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Raskolnikov38 posted:In addition to what other's said, you see that lone Austrian division on the peninsula by itself? That's guarding Austro-Hungry's main and biggest naval base where most of their fleet is. It's not inconceivable that the Entente could have brought in enough naval assets to keep the Austro-Hungarian navy at bay, it's just that the reward was another Salonika.
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Jan 13, 2016 04:36
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HEY GAL posted:so a friend of mine sent me an ad for a paleography course That makes the Disney G read as completely legible. Dang.
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Jan 13, 2016 04:48
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Taiping Tianguo Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 Part 19 Part 20 Part 21 Part 22 Part 23 Part 24 Part 25 The Panthay Rebellion, Part 1  The Farthest Province Yunnan (雲南), the land beyond the southern clouds, was the result of successive waves of imperial expansion during the heyday of the Qing. While they succeeded in displacing the various Tai kingdoms and pushing up to the borders of Burma and Tibet, the people of the province remained stubbornly non-Chinese. An enormously complex smorgasbord of languages and ethnicities populated the province, and aboriginal tribes were subordinate to the government but only weakly incorporated into Chinese civilization. Yunnan's regional identity was relatively strong. Even the early Han settlers, after a few generations, developed a parochial, locally centered outlook. As the saying went, "The mountains are high and the emperor is far away."  Part of this distinct identity was due to geography. Separated by mountains, and adjacent to Burma and Vietnam, Yunnan was linked by trade to the outside world in a way few provinces were. The eastern side of the province was dominated by Kunming(昆明), the capital and the center of trade between Sichuan and Vietnam. The west, meanwhile, was economically focused around Dali (大理), and traded between Tibet and Burma. The patterns of trade ran north- south to foreign lands, not east-west to classical China. The actual trade was largely carried out by non-Han groups, most importantly the Hui (回). The Hui traveled widely from Yunnan to Southeast Asia, where they were recognized widely as traders and merchants, a people apart in everywhere they went. It is actually from Burma, not China, that the term "Panthay" was applied to them. They were successful traders who relied on their transnational family and community ties to facilitate their business. This heavy contact with foreign nations and close ties with ethnic compatriots abroad set the Hui of Yunnan apart from the typical Chinese. So did the fact that they were Muslim. Islam had first come to China with traders not long after Muhammad, but by and large they remained foreigners, restricted to cities and cut off from mainstream life. The ancestors of what would become the Hui came with the Mongol conquest, where Muslims from Central Asia were employed as administrators and enforcers by the multiethnic Yuan empire. By the time of the Ming, these former dominators had simply become another part of China. Some maintained their original Turkic languages and culture. Many others adopted Chinese language and customs, intermarried with Chinese, accepted Chinese converts, and became sinicized- but not enough. They were not foreign, but still Muslim, still not truly Chinese. "Hui" is sometimes used interchangeably with"Chinese Muslim", but it is a bit tricky to unpack the religious identity from an ethnic one. Generally speaking, it refers to a Chinese-speaking Muslim, but is treated as an ethnic minzu by modern day China. An Uighur isn't Hui, though they are "Chinese" and "Muslim". If Wang Peng of Beijing converts to Islam tomorrow, his ID card will still say "Han". Meanwhile, Ma Lin of Kunming will still be a "Hui" even if she has never said the Shahada in her life. If your Han ancestors converted 300 years ago, you count as Hui today, if they did it 50 years ago you are Han. Ethnic identity and the way it is classified has changed continually and it can be misleading to try to interpret it in modern terms.  Typical Hui girl In any case, the Hui were recognized as being set apart from the mainstream of Chinese life by their faith, and also had some sense of themselves as a different people independent of their religion. In large cities they would live side by side with their Han neighbors, but in rural areas they often lived in separate villages. Rural Hui commonly organized into large labor gangs to work in the mines or elsewhere. They did this very efficiently, creating resentment among the Chinese they outcompeted. They also would, on religious grounds, decline to participate in festivals or contribute to the maintenance of shrines, sometimes creating friction with the Han Chinese. And they didn't eat pork, so there was clearly something wrong with them. Suspicion of the Hui was not helped by a warlike reputation, dating back to their origins as Mongol enforcers and reinforced by religious strife in China's northwest (which I will cover when I do Gansu and Shaanxi, but was not relevant to Yunnan except that it contributed to Han Chinese fear of the Hui). The Hui constituted only about 10% of Yunnan's 10 million people, but they had a disproportionate influence beyond their numbers. The rest of the province was divided between Han Chinese and other minority groups, which the Chinese referred to collectively as "yi"(夷). They included Lolo (羅羅), Zhuang (壯), Bouyei (擺夷), Lisu (栗僳) and Miao(苗), all with their own