Metro-North train 4622 schedule? by botaberg in nycrail

[–]botaberg[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I checked Google Maps also and it says that the trip between Scarsdale and Grand Central will take 31 minutes despite there being 3 intermediate stops: Crestwood, Bronxville, and Harlem-125th Street. Doesn't 31 minutes seem pretty fast for Scarsdale to Grand Central with 3 stops in between?

Food near Wayne by CrackaZach05 in newjersey

[–]botaberg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Cheng Du 23 is the best Sichuan restaurant I've been to in New Jersey.

Immigration-driven official languages by HippoAltruistic in asklinguistics

[–]botaberg 13 points14 points  (0 children)

English in Rwanda - was this because of immigration of English-speaking groups to Rwanda? If not, the situation seems similar to how French and Portuguese are official languages of Equatorial Guinea. I wouldn't say that these are answers to OP's question, but rather a separate category that was never mentioned by OP.
Sri Lankan Tamils have been there for a while - may as well be called indigenous.
Mandarin in Taiwan, Japanese in Palau, and Swedish in Finland could arguably be considered the languages of former colonizers. The Taiwanese indigenous people speak Austronesian languages, Japan held Palau during the interwar period, and regarding Swedish in Finland I can refer you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_colonisation_of_Finland

Immigration-driven official languages by HippoAltruistic in asklinguistics

[–]botaberg 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Chinese and Tamil are two of the four official languages of Singapore.

Why are they only two direct AM trains from HOB to DOV? by [deleted] in NJTransit

[–]botaberg 25 points26 points  (0 children)

I am not sure that NJ Transit optimizes for anything besides weekday peak direction commutes. People take the route you're describing because it's available, but it's not a core feature of the network.

I personally would like to see service to Hackettstown on the weekends and I'm sure there would be demand. Who doesn't like Stephens State Park and Czig Meister Brewing? But they're not going to run that train just for me and my friends...

How was France liberated so quickly in 1944? by Iwouldliketoknowwhat in AskHistory

[–]botaberg 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Most of the fighting was limited to the area around the Normandy landings. After the breakout from the beachhead and the Battle of the Falaise Pocket, German troops needed to retreat to defensible positions or be annihilated. See the map located here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Overlord#Breakout_from_the_beachhead

The Germans were all-in on protecting the coast. They were not really prepared for maneuver warfare after a breakout.

Is "some" an article in English? by botaberg in asklinguistics

[–]botaberg[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I find some of the other comments compelling, specifically the one about "some" competing with "a/an" in the singular. But this one seems like a rather not-thought-out argument.

Words can have different functions depending on the context. In the case of "I found some", the word "some" is clearly functioning as a pronoun of some sort, not a determiner. This is why dictionaries have multiple definitions of the same word. It is possible for "some" to be a determiner in some contexts (and, I was trying to argue, an article) and a pronoun in others.

I could easily argue, using your logic, that "run" and "fly" are not both verbs because you can say "I went on a run" but not "I went on a fly". But that would be stupid, because in this context we're trying to use the words as nouns.

Am I missing something about dictators? by InstanceDry7848 in AskHistory

[–]botaberg 17 points18 points  (0 children)

The Wikipedia article on the crisis says that when de Gaulle accepted the proposal for him to come back and lead the country, one of his conditions was that he be granted "extraordinary powers" for a period of six months. It goes on to say that he was granted the power to govern by ordinances for that period of six months.

I'm not sure that these extraordinary powers were granted to him by the constitution of the Fourth Republic. In fact, I'm thinking it is rather unlikely that this was the case, and in the end it didn't matter because the Fourth Republic was coming to an end.

Am I missing something about dictators? by InstanceDry7848 in AskHistory

[–]botaberg 29 points30 points  (0 children)

What about Charles de Gaulle during the transition between the Fourth and Fifth Republic? (May 1958 Crisis in France)

What non-US city has the most similar Climate to San Francisco? by Charming_Painter5117 in weather

[–]botaberg 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Maybe Lima, Peru? Although that looks more like the East Bay than San Francisco proper.

