Super Phil

   It was tempting to jump back to the new political take on the Mary Poppins song, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.  From Northern Sun comes their own take on it about the current president in the U.S. -- Super Callous Fragile Ego Trump You Are Atrocious.   It's a cute play on words, and with that here comes a few last minute takes of my own from the vocabulary lectures I had mentioned in an earlier post,* and these words sound almost as foreign.  To back up a bit, I've never taken (or was required or forced to take) Latin in school, and to be honest, even after all of these lectures I will likely still take away a little more than 10% of the 200+ words presented, despite the grand, almost used-car-salesman pitch, words such as mountebank, treacle (no, not the syrup),panegyric, or desuetude.  Certainly they all sound about as memorable as the names of new chemicals but really, how many people listening would even want to hear such talk?  My opinion, of course.  But here's what was impressive about many of these words...their roots.

  The more I listened (and obviously filtered, discarded, retained and forgot) these words, their incremental background stories began to overshadow the words themselves.  So let's jump to the title above and start with the word super.  Professor Flanigan notes that the prefix super means "above and beyond" in Latin as in our words of supervisor and superior.  And phil (or phile) comes from the Greek for "love and friendship," as in philharmonic, Francophile, and philosophy.  Combine the Greek prefix eu (which means "good or pleasant") with its noun thanatos and you end up with euthanasia (meant to convey a good death or a mercy killing); add the Latin dis (meaning "not" or "opposite") or in to a word and you have its mirror reflection: disagree and incorrect.  Anyway, whatever one does or doesn't remember about this, it slowly makes one realize that there is an order here, a beginning, that the basic roots of words soon gave way to more and more branches, then leaves, then on and on to become other treasures of languages...a mathematical problem unfolding origami-like before your eyes.  So try this word: Rakhine.

   A recent special issue of Scientific American was devoted entirely to us humans and labeled "Why We're Unlike Any Other Species on the Planet."  One of the articles asked "Why We Fight:" Do people, or perhaps just males, have an evolved predisposition to kill members of other groups?  Not just a capacity to kill but an innate propensity to take up arms, tilting us toward collective violence?  The word “collective” is key.  People fight and kill for personal reasons, but homicide is not war.  War is social, with groups organized to kill people from other groups.  Today controversy over the historical roots of warfare revolves around two polar positions.  In one, war is an evolved propensity to eliminate any potential competitors.  In this scenario, humans all the way back to our common ancestors with chimpanzees have always made war.  The other position holds that armed conflict has only emerged over recent millennia, as changing social conditions provided the motivation and organization to collectively kill.  The two sides separate into what the late anthropolo- gist Keith Otterbein called hawks and doves.  So imagine that you were part of a population of over a million people that others felt free to just randomly shoot and kill, a group that even some Buddhist monks likened to "African carp" that "breed quickly."  Such was the sad story of the picture in the last post, that of the Rohingya in Bangladesh (this after fleeing their country of Myanmar) and so graphically described in an article in the London Review of Books titled: Fleas We Greatly Loathe.   Said part of the article: Those who escaped to Bangladesh have recounted that soldiers, often accompanied by Buddhist civilians, encircled villages under the cover of darkness and sprayed bullets through the latticed wooden walls of houses, cutting down people who tried to flee and torching what structures remained.  Satellite images show hundreds of razed villages.  The military’s campaign has produced the most concentrated outflow of refugees in the world since the Rwanda genocide in 1994, and the camp the Rohingya now reside in across the border in Bangladesh is the largest anywhere.  