languages and customs. The Hui were not yi, but they weren't Chinese either. They still got the dog radical, even if by appearance, language, and lifestyle they could often easily pass for Chinese. The circumstances of the yi can be analogized to that of the minorities in Guizhou. They existed somewhat apart from mainstream Chinese civilization, governed by local leaders, but increasingly coming into conflict with Han Chinese settlers and other minority groups over claims to ancestral land. Where they did break out in open revolt, the authorities usually placed them blame on either the treachery of Han instigators, or the foolishness of corrupt Han officials. In neither case was a great deal of agency assigned to the rebellious peoples themselves. Before getting into the circumstances producing the Panthay rebellion, I should first clarify that though Muslim-led, it was decidedly not a holy war. There was no declaration of Jihad, no fatwa calling the Hui to defend the faith against the infidel. Conversely, their enemies in the empire were not interested in converting a dangerous sect, but rather in suppressing a warlike people. To the limited extent that Hui ethnic and cultural identity is separable from religious identity, it was on the basis of ethnic identity as a people apart that war would come. (This is a matter of some debate, of course.) Paths of Blood In the half century preceding the rebellion, numerous incidents of violence between Han and Hui occurred, often originating in mining towns. Yunnan's copper mines were important to the empire, but by the 19th century most were mined out, and competition for work in the remaining mines was fierce. The court would often cast these incidents as cases of local feuds gone out of control, but there were troubling details that didn't necessarily fit this simple narrative. For one, the dead were overwhelmingly Hui. Furthermore, while the incidents may have started with the young men of the mining community, when violence came the elderly, women, and children of Hui communities were among the dead. Nevertheless, the idea persisted that the warlike Hui needed to be controlled. The worst violent incident occurred at Baoshan (保山). Inter-community violence escalated, stirred up by Han societies on one hand and a band of Hui migrants/bandits from the countryside. The local Hui cooperated with the government and had the rowdy Hui elements expelled from the area, but when some of the bandits attacked nearby towns things got ugly. The Han societies were convinced of the existence of a fifth column. They marched into the city, and proceeded to slaughter the Hui. Men, women, and children were massacred alike, leaving 8,000 dead. The incident was initially covered up- local officials presented themselves as having nipped an incipient rebellion in the bud. As the truth came out, they shifted to suggesting that they had lost control of the people, who had failed to properly distinguish between good Hui and bad Hui. The assumption remained that bad Hui was a real and serious problem. The question of whether the massacre might actually be representative of a bad Han problem was not addressed. There was some violent protest and planned rebllion in outlying Hui communities following Baoshan, but Hui community leaders cooperated with the Qing in stifling these, still trusting in the court to eventually make things right. The arrival of Lin Zexu (林則徐) (of opium war fame) as governor general offered some hope. He generally let the government officials complicit in the massacre off the hook, but investigated the incident and arrested several of the massacre leaders from the Han societies. This was immediately responded to by a second massacre of the Hui. Lin sent 10,000 men to the town, at which point several hundred perpetrators were handed over without a fight. Afterwards, Lin decided that Han and Hui must be separated if peace was to prevail. The Hui were relocated one hundred miles away, to a "fertile valley" that in actuality was malarial swamp. Peace had been restored, but at the cost of convincing many Yunnanese Hui that they could no longer trust the government to defend them. The early 1850's saw additional incidents, but nothing that convinced the government to change course and proactively deal with increasing anti-Hui hostility. Rather, the pattern would repeat of a government whose official policy of non-discrimination meshed uncomfortably in practice with a worldview that still saw the Hui (and only the Hui) as a potential threat to provincial order. The decade began with gentry-led militias in the Talang mining region massacring and driving the Hui from the region following an initial dispute over a gambling debt. It was met with a shockingly tepid response from the government even as the militias looted and robbed indiscriminately. Lin Zexu had left the province a year earlier, and soon all of the empire's resources and top talent would be directed to face the Taiping, leaving Yunnan verging on anarchy. Perhaps the officials of the time felt that anarchic chaos dominated by violent Han was preferable to violent Hui, but most likely they were simply ignorant, willfully or otherwise, of the rapidly deteriorating situation. In 1854, the same gangs that had rampaged through Talang moved on and attacked the Shiyang mine. The militia that was supposed to defend the mine instead joined forces with the newcomers to massacre the Hui miners. Ma Rulong (馬如龍)(remember this guy) organized the Hui in self defense. Realizing that they could not defend the mines, they instead blocked the entrances and retreated. Their chance to seize control of the mine's wealth lost, the militia contented themselves with a series of attacks