoleon said, I think it was on the famous raft, “Who holds Constantinople is master of the world.”

Tevery Best posted:

Like Cyrano said, e-mail them and just ask what your options are. Or, if you prefer, I can try calling them for you and asking some general questions.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Cyrano4747 posted:

I have no proof of this, but I strongly suspect that being at least somewhat multi-lingual was much more common, even for your average John, Johann, or Jacques, than it was today simply because it was much more necessary and people grew up hearing a lot more of them.

HEY GAL posted:

So, there's a trial from the Mansfeld Regiment books where a dude was sitting on the stoop in front of his quarters and a local ran past and shouted "Ai! Soldate! Becce futui!" and it turns out half of that is not even italian but a dialect they speak in/near Busto Arsizio called Bustocce, only it was misspelled by the regimental secretary (it should be beché i think). The other half is perfect Latin.

"Hey soldier! I gently caress your mouth!"

The soldier understood enough to grab his sword and run after the guy. He was convicted of murder because he kept attacking the local even after the latter tried to hide, and after that point it wasn't a fight any more.

SlothfulCobra posted:

Wasn't impressment fairly common in the navy? I thought that was half the point of all the beatings.

feedmegin posted:

If you were from those places and wanted to get on in life/move up in the world/enter the professions, it was heavily in your interest to take elocution lessons and speak like a posho. (Not the same as 'like a Londoner', btw - look at Cockney, and indeed RP is more associated with the Home Counties than London proper). This is about class more than geography.

golden bubble posted:

Yeah, but sailors have actual employment options on any civilian vassal. I don't think there are many civilian jobs that require a high proficiency in threatening peasants with your sword while your buddy takes everything they own.

Koramei posted:

Relatedly, is there evidence for English getting more homogenized since the internet? I do think in my experience British people are a lot more familiar with American terms, but that might just be anecdotal. Maybe TV is the bigger influence there anyway.

nothing to seehere posted:

I believe some linguists did a paper on this and divergence has actually increased recently. Don't have a link handy however.

Koramei posted:

I do think in my experience British people are a lot more familiar with American terms, but that might just be anecdotal. Maybe TV is the bigger influence there anyway.

Hazzard posted:

France has an interesting way of dealing with their languages. They have a college that rules on language prescriptively. They decide what the correct way is for French to be spoken and then decree it. Officially Email is not a word in French, they have something else. Nobody uses it, but that's the official ruling, because they don't want French to be "Anglicised" like German has been to an extent.

Animal posted:

What was his punishment?

Cyrano4747 posted:

This actually goes back to the foundation of the Academie francaise in the 17th century. While I don't know if its initial intent was to suppress other languages it had a big role in that in the 19th century by defining what the official french was and pushing aside everything else.

Pellisworth posted:

Anecdotal, but I can't really think of much media we get in America that is specifically set in parts of the UK other than England. So most Americans get a lot of RP mixed in with some other British dialects that we never learn to identify because we're not getting context. A Yorkshire accent is just going to be another variety of British English we can't name because there aren't a bunch of TV shows set in Yorkshire with people speaking in dialect.

my dad posted:

My brother told me about some conference he attended in which professors from all sides of Europe perfectly understood each-other talking in bad English, except for the English (e: as in, from England) professors who could barely understand a word of the pidginy English everyone else was using.

Jaques-Auguste de Thou on the Polish messengers petitioning Henry de Valois to take the throne posted:

There was not a single one amongst them who would not speak Latin fluently, many translated themselves into Italian and German; some spoke our language so purely and beautifully you would swear they were born on the banks of the Seine rather than over the Vistula or the Danube; and this was quite a shame for our countrymen, who not only have no skills, but are also enemies of all skilfulness. Thus, when the guests asked them about anything, they answered with gestures, blushing with shame.

nothing to seehere posted:

I believe some linguists did a paper on this and divergence has actually increased recently. Don't have a link handy however.

Tevery Best posted:

That's actually a basis for a trend developing in English teaching nowadays: no longer teaching perfect Received Pronunciation and giving up on a lot of small things nobody but natives would even notice, since 80% of your communication with English is not going to be with natives. Instead the idea is to put in a lot of practice on things that are shown to directly impact comprehension and to teach reactions to metalinguistic cues (i.e. how to explain to the other party the idea behind that word you're thinking about, but can't recall or don't even know the English equivalent of).

quote:

learned the languages of their trading partners (so typically Czech, Tartar, Turkish, German)

HEY GAL posted:

Incidentally, the Germans behead upright, with the subject kneeling upright and the executioner swinging the sword parallel to the ground. It's supposedly a technically demanding move.

TheLovablePlutonis posted:

*grabs enormous book with meticulously made genocide plans*