Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 September 12

= September 12 =

Greek orthodox bible
There are so may article about the Septuagint, its manuscripts and their critical editions, but I don't get, which is the Greek bible text used in Eastern churches over the centuries, and where it is on the internet? Maybe there is nothing uniform at all? trespassers william (talk) 00:41, 12 September 2014 (UTC)


 * See "Eastern / Greek Orthodox Bible".—Wavelength (talk) 02:23, 12 September 2014 (UTC)


 * That's an English translation. I am asking about the Greek original. The article says "The Old Testament (in progress) is based on the Greek text of the Old Testament (Septuagint / LXX)..." but when I try to figure which is the "default" vversion of the Septuagint I get stuck. There are four major manuscripts with differences and three "recensions" from the first centuries AD, what had eastern priests read in the following 15 centuries? What had they printed inthe later ones? trespassers william (talk) 10:54, 12 September 2014 (UTC)
 * See Byzantine text-type for the New Testament, if I understand rightly. It's similar to the Textus Receptus, but it differs in some respects.  For the Old Testament, see the "Septuagint" article on the Orthodox Wiki; it's a pretty good resource for Eastern churches.  You may want to contact the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America; I'm sure they could give you an answer more helpful than mine.  Go to this page on their website for the "authorized 1904 text of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople" for the New Testament, but I'm not finding the Septuagint on their site.  Alternately, are there any Eastern Orthodox churches in geographical proximity to you?  If so, I'm sure the priest would be happy to help you.  Nyttend (talk) 16:39, 12 September 2014 (UTC)


 * (ec) You may find the discussion on Septuagint manuscripts from the Catholic Encyclopedia ( and ) helpful. Note that the recencions of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, mentioned in the wikipedia article are Jewish recensions, and though they may have had some influence, the Christian versions are not primarily based on those. According to Jerome, writing around 400 AD, (in his preface to Chronicles]), there were three geographically separated manuscript families (or revisions) at the time, that of Hesychius, popular in Egypt, that of Lucian in the region between Constantinople and Antioch, and versions based on Origen's edition in the Palestinian region. The various readings of these revisions were preserved in various manuscripts throughout the following centuries. The Catholic encyclopedia mentions that most manuscripts (including many medieval ones) are difficult to ascribe any one manuscript family, but rather contain a mix of readings. Printed editions are also based on a variety of manuscripts, but it appears that Codex Vaticanus is the most popular 'standard' text. So while it appears to be complicated, you are right, the Septuagint has definitely not been entirely 'uniform' over the centuries - Lindert (talk) 16:45, 12 September 2014 (UTC)


 * By the nature of scribal copying, it was quite impossible for any lengthy text existing in multiple manuscripts to be completely identical in all versions. AnonMoos (talk) 20:41, 12 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Except the Qur'an, obviously. Adam Bishop (talk) 11:24, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Not sure whether you're joking or not, but see Qira'at... AnonMoos (talk) 22:30, 13 September 2014 (UTC)


 * But he's also asking "what had they printed in the later ones", i.e. later centuries. It's quite possible to have a standard Septuagint text today, and one can expect the Greek Orthodox Church, for example, to have an official text.  This would be comparable to the Catholic church identifying a specific standard Vulgate text; textual variants might cause it to be different from the autograph, but it's still a single official text.  Nyttend (talk) 01:05, 13 September 2014 (UTC)


 * There's no "autograph" of the Septuagint; different books were translated at different times (the Pentateuch first, of course) and with different translation philosophies. After Greek-speaking Christians adopted the Septuagint, Jews then produced new Greek translations of Hebrew scriptures with a more strictly literalistic translating style, and based on Hebrew Biblical manuscripts respected by Rabbinic authorities -- and there came to be some cross influence between Septuagint manuscripts and Aquila etc. manuscripts.  Then after the majority of the Jewish community of Alexandria, Egypt converted to Christianity, and harsh repression of Judaism under the Byzantine empire continued, Jews pretty much gave up the use of the Greek language for religious writings for a while... AnonMoos (talk) 22:30, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
 * There was an earliest translation of Genesis, an earliest translation of Isaiah, etc.; that's what I meant. Whether or not the LXX really translated the Bible for Ptolemy the Whatevereth, someone produced the first Septuagint manuscript of each book.  Nyttend (talk) 02:40, 14 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks to all. That's a lot of info and ideas. trespassers william (talk) 11:39, 15 September 2014 (UTC)
 * In Russia, the Elizabeth Bible is still in use. --Ghirla-трёп- 10:20, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Length of a court appearance
I can find a bunch of info about what an arraignment is but can't find how long one takes. Does it change for what the charges are? In the US specifically? Dismas |(talk) 00:56, 12 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Dismas, this is going to vary by jurisdiction within the United States. Federal arraignment takes place in two separate stages, usually on different dates: 1) reading of charges and setting of bail; 2) entering a plea. Arraignment procedures vary by state.  In some states, charges are read, in other states, they are often not read in full.  The arraignment itself is likely to be a matter of minutes, but the time involved for the defendant or his or her lawyer could be much greater due to waiting time if a court is handling a number of arraignments that day. The wait is likely to be longer in a major city than in a small county. Marco polo (talk) 13:01, 12 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Thank you, Marco. And thanks to the rest of the community for not closing or removing this thread.  Dismas |(talk) 01:33, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Do speakers of Kansai dialect feel pissed off when someone speaks awkward Kansai dialect?
I've seen this in Case Closed (season 21) of the Detective Conan series. Is that true for most Kansai dialect speakers?--Wdsss (talk) 07:55, 12 September 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm sure you could find one. Indeed, when people misspeak English, there's at least one English speaker in the entire world that gets pissed off at that.  Probably two or more even.  I'd suggest it's plainly true for any language, that'd you find at least one person who speaks that language who doesn't like it when you misspeak it.  -- Jayron  32  14:49, 12 September 2014 (UTC)