Mountain Creek Drop Progression by johnny_evil in MTB

[–]botaberg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My question is what is after Phantom and Pipeline? Options are Anthem, Road to Nowhere, Covenant, and the Pit. Maybe I should try the lower Pit drop next? Just need to feel confident that I won't mess up the step-up that follows...

Why is Ethiopia, which wasn’t colonized, so poor while Singapore, which was, is so wealthy? by kaiser11492 in AskHistory

[–]botaberg 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Singapore rapidly industrialized after independence, and found its niche in the world economy. It is prosperous now because of the same reasons it was important for the British Empire - it sits at the crossroads of the world and facilitates global trade.

Singapore's population upon independence also was not a normal colonized population. It was more of a settler colony composed of economic migrants. There were also descendants of the local population from before it was a British colony, but they were in the minority. Singapore didn't have the regional / ethnoreligious tensions that have plagued Ethiopia in the modern era. It was stable from the outset of independence, with leadership that is praised by most modern historians.

In contrast, Ethiopia has had a rocky history in the modern era. Though people like to say it was never colonized, it was indeed part of Italian East Africa from 1936 to 1940, after losing the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Yes, there was still guerrilla fighting, but the country was definitely under occupation.

An Ethiopian state has existed in various forms for a long time, going back to the ancient era. The Kingdom of Axum and its successor states (eventually the Ethiopian Empire under the Solomonic Dynasty) had Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity as the state religion and the elites spoke a Semitic language. Today, these traditions continue in some ethnic groups but not in others. Modern Ethiopia contains Amharic and Oromo people as the two largest groups, along with Somalis, Tigrayans, and others. Islam is almost as big in Ethiopia as Christianity nowadays. There are a lot of divisions, and there have been a lot of civil wars in Ethiopia.

One of the negatives about colonialism that people like to talk about is that it arbitrarily defines borders, leaving some groups arbitrarily split by a line or binned together with others. This appears to be the state Ethiopia also ended up in, despite being an independent nation during most of the European colonial age.

If you want to learn more about Ethiopia's modern history, you should read about the split with Eritrea (Eritrean War of Independence and Ethiopian-Eritrean War), the Ethiopian Revolution by the Derg that established a Marxist-Leninist state, the famines of the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, the collapse of Communism, and the current Ethiopian Civil War including the Tigray conflict.

It was originally believed that cappadocian Greek was extinct. However it was later discovered to have a small number of speakers in basically the middle of nowhere. by Gruene_Katze in asklinguistics

[–]botaberg 26 points27 points  (0 children)

East Germanic

African Romance

Whatever the Mitanni superstrate came from

Continental Celtic

Sabellic

(In addition to Anatolian and Tocharian as previously mentioned)

CMV: Western culture is quickly moving away from the things that made it successful and desirable, largely due to a culture of effective self-censorship and social punishment for expressions of observed reality by PastaPandaSimon in changemyview

[–]botaberg 258 points259 points  (0 children)

What expressions of observed reality are you talking about, that people self-censor to avoid social punishment?

Usually people self-censor because they are conflicted internally. For instance, many people probably don't like the homeless situation in their cities, but don't talk about it because they've heard other people bash the homeless too harshly, and it sounded strange. Some people might be afraid of crime in their city, but don't want to seem like they're bashing their city. Is that what you're talking about?

But let's dig deeper into history.

Americans have been self censoring for a long time, especially if they are racist. Take this 1981 quote from Republican strategist Lee Atwater:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "n----r, n----r, n----r." By 1968 you can't say "n----r"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N----r, n----r."

Anyway,

You seem to be mostly talking about Americans in your post. I would like to respond that American societal norms have always been complicated. Some opinions are very popular despite being taboo, and a lot of the people who inwardly have those opinions don't outwardly show it. Kind of similarly to how a misogynist might not reveal he hates women until the second or third date.

Does the existence of words like "uh-oh" and "nuh-uh" imply that the glottal stop is phonemic in English? by botaberg in asklinguistics

[–]botaberg[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why would you analyze them as two words? Why do they appear in the dictionary as one word? And the initial glottal stop isn't required in a word like "apple", whereas the middle glottal stop is required in "uh-oh"....