Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 January 8

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January 8

a Language of mixed languages

Someone from Pakistan told me that Hindko language is a mixture of Pashto and Punjabi. Is this true and is there any other languages that are a mixture of two or more languages? Oh...he also said that Saraiki language is a mixture of Punjabi and Sindhi. Is this also true? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.53.231.174 (talk) 02:09, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Our articles Hindko and Saraiki describe each as a dialect of Punjabi.. Hindko makes no mention of Pashto, but Saraiki is also considered a dialect of Sindhi within Sindh province. There are no references given for that though. In general, a language that arises as a meld of two other languages is a Pidgin, and may develop into a Creole. Rojomoke (talk) 07:06, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Spanglish is one example. Note that such languages are typically not official, but more like slang. StuRat (talk) 08:33, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Maltese language should be another example. It is even an official EU language. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 12:21, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

There's also Maltenglish, a hybrid of the 2nd degree. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:20, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

This probably isn't exactly what you mean, but the origins of English are pretty much an equal mix of French, German and Latin, with minor contributions from other languages. See Foreign language influences in English (not our best written article, but it's clear enough). Equisetum (talk | contributions) 16:07, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

A language that develops from two or more languages is called a Creole language. They usually start out as a Pidgin language.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 16:17, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

• Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics, Sarah Grey Thomason, Terrence Kaufman, is the standard text on this issue. (Google eBook) A language's genetic classification is based on its morphology (noun and verb inflections) and its core vocabulary. English is not a mixed language on this basis. Its noun and verb morphology is purely Germanic (-s, -ed, -en, -ing), and its core vocabulary [http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Swadesh_lists} almost entirely native Germanic save for animal, forest, fruit, mountain, river, push, and because. (Some words like sky are borrowed from Norse.) English obviously does have a large borrowed non-core vocabulary. This is not at all untypical. Thomason and Kauffman spend a third of their book examining and abandonning the creolization theory of Middle English. Creoles, in which a population adopts a non-genetically related core vocabulary, and reanalyzed the morphology, are quite rare. Even then, the core vocabulary is largely from a single source. For example, Haitian Creole has a largely French vocabulary, although its morphology can't be described as flowing from French. There are rare cases like Mednyj Aleut where Aleutian speakers borrowed the Russian verb endings and added them to Aleut verbs. Cases like these are rare, and their analysis a subject of great interest and debate. μηδείς (talk) 19:00, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

• There are also dialect chains, where geographical central locations will have speech forms that can sometimes be interpreted as intermediate between to standard languages. For example, the Catalan language seems to lie subjectively between French and Castilian to someone who speaks the "official" languages. The same for the Rusyn language, which Slovak speakers will say sounds Ukrainian, while Ukraines will say it sounds Slovak. But these "intermediate" languages are not blendings. They have their own unique aspects that do not originate in the languages that surround them. The notion that they are mixed is a social and political artifact, not a linguistic one. Someone once said a "language" is a dialect with an army. μηδείς (talk) 19:11, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

WHAAOE. A language is a dialect with an army and navy. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:39, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Speaking of definitions, I've just read this definition of language: A non-obligate, mutualistic, endo-symbiont. (Naturally, one had long suspected this to be the case, but lacked the intestinal fortitude to come right out and say it.) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:44, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

70.53.231.174 -- You can see Papiamento for a language which looks "mixed" to those who know several European languages. However, modern linguists generally do not use the term "mixed language". During the 19th century and early 20th century, the phrase "mixed language" was thrown around with a number of possible meanings, but most of them were found not to exist in the real world (except for somewhat limited and artificial constructs such as Russenorsk) and/or not to be useful in linguistic discussions. Therefore "mixed language" has no standard meaning in modern linguistics... AnonMoos (talk) 03:47, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Family Name - Vald(h)aris

Hi,

I would like to know about family name "Valdharis". Some write as "Valdaris". Please throw more light on this Family name, like its origin, its representation, its meaning...

Thanks A.C.Annadurai — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.124.200.93 (talk) 08:49, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Hi, I removed your email from the post, since it's against the policy and it's a generally bad idea to post your email so openly on the internet. If someone has an answer to your quetion, they will post it here.129.178.88.81 (talk) 10:34, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

OK. Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.124.200.93 (talk) 06:43, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

• The only name I came up with under Valdaris located to Tamil Nadu, India. There were many hits suggesting Valderas, a town in Spain, as an alternative. There are also the possibilities of a name in Greek or Lithuanian, both of which have last names in -is. Some more clues, like country of origin, would help.

Yes I agree, I see a lot in India. When I tried searching for its origin, I couldn't find about it anywhere. Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.124.200.93 (talk) 06:36, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

I am also trying to find, which spelling is correct. Valdaris? or Valdharis? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.124.200.93 (talk) 06:39, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Whichever way a person or family spells their own name is the correct spelling. RNealK (talk) 05:59, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Affluence of urban vs rural areas

In general, in developed countries, which have more affluent people? Cities or countryside? Why is this? Does it also depend on the country and area?Clover345 (talk) 10:40, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

By "more affluent people", do you mean "richer people" (presumably averaged per head) or "a larger number or proportion of rich people"? Both types of area will of course have some rich and some poor people. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 212.95.237.92 (talk) 13:37, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Traditionally the cities were richer. Some reasons:

1) If you run any type of business which depends on customers, there are more potential customers per unit area in a city, so you can, in theory, make more money there. Of course, there might also be more competition, so this potential isn't always realized. To take one example, say you are a house painter, then you have to travel many miles between customers and suppliers in the country, which means you would have to charge more just to break even.

