Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 December 26

= December 26 =

similarities in Judaism and Shi'a Islam
Besides praying three times a day, what other similarities does Judaism and Shi'a Islam have in common? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.31.16.158 (talk) 00:16, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Do they? In any case, there's a "comparisons" section in Abrahamic religions which you may find useful. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:18, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Gathering. Darkness. The Gathering Darkness (and the light within). Dualism. Feudalism. Submission. InedibleHulk (talk) 18:34, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Why did Greek change so little?
Today's Greeks say they can speak and read Ancient Greek but the Wycliffe Bible is partly undecipherable and Chauncer speak is 9X% gibberish. Heck, even today's English can bewilder Americans ("He paid for time with the best lassie bowler in all England. He was given two full tosses, then a fast bouncer. A ball bent so much that it hit his leg stump. That was a proper yorker old top — he was given out bowled clean through the gate by the express pace which was a faster pace than his usual fast men") Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 08:01, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * First off, there's not much compatibility at the pronunciation level; I don't think that modern Greeks would find ancient Greek pronounced in the ancient Greek manner (e.g. Φυγη as [pʰugɛː] or [pʰügeː] instead of [fiyi]) to be very understandable. And what reading comprehensibility there is kind of depends on intermediate bridges; someone who's studied Katharevousa (formal archaizing modern Greek) can probably take a stab at reading 1st century A.D. New Testament Koine Greek, but someone who knows only Demotic (modern Greek close to the current spoken language) would probably have great problems trying to read 5th century B.C. classical Attic Greek... AnonMoos (talk) 08:26, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * So in what ways is it hard? Like 1395 English, for me it's the horrific spelling: "And the sones of thi puple seiden, The weie of the Lord is not euene weiyte; and the weie of hem is vniust." (And the sons of the people said, way of the Lord is not one way; and the way of Him is unjust.) (probably). Ancient Greek probably has a different biggest reason.
 * "...is not even way...".  Rmhermen (talk) 14:10, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * It's not spelling -- words which exist in both modern and ancient Greek, and have been affected only by standard conventional sound shifts (without morphological restructuring), are spelled the same in modern and ancient Greek, as far as basic letters go (ignoring diacritic marks), even if the pronunciation has radically changed, as in the case of Φυγη.
 * To start with, modern Greek has no verb infinitive forms or noun/adjective dative case forms, and the future tense is formed from θα + the present tense. So whenever a modern-Greek reader comes across an ancient Greek infinitive, dative, or elaborately-inflected future verb, there's going to be a comprehension gap, unless educated about such matters... AnonMoos (talk) 14:56, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * And how do they know so much about ancient/medieval pronunciation anyway? Whatever sounds in foreign words the Greek sounds were compared to are also long gone by the invention of sound recording. Do they model it as a random walk so the average of the earliest solid pronunciations of all the ancient transliterations of word X is likeliest? And add a few rules like speakers tending to remove high effort to need things like the b in debt? And weight transliterations with non-vernacular holy languages (e.g. Catholic Latin) which should change pronounciation much slower? Or did they write phoneme/tongue shape books much earlier then I'm guessing? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 10:14, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * , there's a ssubstantial literature on reconstruction of Ancient Greek (and Latin, and Hebrew, and Chinese ...) pronunciation. Ancient Greek phonology gives some of the methods. Sidney Allen's Vox Graeca (referenced therein) is the seminal book. --ColinFine (talk) 11:08, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Really? I find Chaucer around 2% gibberish, so long as I read it out loud (or sub-vocalise).  Speed-reading it doesn't work, but it's the spelling that has changed for the most part, not the language, and where the language has changed the changes are still fairly easy to puzzle out.  GoldenRing (talk) 06:22, 29 December 2014 (UTC)


 * I haven't read Chaucer only a handful of Biblical verses picked to have never been read before (from the first English Bible (1395)), but since Wikipedia says Canterbury Tales was started in the early 1380s 2% might be about right. But then again you might've read much Shakespeare and even his poems and I have only read Bibles, and a few plays like Romeo&Juliet in school. Shakespeare wasn't keen on making simple non-subtle prose without 17th century in-jokes and in-allusions. And you might be British, you have no idea how incomprehensible Britishy ways of writing are to Americans. I still don't know how you can be given out in cricket and that's fairly simple as there's only one baffling word, not a whole phrase. It's like British intentionally go out of their way to make phrases of English words as old-fashioned and creatively idiosyncratic as possible :) Everyone will understand put out, though, though we usually just say out, but do remember that putting out in USian means sex. So does "he couldn't get his leg over" which is somehow funny enough to cause the cricket commentators to uncontrollably laugh for minutes. Anyway a few percent is still partly undecipherable. I saw one verse which I can't find again which had a literally 100% unrespellable middle half, which utterly corrupted the meaning. No clue what that verse said. Or maybe that was just bad luck. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:19, 29 December 2014 (UTC)
