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HEY GAIL posted:um, (flips through atlas) Eupen-Malmedy will rise again Uhhhh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eupen-Malmedy#Annexed_to_Germany.2C_1940.E2.80.9345 or am I missing  ? 
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Jan 15, 2017 12:52
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Hogge Wild posted:could someone post about cavalry in the austro-prussian war Well, cavalry is best known for its charge on both sides that ended the battle of Königgrätz. During that episode, the Austrian cavalry, which had been held in reserve until then, was ordered to attack the advancing Prussians to cover the retreat of the main Austro-Hungarian formations. The equipment and general level of cavalry on both sides was, I would say, relatively similar, unlike the infamous gap between Prussian and Austrian infantry. The Habsburgs fielded a mix of mainly Hungarian dragoons and hussars armed with sabers and pistols; additionally there were Polish hulans - lancers, and Cisleithanian (Austrian and Bohemian) cuirassers, who, however, did not fight in their armor. The Prussians had lancers of their own, and additionally their equipment consisted of sabers and carbines. During the final stages of the battle, both sides deployed a total of approx. 11,000 cavalrymen, which made it the second largest cavalry battle of the 19th century, after the Napoleonic battle of Leipzig. The main event of the cavalry battle occured at the village of Střezetice, about five Austrian regiments of cavalry charged into five regiments of Prussian horses, with both sides also deploying their artillery. After several minutes of close quarters combat the Prussians feigned retreat, and lured the Austrians within the range of Prussian infantry, which forced the Austrians to withdraw with heavy losses. This short skirmish of a couple of minutes killed some 1700 Austrian cavalrymen, and a smaller number of Prussians, due to the fact they weren't under an equally strong artillery fire, and did enjoy infantry support. Simultaneously the Austrains charged along a different route, with three regiments of their own against three regiments of the enemy. The results were much the same, the Austrian cavalry ended up charging into infantry, which was able to cause severe casualties with its rapid fire. The third and last vector of Austrian charge was the only one that resisted Prussian feigns, and consequently was able to disengage with light casualties, but it was also the smallest cavalry force taking part in the charge, of two regiments. Over all, the delaying charges of Austrian cavalry, the main thrust at Střezetice and the two supporting counter attacks, lasted for less than half hour, and left some 2000 Austrians and maybe 600 Prussians dead. The discrepancy was due to the weakness of cavalry when exposed to modern artillery and infantry, which proved itself to be very well suited to facing cavalry assaults. However, the charges did serve their purpose, and allowed the Austrians to organize part of their artillery into an effective covering force, which delayed Prussian advance for further four hours (albeit at the cost of own annihilation), thus giving the core of the Austrian army ample time to retreat from pursuers. It should be mentioned that Austrian artillery was the crown jewel of the Habsburg army, and contemporary Prussian commanders openly admitted the vast superiority of Austrian batteries to their own gunners. So we can see the actions of Austrian cavalry, while leading to heavy losses for themselves, as vital operations that protected Austrian best forces (guns) from Prussian assaults during the most critical and chaotic stages of the battle, and enabled Austrians to further use their artillery to frustrate the Prussians, which they did, causing numerous casualties - and so perhaps the cavalry charge turned what could have been a slaughter of defeated Austrians into a retreat protected by their reformed elite forces.  
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Jan 15, 2017 12:53
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In practice, how did the Prussians go about getting a couple thousand people who are engaged in hand-to-hand combat to feign retreat? Were orders given out beforehand to fall back to x after y minutes or did some commanding officer get the idea to feign retreat during the fight and start yelling really loudly?