on Hui villages. If economic rivalry among miners lay at the roots of Han-Hui hostility, that origin had long been forgotten. The militia's goal was ethnic cleansing,"洗回" ,plain and simple. Over two years, at least dozen villages were destroyed and several cities struck, with the mosques destroyed and any Hui found massacred. At least 8,000 were killed. In 1856, the genocidal rampage had moved to the area of the provincial capital of Kunming. It was now time for the Qing officials to decide what to do about it. Governor-general Hengchun (恆春) was absent, having been called to Guizhou to help deal with the Miao rebellion. In his absence, military control devolved to Shuxinga(舒興阿), the governor. He had previously been stationed in the northwest, where he had developed a lasting hatred of Muslims. Shuxinga was in extremely poor health mentally and physically, so Qingsheng (清盛), a provincial judge who seems to have shared Shuxinga's views on Muslims, took an increasingly large role in day to day government. He would work closely with the local Han gentry to come up with a plan.  Map of Some Massacres To these men, the news of fighting presented an excellent opportunity to put an end to the Han-Hui violence. More specifically, by putting an end to the Hui. Using the news of violence near the capital as an excuse, a secret letter is circulated through the city and outlying area, notifying officials and prominent Han leaders that the Hui are to be suppressed. Gesha wulun (格殺勿論) goes the order, no consequences for legal killing. In modern Google translation, "shoot to kill." The order is put into practice and 8,000 Hui are murdered in Kunming alone until Qingsheng's mother begs him to put a stop to it. The Kunming massacre will mark the start of the Panthay rebellion. The Righteous Anger of the Hui People As word gets out that killing Hui is now officially approved, violence spreads throughout the province, and thousands are murdered. But as the ethnic cleansing attempt goes province wide, so becomes the Hui response to it. News of the Kunming massacre spreads rapidly as the Hui warn their communities, and before long they have organized province wide in self defense. Soon, militias are ready, and soon after that militias become armies. The Hui people mobilize en masse in self defense, and the whole of Yunnan will soon be embroiled in conflict. For the recently returned governor-general Hengchun, this all seemed like a terrible mistake. He did not initially attempt to stop the Hui militarily, hoping that restraint on his part would allow the situation to calm naturally. The belief that most Hui were not interested in rebellion and would only fight if provoked was correct. His miscalculation was not realizing that circumstances had long ago passed that point of no return. He had no control over the Han militias and gentry-led organizations that had provoked the fighting and were continuing to attack the Hui, so his non-confrontational approach was futile. Meanwhile the imperial court, in accordance with long standing prejudice, assumed the Hui, at least the "bad" ones, were at the root of the problem and demanded their suppression. Eventually Hengchun gave in and committed imperial troops to the fight against the Hui. The Hui had, too many times in the past, trusted the government to protect them and been betrayed. This time, as the massacre at Kunming fell into the same pattern as Baoshan and so many previous incidents, they refused to let themselves be butchered illegally and then be victimized legally by a supposedly impartial government. As always, violence between the Han and Hui had been met with a response that was from the government's perspective fair and balanced, as the troops were instructed to only kill rebellious Hui. The fact that military action against the exterminationist Han militias was never even considered demonstrates that the failures of Qing ethnic policy ran much deeper than any one official. Hui resistance would rise up throughout the province in geographically separate movements. Perhaps the most successful was in the far west, near the major city of Dali. The city lay in a large valley with fortification at either end, meaning it should be relatively secure from attack. Many of the forces supposed to be defending the city, however, had been sent away on a successful campaign to put down a Hui uprising in Yaozhou. As news of the fighting elsewhere reached Dali, Han militias were again organizing to attack the Hui. But in Dali the Hui refused to wait for a government response and struck first. They were able to seize both the north and south pass fortifications. Assisted by a contingent of Hui from outside the valley, they then fought to take control of the city of Dali, having overcome the Hui's numerical disadvantage by concentration of force. The Han defenders divided in two, seeking to break out and seize either of the passes. Both forces were destroyed, leaving the Hui in command of an economically and strategically important city which could be the nucleus of future resistance. The capture of Dali also gave them a leader. The victorious Hui select Du Wenxiu (杜文秀 ) to be generalissimo and leader of the Yunnan Hui. He calls for a new system in which Hui, Han, and Yi unite together in harmonious cooperation. It is the beginning of a multi-ethnic, independent Yunnanese government that will last for over sixteen years.  