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Koramei posted:Oh wow have you got a source for this? I'd be interested in reading more about it. I wonder what countries it's applicable to as well, or where it's caught on. Even though functionally I can see how a more utilitarian English would be way more useful in most situations, I wonder how many people would be actively willing to learn (or in many situations, send their children off to learn) a more basic/'inferior' version of the language, since the end goal of sounding totally indistinguishable from a native speaker (even to the point of mimicking accents) seems to be important to a lot of ESL learners at least in my experience (Koreans). Unfortunately everything good I have on-hand seems to be behind academic paywalls. Try googling English as Lingua Franca - the key people involved are Jennifer Jenkins from King's College and Barbara Seidlhofer. David Crystal also touches up on it every now and again. Robin Walker from TESOL Spain has made some very good lectures on the subject that I've seen - very practical stuff, little in the way of ivory tower buzzwords - but I can't find them on YouTube. I have to say that while I don't think the idea has been introduced in any official curricula, maybe some private schools apply it, and it definitely is making the rounds in academic circles. And yes, the odium of speaking a "worse" language is a very real obstacle in spreading this idea further. But the argument here is that there are very few people who are going to get any mileage out of native-like English - interpreters, translators, diplomats, actors, singers - so it should be considered English for Special Purposes, not a basis for a general course. Koramei posted:How important were Tatars in Poland? Was this all just post-Mongols or were there significant trade links even beforehand? Did Poland brush up against the steppe in Medieval times/ was there a big Tatar minority in Poland? The Tartars first appeared in Poland in 1248 and basically burned everything that wasn't a fortified city. Fortunately, they were only passing through, so people picked up after a while. Ever since the Crimean Khanate formed, they were a force to be reckoned with in Polish-Lithuanian politics. Their incessant raids were often a form of proxy warfare by the Ottomans, and plagued the southeastern parts of the country. But they also traded in goods imported from the Far East - spices, silk, china etc. Many Tartars sought refuge in the Commonwealth from political crises. Starting with Grand Duke Vytautas, Lithuanian and then also Polish rulers welcomed them, and many were allowed to retain their noble status. In fact, they were so sought after that Tartar prisoners of war were often released and settled. Lithuanian and Polish Tartars routinely fought for the country - their first notable battle being probably Grunwald in 1410. The Second Polish Republic had a Tartar minority of about 5,5 thousand, with significant autonomy and many organisations. Furthermore, it maintained a policy of so-called prometheism, which aimed at supporting cultural and political (usually in exile) institutions of national minorities in the Soviet Union in order to eventually make them strong enough to break away from the Russians. Polish Tartars were amongst the chief activists in the movement, fostering closer ties between Poland and Crimean Tartars. During the Second World War, Polish Tartars were victims of German extermination campaigns. They fought in their own units during the September Campaign, and one story says that on one occasion they charged German positions, cutting off the defender's ears in full gallop, then ran away and left the enemy looking for their missing body parts in shame. Naturally, no documents survive on that battle, because such a manoeuvre did not conform to regulations and was thus not reported to the unit's superiors. Today, there are about 2 000 Tartars in Poland. They mostly live peacefully in two small villages near the Belarussian border, or in small communities in large urban centres. The first book to be printed in Tartar in Crimea after the Soviet ban on the language was lifter in the 1990s was Adam Mickiewicz's Crimean Sonnets.
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Sep 14, 2015 23:03
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Tevery Best posted:The local parish priest came back something like five minutes before the service was supposed to begin. I guess you can imagine his surprise when he saw his tiny little temple overran with complete strangers from halfway across the continent, one of whom was getting ready to perform a Mass. I'd say it only grew bigger when our guy started to explain himself... in Latin. But they did manage to work it out. If we're sharing odd communication using mutual third languages my best one is flirting with a Japanese woman in a bar in Seoul, S. Korea, speaking German.