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Jan 15, 2017 13:07
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hogmartin posted:I had a German professor (from Germany) get almost personally insulted and immediately dismissed the question when I asked about it. If you can read German, you can squint a bit and read maybe 60% of Dutch, but according to her, they are wholly distinct languages. 40% of written language is already quite a large departure. It is obviously very hard to name a clear distinction between a language and a dialect, especially without inadvertently (or completely on purpose) insinuating that an ethic group "owns" any given language. For this reason, associating languages with independent political entities is a very poor workaround, but one that in most (but not all) cases helps resolve conflicts rather than intensify them - and, over time, frequently develops from pretence to actual fact. In any case, the phenomenon you're describing is called plurilingualism and is actually a Big Thing in the Common European Framework for Language Teaching. Actually, while I'm at it, I have a question. my dad, are there any central regulatory bodies for Serbo-Croatian? Any organisations with a role similar to, for example, the French Academy? If so, how do they fare in the face of the political conflicts between Serbs and Croats (and other nations speaking the language)?
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Jan 15, 2017 14:05
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Tevery Best posted:Actually, while I'm at it, I have a question. my dad, are there any central regulatory bodies for Serbo-Croatian? Any organisations with a role similar to, for example, the French Academy? If so, how do they fare in the face of the political conflicts between Serbs and Croats (and other nations speaking the language)? Not anymore, as far as I know. Every nation has an independent regulatory body now. Given enough time, I'd say about a human lifespan of sustained effort, especially if it includes stuff like segregation and strongarming teachers who try to dissent, they'll be able to split the shtokavian dialect of Serbo-Croatian(or whatever you want to call it) in a meaningful way, but we're a long way from that. In the meantime, I look forward to decades of laughing at idiots using the exact same words to tell each other that they speak in different languages.
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Jan 15, 2017 14:58
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feedmegin posted:Uhhhh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eupen-Malmedy#Annexed_to_Germany.2C_1940.E2.80.9345 or am I missing espirito santo, in brazil. home of the largest group of pommersch speakers in the world. THere.
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Jan 15, 2017 15:14
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Tevery Best posted:40% of written language is already quite a large departure. I might have been too glib, I wasn't implying that Dutch or German is a dialect of another. More that the professor was... scandalized maybe? at the thought that she could read a Dutch newspaper. I was a third-year German student, and I could read one, kind of. It just seemed that there was something more ethnic or political going on rather than linguistic. Maybe Dutch and Afrikaans would be a better example. I'll have to read up on plurilingualism, that sort of thing is fascinating. My dad (n.b. actual dad, not forums poster my dad) is fluent in Spanish and did his two week reserve drill in Napoli one year. He said that once he got a handle on verb conjugation and some word endings, he had no trouble understanding or being understood in Italian. Maybe not perfectly correct, but definitely intelligible.
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Jan 15, 2017 15:34
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So I've been reading Europe's Tragedy, and I just read the bit where the author describes how artillery crews would name their pieces. I've also been reading a lot of Patrick O'Brian, and the guns aboard the Surprise all have names/nicknames too. This seems like a really interesting practice to me - was this practice of naming artillery pieces widespread? Does anyone have any examples of named guns like this?
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Jan 15, 2017 17:16
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I've been wondering how far back that goes. In the US crews will name their gun using the first letter of their battery and spray paint it on the tube. I saw a Battery L that had a gun named Lexington Steele.... p sure the Bn co made them re name it when he found out where that came from.
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Jan 15, 2017 17:22
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hogmartin posted:I'll have to read up on plurilingualism, that sort of thing is fascinating. My dad (n.b. actual dad, not forums poster my dad) is fluent in Spanish and did his two week reserve drill in Napoli one year. He said that once he got a handle on verb conjugation and some word endings, he had no trouble understanding or being understood in Italian. Maybe not perfectly correct, but definitely intelligible. One of my district managers when I was at Best Buy was fluent in Spanish and Italian. On Black Friday, he sold a Portugese-speaking family full service plans. Still blows my mind.
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Jan 15, 2017 17:45
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aphid_licker posted:In practice, how did the Prussians go about getting a couple thousand people who are engaged in hand-to-hand combat to feign retreat? Were orders given out beforehand to fall back to x after y minutes or did some commanding officer get the idea to feign retreat during the fight and start yelling really loudly?