Map 1600 years ago by Talessman as shown on Wikipedia English

   Its background history is a jumble (and my apologies to any true historians out there) but here's what I can make of the picture.  Way back, as in 5000 years ago, there were people living in Arakan, an area Wikipedia describes as (and I've edited a bit here): ...a historic coastal region in Southeast Asia.  It borders faced the Bay of Bengal to its west, the Indian subcontinent to its north and Burma proper to its east.  The Arakan Mountains isolated the region and made it accessible only by sea.  The region now forms the Rakhine State in Myanmar...The first inhabitants of Arakan are likely to be the Tibeto-Burman people, who today make up the region's majority.  Given its proximity to the Indian subcontinent, Indo-Aryan speaking peoples have been present in Arakan since antiquity.  Arakan became one of the earliest regions in Southeast Asia to embrace Dharmic religions, particularly Buddhism and Hinduism.  Islam arrived with Arab traders in the 8th century.  Then came the British takeover of India, the mess of making and dividing borders and in a convoluted sequence, the dissolution of a people by removing them from any census taking and thus making them no longer a part of that nation.  Okay, I'm doing my own truncated interpretation of the history (which the LRB piece explains in a bit more length and Wikipedia goes even further down the rabbit hole) but basically it comes down to this says the article: Anti-Rohingya agitators often point to the corrosive effect British rule had on Buddhism as evidence of what will happen unless this alien entity is contained.  The British, who took Burma in three stages after 1824, ended nearly a thousand years of unbroken monarchical rule and sidelined the Buddhist clergy, disdaining its central position in society and embittering the Buddhist population.  The subsequent importation of hundreds of thousands of Indian workers, who rose to economically powerful positions, compounded fears that Buddhism was under threat.  Indian Muslims were accused of forcing Buddhist women to convert on marriage, thereby diluting the Buddhist line.  The Rohingya are seen as the latest iteration of this colonising drive, and legislation has accordingly been passed to mitigate its effects.  In 2014, as anti-Muslim sentiment was growing inside Myanmar, parliament passed a set of laws --advocated for by ultra-nationalist monks-- that required anyone who wished to convert to another religion to seek official permission, and gave local governments the power to limit the reproductive rates of women if they considered their region to be suffering from overpopulation.  A conviction that Rohingya are plotting to usurp the position of local communities, and that the Western countries providing them with aid and vocal support are abetting this project, has been fanned throughout the democratic transition by monks, activists and politicians.  Monks pepper their entreaties to protect the faith with references to Malaysia and Indonesia, onetime Buddhist strongholds that have long since fallen to a rapacious Islam.
 
   To many of you, this is one big yawn.  After all, what does all of this have to do with what is going on in your part of the world?  But does any of the Rahkine/Arakan history sound at all familiar, as in war-drawn borders being closed and fear being increasingly generated, whether truthfully or falsely.  Is this a clash of religions or a clash of economies (or politics)?  And if you look at the map above, what jumps out at you?  For me it was the once-massive size of the Serbian population.  I bring all of this out because perhaps as with our languages we can go back to our roots and see where everything began and how it all evolved.  Just as a tiny speck of dust can block a fuel line, one could view this issue of eliminating ethnic populations as a problem to be justified or something much larger now being forced into extinction.  As the article points out, we've seen this sort of "cleansing" happen in the ghettos, and Rwanda and yes, Serbia.  Think of what something as simple as a tiny bit of clotted blood can do in causing a stroke, how it can devastate and paralyze a much larger body.  But we should perhaps pay attention to the little things, the small almost-unimportant things as deemed by ruling powers and militaries...things such as populations of over a million people, even if they are halfway across the world.  How large is your city?  A million?  Rotterdam, Cologne, Bordeaux, Jerusalem, Dallas, San Jose...should the winds change, you just may be next.  And would the world notice?

*To spare you jumping back, I had mentioned the word factotum and how Professor Cline had noted that fac is from the Latin verb facio which means to "make or do."  Then he jumped to manufacture with the Latin root man meaning "hand."   Sometimes this gets confusing as in the popular phrase "mano a mano" often interpreted as meaning "man to man," an interpretation that comes about in a roundabout way from the actual translation of "hand to hand" thus becoming "let's fight like men, hand to hand."  Of course, you might have heard the phrase said as "mano y mano" which is more or less the butchering of the grammatical translation meaning "hand and hand" but you get the idea.  That's the way languages evolve.  Manuscript, manicure...manufacturing.  Sort of interesting, eh?