A plan comes together Meanwhile, in the south, Ma Rulong, leader of Hui resistance during the 1854 massacres was organizing a force composed of equal parts Hui and yi, responding to the massacre of Hui in the southern city of Lin'an (臨安). For reasons that aren't clear, the ethnic cleansers had apparently assumed that the yi would be on their side, since the Hui were the only minority who were currently marked for genocide. The yi were in fact no more well-disposed towards the government then their counterparts in Guizhou. Instead of standing aside, the many ethnicities of Yunnan recognized increased Han settlement and Chinese government as a much more dangerous threat to their traditional lands and way of life than the Hui, and would rise up as well once the Hui proved the viability of resistance. "They came for the Hui, and I Ma Rulong was one of many Hui leaders who emerged to lead the decentralized resistance. The Hui of Yunnan looked to Ma Dexin (馬德信), a prominent and educated cleric who had been to Mecca, for leadership, but his role was as spokesperson and spiritual leader, not a warrior. He delegated military matters to a man named Xu Yuanji (徐元吉). Ma Rulong, while, unable to claim Lin'an for the rebels, was able to carve out an area of relative safety between Lin'an and Kunming. He makes a momentous decision and convinces Ma Dexin to lend his forces in support. In June of 1857, Ma Rulong leads a massive multi-ethnic force to the capital of Kunming, which sits alone on a vast plain.  Hengchun closed the gates of the city, exposing thousands trapped outside the walls to the rebel's wrath. The government troops had been dispersed throughout the province, fighting widespread rebellions and the new rival government in Dali, and were completely surprised and unequipped to deal with the tens of thousands of rebels that had appeared in front of the capital. Hope of relief from other provinces was futile, as any substantial forces that existed would have been sent east to fight the Taiping, not west to distant and unimportant Yunnan. After a failed attempt to sortie out of the city, Hengchun was out of options. In July of 1857, governor-general Hengchun does the only thing he can. He kills himself.
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Jan 13, 2016 05:03
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HEY GAL posted:it's not latin script. germans have their own alphabet at this time, and will keep using the drat thing until 1941 Literally the reason why Hitler wasn't all bad. I mean, yes, the holocaust, I'll admit, but you have to balance it against making German readable...
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Jan 13, 2016 09:15
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ArchangeI posted:Literally the reason why Hitler wasn't all bad. I mean, yes, the holocaust, I'll admit, but you have to balance it against making German readable... and cyrano still has a phrasebook given to GIs after the war that contains "do you know how to write in latin script please" edit: it's only an accident of history that we're not both typing in something like that right now--English used to be written in a Northern script, like German and Dutch (and possibly Swedish? idk) but when the English printing industry was getting off the ground a lot of Italians came over to work as technicians. and what we're writing right now is what they taught the English, which is their reinterpretation of a script called Carolingian Minuscule, which they thought was not only pretty but classically Roman. It wasn't, they were like 700 years off, but it is a really nice script. Anyway that's why ever since the late middle ages we've written like Romance language speakers. The English W used to be a big circular squiggle that looked almost like the @ symbol. edit 2: actual classical roman handwriting looked like this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:I_littera_in_manuscripto.jpg HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 09:27 on Jan 13, 2016 |
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Jan 13, 2016 09:21
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HEY GAL posted:so a friend of mine sent me an ad for a paleography course I saw this on the phone and thought it's a tughra.
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Jan 13, 2016 09:25
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JaucheCharly posted:I saw this on the phone and thought it's a tughra. It's Ali G's tughra.
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Jan 13, 2016 09:29
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JaucheCharly posted:I saw this on the phone and thought it's a tughra. when i first started learning paleography, the early modern german attitude towards handwriting reminded me of that of the arabic speaking world. it's this entire thing about energy and self-expression, it's pretty cool
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Jan 13, 2016 09:30
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I just realized that if I won the billion dollar Powerball, one of the things I would do would be to commission a Chinese shipyard to build me a working, sailable replica of the Goeben.
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Jan 13, 2016 16:08
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I wonder if it's enough money to raise a proper regiment with the legal status and everything. I think I'd probably go for the Turbinia or something a bit more manageable.
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Jan 13, 2016 16:21
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P-Mack posted:Taiping Tianguo Woo, was waiting for a new one.
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Jan 13, 2016 16:31
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wdarkk posted:Just one division? Land three and grab it! You mean try to land thirty, lose 27 and then grab it for a couple weeks before Austrian whining summons another German army to take the naval base back.