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Jan 15, 2017 17:54
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MANime in the sheets posted:One of my district managers when I was at Best Buy was fluent in Spanish and Italian. On Black Friday, he sold a Portugese-speaking family full service plans. Still blows my mind. That's pretty impressive. When I hear Portuguese, the needle on my lingometer flaps between Spanish words and French pronunciation and never locks on.
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Jan 15, 2017 17:56
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FastestGunAlive posted:I've been wondering how far back that goes. In the US crews will name their gun using the first letter of their battery and spray paint it on the tube. I saw a Battery L that had a gun named Lexington Steele.... p sure the Bn co made them re name it when he found out where that came from. Huh, that's really interesting that it's still something that's done! Where I grew up the local council have preserved a mortar called Roaring Meg that was apparently the largest one used in the English Civil War and was especially cast for besieging one of the local castles, so it seems like it goes back at least 400 years (or near enough)
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Jan 15, 2017 18:00
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HEY GAIL posted:i've found the one thing on earth that could have made the austro-hungarian parliament more entertaining Have you somehow hacked into my althist fanfic novels? 
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Jan 15, 2017 18:00
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hogmartin posted:I might have been too glib, I wasn't implying that Dutch or German is a dialect of another. More that the professor was... scandalized maybe? at the thought that she could read a Dutch newspaper. I was a third-year German student, and I could read one, kind of. It just seemed that there was something more ethnic or political going on rather than linguistic. Maybe Dutch and Afrikaans would be a better example. This is also true of Italian guys trying to get laid on vacation in Valencia. I don't anything about linguistics, but maybe different language families/structures have a tendency to conserve intelligibility across its child languages? A lot of Russian-speakers have told me that they can understand the gist of every other slavic language. I can't really speak of this for English and anything Germanic or Romance.
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Jan 15, 2017 18:16
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Owlkill posted:Huh, that's really interesting that it's still something that's done! Cheers. What's discussed in Europes Tragedy? Is there a naming convention or is it whatever comes about akin the roaring meg there? I know there were several named guns going back to the earliest cannons but I'll have to check my references when I get home
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Jan 15, 2017 18:19
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:This is also true of Italian guys trying to get laid on vacation in Valencia. Knowing some French and Latin, I can get the gist of written Spanish fairly easily (though I wouldn't like to try and speak it or e.g. understand it on TV). It wouldn't surprise me at all if the same is true of Germanic languages, e.g. 'know English and German, mostly understand written Dutch'.
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Jan 15, 2017 18:39
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feedmegin posted:Knowing some French and Latin, I can get the gist of written Spanish fairly easily (though I wouldn't like to try and speak it or e.g. understand it on TV). It wouldn't surprise me at all if the same is true of Germanic languages, e.g. 'know English and German, mostly understand written Dutch'.
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Jan 15, 2017 18:47
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FastestGunAlive posted:I know there were several named guns going back to the earliest cannons but I'll have to check my references when I get home And siege engines were also named; Edward I had a trebuchet named Warwolf built during the 1304 siege of Stirling Castle. And while confirming my memory of that, I found that during the 1191 Siege of Acre there were trebuchets named God's Stone Thrower and Bad Neighbour used.
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Jan 15, 2017 19:11
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Lobster God posted:And siege engines were also named; Edward I had a trebuchet named Warwolf built during the 1304 siege of Stirling Castle. This is ebsulutly fescinating.
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Jan 15, 2017 19:16
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Lobster God posted:And siege engines were also named; Edward I had a trebuchet named Warwolf built during the 1304 siege of Stirling Castle. And while confirming my memory of that, I found that during the 1191 Siege of Acre there were trebuchets named God's Stone Thrower and Bad Neighbour used. The crew of bad neighbour just laughing hysterically to themselves over their ironic naming and mocking the super serious GST dudes
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Jan 15, 2017 19:19
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og3ms7KjnVM We all know these Hollywood nazi cliches and that got me curious: what are the other countries nazi clihces? For example, I think in Soviet cinema sterotypes would be less comical. Or what are the other notable cliche characters from history? Of course we all know the siff upper lipped British colonial officer.
