Humanities desk
< April 4	<< Mar \| April \| May >>	April 6 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

April 5[edit]

Austro-Hungarian troops in Bosnia and Herzegovina question[edit]

Were the Austro-Hungarian troops in Bosnia and Herzegovina Austrian or Hungarian? Futurist110 (talk) 06:02, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

We have an article Schutzkorps... -- AnonMoos (talk) 07:50, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

However that was a sort of paramilitary militia. Regular troops of the Austro-Hungarian Army mostly formed the Common Army, which were in units of mixed ethnicity from all over the empire: "in 1906, out of every 1000 enlisted men, there were 267 Germans, 223 Hungarians, 135 Czechs, 85 Poles, 81 Ukrainians, 67 Croats and Serbs, 64 Romanians, 38 Slovaks, 26 Slovenes, and 14 Italians" according to our article. The two official languages of Austrian and Hungarian were not understood by the majority of conscripts, so a basic vocabulary based on the Czech language was used, called Army Slavic, but recruits had the constitutional right to be trained in their native language. In addition, the smaller Imperial-Royal Landwehr was comprised of German-speaking Austrians and the Royal Hungarian Honvéd was Hungarian-speaking; these were mainly reserve and home-defence forces, rather like the US National Guard, but included some regular troops as well; they were unlikely to be deployed outside of their home provinces in peace time. See also Habsburg Languages at War. Alansplodge (talk) 12:19, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure quite how literally we should take that quote about "out of every 1000 enlisted men, there were..." I think it could well be a form of words to avoid saying "the army contained 267,000 Germans, 223,000 Hungarians, etc..." It reads a lot smoother without all those thousands, but it also adds the implication that you could pick any thousand men from the army and expect to find them split in those proportions. Our article on the Common Army suggests otherwise. Admittedly talking about languages rather than ethnicity, it says that each regiment had a regimental language determined by what was spoken by most of its members - that would always have been German if the Rothenberg quote were literally true, so clearly it wasn't. The article gives the example of the 100th Infantry in Krakau, made up of 27% Germans, 33% Czechs and 37% Poles (and consequently with three regimental languages!). Also, coming back to the original question, there were apparently specific Bosnian-Herzegovinian regiments in the Austro-Hungarian army, who might have been the troops the OP asked about. Chuntuk (talk) 10:30, 8 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Chuntuk, I see we do have an article called Bosnian-Herzegovinian Infantry. However, according to this article, "From 1891 onwards, Bosnian-Herzegovinian units were relocated to different garrisons of the monarchy: first to Vienna and Budapest and later also to Graz, Wiener Neustadt, Trieste and Bruck/Leitha", in other words, anywhere BUT Bosnia and Herzegovina. Alansplodge (talk) 18:58, 8 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

A bit more research finds a more reliable quote:

Managing this multilingual rank and file that spoke at least 13 different languages was addressed in two ways. Firstly, German was decreed by the Emperor to be the language of command. Different sources give between 60 and 80 words – in practice, a limited vocabulary through which officers commanded those in their charge. Secondly, each regiment would have one (or sometimes more) regimental languages, which their officers, supposing they were not themselves speakers of those languages, would be expected to learn. For example, by 1901, there were 94 units in the Common Army using only German, 133 using two languages, 28 with three or even four. In the Hungarian half of the monarchy there were 27 regiments which had various national languages as regimental language other than Hungarian. There were two regiments speaking Slovak, three Romanian, six German and Hungarian, one German and Slovak, three German and Romanian, five Hungarian and Slovak, six Hungarian and Romanian and even one Hungarian, Romanian and Ruthene (Ukraininan).

Military Newspapers and the Habsburg Officers‟ Ideology after 1868 (p. 8)

Another name for "has-a" and "is-a" relationships[edit]

In object-oriented computer programming, there is a distinction between a has-a relationship and an is-a relationship between classes (basically types) of objects. The relationships are kind of like they sound. A class is said to have a has-a relationship with another if particular instances of the class contain instances from another (the instances "have" instances of another). A class is said to have an is-a relationship if that class is a type of the other class.

Is there a term for this distinction that is more general than the computer science terms? For example, trees have leaves (but leaves are not types of trees). On the other hand, a birch tree is a type of tree (but trees don't literally contain birches). The first example is a has-a relationship, whereas the second example is an is-a relationship.

I assume this is something that must have been be discussed in philosophy, similar to how Hume discussed the distinction between is and ought, but I can't seem to find it.

Thanks!

AlfonseStompanato (talk) 18:58, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Don't have precise answer for you, but perhaps have a look at Categorization and Classification (general theory). older ≠ wiser 19:28, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

In type theory, a type S is a subtype of type T if each value of type S is also (or behaves just like) a value of type T. This is similar to the is-a relation. Container types, of which there are quite a variety, have composite values, and the types of such values may be called component types. For example, given the definition in C of a record type struct person {string name; date birthdate;};, the type date of the second field is a component type. This is similar to has-a. The nature of these two relationships is so different (a human is-a mammal and has-a body) that it would somewhat surprise me if philosophers have managed to turn the distinction into a problem. --Lambiam 09:04, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps something in the field of Metalanguage could help sort this out? --Jayron 32 11:48, 7 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

There is no reason to assume these two topics have been discussed because they have nothing to do with one another. Both are parts of object-oriented design, but why pick those two and not two of the many other aspects of design? One deals with extending/abstracting a class. The other deals with class attributes. They often appear in the same class lecture, but many other things appear, such as methods, public/private attributes, etc... I believe that hearing them described in the same lecture is creating the impression that they are inherently related. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 19:24, 12 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]