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Jan 13, 2016 16:34
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HEY GAL posted:it's not latin script. germans have their own alphabet at this time, and will keep using the drat thing until 1941 Did they capture a better one in Russia?
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Jan 13, 2016 16:44
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HEY GAL posted:so a friend of mine sent me an ad for a paleography course Are you sure those aren't crop circles?
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Jan 13, 2016 16:46
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Taerkar posted:Did they capture a better one in Russia? Amusing as it is to think of the Germans writing in Cyrillic...one of the ways Nazism/fascism differs from plain old Wilhelmine authoritarianism as an ideology is an emphasis on modernism, and adopting the same script as the rest of Europe was seen as modern. They had a spelling reform in the works too. Edit: this is what Hitler had to say in a speech on the subject - 'Your alleged Gothic internalisation does not fit well in this age of steel and iron, glass and concrete, of womanly beauty and manly strength, of head raised high and intention defiant ... In a hundred years, our language will be the European language. The nations of the east, the north and the west will, to communicate with us, learn our language. The prerequisite for this: The script called Gothic is replaced by the script we have called Latin so far ...' feedmegin fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jan 13, 2016 |
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Jan 13, 2016 16:49
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Standing by for a Cyrano4747 wall-o-text on Sütterlinschrift in 3... 2... 1...
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Jan 13, 2016 16:54
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Arquinsiel posted:Maybe the drugs caused him not to notice that the 90's ended way back? I think I had a mobile phone in mid 99, but Ireland seems to have been way ahead of the curve in child adoption of phones so I got mine in 1999 or 2000 I think, but yeah, both early adopter and cargo-tron goonlord.
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Jan 13, 2016 17:07
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Well, there's about 30 years left for adolf's prediction of Lingua Germanica to come true... those immigrants better start making warpdrives and cheap wetware if they want to make Germsny great again.
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Jan 13, 2016 17:26
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So, we all know how the Germans loved to use captured Allied equipment, from tanks and trucks to small arms and more. But I was wondering if the Allies did the same (albeit obviously not on that scale). I've come across a few examples like that Soviet assault gun on the Pz III chassis and the Panther 'Cuckoo'that was used by the 4th Coldstream Guards. I've also read that the Brits were very impressed with the German 8cm mortar and would use them when they found some, but I'd like to know if there are other interesting stories out there of the Allies using German equipment other than picking up a mp.44 and using it until the magazine ran out.
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Jan 13, 2016 17:26
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JcDent posted:Well, there's about 30 years left for adolf's prediction of Lingua Germanica to come true... those immigrants better start making warpdrives and cheap wetware if they want to make Germsny great again. Isn't the fact that English is the Lingua Franca of the modern world in part thanks to English being a bit of a bastard language, in that it has both Germanic and Latin roots, so it's much easier to adapt to new words? German doesn't seem that adaptable in my eyes..
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Jan 13, 2016 17:29
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JcDent posted:Well, there's about 30 years left for adolf's prediction of Lingua Germanica to come true... those immigrants better start making warpdrives and cheap wetware if they want to make Germsny great again. To be honest, I'm giving greater chances for someone inventing working commercial fusion reactors in the next 4 years, having them replace all our nuclear ones, just for them to explode and usher in a strange new age of mutation and magic.
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Jan 13, 2016 17:32
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Molentik posted:Isn't the fact that English is the Lingua Franca of the modern world in part thanks to English being a bit of a bastard language, in that it has both Germanic and Latin roots, so it's much easier to adapt to new words? German doesn't seem that adaptable in my eyes.. English being the Lingua Franca now has absolutely nothing to do with the qualities of the English language.
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Jan 13, 2016 17:33
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E: I'm glad mr. P-mack you're still rolling on these posts. In addition to all the other goodness, I'm learning a shitload about Chinese ethnographty that I was in ignorance of. Is China sorta like India in that it has a lots of ethnic groups that kinda get glossed over when talking about China?HEY GAL posted:so a friend of mine sent me an ad for a paleography course Nothin' but a G thang Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Jan 13, 2016 |
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Jan 13, 2016 17:40
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Molentik posted:So, we all know how the Germans loved to use captured Allied equipment, from tanks and trucks to small arms and more. But I was wondering if the Allies did the same (albeit obviously not on that scale). I've come across a few examples like that Soviet assault gun on the Pz III chassis and the Panther 'Cuckoo'that was used by the 4th Coldstream Guards. I've also read that the Brits were very impressed with the German 8cm mortar and would use them when they found some, but I'd like to know if there are other interesting stories out there of the Allies using German equipment other than picking up a mp.44 and using it until the magazine ran out. EDIT: And it's probably one of the biggest examples of Allies using German equipment since the jerry can was so much superior than anything the British had in North Africa.
