Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2009 May 13

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May 13

Kings of Aquitaine

Who held the title of King of Aquitaine after Carloman II of France? I not talking about the dukes that is another subject. Wikipedia's list ends with Carloman II, but Louis V of France] was King of Aquitaine in 950. Does the other language (like french or german) have a better list? --Queen Elizabeth II's Little Spy (talk) 02:25, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Charles The Fat, 884-888.--KageTora (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 02:31, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

That was a list of Kings, but you'll find a specific article on him here.--KageTora (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 02:36, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Our article Duke of Aquitaine also lists various people who were also named King of Aquitaine, either because it was granted them or because they called themselves that. During various times, it appears that the King of Aquitaine was usually part of the Crown of West Francia, and there were not often seperate kings of Aquitaine during Carolingian times. So, with only a few exceptions (Pepin I of Aquitaine, Pepin II of Aquitaine, Ranulf II of Aquitaine) all Carolingian Kings of Aquitaine were also Kings of West Francia, either for their entire rule, or after a time as only King of Aquitaine. There does not appear, however, to be a clear distinction between Dukes of Aquitaine and Kings of Aquitaine. While it was definately a seperate kingdom under the Merovingians, it appears that under the Carolingians it was treated as a fief of the Carolingian kingdom. --Jayron32.talk.contribs 06:09, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Also, if you read the article on Louis the Stammerer, it makes the statement that the Kingdom of Aquitaine was absorbed into the Kingdom of West Francia during the Stammerer's reign, meaning that it ceased to be an independant kingdom before the time frame you are looking into. It may have been one of those titles that hung on for some time after it stopped being practical, but there doesn't appear to be a functional Kingdom of Aquitaine into the tenth century. --Jayron32.talk.contribs 06:14, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

The Parker manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has a section on this particular sequence of inheritences, but it's unclear, because they just call them Carl (for Charles, not distinguishing it from Charlemagne and other Charleses) and Hloþwig (for Louis). Steewi (talk) 00:43, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Abdoulaye Wade's wife

Since Abdoulaye Wade have one son Kiram born in 1968, then how old will Viviane (A. Wade's wife) be by est. Speciality she's white and is raised from France, not Africa, so she's totally non-black. When is A. and V. Wade marry. I'm guessing is mid 60s is A. and V. Wade's marial date, so is it good to say Vivane is about 15-20 years younger than Abdoulaye, so should I give Vivane's birthyear of 1942-1948, because Abdoulaye was 42 when his son was born.--69.229.4.179 (talk) 03:53, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

In this | article, written in French, there is the following information: Viviane Wade, 68 years old in 2000, was born in Besançon in 1932. She met Abdoulaye Wade in 1952, and they were married nine years later (1960 or 1961: the article is dated June of 2000, and also says that, at that point, the Wades had been married for 40 years). Please feel free to check my translation and make changes as appropriate. I am not sure what her skin colour has to do with her correct birth date. // BL \\ (talk) 04:13, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

• • Yup, 1932 is right. 68 in 2000; this year she'll be 77. I don't int. French but Wades was marry in 1963, the list of important events is at the bottom of the page. But thanks. Wades is actually 6 years apart.--69.229.4.179 (talk) 04:50, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

• • • The official Senegalese government biography of Viviane Wade [1] lists her birthday as September 13, 1932 in Besançon, France. Her maiden name is Viviane Vert. Abdoulaye & Viviane Wade were married on June 30, 1963, according to the site. The site gives a good size biography of the First Lady, however, it is in French. Scanlan (talk) 05:32, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Denis Sassou Nguesso's wife

Since Denis Nguesso (R.O. Congo') is like 65 right now then what est. year would her wife be. Usually article won't mention it. Would Mrs. Nguesso be born like 1950?--69.229.4.179 (talk) 04:58, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

• Antoinette Sassou Nguesso is wife of denis Sassou Nguesso who is the national leader of R.O Congo. --69.229.4.179 (talk) 23:07, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

• By what I see on Google images this makesme doubt she will be younger than 1950 birth, a good guess is Antoinette nguesso is born between 1944 and 1949, by the face she looks. maybe somebody will find a better source.--69.229.4.179 (talk) 23:20, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Conservative/Green alliance?