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Sep 14, 2015 23:06
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Hazzard posted:Isn't Frisian the closest of all European languages to English? That's something I've heard and just confirmed with my degree in Wikipedia. I reckon as a thing British people have more or less lost the ability to learn foreign languages as a society since we're talking in my native tongue right now and I'm not being forced to look at Spanish until my eyes bleed. It's close to Old English, but Old English is not all that close to modern English. Might still be the closest though. Required: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34
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Sep 14, 2015 23:34
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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^^^^Please define "close". No seriously, that is super contentious. Also I can understand the farmer too just by knowing German. Koramei posted:Dialects and accents blending, much more mutual intelligibility even with terms that were pretty unique to a certain dialect, stuff like that? The sort of stuff you expect when you have people from different backgrounds spending a lot of time together. I know next to nothing about linguistics so sorry if that wasn't clear. Huh? In as much as we can talk about dialects "blending", it happens across generations. (Purposefully ignoring "accent", that's its own wasp's nest.) Like, not to be flippant, and certainly not singling you out, but this conversation is going in a very hand-wavy anecdotal way that is making me very confused about where people are getting the "facts" they're mentioning having read. Like, these would be ground-breaking findings and I have no idea what people are referencing. O, by the way to Cyrano : yes, multilingualism seems to make learning more languages easier, especially if it's done early and continued, e.g. a bilingual from birth is gonna have a pretty easy time picking up a third language in childhood, a fourth in adolescence etc. and there's some (weak but we're working on it) evidence that it might stack. Keep in mind the vast majority of the world has been multilingual throughout all history and still is. This has been a linguist who usually just lurks cause y'all are better at history than me bothering to post cause you wandered into my wheelhouse. Xiahou Dun fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Sep 14, 2015 |
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Sep 14, 2015 23:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:If we're sharing odd communication using mutual third languages my best one is flirting with a Japanese woman in a bar in Seoul, S. Korea, speaking German. not strictly the same thing but the only way i was able to keep up with 'lock, stock and two smoking barrels' was by reading the spanish subtitles on the version i watched.
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Sep 15, 2015 00:23
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Forgotten Weapons uploaded a longer video on the infamous Chauchat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCwP3Dm52Ls
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Sep 15, 2015 00:26
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Xiahou Dun posted:^^^^Please define "close". No seriously, that is super contentious. Also I can understand the farmer too just by knowing German. Lots of European languages are pretty close for most of the vocabulary, so you can recognize most of the words, and they're far enough that rapid communication is nearly impossible. You could see that the Frisian didn't understood the Old English word for "buy" and the closest homophone he knew was the unrelated "shed". So it's not like a Frisian and a German or 10th century Viking could just have a conversation. But people are very adaptable and eager to communicate. Columbus managed to communicate with Taino people although their cultures had never had any contact.
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Sep 15, 2015 00:45
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Chamale posted:Lots of European languages are pretty close for most of the vocabulary, so you can recognize most of the words, and they're far enough that rapid communication is nearly impossible. You could see that the Frisian didn't understood the Old English word for "buy" and the closest homophone he knew was the unrelated "shed". So it's not like a Frisian and a German or 10th century Viking could just have a conversation. But people are very adaptable and eager to communicate. Columbus managed to communicate with Taino people although their cultures had never had any contact. Likewise, during the mutiny on the Bounty the mutineers (and a few people who just went along with it and weren't actively ousting Bligh) integrated with the Tahitians and other natives of the islands they settled on to different degrees. Heywood (who was of the "I'm just stuck here and didn't really want to mutiny" variety) in particular heavily studied the Tahitian language and began wearing native dress and tattoos. On the other hand, Fletcher Christian (the man most responsible for the mutiny) was pretty much a sociopathic rear end in a top hat who kidnapped Tahitians for labor and baby making and as far as anyone knows got himself murdered somewhere along the line.
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Sep 15, 2015 00:52
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Chamale posted:Lots of European languages are pretty close for most of the vocabulary, so you can recognize most of the words, and they're far enough that rapid communication is nearly impossible. You could see that the Frisian didn't understood the Old English word for "buy" and the closest homophone he knew was the unrelated "shed". So it's not like a Frisian and a German or 10th century Viking could just have a conversation. But people are very adaptable and eager to communicate. Columbus managed to communicate with Taino people although their cultures had never had any contact. Yes. I know. I asked for a definition. What does "close" mean? How does nasalizing vowels compare to having lost V2, for instance, in terms of comprehensibility?
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Sep 15, 2015 01:17
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Non-linguistic question: What happened to all of the AT guns everyone had kicking around when WW2 ended? Were AT guns used in any significant capacity by cold war armies? Or were they replaced by missile launchers and poo poo? I never see cold war stuff mention AT guns but I don't know how effective early AT missiles were and surely there would've been a period of overlap. They seem so much more cost-effective and logistically simpler than tanks that I wonder why western nations didn't stockpile the poo poo out of them.
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Sep 15, 2015 01:23
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Given that there are languages with no fixed order... my guess is nasalising vowels will catch you out more in spoken communication. Pure guess on my part though.
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Sep 15, 2015 01:26
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Slavvy posted:Non-linguistic question: They were sold to various nations in the Middle East or stockpiled for a rainy day. The Ukrainians are rolling out ZiS-3s and BS-3s since the Minsk agreements came into effect, and some D-44s showed up way earlier.