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Jan 13, 2016 17:41
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Molentik posted:Isn't the fact that English is the Lingua Franca of the modern world in part thanks to English being a bit of a bastard language, in that it has both Germanic and Latin roots, so it's much easier to adapt to new words? German doesn't seem that adaptable in my eyes.. Note which countries have been superpowers for the last, ooh, two centuries ish (and note that the lingua franca of eastern Europe before the Cold War ended was Russian). Double-note that the lingua franca before English was French, at a time when France was the single most powerful European power; and of course go back far enough it was Latin. If we were going for a language that was actually 'good' to be the lingua franca of Europe from a technical point of view, I'd vote for Spanish or Italian. Nice and regular, easy to learn and pronounce, familiar to people who speak other Romance languages. English would come quite a long way down the list.
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Jan 13, 2016 17:43
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Molentik posted:So, we all know how the Germans loved to use captured Allied equipment, from tanks and trucks to small arms and more. But I was wondering if the Allies did the same (albeit obviously not on that scale). I've come across a few examples like that Soviet assault gun on the Pz III chassis and the Panther 'Cuckoo'that was used by the 4th Coldstream Guards. I've also read that the Brits were very impressed with the German 8cm mortar and would use them when they found some, but I'd like to know if there are other interesting stories out there of the Allies using German equipment other than picking up a mp.44 and using it until the magazine ran out. The SU-76I and SG-122 are not a good example, since they weren't made because the Soviets loved the PzIII so much, they were made because SU-76 and SU-122 production was slow to take off and the PzIII chassis was the least bad out of all the available ones. The vehicles were produced in miserly numbers and the project was shut down as soon as domestic production caught up. As for German tech that the Soviets loved: their muzzle brakes. The early production IS-2 muzzle brakes are German clones, and they're not shy about admitting it.
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Jan 13, 2016 17:46
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100 Years Ago For about 12 hours, things in Mesopotamia seem as though they might actually be going rather well for the force marching towards Kut. Don't worry, things soon go off the rails as General Younghusband goes groping around in search of a river that he was never going to find, and a brief frontal attack ends entirely predictably. Robert Palmer's perspective on the day's events isn't any better; he was probably lucky to still have been condemned to a day's General Reserve marching; and Bernard Adams returns to his men full of beans and almost ready to beard his own Brigadier with lessons learned at the Third Army School. Down in the Caucasus, meanwhile, it's a critical day; the Russian feint in front of Koprukoy has successfully convinced the Ottoman acting commander (the actual commander is still on an extended leave in Constantinople, never mind the major battle his army is fighting) to commit reserves to the wrong place. Now all they have to do is launch their attack tomorrow on the Cakir Baba at exactly the right time, there'll be no reserves left to oppose them, and Robert's your father's brother. Except there's the small matter of how their own reinforcing units are now having to advance along paths where the snow is chest-deep... Jaguars! posted:Sergeant Major is the fattest sergeant, not the grumpiest major, thus meeting between sergeant-major (very senior NCO with some pretensions to officering) and corporal (junior NCO) is reasonably above board One was referring to her luncheon with the Colonel 
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Jan 13, 2016 17:52
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Libluini posted:To be honest, I'm giving greater chances for someone inventing working commercial fusion reactors in the next 4 years, having them replace all our nuclear ones, just for them to explode and usher in a strange new age of mutation and magic. Likelier scenario that European birthrates improving without outside influence. Poor refugees: prejudice and squalor now, economical burden of aging populace later. Can someone tell me about Franco-Prussian warfare? I keep imagining it as Napoleonic lines But With Breachloaders Now And MGs. Dreadful and boring.
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Jan 13, 2016 18:03
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HEY GAL posted:edit: it's only an accident of history that we're not both typing in something like that right now--English used to be written in a Northern script, like German and Dutch (and possibly Swedish? idk) but when the English printing industry was getting off the ground a lot of Italians came over to work as technicians. and what we're writing right now is what they taught the English, which is their reinterpretation of a script called Carolingian Minuscule, which they thought was not only pretty but classically Roman. It wasn't, they were like 700 years off, but it is a really nice script. Well it wasn't an accident. English printers had multiple sets of type (which were usually made in Amsterdam) and switched depending on subject matter. The tendency seemed to be that blackletter was used for "popular" works: psalters, school books, and most famously broadsides. When printers wanted to evoke humanism and classicism, they used roman type, such as for scholarly or scientific works, history, or It wasn't a case of blackletter being unpopular. The Martin Marpelate tracts (foul-mouthed puritan samizdat of the late 1500s) were initially in blackletter, but they switched to roman type as the authorities start breathing down their neck, presumably left behind when they switched location to avoid capture. Far more of the roman-printed texts ended up in people's libraries, so we have a more complete record of what was produced.