 * For what it's worth, that bit of cricketing talk you quote above is meant as comedy - it's full of sexual double entendres.PiCo (talk) 22:58, 30 December 2014 (UTC)
 * @PiCo, That's because I suddenly realized I could replace most of the words with double entendres and still keep the old ones that's how many baffling cricket terms there are. You have to have read a lot of cricket articles to be able to know those. I could've had a batting partner pay to have bat against the best too but that would've been too dirty. And yes, I guess I would call all the forms English on this thread mutually intelligible when read but you can tell the orthography's not going to make it to 400 BC, even if you added Norman-flavored Latin and pre-Roman Celtic. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 01:14, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Quality of mouth (ancient greek)
I look for bibliography that deals with the way which greeks saw the function of the mouth - the fact that in one way it could be used for speech, but on the other way it could be use for oral sex. --79.178.22.136 (talk) 17:02, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Did ancient Greeks not consume food the usual way? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:28, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * It sounds as if you might be asking if the Greeks used different terms to describe the mouth depending on context based on its functions for speaking, sexual stimulation, or (as BB pointed out) eating. I don't know about the Greeks, but the Romans used the term os impurum.  Is that the sort of thing you are looking for?  Perhaps you can better explain your question.  We do not have a Sexuality in ancient Greece article, but that is an entry under Outline of ancient Greece.  The only mention of oral sex I find is in Pederasty in ancient Greece: "Oral sex is likewise not depicted, or is indicated only indirectly; anal or oral penetration seems to have been reserved for prostitutes or slaves."  -- ToE 11:52, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Did the medieval church do anything to limit the number of abandoned, unwanted children?
Or did they just let it be and place the abandoned, unwanted children in nun-run orphanages? In a nunnery, would the nuns actually wet nurse the infants, or would they hire wet nurses? 71.79.234.132 (talk) 18:37, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Well, what were they supposed to do about it? (What can anyone do about it now?) But abandoned children wouldn't necessarily be taken to a nunnery. They were often raised by monks, or by the local bishop (probably the origin of my last name, for example). Adam Bishop (talk) 19:45, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I imagine that the wet nursing issue was probably decided on a convent by convent basis. Regarding attempting to limit the number of abandoned, unwanted children, well, good luck there. Except for the children of the nuns themselves, there wasn't a great deal they were actually in a position to do there. But, yeah, more or less in general, I think that there were a number of children who like Quasimodo were dumped on the foundling's bed for the church to work with in whatever way they saw fit. Unfortunate, and not something most of us today would condone, but when the church was pretty much the primary if not only social-service agency running that sort of thing happened a lot. John Carter (talk) 19:53, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
 * So, what was the medieval church's stance on contraception and infanticide during the Middle Ages? Or did they silently avoid this issue? 71.79.234.132 (talk) 20:01, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Never mind. I already found my answer via Google. Duuhhh... 71.79.234.132 (talk) 21:06, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * In case others are interested, the Church never condoned infanticide, or induced abortion, which it viewed as witchcraft. Aquinas defined quickening at about four months (when the baby first kicks) as the time of ensoulment. Child mortality was so high that most children did not survive until adulthood, and were highly valued as future laborers and providers for aged prents.  Abandoned children left at the church doorstep (usually illegitimate) were given names like Iglesias (churches) Cruz (cross) and Blanco (blank). μηδείς (talk) 21:20, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Edit: I believe that is incorrect. I just recently found out that the Roman Catholic Church did allow induced abortion under certain cirumstances. Infanticide, on the other hand, may be another story. 71.79.234.132 (talk) 05:14, 31 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Clearly sexual abstinence reduced population growth, and the more unwanted laborers tended to drift into monastic orders the more they did so. When abstinence failed, there were things like monk's pepper and hemp seeds ("gruel") with (not well established) negative effect on fertility. Wnt (talk) 21:25, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * The other effect on population growth was infant mortality, which was very high in certain places in the Middle Ages, and indeed right up until living memory in the UK (for example, my own mother was one of 11 children, 5 of which survived infancy). So it's quite possible unwanted infants weren't as common as the OP might imagine. --TammyMoet (talk) 21:42, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I can't put an exact number of unwanted infants in the past, but this website suggests that foundling homes started in the Middle Ages, and actually increased over time. By how much, I can't say. 71.79.234.132 (talk) 22:15, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Disease helps to keep a population in check as well as to enable the fittest to survive. Infants with weaker immune systems and serious deformities are probably not going to survive to adulthood, so those who do get to pass their healthier, stronger genes to the next generation. 