Hello. I was wondering if anyone knew if there has ever been a governing coalition in any democracy where conservatives (either self-styled or now conventionally thought of as) allied with (amongst others) greens? Does anyone know if this has ever happened? Batmanand | Talk 09:39, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

The city of Hamburg is currently governed by just such a coalition, which, as you can probably guess, is not without its problems. As Hamburg is a free city state, its parliament corresponds roughly to state government level in the US -- Ferkelparade π 15:06, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Finland has a government which includes the National Coalition (conservatives), Centre Party (conservatives in social issues), Swedish People's Party (conservatives in economic issues) and Green League.Baeksu (talk) 08:45, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Autocracy and despotism - difference?

What's the difference between autocracy and despotism? Our articles don't make it clear. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 11:36, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Our article on Autocracy states "Today it is usually seen as synonymous with despot, tyrant and/or dictator, though each of these terms originally had a separate and distinct meaning.". Historically, Autocrat and Despot were legitimate titles of monarchs. For example, Despotate of Epirus, and the Russian Tsar was known as "Autocrat", since that was essentially the Greek name for emperor. So historically there was a distinction. Today, however, both terms imply a sort of illegitimate dictator. However these were not originally perjorative terms, and they were not interchangable, as they always refered to specific rulers, not necessarily a general style of government. --Jayron32.talk.contribs 13:12, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

In ancient Greek the word "tyrant" (τυραννος) basically meant someone who came to power outside the traditional rules (i.e. not as the heir of an established monarchy, nor appointed according to existing constitutional procedures), and was not really a derogatory term originally... AnonMoos (talk) 15:15, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

My feeling is that autocracy has the connotation of one-person bad rule, whilst despotisim has the connotation of one-person self-appointed rule, at least in common usage. You might say that "the CEO used to manage the board democratically, but has become increasingly autocratic recently" (ie has increasingly concentrated power in their own hands), whereas a despot is typically someone whose initial acquisition of power was in some way illegitimate. That's my two cents, at least. Batmanand | Talk 17:31, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Is there a name for this?

I don't wish to start a debate so I'm purposely going to use very generic terms. Let's say that there's a political debate about some issue. Let's say that there are two sides to this issue, Side A and Side B. Let's also assume that a media outlet supports Side A and therefore wants to portray Side B in a negative light. The media outlet reports on Side B's viewpoints and does a man-on-the-street interview. Rather than pick a proponent of Side B at random, they intentionally pick someone who's not articulate, dressed sloppy and not so good looking. IOW, the media outlet purposely picks someone who looks bad. Is there a name for this tactic?

Is Media Bias what you are looking for? 65.121.141.34 (talk) 14:47, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

No, I just went through the article and don't see this specific tactic mentioned. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 16:50, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

It could be considered a form of Poisoning the well, or an Ad hominem#Guilt by association ("A slovenly person supports B, therefore all B supporters are slovenly"). -- 128.104.112.117 (talk) 17:29, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

also possible: Argumentum ad crumenam, Appeal to ridicule. Style over substance fallacy--Digrpat (talk) 17:51, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Fox News Channel. --Nricardo (talk) 02:23, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

I've never seen FNC do this, but it's a common technique used for comedic effect on shows like The Daily Show, and going back to TV Nation. —Kevin Myers 03:13, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Now, I love the Daily Show, but it's not journalism, and does not profess to be. Counting it as a source of real news muddies the waters here... --Jayron32.talk.contribs 03:41, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Good thing no one has counted it "as a source of real news", then. The point is, of course, that this technique, whatever it may be called, works very well in political satire. My guess is that people encounter this technique more often in comedy than in straight news. —Kevin Myers 03:59, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Questionable Content recently revealed that a recurring character is a professional straw man. —Tamfang (talk) 05:37, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