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Jan 13, 2016 18:05
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JcDent posted:Likelier scenario that European birthrates improving without outside influence. The only people with MGs were the French, and they didn't really use them effectively. Also, why do you think it would be substantially different to American Civil War warfare, given that was only a few years before? 
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Jan 13, 2016 18:08
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Nebakenezzer posted:E: I'm glad mr. P-mack you're still rolling on these posts. In addition to all the other goodness, I'm learning a shitload about Chinese ethnographty that I was in ignorance of. Is China sorta like India in that it has a lots of ethnic groups that kinda get glossed over when talking about China? I've been learning this ethnography stuff as I go, and its complicated and I'm terrified some expert is going to descend on the thread and yell at me for getting something wrong. China today is 94% Han Chinese, and minorities are concentrated in the west (Yunnan is still 50% minority) so theres plenty of places that are basically homogenous, nothing like the madness that is India. The problem is that ethnicity is forced into the 56 minzu paradigm. This creates a very essentialist conception of identity that downplays the fluidity of ethnic identity as a social construct. Then they try to apply the same categories back in history on to people that didn't think in those terms. The Qing idea that people should and will eventually become Chinese is replaced with the idea that you are, have always been, always will be Hui or Miao or whatever, but that that identity is a subset of the common Chinese 5000 year history. It's also not great because some of these 55 minorities are subgroups of a common people, others contain completely unintelligible languages grouped together, but you will never ever convince the CCP to deviate from 55 as the number. Then we get to the Han, which is a uniform ethnic group with a common history despite half a dozen different languages, err, umm, dialects. Go back to the Qing, and the Hakka get the dog radical. Today they're part of that Han 94%. The CCP manage to assemble a way of understanding ethnicity where the Muslim rebels of the 19th century are heroes, but merely talking about greater autonomy for Xinjiang will get you arrested. Once I get to the end of the narrative I'll dig more into the historiography of the anti-Qing rebellions.
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Jan 13, 2016 18:21
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hogmartin posted:Standing by for a Cyrano4747 wall-o-text on Sütterlinschrift in 3... 2... 1... Not really much to say about it. I'm just really loving glad that it went away for purely selfish reasons. my dad posted:English being the Lingua Franca now has absolutely nothing to do with the qualities of the English language. To expand on this a little bit, as both someone who has learned a foreign language (a couple of times, if you count my non-functional dabblings in French and Spanish alongside my actual semi-proficiency in German) and taught English abroad: Ignoring the obvious actual reasons why English became dominant (legacy of Imperial England, the US's status as superpower, economic powerhouse, and owner of the largest concentration of top-tier universities in the world*) there is one little grammatical wrinkle: English is easy as all gently caress to learn the basics of, but difficult as a motherfuck to master. Compared to German, for example, the grammar is insanely simple, especially when you are talking about day to day conversation. gently caress, most of our verbs have two goddamned present tense forms. That's insane. Our case system is also so vestigial that it can be (nearly) ignored entirely if all you need to do is interact with English speakers at a service industry level. If you live in a town that gets tourists, learning enough English to interact with them isn't difficult. What IS a royal pain in the rear end, however, is the vocabulary and the spelling. I forget the exact number, but English has something like twice the number of words of the next language. Spelling and pronunciation is also completely batshit insane. If you're someone who really needs to master the language and be able to express complex ideas (say, taking university courses) it's a lot of goddamned work. *as an aside, the university thing is more important than you would think. Take the 19th century as an example: a lot of older subjects that had major research centers in Germany were utterly dominated by German, to the point where English speakers had to learn it to function. In some of the slower moving examples of those fields where a lot of major work was done before the 40s it's still an incredibly useful utility language. Archaeology is the big example, but there are others. Interestingly enough it was British and American innovations in engineering which pushed English being taught in German universities in the early 20th century, as the weight started to shift in certain practical subjects to the English speaking world. This caused a LOT of angst in German academia, incidentally, up to and including parliamentary debates over whether Greek and Latin should still be the default language classes for university-bound kids or if there should be a more practical track that would let them take English or other European languages.
