Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2021 March 3

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March 3

Question about plot with police and criminals

I remember reading a story in the Donald Duck pocket books where the mayor of Duckburg hires Donald Duck as the new chief of police after the old one resigns. Right from the start of Donald's job, a leader of a criminal gang poses as a police informant and informs Donald of the operations of every criminal gang in the city, except his own. Donald's police forces successfully catch all the other criminal gangs. However, this has been a ruse - the first criminal gang now has free rein over the city as the police have eliminated all the competition.

Once this gets discovered, Donald gets berated for allowing this one criminal gang to proceed freely without fear of competition. Donald only saves face by enlisting real police informants and thus catching even the last remaining criminal gang.

What I don't understand here is why Donald got berated. Isn't it the police's job to catch criminals and stop crime? What should Donald have done instead, let the criminals proceed freely? Is there something I'm missing here, or is this a massive plot hole? JIP | Talk 00:18, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

The part you seem to be missing is that it is humor, and fiction. If Donald Duck DOSEN’T get berated, it isn’t funny. Don’t read too much into it; Toons ain’t that deep. . DOR (HK) (talk) 02:09, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

I have never liked this kind of reply. It's basically "in fiction, anything can happen". Even fiction should make sense. Going by this logic, Donald Duck could simply have magically read the criminals' minds and used magical powers to catch them on the spot. What I thought I was really asking here was that isn't it the job of the police to try to catch criminals and prevent crime in the first place, regardless of how it affects the internal conflicts of criminals. JIP | Talk 03:32, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Even fiction should make sense. Perhaps a perfect piece of fiction would make perfect sense, but authors rarely achieve perfection, and may sacrifice perfect sense deliberately or through less-than-perfect craft for the sake of writing a story that entertains (not to mention one that meets a deadline – remember the old maxim, "We don't need it good, we need it Tuesday").

This may be especially so for fiction written with no serious intention or message, specifically for children who (sometimes mistakenly) may be considered by adults to be a less discerning and demanding audience: I suggest that a Donald Duck comic falls into this category.

Add to this the observation that in the Real World people often deviate from strict logic, and that sometimes every possible reaction to a situation will be criticised by someone, either from honest disagreement or for a tactical advantage: this is why we are beset with contentious politics rather than logical, reasoned debate followed by calm concensus. Sometimes, also, there is no good solution to a bad situation, only various more bad and less bad ones. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.125.75.168 (talk) 03:57, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

What you've described in general is not dissimilar to plotlines I've seen on various modern TV cop shows. The difference is that usually it's not funny. (And the Donald Duck story doesn't sound funny either, though maybe it was the way it was presented.) Also, Donald Duck is not especially known for intelligence, let alone mind-reading. He is known for being emotional and short-fused, which I imagine he was once he found out he'd been duped. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:06, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

In fact, that general plotline is probably a lot older than that. I recall a Superman TV episode from the early 1950s, called "Crime Wave", in which Superman rounds up all the leading crime figures in Metropolis - all but the unknown number 1 guy. A prominent community figure argues that number 1 doesn't even exist. Superman, being a lot smarter than Donald Duck, participates in a ruse to flush out the number 1 guy. And, surprise-surprise, it turns out to be that prominent community figure. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:10, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

So clearly the mayor of Duckburg should have hired Superman instead of Donald! --142.112.149.107 (talk) 04:14, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

He might have, if they weren't rival media companies. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:37, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Superman has a non-compete clause in his employment contract? Clarityfiend (talk) 04:40, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

He's a free-lancer. But he has a handshake deal with Batman. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:02, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Conceivably, allowing one criminal gang to proceed freely without fear of competition brought Duckburg in a worse situation. To determine this decisively will require an in-depth study of Duckburg crime records. Absent such study, perhaps we should trust the mayor's judgement – although his decision to hire Donald for the job casts some doubt on the soundness of his mentation.  --Lambiam 15:31, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

So if the police force cannot catch every criminal gang in the city, they should deliberately leave some gangs uncaught to allow for competition between the gangs to limit their activity? JIP | Talk 16:47, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

See Divide et impera. If they can capture all gangs, that's the best. If they are unable to do so, the next best may be letting a pair of gangs fight each other rather and thereby weaken each other instead of giving one an unassailable monopoly.  --Lambiam 00:54, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