I believe the term you're looking for is (most generally) selection bias, but more specifically, sample bias (particularly "spotlight fallacy"), exclusion bias, and publication bias. The Jade Knight (talk) 09:00, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Civil rights in Japan and South Korea

My last question got horribly misunderstood so let me ask it more bluntly and in way that is likely to tell me what I need to know: Are civil and political rights of people in Japan and South Korea comparable to those in North America and Western Europe? Thanks. --ReluctantPhilosopher (talk) 19:30, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

I only know about Japan and the UK, but I would say they were more or less the same, except that the government in Japan isn't constantly spying on everyone. There is FAR less crime so you hardly ever see police on the streets and there are no surveillance cameras. There are labour unions and most large companies have them, though some companies ban membership of a union. Legal matters are divided into both civil and criminal, as in the UK. However, Japan has the death sentence, whereas the UK doesn't. Pretty much the same, though. Also, I've been told that South Korea is pretty much the same as Japan.--KageTora (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 20:40, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

And in answer to all these questions you posted above: "Has economic development in these countries been accompanied by development of civil activism as in the west, leading to vibrant institutions for delivery of justice? Are the people in these countries similarly proactive about civil liberties? Is the justice system just as fair and efficient? Is the political scene as dynamic and representative? Is the news media equally free, critical and active? Are there media like cinema, theater and books through which the society reflects upon itself? " Yes. Also, just to add a little more to the last question, there are plenty of books in which the writers talk about the society, both modern writers and pre-WW2. Natsume Soseki is one pre-modern writer I can recommend for this. --KageTora - (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 02:43, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

All right, Kage Tora, I guess that answers my questions, thanks. -- ReluctantPhilosopher (talk) 13:26, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

From a legal perspective, I would say Korea is on par with the Japan described above. But, socially, I see Koreans as much less inhibited than Japanese. DOR (HK) (talk) 06:11, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Okay, thanks :) ReluctantPhilosopher (talk) 13:26, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Derek Bok Quote

When did Derek Bok coin the quote "if u think education is expensive, try ignorance" —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.161.169.66 (talk) 20:24, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, according to this he didn't, in fact, say it but was claimed to have done so by Ann Landers. Deor (talk) 21:51, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

I doubt if he used "u" instead of "you". Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 23:58, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

How could you tell the difference if he read it aloud? - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 19:34, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

I thought it was Colin Powell who said it? --TammyMoet (talk) 17:52, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Words in the World

hi, how many words are there in the worlds, from all the thousands of languages. Including different forms and tenses etc of the same word, e.g. I 'sit' and he 'sat'. Thanks, --81.77.177.87 (talk) 20:48, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

It is nigh impossible to list every word from every language. The Ethnologue lists 7,300 languages, and for at least a few thousand of them, there are no dictionaries (or any way to possibly track commonly spoken words). Even assuming that the average language (lowball) has 250,000 words, that puts the amount of words in the world at over 1.8 billion. Currently, the Oxford English Dictionary lists 615,000 entries. How that compares to other languages, I have no idea. Livewireo (talk) 21:03, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Even if a serious (yet probably totally in vain) attempt to list all the words in every language was made, it would take decades, or perhaps centuries, and over time languages change and new words are added all the time. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (i.e. the small one) added the words in that link in 2008, and will be adding more in 2009, and so on. It's an impossible task.--KageTora (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 22:21, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Oh, come now, show some imagination. It's not impossible to approximate, just hard, and will require you to use already-existing resources like the OED that exist in every language, including microlanguages that are currently spoken by 23 people. Tempshill (talk) 23:26, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Right, well, get to work, then. see you back here in a few hundred years :)--KageTora (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 23:37, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