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Jan 15, 2017 19:25
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Having learned some Swedish, it's not much harder to read Danish or Norwegian. But heaven forbid understanding a word coming from a Dane's mouth... the same goes with Dutch, I understand some German and written Dutch is very similar, but I don't understand how people can produce such sounds when I assume our vocal cords are not different. OTOH as a Finn, while our neighbours in the north and in the south belong to the same lingual family, Sami vocabulary is completely different and Estonian vocab is only superficially similar and the words that are in common often have changed meanings, like 'cheap' meaning 'bad'.
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Jan 15, 2017 19:39
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Old English and modern Frisian are apparently mutually intelligible. https://youtu.be/OeC1yAaWG34
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Jan 15, 2017 19:42
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Eela6 posted:Old English and modern Frisian are apparently mutually intelligible. https://youtu.be/OeC1yAaWG34 Certainly not if you pronounce it like that :cringe: Also I'm glad somebody finally decided to take those Frisians down a peg and called them a mongrel nation.
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Jan 15, 2017 20:12
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edit, wrong thread. As long as I'm here, battleships !
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Jan 15, 2017 20:54
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bewbies posted:edit, wrong thread. Loved RiRi in that one
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Jan 15, 2017 20:58
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Fish of hemp posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og3ms7KjnVM Yugoslav cinema has its own specific ideas about depictions of various forces and individuals, I'll try to represent them here with scenes from two well known films: (videos linked to specific scenes, I'm not asking you to watch the whole films) Battle of Neretva: Partizan post-victory party. Italian commander surrenders to and cooperates with the Partizans against the Germans but refuses to open fire on fellow Italians. German general meeting with collaborationist representatives and discussing battle plans. The Black Legion (Ustaše) making an appearance (followed by a scene of an artillery barrage) Partizans ambush a Chetnik force: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ONQa1m43Ro&t=8239s Battle of Sutjeska: German officers doing an aerial overview of their forces More German officers British commandos attached to the Partizans Difference between German and Partizan forces before battle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYZGhsx2UTI&t=6158s (if you happen to recognize certain actors, my comment is "Yes, Tito had cash to burn")
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Jan 15, 2017 21:11
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Fish of hemp posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og3ms7KjnVM The only stereotypes I can think of are a monocle and a heavy leather coat, but I think those are pretty recognizeable in Western cinema as well.
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Jan 15, 2017 21:40
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Nenonen posted:But heaven forbid understanding a word coming from a Dane's mouth...  I speak a southern Swedish dialect that the rest of the country despises. When I was at the Swedish Air Force Museum, there was an old guy with his middle-aged son standing by an old plane that my grandfather worked on as a mechanic. He remembered when they trucked the planes in from the harbors and I was trying to tell him about my grandfather, but his son had to translate everything I said because he couldn't understand me. 
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Jan 15, 2017 22:21
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my dad posted:Battle of Neretva: I've seen this movie! Well, the Western cut with a bunch of these scenes deleted and a new musical score. I'm surprised they cut so much of Orson Welles' part.
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Jan 16, 2017 00:58
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FastestGunAlive posted:I've been wondering how far back that goes. In the US crews will name their gun using the first letter of their battery and spray paint it on the tube. I saw a Battery L that had a gun named Lexington Steele.... p sure the Bn co made them re name it when he found out where that came from. I mean, you can't say it isn't appropriate.
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Jan 16, 2017 01:06
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Fish of hemp posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og3ms7KjnVM I feel Nazis kinda chose the way they would be portrayed for posterity by embracing a certain aesthetic. There isn't much of a room for artistic divergence in this area, given the ideological - orthodox nature of the underlying Nazi imagery. So you get the same stereotypes the world over. It would be mistaken to think the Soviets had less of a sense of humor about the Germans than the British, they did make plenty of jokes and comedic sketches about the Nazis.