For reference: my contacts tell me that the story in question appears to be this one. --Wrongfilter (talk) 17:27, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes, that's the one I am asking about. JIP | Talk 19:49, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

This... totally happens in real life. Criminal A has incentive to rat on a directly competing party, especially if they don't like them personally, and especially if they need a deal to reduce a sentence or police pressure generally. The cops look good and politicians get re-elected behind the resulting arrests. Everybody wins. Except Criminal B. You hear names like Bulger and Giuliani in the news. Temerarius (talk) 23:35, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

• I don't see that much of a problem with the Donald Duck plot (at least as described). Donald's goal should not have been just to arrest criminals, but also to reduce the crime rate. If Donald had a bunch of criminals arrested, but the crime rate stayed the same because the remaining criminals were able to increase their number of crimes committed to make up for the other gangs being off the street, then Donald's methods didn't work and he deserved to be criticized. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 05:31, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Donald's job performance is not beyond reproach, but we must admit that he's facing a dilemma here. His least-worst option (among realistic options) for the safety of law-abiding Duckbergers might be to leave the status quo largely intact. The only thing worse than a large number of criminals is a small number of criminals. The story seems to be pointing that out: a monopoly on crime is not good for a city. The author's dedication to realism leaves us wanting when the mayor doesn't pat the Chief on the back and enjoy his re-election while trying to ignore the remaining criminals. At this point all illegal drugs, gambling, human trafficking, and every unregistered firearm in Duckburg are effectively in one man's hand. This man would probably tell Mr Duck that he's free to leave them alone and receive a regular cash payment, or try to arrest them, which is fine except for his people would have to kill Donald, his nephews, the Mayor, and his wife. At this point corruption happens. If by some miracle it doesn't, and the remaining gang is all locked up, then you're in trouble. Because now it's a total power vacuum into which the REAL gangsters, the Wolves from Toontown, pounce. Those big-city guys are organized and they don't mess around. Now we're looking rose-colored at the good old days when Felix would go down the block three times a week to score a little catnip, and Betty would give a sly handjob or better after a bespoke dance, and everybody'd look the other way. Now things are worse for them too, and nobody asked why they did it in the first place cause they knew the answer. Felix had to get high because he had unaddressed mental health problems, and Betty had to get money that way because she got kids so she needs either free childcare or a well-paying regular job with very flexible hours. In other words, they don't have money. Of course Scrooge up there has money, and his vault wouldn't look like that if he were paying his taxes. Making him the biggest criminal if you count it by the dollar. But he's a close personal friend of the mayor, and every single duck on city council--plus every one who ran against them and lost--has received campaign contributions from Mr McDuck at some point or another. Now Donald really wishes he hadn't taken the police job. Temerarius (talk) 09:19, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Works about the Theresienstadt Ghetto

I would like to add considerable information to the page List of Works about the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Firstly, a book I translated and published called 'Fortress of my Youth' by Jana Renée Friesová, translated by Elinor Morrisby. I published this book under Telador Publishing in 1996 and subsequently the book is now published by the University of Wisconsin Press in the USA, and I hold the English copyright.

There are many gaps in the section 'Music'– works by Gideon Klein, Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krása, and Pavel Haas. None of these are listed. Their works have been recorded on 'Romantic Robot' RR1941 with an assortment of artists performing. The title of the cds is Theresienstadt Die Musik 1941-1944.

Thank you.

Dr Elinor Morrisby <redacted> — Preceding unsigned comment added by <redacted> 06:09, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

I added a title to separate this section off, and linked to the article in question. --142.112.149.107 (talk)

You are welcome to improve our articles. For a variety of reasons it may be helpful, both to you and to other editors, if you create an account (see Wikipedia:Why create an account?), but this is not required.  --Lambiam 15:20, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

As Lambiam says, you are welcome to improve our articles; but when it comes to adding sources that you are involved with - that you translated and published - that might be seen as a conflict of interest, so in those cases, it would be better for you to make an edit request on the article's talk page, and leave it to an uninvolved editor to decide whether it is appropriate to add it. --ColinFine (talk) 09:33, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

A French person travelling back in time to the 1320s or 1330s: Would he actually be able to communicate with the locals of this time period?