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Jan 13, 2016 18:21
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xthetenth posted:I wonder if it's enough money to raise a proper regiment with the legal status and everything. I read a claim that you can set yourself up as a warlord in Afghanistan for $100,000. But I expect it would be more complicated than showing up with a suitcase of cash....
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Jan 13, 2016 18:28
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JcDent posted:Can someone tell me about Franco-Prussian warfare? I keep imagining it as Napoleonic lines But With Breachloaders Now And MGs. Dreadful and boring. Just imagine a bunch of badly lead Frenchmen sitting around surrounded by Germans while an endless rain of grenades comes down. The Franco-Prussian War was basically Artillery -The Reckoning: The new gorefest for horror fans.
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Jan 13, 2016 19:04
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feedmegin posted:The only people with MGs were the French, and they didn't really use them effectively. Also, why do you think it would be substantially different to American Civil War warfare, given that was only a few years before? Well you've got two industrialized belligerents instead of just the one, and everybody is jammed in over a tiny front. Like wondering if WWI's eastern front would be substantially different from the West.
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Jan 13, 2016 19:07
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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The Franco-Prussian War also saw the first purpose-built AA gun! Krupp modified a 1 pounder (37mm) gun on a high-angle carriage to shoot down communication balloons during the siege of Paris.
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Jan 13, 2016 19:10
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P-Mack posted:Then we get to the Han, which is a uniform ethnic group with a common history despite half a dozen different languages, err, umm, dialects. Go back to the Qing, and the Hakka get the dog radical. Today they're part of that Han 94%. You glance on this but it's pretty important isn't it? I don't wanna say this authoritatively 'cause I'm not totally clear on it, but I'd been under the impression that the idea of "Han" as any kind of uniform ethnic group wasn't really an actual thing until the Cultural Revolution threw everything into chaos and people started moving across the country in large numbers. + incentivized settling in the western provinces and rural flight over the past couple of decades etc since then. Even today though a Han from Shanxi and a Han from Zhejiang are so dissimilar that the only reason we think of them as alike is because it's convenient for the CCP this way and nobody in the west can be bothered to learn it differently.
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Jan 13, 2016 19:15
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It's convenient for the CCP but looking at examples around the world, it's looking (IMextremelyHO) a lot better than the alternative.
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Jan 13, 2016 19:17
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Mr Enderby posted:Well it wasn't an accident. English printers had multiple sets of type (which were usually made in Amsterdam) and switched depending on subject matter. The tendency seemed to be that blackletter was used for "popular" works: psalters, school books, and most famously broadsides. When printers wanted to evoke humanism and classicism, they used roman type, such as for scholarly or scientific works, history, or xthetenth posted:I wonder if it's enough money to raise a proper regiment with the legal status and everything.
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Jan 13, 2016 19:45
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Koramei posted:You glance on this but it's pretty important isn't it? I don't wanna say this authoritatively 'cause I'm not totally clear on it, but I'd been under the impression that the idea of "Han" as any kind of uniform ethnic group wasn't really an actual thing until the Cultural Revolution threw everything into chaos and people started moving across the country in large numbers. + incentivized settling in the western provinces and rural flight over the past couple of decades etc since then. Even today though a Han from Shanxi and a Han from Zhejiang are so dissimilar that the only reason we think of them as alike is because it's convenient for the CCP this way and nobody in the west can be bothered to learn it differently. That's the problem, yeah. Imagined communities and all that. There was a broad concept of distinctive Chineseness before the modern era but it was more closely tied to "civilized" dress and customs than genetics. The Manchu had obvious reasons to not fully exclude themselves from the umbrella of Chinese identity. You could change your Miao name and become Chinese if you really wanted to. The Hui stopped the assimilation process halfway, which may have been what marked them as a target. But if you yell "One China 56 Minzu 5000 Years" for 60 years the modern day territory starts conforming to the map. The past doesn't, and we don't really have a fully developed common vocabulary to describe ethnicity that matches up with how people of the time understood it. The books I've been reading spend the first 20 pages trying to ad hoc create that framework before getting into the actual history. I think we talked about Karl May and Germany a while back. This book I'm reading about the Hui has a quote from a 20th century Chinese settler describing moving to Gansu as being a Wild West cowboy in Indian country. I wonder now how "Han" as an identity becomes something different in a frontier context, kind of how "white" did once there was an Other to define it against.
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Jan 13, 2016 19:48
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