It may be possible. But you would need approximately 7,300 people to do it, as you would need native speakers. The OP is also asking about tenses and other forms of words, too, you see. They would all have to put every form of every word in their own language down on to a Word file, then you get those 7,300 files and join them together, and do a Word count. It would still take years and would be an ongoing process with new words being added in many languages every year, so it would never be finished, unless the question was 'how many words in the world at a certain point in time'. If that means today, as in now, then we wouldn't need all the extra new words to be counted, too. It would still take years, though.--KageTora (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 23:43, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

You could start with taking the number of entries in authoritative dictionaries, e.g. the OED for English, and multiplying that by an average number of tense (etc) permutations for each word to get a rough approximation.

The OED has 301,100 main entries. If we suppose on average an English word has, what, 3? 4? permutations? That gets us to about 1-2 million.

It's simpler for Chinese. The authoritative Comprehensive Chinese Word Dictionary has 370,000 word entries. Happily, Chinese words don't do morphing.

At the end, for languages not comprehensively recorded by dictionaries, we can probably look for their closest recorded relatives and just approximate the number using that. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 00:18, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Note that the original poster in this thread specified that inflected forms be counted separately. That greatly inflates the count, because in languages like Greek and Sanskrit, each verb can have many dozens of inflected forms. In agglutinative languages (like Turkish) and "polysynthetic" languages, the number of separate inflected "word" forms is truly astronomical. AnonMoos (talk) 00:39, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

In fact, because of things like recursion and the changing of languages and extinct languages and languages yet to come, the number is in fact, infinity. There is a mathematically infinite number of words that one can say. Steewi (talk) 00:47, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

That's what I was saying. Because of language change, it would be an ongoing and never ending process. It would have to 'how many at a given time'.--KageTora (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 02:05, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Actually, the number is demonstratably not infinity, but an uncountably high but finite number. Infinity is not a synonym for "too many to reasonably count" There are a finite number of words that have every been spoken, its just that this number is so astronimically large that it would be impossible for any small number of people to reliably count and catelog those words. But even if it is impossible to count them all, it doesn't mean that there is an infinite number. Nothing theoretically countable in this way is actually infinite, even if it is practically uncountable. This does not mean that counting them all is possible, it just not truly infinite. --Jayron32.talk.contribs 03:39, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Note that Steewi said "infinite number of words that one can say". By counting all the possible words with combinations of 2 phonemes, then with 3 phonemes, then 4, and so on, it would be infinite, even though not practical for language purposes because the words would end up getting so ridiculously huge you'd die of old age before you finished your first one. Totally hypothetical, this, of course.--KageTora - (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 04:06, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

We're hyperpedantic at this point, but Steewi was incorrect due to human lifespans. Tempshill (talk) 04:25, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

And what do you do with words that are the same in multiple languages? Or words that are spelled the same in two languages, but have different meanings ie, the word Gift in English and German. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.121.141.34 (talk) 13:48, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

What about words that are spelt the same in one language but have different meanings? Or different spellings of the same word? --Tango (talk) 15:39, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

The answer at this moment is exactly 1,265,485. However, this number is likely to increase, perhaps exponentially (see chart), over the next several decades. The Jade Knight (talk) 08:48, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

What are you on about?--KageTora - (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 14:17, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Looking for building pictures

I am trying to find a number of pictures of buildings, mostly from the 17th century. So far I have most of them, almost all from here, but there are still a few missing. I think I need help with filling in these few gaps. I am looking for a range of the design proposals for rebuilding St Peter's Basilica in Rome, including the completed building from before the nave was extended, and a view of the piazza with the new facade visible to one side, the Laurentian Library of Florence, showing both the stairs and the wall next to it, the only pictures I have so far only show one or the other, a cross section through San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, and the inside of any Baroque style church in which the decoration is kept to a minimum to emphasize the importance of the space itself.

148.197.114.207 (talk) 21:04, 13 May 2009 (UTC)