This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

I use Reddit search more when I'm doing exploratory searching hoping to land on a site I've never been before, because it serves me already vetted/reviewed sites. In this way, Google is no longer a tool for me to do search, where I'm not sure where I'll end up, it's now a tool to get me where I know I want to go (which happens to be some wikipedia page most of the times).

It's really true. One might think that mutual intelligibility (ability for speakers of one to make themselves fully understood by speakers of the other) would be the standard for differentiating languages from dialects, but the distinction really ends up just being political. The spoken forms of Hindi and Urdu are entirely mutually intelligible but have two separate names.

Many varieties of Arabic and Chinese are mutually unintelligible but are called "dialects" of one Arabic or Chinese language, presumably to promote a unified Arab or Chinese identity. Speakers of Moroccan Arabic and Levantine Arabic or of Mandarin and Cantonese can't understand each other any better than speakers of Spanish and Italian can, but we don't call Spanish and Italian dialects of Modern Latin!

It gets even weirder when you have a dialect continuum, like with Polish-Russian-Ukrainian. Russian is somewhat mutually intelligible with both Polish and Ukrainian, but Polish and Ukrainian are not themselves mutually intelligible! So even if politics didn't play a role in the distinction between language and dialect, it would be hard if not impossible to come up with a universal distinction.

Try Serbo-Croatian[1]. But OTOH, most Slavic languages are fairly similar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian

However, colloquial Hindi and Urdu are somewhat-to-very similar and are indeed intertwined which is what allows most speakers of either language to understand each other.

Give me a word and in most cases I'll be able to tell if it originates from Hindi or Urdu.

I always start shaking my head when either Croats or Serbs tell me that they speak different languages, because frankly, I can't even tell them apart. Sometimes they find my notion of their languages' sameness offensive, which in turn I find offensively childish.

It's kinda like Ubuntu vs Kubuntu. They're both Ubuntu, but with different Desktop Environments.

Related story: I grew up in northeastern USA. When I was young someone from Scotland came in for business. I went fishing with him and my dad. I had a hard time understanding most of what he said.

India Sanskrit-ized it, Pakistan Persian-ized and Arab-ized it. Otherwise both were basically the same languages with different scripts.

stackoverflow: fast string search algorithm

And chrome would do the right thing.

The Pakistani Army controls a huge sector of the Pakistani economy, and benefits disproportionately in the budget. The only way they can maintain so much power is to have a low-level conflict going with India.

Tomorrow, if Pakistan and India signed a peace accord, and froze the borders where they are, the Pakistani Army would be basically useless. They don't want that.

Interestingly, since the rise of the Tablighi Jamaat in the 1970s the general mood of wealthy South African Indian Muslims has become a lot more conservative. Beards and headscarves everywhere (it isn't unusual to see women with full face veils in the swankiest Johannesburg and Durban shopping malls), and even among the less religious, the mood is generally more conservative. Political participation seems to be in decline, except for Muslim-centric issues like Palestine. Since the end of apartheid, insularity has, in many ways increased. Recent Turkish immigrants provide some liberal religious influence, but they are outnumbered by conservative Paskitani immigrants. But even without these immigrants, the trend was becoming conservative.

In all, there seems to have been a worldwide shift to conservatism and insularity amongst Muslims in the past few decades. Not just in backwaters like Afghanistan. Saudi money cannot be the only explanation.

There are different versions of Islam just like there are different versions of most other religions (e.g. Catholic vs Orthodox Christianity).

Saudi Arabia has a majority of Wahhabi followers. The Wahhabi sect of Islam promote extreme Islam, Shariah, etc..

These Wahhabi followers terrorize fellow Muslims who follow a different sect of Islam... their goal is to purge the world of infidel Islam and to put in Wahhabi Islam which they believe is the true version.

Saudi Arabia, as I said earlier has a majority of Wahhabis. They send these Wahhabi missionaries to other Muslim countries who follow moderate Islam and their goal is to convert the inhabitants to become extremists and in turn try to convert their fellow countrymen into extremists as well.

And just to make it clear, their conversion tactics include bombings, killings, etc.. So it isn't just a knock on the door and asking if someone has 15 minutes to talk about our lord and savior Muhhamed.

Source: my country has these scumbags.

b. Google being "always under fire" by consumers, regulators and activists is no reason to start letting it off the hook. In fact, it should be the converse.

I also love how people throw in the "multinational" qualifier as if this makes a company that much more evil.

To created purely to give pleasure to people is one thing, it is an act of generosity and altruism, if it is done to manipulate, then it is something very different. PR and advertising are manipulations.

The worst thing is to see something like this, allow it to emotionally effect one, then discover at the end that is is a corporate manipulation. Dunno about others, but that makes me feel used.

Let's not be overly generous.

I won't speak to Ireland or Israel, but in the case of India, the political strife was not a coincidence - it was the all-but-deliberate result of the British. They actively funded terrorist groups on conflicting sides with the express goal of dividing the region not just geographically (Partition), but ideologically and politically.

(This is, of course, not too different from the US funding terrorist groups when it is politically convenient to do so, and then invading foreign countries to overthrow the rulers brought to power by those same terrorist groups, when it becomes politically convenient to do that instead.)

Not a "sad fact". It's how the "british empire" planned it, melticulously and with great effort and cunning.

It's a result of their "divide and conquer" way of ruling, in their colonial era, and it's something they pursued afterwards in order to keep it's post colonial grip on those places. With lackeys, puppet governments et al.

Oh, and add Cyprus/Nothern Cyprus, Ethiopia/Eritrea etc to the mix.

Not really. The East Pakistan/West Pakistan war (which resulted in an independant Bangladesh) was between Muslim groups with little religious difference, but huge language, class, and cultral bigotry, with the Urdu-speaking West Pakistani-dominated millitary having a significant role.

Islam was pretty irrelevant. And my impression is that much of the harshest religious conflict in India itself owes plenty to Hindu extremists.

(From my POV the biggest problem in Pakistan is that a minority of usually millitary-backed elites remain in power, no matter how corrupt or awful they are, because they attract US support so long as they pretended to battle Communism during the Cold War, and now radical Islam. But actual Pakistanis or real experts on Pakistani politics may wish to correct me.)

In fact, many kids actually go to schools where English is the primary teaching language - it's not uncommon for kids to not know how to say the days of the week in Hindi.

Why?

Its not hate so much as being an unactionable distraction that interferes with buy the perry the platypus wooden action figure it does nothing... oh wait see how annoying that interruption was and how little it added to the conversation?

Personally I prefer paid promotional product placement. So I was working on a S-100 circuit board in my basement "lab" last night using my Hakko model 937 digital temperature soldering iron with 1/16th inch tip (or whatever millimeters it is) and my Kester no-kleen #235 flux 0.02 dia solder (well you get the idea) Like how most hollywood computers happen to be Apples.