 * I highly recommend this short story, written by Haruki Murakami, a generally critically-praised Japanese author. It includes some nice description and "translation" of Kansai dialect, and also discusses how some Japanese people feel about it. One of the characters has mastered Kansai as a 'foreign' language, being a native speaker of Tokyo/standard dialect. But Jayron's basically right, at least some native speakers of any given dialect will be annoyed if outsiders try to speak it, though others might find it to be a sign of good faith and friendship. See e.g. Style_(sociolinguistics), it's generally accepted that when speaking to people we like, we tend to subconsciously mimic their speech characteristics. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:19, 12 September 2014 (UTC)


 * I found an interesting discussion on a language blog; Attitudes of minority languages speakers to learners. Alansplodge (talk) 17:45, 12 September 2014 (UTC)
 * I wonder though how similar that is to the case of nonstandard (not necessarily minority) dialects (or mutually intelligible languages). Also, there must be published studies of this, not merely Facebook and blog comments. I failed to find anything on Google Scholar, though. I don't really know what keywords to use. I did find a study that found that standard UK English speakers had a higher opinion of Glaswegian speakers after trying to imitate their accent, but that was the imitators' opinion of the imitatees, not the other way around. -- BenRG (talk) 02:05, 15 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Murakami wrote that story in Japanese, presumably using real Kansai Japanese, and the translator seems to have made almost no effort to render it as a nonstandard English dialect—he just tossed in some random "y'know"s and "gonna"s, which are strange choices since they're part of standard US English vernacular. I think an English "equivalent" of Kansai-ben would be more like Scots. -- BenRG (talk) 02:05, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Soviet violations of US borders
Off the top of my head I can't recall any and my web search also yields nothing, so I wonder whether there were any instances of violations of US airspace or territorial waters by Soviet aircraft/ships/submarines? Brandmeistertalk  19:05, 12 September 2014 (UTC)


 * I was under the impression that Tupolev Tu-95 variants equipped with electronic surveillance capabilities often flew parallel to the U.S. coasts, and sometimes played games with approaching very close to U.S. airspace, but there doesn't seem to be anything about this on Wikipedia... AnonMoos (talk) 20:35, 12 September 2014 (UTC)


 * They still come close. [Last month] for instance. Rmhermen (talk) 00:14, 13 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Sort of, in the case of Sputnik. Up until that time, it had been somewhat assumed that national air spaces extended out into space.  However, after Sputnik, the US decided not to protest, but instead use it as a precedent and put their own spy satellites over the Soviet Union.  (Of course, it took many years to bring this goal about.) StuRat (talk) 01:03, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Mike Tyson rape case
Mike Tyson's been in the news recently so that kind of piqued my interest about his rape conviction. It says at the Mike Tyson article that, "Further testimony came from Thomas Richardson, the emergency room physician who examined Washington more than 24 hours after the incident and confirmed that Washington's physical condition was consistent with rape." Was it ever revealed what those physical conditions were, and how they were consistent with rape? ScienceApe (talk) 20:31, 12 September 2014 (UTC)
 * There's a standard examination in most jurisdictions done on rape victims; it is highly standardized and the same for every victim, and there are rigidly defined standards for what qualifies as "consistent with rape"; medical examiners and other forensic scientists work within these standards. See Rape kit for a description of how rape exams are done.  -- Jayron  32  00:31, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
 * That didn't answer my question. ScienceApe (talk) 16:01, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Private communities and HOAs
I'm curious to know through what legal mechanism private communities and homeowners associations function. Are they one giant slab of property or is it more complex than that? — Melab±1 &#9742; 23:02, 12 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia has an article titled Homeowner association which covers some of the legal background regarding their operation. -- Jayron  32  00:28, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
 * So are they some sort of agreement? — Melab±1 &#9742; 22:58, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
 * HOA's are generally set up as a covenant whereby the prospective buyer must agree to enter the covenant (sometimes called a CCR or "Covenants, conditions, and restrictions") which are riders placed on the deed that obligate the owner of the property to certain standards of property maintenance, and to pay fees to an HOA to both maintain common property within the development and to enforce the covenants within the neighborhood. For example, the HOA can fine homeowners for not maintaining their property; these fines can be placed as liens against the property which must be payed before the property can be sold.  The HOA generally has a local board (with a president and several members elected from the community), the board usually then hires an HOA management company (a sort of property management) to manage the HOA system.  The entire purpose of an HOA is to maintain property values for the whole community; if your nextdoor neighbor's home is left to rot, it takes down the value of your own house.  HOAs are supposed to prevent/discourage that.  -- Jayron  32  05:12, 14 September 2014 (UTC)
 * So do future buyers need to agree to them? Because once the developer has sold it, then they no longer control it. — Melab±1 &#9742; 03:14, 16 September 2014 (UTC)
 * If I understand rightly, a restrictive covenant of this sort must be placed in future sales, i.e. you may not sell the property unless the terms of the sale include a similar provision. I've never quite understood enforceability, however.  It's one thing when the deed provides for the property to revert to the seller (or heirs) should the covenant be broken, but is that kind of provision really in deeds of sale for HOA-affiliated properties?  Just another reason I hope I don't have to live in suburbia.  Nyttend (talk) 18:14, 16 September 2014 (UTC)