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Sep 15, 2015 01:31
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AT guns aren't of much use any more....against tanks. They can still be rolled out to blast holes in buildings or suppress dug-in positions and have enough power to wreck the poo poo out of thin-skinned vehicles like trucks, Humvees, and less armored APCs. The problem you have there is that they aren't as immediately mobile as an armored vehicle of the same offensive power.
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Sep 15, 2015 01:47
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So when did they stop getting used by NATO and the soviets? Mid-50's?
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Sep 15, 2015 02:34
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Arquinsiel posted:Given that there are languages with no fixed order... my guess is nasalising vowels will catch you out more in spoken communication. Pure guess on my part though. No there are no such languages. Even poo poo like Walperi has rules, they're just complicated as gently caress. I'm freely willing to end this derail whenever, I'm just pointing out that it's laymen going off of tummy feels and mythical studies of questionable value. I can keep sperging, but it's better for everyone if y'all just talk about guns.
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Sep 15, 2015 02:37
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MassivelyBuckNegro posted:not strictly the same thing but the only way i was able to keep up with 'lock, stock and two smoking barrels' was by reading the spanish subtitles on the version i watched. There's a bit where the english version has english subtitles.
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Sep 15, 2015 02:39
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Xiahou Dun posted:No there are no such languages. Even poo poo like Walperi has rules, they're just complicated as gently caress. But non-snarkily, TBH I think they concept of "closeness" in lay terms is people trying to express the idea of symmetric difference between the sets of the semantics of well-formed-formulae in the compared languages picked from a snapshot of "now" weighted for statistical usage commonality without having the technical understanding of set theory, statistics or formal languages to do so. Which I am sure I've somehow hosed up the set logic of and that doesn't actually formally describe the concept I am envisioning at all.
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Sep 15, 2015 03:15
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Yeah you've basically done a great rendition of Why I Have a Job ; your intuition tells you things but they're actually super complicated if you actually want to talk about them besides Bullshit No Like Really Guys I Think X. Also Latin doesn't have free word order. You're just allowed to move around a lot and the rules are complex as balls. But fundamentally "Luce, ego pater tua sum" and "Luce, pater tua sum ego" (toy example so don't think about it too hard ; my Latin is awful) mean different things and "Luce, pater sum ego tua" is just awful regardless. It's called Scrambling and German, Russian, Korean, Japanese, etc do it all the time and it's a complicated but rule-governed system. For further information read my dissertation.
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Sep 15, 2015 03:26
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Slavvy posted:So when did they stop getting used by NATO and the soviets? Mid-50's? The soviets held on to theres a lot longer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprut_anti-tank_gun Nato replaced there antitank guns with recoilless in the 50s.
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Sep 15, 2015 03:32
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Ensign Expendable posted:They were sold to various nations in the Middle East or stockpiled for a rainy day. and eventually donated (or sold for scrap value?) to any American Legion/VFW big enough to have their own building even the ones in lovely backwater towns of 2k in upstate NY have a Bofors gun, old tank, or some kind of artillery rusting away on their lawn
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Sep 15, 2015 05:03
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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. Tax collector?
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Sep 15, 2015 05:42
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banditry is a freelance gig
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Sep 15, 2015 05:50
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chitoryu12 posted:AT guns aren't of much use any more....against tanks. They can still be rolled out to blast holes in buildings or suppress dug-in positions and have enough power to wreck the poo poo out of thin-skinned vehicles like trucks, Humvees, and less armored APCs. The problem you have there is that they aren't as immediately mobile as an armored vehicle of the same offensive power. Well the idea is that they are also a lot cheaper than an armored vehicle of the same offensive power. But AT guns aren't even supposed to be offensive weapons, they are supposed to defend an area so you can use your tanks elsewhere to actually win the war. The NVA (East German Army) had them in the 70ies to hold the flanks of an armored thrust against counterattacks. Which is fine in theory, except the NVA found during exercises that this was pretty problematic because the version they had had no IR sights and could easily be blinded by smoke or suppressed by artillery fire if they were spotted. A tank could just move out of the beaten zone and most of them had more sophisticated sights. But the bigger issue is that an AT gun weighing several tons and with a crew of seven would perform, on the best of days, slightly better than a two-man ATGM team with man portable equipment.