71.79.234.132 (talk) 22:05, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Conditions were quite good in the late Middle Ages, which is what drove laborers into town to seek work, as well as the increasing phenomena of foundlings. This icreased population density made the Black Death possible, and population losses weren't recouped for about a century.  As humans are the apex predator, much of our evolution is driven by diseases, but this is more of a Red Queen hypothesis situation.  We end up developing cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia as genetic diseases to deal with endemic contagions like cholera and malaria, while the diseases themselves like chicken pox and HIV become less virulent through attenuation.  Technically, developing immunity to a disease counts as fitness, but as the fitness landscape changes there's always a new emerging infectious disease to deal with. μηδείς (talk) 22:33, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Indeed, I do remember back in high school, that the lowered population density caused by the Black Death contributed to less competition for resources. Then, the people could demand more pay from their employers. 71.79.234.132 (talk) 00:29, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's a slightly different topic, but the survivors lived in a world where abandonned capital had become cheap and labor scarce. μηδείς (talk) 19:02, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Even a skilled orphan stood a chance. Good times. InedibleHulk (talk) 19:08, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Comment: I find it hard to understand how celibate nuns could lactate and so wet-nurse infants. --Bill Reid | (talk) 19:46, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Response: One, you're assuming that they were in fact individually celibate, which is open to question. Two, it would certainly be possible that in some cases a convent could have hired or otherwise employed in some way some lactating women to wet-nurse children as required. Convents did tend to have serious money relative to the community in general, and they could easily have paid wet-nurses or had priests prescribe wet-nursing as penance as required. John Carter (talk) 19:56, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
 * A she-wolf works for free, and Romulus and Remus turned out alright. Bartholomeus Anglicus warned that wolves "loveth well to play with a child, if he may take him; and slayeth him afterward, and eateth him at the last." But Isidore of Seville assured they lose their ferocity if you keep an eye on them. It doesn't take a special nun to watch a wolf. InedibleHulk (talk) 20:31, 27 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Humans don't need to bear children to lactate. See, e.g., . Basically, if a woman tries to breastfeed a child for long enough, the child trying to suckle, she will begin to lactate. People in the past were aware of this, just as they were aware of the ability of mothers who had lost their children to wet nurse the surviving children of other mothers. 86.156.148.98 (talk) 20:43, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Syed Shah Nasiruddin (Sipah Salar)
How come there is no page for Syed Shah Nasiruddin (spiah salad) and his lineage? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nazida88 (talk • contribs) 19:13, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Assuming he is notable and you have reliable sources, feel free to create the article yourself. I have placed some helpful info at your talk page. μηδείς (talk) 21:33, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * The standard answer for this is "because you haven't started it yet." :) Wikipedia is made up of volunteers.  In this particular case we have another problem, which is that we have very few people who speak Arabic, in part due to poor Internet availability in many Arabic countries and in part because http://ar.wikipedia.org/ may see more of their efforts.  Add to this that they might even have an article that we can't find because different transliteration is used!  And to make an article based on English sources... each one might have its own transliteration, which means when we search, we don't find enough information to get started working on.  To give an example of how bad the situation is, even ten years after the infamous September 11 attacks, many newspapers still wrote "Osama" while many others wrote "Usama"!  We really need help with all these sorts of articles, because most of us couldn't tell this person from Naseeruddin Shah... Wnt (talk) 21:45, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Or of course because the dreaded Deletionists got to it. —Tamfang (talk) 22:19, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, see the Langoliers. μηδείς (talk) 22:34, 26 December 2014 (UTC)


 * If we knew more about him it would help. As it stands we have some titles (syed, shah, sipahsalar), and a fairly common name Nasiruddin. Was he actually a shah or is that part of his name? This could be dozens of people. When and where did he live? Adam Bishop (talk) 22:48, 26 December 2014 (UTC)