If a Frenchman magically travelled back in time to Medieval France in the 1320s or 1330s, would he actually be able to communicate with the locals of this time period? If so, just how well? Futurist110 (talk) 07:39, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

So the question is, essentially, one of the degreee to which (very) early Middle French intelligible to a native speaker of Modern French, and the degree to which either speakers of early Middle French would understand Modern French or a speaker of Modern French could adapt to early Middle French. I suspect that this would be quite the difficult undertaking, and not merely because of differences in the languages. Literacy (and the great breadth of vocabulary that goes along with it) and the standardization of language across large regions or a nation are relatively recent inventions.

The real obstacles, in my view, are phonetic changes. I don't recall if there were any changes in French equivalent to the Great Vowel Shift that occurred in English in the same period. There were certainly major changes in French morphology that occurred, such as the (by and large) elimination of grammatical case. 69.174.144.79 (talk) 08:37, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Futurist110 -- There's been a certain continuity in the spellings of the written language which conceals vast differences in pronunciation, so I don't believe that communication would be easy at all. There hasn't been one overall obscuring change (like the Great Vowel Shift in English), but there has been an accumulation of many lesser sound changes -- to start with, there were a whole lot fewer silent letters back then... AnonMoos (talk) 13:53, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Also, there would have been MUCH more variability and localization of dialects/languages. Essentially everyone in France today from the tip of Brittany to Nice and everywhere in between speaks a common language. Everyone is taught the same thing in schools, all media is in the common language, and while local languages exist, insofar as they still do, they are mostly spoken sparingly or by people who code switch between the local language and French, and these languages are often perceived as merely "imperfect French" rather than distinct languages with a long, independent history (which in many ways, they are). In pre-modern times, not only would some of those locales been speaking essentially unrelated languages (like Occitan in the south or Breton in Brittany), but numerous other languages that would have been very different from the language that evolved into Modern French, things like the Picard language or Franco-Provençal. Actual modern French evolved from a prestige dialect known as the Francien language that originated in the Ile de France, and while there would be varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with the various other languages of the realm, even what we call today "Middle French" would not have been spoken outside of Paris and the immediate environs, excepting among the noble classes. The common local vernaculars would have been very different from "Middle French". Once we go back to Old French or "Romanz", it would have been much closer to Latin than anything we recognize today as distinctly French. --Jayron32 14:53, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes, dialectical variation is a much bigger thing than most realize, in large part due to standardized compulsory education and mass media. In a more "natural" linguistic environment, language would have a gradient of variation from place to place, and at what we now regard as national borders, the people living on either side of those borders may well have understood the speech of one other as well as or perhaps better than they would understand the speech of someone from their own capitals.

But even viewing the question as "What if you took a Modern French speaker and put him in a room with a learned Parisian nobleman of the period?" I believe the answer would be that they wouldn't communicate easily. 69.174.144.79 (talk) 21:26, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Just how much would they be able to communicate? None at all? Or to some extent? Futurist110 (talk) 00:16, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Phonological_history_of_French confirms extensive changes in phonology between 1320 and the present day. These include vowel changes such as changes in the diphthongs /au/ > /o/. and /ei/ > /ɛ/, the loss of all final schwas, the merger of /œ̃/ and /ɛ̃/ to [æ̃], and of /ɑ/ and /a/ to /a/… Consonant changes include loss of final consonants in words like dix (“10”), the merger of the sounds spelled “s” and “c”, the loss of /h/, and the merger of /ʎ/ with /j/ in words like meilleur (“better”).

Grammatically, that same article also mentions that French of your period could often omit subject pronouns (I, she, they, etc) because inflectional endings on the verb took care of that. This would also undoubtably confuse a modern speaker.

What would be the level of difficulty? Haven't found a reference yet, but note that many of these changes did not occur in Quebec French, and French TV shows in France today often subtitle Quebec-French speakers. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 15:36, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Canadian French also changed a lot from the 1700s to today, probably as much as Metropolitan French, but in different ways; the languages have diverged, but I wouldn't necessarily say that Quebecois French is quantitatively more conservative. This article covers some of the key distinctions. --Jayron32 17:51, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