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Jan 16, 2017 01:31
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I've seen this movie! Well, the Western cut with a bunch of these scenes deleted and a new musical score. I'm surprised they cut so much of Orson Welles' part. Huh, didn't know there was a special Western cut, although it really shouldn't have come as a surprise. Were the scenes portraying the Chetniks negatively cut out? USA was where most of them who left Yugoslavia ended up after the war. Or was it just a cut to reduce the length of the film? Speaking of the Chetniks:  Ruth Mitchell: American reporter, sister of General Billy Mitchell, and a, uh, Chetnik. my dad fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Jan 16, 2017 |
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Jan 16, 2017 02:08
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my dad posted:Huh, didn't know there was a special Western cut, although it really shouldn't have come as a surprise. Were the scenes portraying the Chetniks negatively cut out? USA was where most of them who left Yugoslavia ended up after the war. Or was it just a cut to reduce the length of the film? About an hour and a bit of the film were cut out to shorten the running time. The Ustase are cut out completely except for one scene and the Chetniks are shown as basically being bloodthirsty long-haired barbarians on horseback who kill off most of the surviving characters including Sylva Koscina's hot partisan girl character. Orson Welles' character (confusingly called a "senator", did the Chetniks even have a Senate?) for one scene and then gets shot by his own men for not thirsting for partisan blood enough. I was surprised he had way more to do in the original cut of the movie because he and Yul Brenner were the biggest "Western" names in the film, so it seems like more of their scenes would've been included in the English-language dub version. On the credit side, the music was upgraded to a rousing Bernard Hermann score. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jan 16, 2017 |
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Jan 16, 2017 02:26
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To answer your question about the Chetniks in more detail, they've been portrayed unevenly in the West. During the war they were initially heroic freedom fighters because they got their start resisting the Nazi invasion, so you got wartime films about them and this bled over into the early postwar portrayals (Ian Fleming made a passing reference to them as being something like "Mihailovic's resistance fighters" in one James Bond novel), and by the late 60s-70s adventure novelist Alistair MacLean is depicting them as flunkies of the Nazis with a greater taste for brutality than the average non-SS German. I imagine this had a lot to do with Tito's efforts to make Yugoslavia part of the Non-Aligned world instead of being Another Soviet Puppet Satellite. The various anti-partisan groups were way more easy to characterize as vulgar Nazi lackeys instead of misguided anti-Stalin idealists used and thrown away by the Nazis. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Jan 16, 2017 |
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Jan 16, 2017 02:34
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Yugoslavia had an odd role in Western thinking during the Cold War because it was Communist but not Warsaw Pact, and since it wasn't behind the Iron Curtain there was a fair amount of commerce including lots of Yugoslav actors and actresses making respectable names for themselves in Italian cinema and numerous Hollywood films being shot on location in Yugoslavia (Kelly's Heroes and Force 10 from Navarone to name two). Fun fact, one major "future history" written in the early 1980s by a consortium of British defense analysts featured a scenario where World War Three happened in part because a Warsaw Pact invasion of post-Tito Yugoslavia was met by a NATO counter-intervention. This is probably all very strange to someone who actually lives there.
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Jan 16, 2017 02:45
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Yugoslavia had an odd role in Western thinking during the Cold War because it was Communist but not Warsaw Pact, and since it wasn't behind the Iron Curtain there was a fair amount of commerce including lots of Yugoslav actors and actresses making respectable names for themselves in Italian cinema and numerous Hollywood films being shot on location in Yugoslavia (Kelly's Heroes and Force 10 from Navarone to name two). Fun fact, one major "future history" written in the early 1980s by a consortium of British defense analysts featured a scenario where World War Three happened in part because a Warsaw Pact invasion of post-Tito Yugoslavia was met by a NATO counter-intervention. 
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Jan 16, 2017 02:49
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I was trying not to bring that up. Thanks a lot. Mind you, it's probably the only Eastern European car to ever be imported to the United States in any numbers (not even Skoda ever managed to become a household name in North America and I doubt they've even sold 100,000+ units of anything in the US market, let alone cars), so that's something. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Jan 16, 2017 |
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Jan 16, 2017 02:56
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Edit: Nevermind, beaten.
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Jan 16, 2017 03:03
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