2) Wealthy individuals often move to the city, for the better facilities there. For example: running water & sewers, electricity, hospitals, restaurants, etc.

3) Housing prices can be higher in more densely populated areas, keeping poor people out.

However, a trend has also been observed where more people flock to the city than can be absorbed by it, leading to unemployment and slums. And poverty in the city is often worse than rural poverty, as the possibilities to hunt or gather your own food, build your own shelter, etc., are more limited in the city. StuRat (talk) 15:39, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

I can't think of a developed country where a truly rural region is the most affluent part of the country. This is apart from the occasional wealthy resort enclave such as Nantucket. In rural areas, there are few of the career, educational, and networking amenities that affluent people use to maintain their wealth and ensure its generational continuity. If you want to include wealthy resort communities where few people live year-round, you might find some rural locations with median incomes above a country's most vibrant urban areas. However, apart from these, it is hard to think of a rural area more affluent than Manhattan or San Francisco in the United States; than London in Britain; than Paris in France; than Hamburg or Munich in Germany; than Milan in Italy; and so on. Marco polo (talk) 20:32, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Some plantations might count as wealthy areas, provided you exclude the slave/migrant/native workers from the figures. (And if those exploited workers live elsewhere, that might well be the case.) StuRat (talk) 21:05, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

In 1980 - 81 I was employed as a research assistant at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, to test a theory that people moved from the inner city to suburbs to rural areas as they became more financially stable and amassed more wealth. Unfortunately for this project, Thatcherism muddied the waters and it was not possible to complete the study. To address Marco Polo's point above, London is huge and certainly not homogeneous. Areas in London such as Bethnal Green are appallingly poor, and some such as Kensington and Chelsea are stinkingly rich. However, large swathes of the Home Counties are also stinkingly rich - at least the people who live there are. And some counties such as Warwickshire contain the richest in the country. --TammyMoet (talk) 22:05, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

The prevalence of minorities in urban slums dates back a long way, yet there is a big component of white flight, driven in large part in the U.S. by Brown v. Board of Education, which put an end to segregated education and in large part left many affluent families feeling that they had a choice between (usually religious) private schools or departing the city, because they felt the curriculum had been reduced to a less-educated level of the lower class. (I remember one Russian immigrant telling me that the city school expected his child to read and discuss only four books in a year of English class, that magnet schools were determined by lottery, and that he had no other option)

In addition there are other factors worth considering - the combination of the rise of gangs due to the War on Drugs and the corresponding CIA and Contras cocaine trafficking in the US conspiracy really threw a lot of urban minority neighborhoods to the wolves. The danger was so severe that people stayed far, far away, with a murder rate double what it is now (and the U.S. is very high relative to many countries still).

When we look back even further though, there was quite deliberate planning for deurbanization going all the way back to the discovery of the atom bomb and the Eisenhower Administration's intense program of building expressways. I think there must have been some elite opinion that saw cities as being sacrifice zones to a potential nuclear war from which the best and brightest needed to be extricated. Wnt (talk) 22:13, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

It's true that in the United States, suburban areas can be more affluent than their central cities. (Though this is decreasingly true in the most affluent urban areas, such as New York and San Francisco.) However, suburbs are not rural.

I have some familiarity with England, and I don't think the Home Counties generally count as rural, except from the parts farthest from London. Certainly no part of Surrey is truly rural. They are what in American terms would be considered suburban or exurban. There is regular commuter rail service from most parts of the Home Counties to London, and while there are bits of residual agriculture, the vast bulk of the population depends on urban social infrastructure and employment. As for London, while Bethnal Green is impoverished by London standards, I suspect median household income is still higher than in the most rural parts of Britain. This map mostly confirms my point. The lowest incomes are in North Wales, though some deindustrialized urban areas in northern England have median incomes nearly as low. Certainly not all urban areas are affluent. However, the areas with the highest median incomes are in London, and no other part of the country comes close. Note that the map does not give data for Kensington and Chelsea or Westminster-South, which would almost certainly have median incomes an order of magnitude above the others shown. One almost wonders whether the ONS suppressed the data at the behest of the Conservative government because of the outrage it might unleash. Marco polo (talk) 22:24, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

It might be interesting to compare wealth rather than income. In many countries house prices make it very hard for normal wage households to buy a house. In some rural areas, there are no rental apartments. In these areas, every household owns a house and probably a car, whereas rentals are the norm in urban areas, using most of the wages to pay the rent. One needs substantially lower a income if one already owns the house. Unfortunately, whereas income statistics is easy to come by, wealth statistics is difficult to come by, especially if one goes back 15 years or more, and difficult to compare between countries. These measures will give very different inequality measures, as seen by comparing : List_of_countries_by_income_equality and List_of_countries_by_distribution_of_wealth DanielDemaret (talk) 20:47, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

• The median household income of Bucks County, PA, (think Shyamalan's Signs) is $59,000 The Median Philly income is $40,000. Most US cities have a large poor population and a small rich enclave or three. μηδείς (talk) 01:17, 10 January 2014 (UTC)