This raises the question: Could a learned Parisian nobleman from the 1700s have actually understood a learned Parisian nobleman from the 1320s or 1330s pretty well? Futurist110 (talk) 00:16, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Just speculation, but probably not comfortably, yet still a bit. Just as, if you take your time and everyone speaks very slowly, people with closely-related languages of the same family of languages can kinda make themselves understood to each other (i.e. Spanish vs. Portuguese, or Dutch vs. German), there could be some communication, but I'm not sure that a comfortable, nuanced conversation about politics would be possible. The difference between them would be similar to the difference between Shakespeare and Chaucer in English, given the time difference. --Jayron32 13:45, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

That's an interesting frame for comparison; thank you! And Yeah, I doubt that Chaucer and Shakespeare could have actually understood each other all that well. They would have understood something that the other one was saying, but not everything by any means. Futurist110 (talk) 23:37, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Advice to time travelers... learn Latin (and specifically Church Latin). Blueboar (talk) 14:07, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Unless one is anywhere but South Europe. Latin's not much use in China, India, or the Americas, ca. 1300s. DOR (HK) (talk) 02:00, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Not just South Europe: "This island at present... contains five nations, the English, Britons, Scots, Picts, and Latins, each in its own peculiar dialect cultivating the sublime study of Divine truth. The Latin tongue is, by the study of the Scriptures, become common to all the rest" - Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Alansplodge (talk) 11:34, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Only among clerics. Most people were not engaged in "the sublime study of the Divine truth", but were instead mostly involved in agricultural work or the trades, and they spoke a slew of languages, most of which were not even closely related (including the Anglo-Saxon language, various Celtic tongues such as the Goidelic languages of the Scots and Picts, and the Brittonic languages of the Britons). While many of those people may have heard Latin in church services, few would have understood it and even less would have a working knowledge necessary to even rudimentary conversation in it. Furthermore, even as late as the 7th century, few clerics spoke latin. The various strains of non-Catholic christianity included native Celtic Christianity and as noted at Christianity in Anglo-Saxon England, there were a "variety of languages spoken, which probably included Old Irish, Old English, Frankish and Old Welsh, as well as Latin" among the clerics at the Synod of Whitby, which did establish the Latin rite as the form of Christianity for all of Britain; however that clearly shows that Latin, while spoken among some clerics in Britain in the early middle ages, was far from universal, even among the ecclesiastical types. Among the average peasants that made up the vast bulk of the population of the island, it was basically unknown. --Jayron32 12:36, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

According to Edward Sapir, the big 5 historic civilizational languages were Classical Latin, Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Chinese (though the pronunciation used for Classical Chinese has changed more drastically down the centuries than is the case for the other four)... AnonMoos (talk) 07:27, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Standard reminder that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy... There is a long tradition of using the exact same word to describe a disparate set of languages across both time and space; what gets called "Chinese" and "Arabic" (often without qualification) represents a bewildering variety of languages (or dialects or whatever word you want to use) most of which have almost no mutual intelligibility. The Arabic of the early middle ages is no more like the languages called "Arabic" spoken today than is the Latin of the late Roman empire like French or Spanish; and the Arabic spoken in Morocco is probably more different than the Arabic spoken in Iraq than is the difference between, say, Swedish and Danish. What those five languages represent are the prestige languages of the wealthy ruling classes (and their direct underlings who were paid to write the histories of those people) in the five great Empires of classical and early medieval times, and more importantly represent the language of the main religious/mythological/philosophical texts of those empires (i.e. the Homeric epics, the Vulgate bible, the Quran, the Vedas, and the Analects). Thats why those languages are preserved in that way; not because they were necessarily more widely spoken than others, but because the people that spoke those languages had the power to ensure their languages had a preserved literature. --Jayron32 14:37, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Sapir meant standard written Classical Arabic, not every Arabic colloquial and vernacular dialect which ever existed. Today's Modern Standard Arabic isn't too far from medieval Classical Arabic in many respects. The five languages which Sapir mentioned are the five biggest civilizational languages which have maintained a continuous tradition down to the present (as opposed to ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, and Egyptian, which nobody could read after 500 A.D. until the 19th century decipherments). AnonMoos (talk) 20:50, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

Those five languages are distinctive, even among prestige languages, in that each is the "classical" language for a broad culture (speaking many unrelated languages) that borrows freely from it whenever someone needs to coin a term. —Tamfang (talk) 01:30, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

R Grandsaignes d'Hauterive, Dictionnaire d'ancien français: moyen age et renaissance (Paris, 1947) looks to be a useful tool. The dictionary entries give the meanings of the words, the date of currency, and a sentence in which they appear. The first two paragraphs on page VII read:

Mots. Ce dictionnaire comprend les mots de l'ancienne langue du moyen âge et de la Renaissance (1 400 mots environ propres au XVI^e siècle) qui n'ont pas survécu dans la langue moderne (du XVII^e siècle à nos jours).

