This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

Post by dsrguru » Tue, Nov 19, 2013, 4:43 AM UTC

hrkristian wrote: post #69

dsrguru wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Yiddish scholar once said that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." It's really true. One might think that mutual intelligibility (ability for speakers of one to make themselves fully understood by speakers of the other) would be the standard for differentiating languages from dialects, but the distinction really ends up just being political. The spoken forms of Hindi and Urdu are entirely mutually in…

The same applies to the Scandinavian languages, to an extent. A Norwegian will generally have little issue understanding both Danish and Swedish, while Swedes and Danes have a much harder time understanding each other. However, us Norwegians receive a lot of influence from our neighbors and so understanding of their slight differences in language comes as a side-effect of that. A kind of younger sibling complex. May…

Post by srisa » Tue, Nov 19, 2013, 4:50 AM UTC

kunai wrote: post #51

JPKab wrote: post #41

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Hindi or Urdu? Haha... I always find the "language vs dialect" thing very interesting. The distinction when it comes to Hindi and Urdu is totally political. Two of my old buddies, one an Indian, the other a Pakistani, could completely understand each other, yet both insisted that they spoke different languages (Punjabi/Hindi and Urdu respectively) Another friend of mind, who left Pakistan as a 10 year old, always jus…

Urdu and Hindu are essentially the same thing -- except one is written in classic Indian devanagari Sanskrit-style script, and the other is written in Arabic script. And, of course, regional dialect -- but really, those distinctions are excusable in daily speaking. The related language families are just so related across the board -- Marathi, Punjabi, and Hindi -- that one can pick up the other with just a bit of pra…

Post by InclinedPlane » Tue, Nov 19, 2013, 4:52 AM UTC

baldfat wrote: post #44

InclinedPlane wrote: post #21

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Pakistan is a pretty screwed up country in a great many ways, and much of their problems are due to Islam having such a central role in the identify of the country. I think they have the capacity to get past their problems but they have as difficult a problem ahead of them as does Iraq, Syria, or Lebanon. On a meta-level it's fascinating how the vast majority of countries in the world still tend to be mono-ethnic "na…

well that anti-Islam rant might work IF there was no Islamic nation that wasn't peaceful.

Post by anigbrowl » Tue, Nov 19, 2013, 5:01 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #67

anigbrowl wrote: post #12

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For those interested in history, Freedom at Midnight is a great documentary book on the liberation and subsequent partition of India: http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-at-Midnight-Dominique-Lapierre... It's a sad fact that the departure of the British Empire from various colonial possessions frequently resulted in a power vacuum followed by deep internal conflicts which remain problematic today - Ireland, Israel, and Ind…

> It's a sad fact that the departure of the British Empire from various colonial possessions frequently resulted in a power vacuum followed by deep internal conflicts which remain problematic today - Ireland, Israel, and India being three obvious examples. Not a "sad fact". It's how the "british empire" planned it, melticulously and with great effort and cunning. It's a result of their "divide and conquer" way of rul…

Post by mbennett » Tue, Nov 19, 2013, 5:02 AM UTC

r0h1n wrote: post #64

Colour me cynical, but when a corporation is under fire from consumers, regulators and activists, a soppy and heartstring-tugging ad is exactly what the doctors order . It is literally Google saying, "Oh look, cute puppies!" when faced with a global barrage of criticism about its disdain for user privacy or its own past promises.