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Sep 15, 2015 06:44
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100 Years Ago We're now just ten days from the autumn offensive on the Western Front, and final preparations are well and truly underway. The French have been considerably refining their cavalry tactics so that if another rupture occurs like at Second Artois, when the Moroccans made it all the way over Vimy Ridge and outran their support, they'll be much better-placed to exploit it. Meanwhile, everyone's digging jumping off-trenches, and a British bombardier has worked out an excellent scheme for concealing his gun from the enemy, rather important when he has to hide it only 400-odd yards from the German observation posts. His solution would have made the French artists of the Camouflage Committee proud. No Louis Barthas today, but if you're missing him I've now filled in the entries for the 12th and 13th, in which he has now come under the command of a man who the blokes quickly rename "Brigadier-General I'm-Going-To-Beat-You-Up", and has been assigned by Sublieutenant Malvezy...to fill in for him as a temporary officer while Malvezy has a nice holiday. (I for one was expecting Malvezy to make Barthas the new latrine orderly, mais ils sont fous, ces officiers.) Also from those days; an update on the situation at Verdun, and the Ottoman government shamelessly appropriates the property of deported Armenians. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Sep 15, 2015 |
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Sep 15, 2015 12:19
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ArchangeI posted:A tank could just move out of the beaten zone and most of them had more sophisticated sights. But the bigger issue is that an AT gun weighing several tons and with a crew of seven would perform, on the best of days, slightly better than a two-man ATGM team with man portable equipment. This strikes me as a trend in equipment that has been going on for a while. We've been steadily moving from weapons with a high infrastructure footprint (big rifled cannons that can tolerate the the pressure from propellant, and absorb the recoil) towards weapons with a low infrastructure footprint (TOWs, MLRS, anything that lets you shoot and immediately scoot out of the way of counterbattery fire). The tradeoff is that individual shots become more expensive and bulkier, so you can't carry as much ammo, and need to be more heavily supplied from your manufacturing centres. It's funny because the initial trend has been from complex missiles and simple launchers (the earliest fire arrows) to simple missiles and complex launchers (arbequeses and muskets and rifles) as metallurgy improved and you wanted systems that could pump out as many projectiles as quickly and cheaply as possible.
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Sep 15, 2015 12:42
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Phobophilia posted:It's funny because the initial trend has been from complex missiles and simple launchers (the earliest fire arrows) to simple missiles and complex launchers (arbequeses and muskets and rifles) as metallurgy improved and you wanted systems that could pump out as many projectiles as quickly and cheaply as possible. I'm not sure that necessary applies as a general trend. I mean, a catapult is pretty complicated compared to a rock, or even a sling to a smaller rock.
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Sep 15, 2015 13:39
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it's easier to make a matchlock musket than it is to make a bow; i can tell you one and JaucheCharly can tell you the other
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Sep 15, 2015 13:47
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Xiahou Dun posted:Yeah you've basically done a great rendition of Why I Have a Job ; your intuition tells you things but they're actually super complicated if you actually want to talk about them besides Bullshit No Like Really Guys I Think X.
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Sep 15, 2015 13:50
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Phobophilia posted:This strikes me as a trend in equipment that has been going on for a while. We've been steadily moving from weapons with a high infrastructure footprint (big rifled cannons that can tolerate the the pressure from propellant, and absorb the recoil) towards weapons with a low infrastructure footprint (TOWs, MLRS, anything that lets you shoot and immediately scoot out of the way of counterbattery fire). The tradeoff is that individual shots become more expensive and bulkier, so you can't carry as much ammo, and need to be more heavily supplied from your manufacturing centres. This doesn't make much sense to me, I think modern systems are much less tied to heavy supply columns than ever before. The amount of munitions needed for preparatory fires for artillery systems before the invention of the sub-munition (or precision munition) was enormous. You're carrying less ammo but that's because you need so much less of it between re-supply opportunities and when you do get supplied it's much more compact and movable. You read histories where the preparatory fires would be hundreds of guns firing continuously for hours, that sort of thing requires basically a line directly from the factories to support.
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Sep 15, 2015 13:54
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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. Um, minor point but Yorkshire is, in fact, in England. I guess you mean the Southeast?
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Sep 15, 2015 14:00
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cheerfullydrab posted:Not exactly. English went through the same homogenization, in England, as many other languages did. There were definitely distinct dialects, and they were absolutely associated with specific places. The English that sought to replace them was definitely thought of as being from around London. My favorite British English dialect, like a lot of people's, is the Yorkshire dialect: Well, obviously, yes. But RP's still more a class-driven than specifically region-driven thing, although there are elements of both. It's 'talk like the elite', and the elite mostly happened to live around and in London, as opposed to 'talk like a Londoner', because the vast majority of Londoners didn't speak a more prestigious dialect than people in places like Yorkshire. Otherwise the prestige accent would be Del Boy or Ken Livingstone or something rather than RP.