Cependant beaucoup de termes encore vivants y sont portés, soit que leur forme ait changé au point de les rendre méconnaissables, soit plus souvent que leur sens ait été par la suite profondément modifié. Nous avons fait suivre l'article consacré à ces vocables de la lettre v, pour les distinguer d'entre tous les mots perdus pour la langue.

My translation, (for what it's worth), is:

Words. This dictionary comprehends the words of the ancient language of the middle ages and of the Renaissance (1,400 words about particular to the sixteenth century) which have not survived in the modern language (from the seventeenth century to our days).

However many terms yet living are carried there, be it that their form has changed to the point of rendering them barely recognisable, be it more often that their sense has been therefore profoundly modified. We have made to follow the article consecrated to these terms the letter v, to distinguish them from among all the words lost to the language.

There are plenty of entries dating back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. There's a line of Chaucer in this link [1] which is perfectly intelligible. 95.150.9.67 (talk) 11:37, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Many other passages in Chaucer are not "perfectly comprehensible" to modern readers, and the comprehensibility of some passages is mainly due to their being in written form -- if they were pronounced the way that Chaucer pronounced them (with almost every long vowel and diphthong having a very different sound than in modern English etc), the comprehensibility would mostly vanish. I have a 1929 book "Historical Outlines of English Phonology and Morphology" by Samuel Moore which includes a reconstructed 14th-century pronunciation of the first 117 lines of the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales" transcribed into IPA, and if someone read them out loud to you at a normal rate of speed, adhering strictly to the IPA symbols, I guarantee that you would understand very little of it... AnonMoos (talk) 23:31, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Vietcong Guerilla Literature

Good Day! I've recently watched a documentary where they said that the Vietcong had a book which they used as a blueprint to organize their guerilla tactics and their hideouts. I don't recall the name of the book, so I was curious if someone knows which book was meant. A friend of mine says that they used the "The Partisan's Companion" by Kalinin from the second World War. I don't know if he's correct or not. I've also heard that some of the Vietcong used Major Hans von Dach's "Total Resistance", but I don't know if this is true.--85.4.148.47 (talk) 12:58, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

The only thing I found was from PBS (perhaps the maker of your documentary?), Battlefield Vietnam - Guerilla Tactics, which says: "There was even a standard handbook specifying how tunnels were to be built". Alansplodge (talk) 13:29, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

The table of contents of The Partisan's Companion contains nothing suggesting instruction in tunnel building.  --Lambiam 14:24, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I imagine it would have been locally produced. Alansplodge (talk) 16:37, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

I've searched for literature, but I've only found a book by an East German author named Rainer Salzger with the titel "Charly and his deadly tricks". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.4.148.47 (talk) 18:55, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

US military in China (late-1930s/early-1940s)

Was there an American military mission in China during the late-1930s or early-1940s? 86.145.97.63 (talk) 20:13, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

General Marshall "established the American Military Mission to China (AMMISCA) on 3 July 1941 under Brig. Gen. John Magruder". Clarityfiend (talk) 20:32, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

But see also China Marines, "the United States Marines of the 4th Marine Regiment, who were stationed in Shanghai, China from 1927 to 1941 to protect American citizens and their property in the Shanghai International Settlement".

And the Yangtze Patrol, a US Navy river gunboat flotilla in China, involved in the 1937 USS Panay incident. Alansplodge (talk) 20:48, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

"Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45" is a well-known book by Barbara Tuchman on Chinese history, with a particular focus on a senior U.S. military man who spent over 5 years there during the 1930s and 1940s... AnonMoos (talk) 22:29, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

US military in China (late-1930s/early-1940s) According to the 2010 film The Way Back set in the early-1940s, Smith decided to go to Lhasa with the help of one of the monk's contacts, who would smuggle him out through China. Once there, he anticipated he would be able to connect with the US military, his return to America ensured. 86.129.243.160 (talk) 20:26, 17 March 2021 (UTC)