Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 September 30

= September 30 =

Identify the play: Bird at the window means death
I wonder if anyone can identify a play, presented on US network TV in the late 1950's in which a bird flaps at a window wanting in, and when an old man opens the window over the objections of his family, the man dies. On Google I only found references to superstitions about a bird flying against a window being an omen of someone dying. Edison (talk) 04:19, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
 * You misunderstand, a bird flying inside a house means death. Sleigh (talk) 05:47, 30 September 2015 (UTC)


 * Yes, might also watch Six Feet Under through S4E5 where at imdb, "a bird some consider to be an omen and others merely to be an annoyance continues to invade the house. When Nate is insulted for allowing its return by not closing the window it originally entered through, he takes out all his frustration on the bird." This is a rather old superstition that I heard of through my grandmother, a Rusyn person.  I know it is widespread through Eurasia, and assume that Marija Gimbutas's writings on the Bird Goddess will probably address it.  I am not an expert on North American traditions, but someone else might comment. μηδείς (talk) 01:55, 2 October 2015 (UTC)


 * None of the above addressed "a play, presented on US network TV in the late 1950's" which was the info sought. I looked through all episodes of the TV drama series Playhouse 90 and that was not the venue. It could have been "US Steel Hour" or some series which presented more absurdist dramas. A site which describes all episodes of live TV drama from the 1950's "golden age of TV drama would be useful. I'm thinking 1957 through 1958. Edison (talk) 13:39, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Anglophone/Francophonie
If Anglophone is to English speaking countries, and Francophonie is to French, then what is the German equivalent? --194.66.219.40 (talk) 09:33, 30 September 2015 (UTC)


 * Just "Germanophone" (or "Germanophon" in German). German sometimes uses the Latin-derived "Germano-" for language-related things. If you study German language and literature in school, that's called "Germanistik". Adam Bishop (talk) 09:39, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
 * See also German Sprachraum. --Wrongfilter (talk) 09:46, 30 September 2015 (UTC)


 * I like teutonophone. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  09:56, 30 September 2015 (UTC)


 * Germanophones can be subdivided by dialect, of course, into branches such as the Saxophones. —Tamfang (talk) 22:46, 1 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Deutschegrammophone? Blueboar (talk) 16:54, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

History of housing?
In pre-modern times, how did housing work - have there always (since the cave-dweller days) been some people who rented their housing and some who owned? Did renting work similarly in antiquity as today - where the tenant paid some amount every month (or whatever time period) to live in someone else's property? Or did it work differently? 74.96.84.58 (talk) 14:06, 30 September 2015 (UTC)Nightvid


 * Is there a specific area of the world that you are interested in? Otherwise the question is probably too broad to summarize here. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:48, 30 September 2015 (UTC)


 * Two articles to start on would be domus and insula (building), referring to the Roman era. Ancient Greeks are a bit tricky as they used adobe and it rained a bit in the inventing eons.  --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 19:41, 30 September 2015 (UTC)


 * Medieval houses (going back at least as far as the 12th century) could be rented and bought and sold, and contracts and other legal documents about housing are remarkably similar to similar modern documents. They had mortgages and reverse mortgages and all that. I suspect this is because they were borrowing from Roman law although I've never looked into Roman housing law specifically (but any jurisdiction that still uses civil law probably owes a lot to the Roman law of late antiquity). Adam Bishop (talk) 20:15, 30 September 2015 (UTC)


 * And let's not forget feudalism and serfdom, where the serf generally owed payment in the form of crops and/or labor to their lord in exchange for their fief. Land tenure might be informative. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 20:26, 30 September 2015 (UTC)


 * More specifically, Feudal_land_tenure_in_England. As far as I can tell from everything I've read about feudalism and Manorialism, rents and taxes were paid for land, not houses.  I've always assumed that people (whether peasants or nobles) just built (or had built) whatever house they could afford with the resources they got from the land they rented minus those given to their lord in tax or rent.  However, I realize now that I've never seen this explicitly stated anywhere, so it's possible an erroneous assumption.  Here are some non-Wikipedia links on the subject: http://www.learner.org/interactives/middleages/morehome.html, http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/medieval-england/the-lifestyle-of-medieval-peasants/, http://westernreservepublicmedia.org/middleages/feud_peasants.htm, http://www.localhistories.org/middle.html.  The second link repeats the myth that people in the middle ages never (or almost never) bathed, so I'd be a bit skeptical about the other claims in that one. Iapetus (talk) 10:46, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Remember though that there were more people in the Middle Ages than just peasants and nobles. There were cities too, with merchants and craftsmen and other people who were the original "middle class". Adam Bishop (talk) 11:06, 2 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Just on the question of timing, in Britain and Ireland rents were traditionally due on Quarter days. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 09:46, 2 October 2015 (UTC)