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Sep 15, 2015 14:07
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Oddly enough for this linguistics digression US Grant has something to say on the matter when discussing how the ACW formed the country:quote:After our rebellion, when so many young men were at liberty to return to their homes, they found they were not satisfied with the farm, the store, or the work-shop of the villages, but wanted larger fields. The mines of the mountains first attracted them; but afterwards they found that rich valleys and productive grazing and farming lands were there. This territory, the geography of which was not known to us at the close of the rebellion, is now as well mapped as any portion of our country. Railroads traverse it in every direction, north, south, east, and west. The mines are worked. The high lands are used for grazing purposes, and rich agricultural lands are found in many of the valleys. This is the work of the volunteer.... e: He doesn't say it out right but the implication is that post-war American English was much more homogenized due in large part to the new found mobility of the population. Murgos fucked around with this message at 14:22 on Sep 15, 2015 |
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Sep 15, 2015 14:18
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Murgos posted:This doesn't make much sense to me, I think modern systems are much less tied to heavy supply columns than ever before. The amount of munitions needed for preparatory fires for artillery systems before the invention of the sub-munition (or precision munition) was enormous. You're carrying less ammo but that's because you need so much less of it between re-supply opportunities and when you do get supplied it's much more compact and movable. You read histories where the preparatory fires would be hundreds of guns firing continuously for hours, that sort of thing requires basically a line directly from the factories to support. Well, lots of tube artillery is more efficient at delivering X tons of high explosive on a target than equivalent rocket artillery. But of course, we have better ways of blowing up a thing now (we drop X tons of high explosive from the stratosphere). I guess the relationship between the complexity of the launcher and the complexity of the missile is variable, and depends on the local needs. I mean, the US military is bringing out railguns now, that's a pretty complex launcher.
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Sep 15, 2015 15:02
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Murgos posted:Oddly enough for this linguistics digression US Grant has something to say on the matter when discussing how the ACW formed the country: Reconstruction probably helped that along, even if it was only for a few years.
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Sep 15, 2015 15:53
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Phobophilia posted:Well, lots of tube artillery is more efficient at delivering X tons of high explosive on a target than equivalent rocket artillery. But of course, we have better ways of blowing up a thing now (we drop X tons of high explosive from the stratosphere). That's kind of my point. We were previously more tied to supply and industrial capacity than we are now. Unless I read your original post wrong you were arguing the opposite. I will certainly admit that the complexity of modern systems has lengthened the lead time to replenishment by a huge amount though. Converting a machine shop to pumping out 155mm HE rounds by the tens of thousands is fairly trivial. Standing up a new factory to increase the supply of MLRS rockets and their submunitions on the other hand would be a considerable effort.
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Sep 15, 2015 15:59
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Murgos posted:That's kind of my point. We were previously more tied to supply and industrial capacity than we are now. Unless I read your original post wrong you were arguing the opposite. I am not really sure that's right. A standard non guided mlrs rocket is not really that complex. And when you begin looking at guided solutions it's actually easier to do in a rocket because of the lower muzzle velocity in a rocket vs a howitzer. And regarding bang on target. The rocket launcher is better for a lot of bang right now vs a howitzers bang over time. One mlrs can put 12 rockets on a target equivalent to a battalion of 8 inch guns.
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Sep 15, 2015 17:14
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HEY GAL posted:it's easier to make a matchlock musket than it is to make a bow; i can tell you one and JaucheCharly can tell you the other Speaking as a gun nut, I'd love detail on the manufacture of matchlocks.
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Sep 15, 2015 17:35
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Murgos posted:Standing up a new factory to increase the supply of MLRS rockets and their submunitions on the other hand would be a considerable effort.
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Sep 15, 2015 17:41
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Keldoclock posted:I'm sure someone either has, will, or currently is tricking a Chinese factory into manufacturing weapons without them knowing that's what they're doing. Well, Palestinians are making their own rockets in their bid to dig themselves a bigger hole. Granted, those aren't very good rockets. Speaking of which: SCUD. Was it ever used to great/good effect militarily? It seems that whenever I hear about it, it's either Americans bombing them, or I'm in a game and I have to C4 launchers or something.
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Sep 15, 2015 18:26
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Keldoclock posted:I'm sure someone either has, will, or currently is tricking a Chinese factory into manufacturing weapons without them knowing that's what they're doing.
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Sep 15, 2015 18:40
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