What book are you reading?

[Fatman17]

@Fatman17 ji

seeing as you're such a fan of military aviation, I highly recommend this one (in case you haven't read it already)

A valentine for one of the ugliest, albeit most lethally effective, warplanes ever built--as well as for the men who flew them during the Desert Storm campaign. Drawing on interviews with over one hundred A-10 pilots who served in the Persian Gulf during the 1990-91 hostilities, Smallwood (himself an aviator and Korean War vet) offers riveting perspectives on aerial combat. Setting the stage with an informative briefing on how, in the 70's, the Air Force developed the A-10 (a.k.a. ``Warthog'') as a means of supporting ground troops with massive firepower, he moves into anecdotal vignettes detailing the ways in which so-called ``hog drivers'' and their commanders whiled away the weary hours of the calm before the storm in Saudi Arabia's inhospitable clime. At the heart of his narrative, however, are vivid accounts of how A-10s accomplished their tank-busting missions and then some once the battle was joined. Tasked, among other objectives, to take out missile launchers and artillery emplacements far behind the front lines (assignments normally reserved for jet fighters), the slow-moving, heavily armed Warthogs were credited with over half the bomb damage inflicted on Iraqi forces and installations. Employing improvisational tactics, A-10s also flew reconnaissance and assisted in rescues of coalition pilots; they even scored air-to- air kills, downing a couple of enemy choppers. Indeed, the plane's ungainly Gatling-gun platform performed so well that pilots demanded their craft be redesignated ``RFOA-10'' (for ``reconnaissance/fighter/observation/attack'').

Thanks for the share
BTW I'm a big fan of RAVI RIKHE. l have most of his books except one.

 

[Sharma Ji]

They even made their own alcohol with rotting/fermented apples or whatever to get around the on duty alcy ban. Hogs Drivers were the bee's knees !

 

[Sharma Ji]

Thanks for the share
BTW I'm a big fan of RAVI RIKHE. l have most of his books except one.
View attachment 36978

Thanks, will check. It is most embarrassing to say so, but I am woefully ill-read on Indo Pak wars

 

[Fatman17]

Thanks, will check. It is most embarrassing to say so, but I am woefully ill-read on Indo Pak wars

I find his writing very balanced for a Indian war historian.

 

[Nilgiri]

If you want a house that is not Greed. Everyone wants a house of their own to get away from the Landlord mafia. Now if you want to own 10 houses and become part of the Landlord mafia then that is GREED. IMHO Landlords are the worst kind of human beings (with apologies to any Landlords reading this).

I discussed with few other friends in various other places since and we tied it in the end to larger linguistics even. Let me summarise some of it:

One famous Tamil song (Oruvan oruvan from movie "Muthu" 1995) has deep but simple core exploring avarice-greed.

I was very much impressed by it when I first heard it (my rough translations, of course inevitably losing most of the original lustre that happens in any such process):

mannin meethu manithanukaasai
manithan meethu mannukkaasai
this land/earth is money for man....
but (in the end) man is also money for the earth ...


mannthan kadaisiyil jaikkirathu
ithai manamthan unaru marukkirathu
yet it is the earth that triumphs in the end...
yet the mind forgets this!


Kaiyil konjam kaasu irunthaal
Neethan atharku ejamaanan
if the hand has just (limited) money within it...
you are the master of that money...


Kazhuthu varaikkum kasu irunthal
Athuthan unakku ejamaanan.
but when the money is up to your neck...
it is now that money that is your master!


Vazhvin artham purinthuvidu
Vazhkkaiyai vaari kudithuvidu
one must realise (from all this) the meaning of life...
to then drink its true essence!

but this message is found in many old poems and verses in our languages of the south
This was just another way it was brought out in a song (some brilliant music by AR Rahman, great vocals by SPB which along with rajinikanth acting, made this movie quite popular in places like Japan too heh)

wonder if @Joe Shearer can translate a later verse:

Vaanam Unakku, Bhoomiyum unakku
Varappugalodu sandaigal edharkku?
Vaazhachcholvadhu iyarkkaiada!
Vaazhvil thunbam seyarkkaida!

btw one comment i found in one of its YT videos lol:



BTW, the great thing about Tamil is how agglutinative it is....another dimension of poetic meter is unlocked by it compared to whats available further north.

Its part of reason there is impression Tamil, Malayalam et al. are spoken very fast to northerners ears, as @Oscar brought up earlier in another thread (when he tried to learn some lol)

But really it isn't, there is inflectional additions at same meaning rate, auto-conjugation and so on proceeds in the head with fluency with no difficulty...these things just dont arise in more analytic/fusional languages (like in Indo-European family)

I actually compared this deeply with some Turkish friends as Turkish is agglutinative too (and also considered extremely "fast talking" by those not used to agglutination)

Me:
its pretty fascinating to compare tamil and turkish for their agglutination. its the same order and everything. Konusuyorum (konusu + yor + um) vs pesukiren (pesu +kir + en) for i am speaking (english which has limited agglutination so uses more words). i.e the order of verb-root + tense + possesive pronoun....and there is some kind of similar sounds too in way this is done.

Me:
definitely turks like tamils often prefer closing with consonants, rather than leaving open vowels at the end etc it seems (sound wise) and love the r, n and m in the morphology bits within the agglutinative follow ons

Me:
and this is why to non-agglutinative folks, both languages seem very fast spoken, but in our heads its not that fast at all, because we are auto conjugating from experience

Me:
i think overall the speed of message is same for most languages, just agglutination offers more precision immediately.

Turkish friend:
Yediremiyeceklerimizlerdenmişcesine.

Turkish friend:
As if you are from the ones whom we can't make eat.

Me:
actually its not so strange to tamils lol, we have some like these, not as extreme but they are there...really there is no definite limit in the rules, so its open ended, just as many adjectives and tenses that make sense with the original verb/item root

Me:
once you have agglutination deeply, it all follows same thing overall....especially if you have the character set that allows the precision too

Me:
thats where korean and japanese had a bit of brrake put on, by using chinese characters..... even though they are agglutinative, the written language meant it had to turn into separate words more often (given logogram nature of written chinese, its very different to alphabet)

Me:
and also why with time, japanese and korean formed their own scripts by breaking down chinese ones into constituents....though korean one started from scratch (hangul) compared to japanese one which just broke it down (kana)

Me:
but interesting this is common feature of altaic-steppe .... and its shared with south india too and couple other places of world

On my bookshelf are two high quality books on linguistics that really expanded my knowledge and deeper interest in the subject (after it really got sparked some years back, when my deep dives into history kept showing great intersection with evolution of languages), I keep going back to both frequently. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the subject at large.

First one is a very good comprehensive map and guide to the largest view of the subject (i.e the universals):

Amazon.com

The second one works with the fieldwork involved with endangered languages and it explains the application of general terms so well as a result.

Amazon.com

 

[Fatman17]

I discussed with few other friends in various other places since and we tied it in the end to larger linguistics even. Let me summarise some of it:

One famous Tamil song (Oruvan oruvan from movie "Muthu" 1995) has deep but simple core exploring avarice-greed.

I was very much impressed by it when I first heard it (my rough translations, of course inevitably losing most of the original lustre that happens in any such process):

mannin meethu manithanukaasai
manithan meethu mannukkaasai
this land/earth is money for man....
but (in the end) man is also money for the earth ...


mannthan kadaisiyil jaikkirathu
ithai manamthan unaru marukkirathu
yet it is the earth that triumphs in the end...
yet the mind forgets this!


Kaiyil konjam kaasu irunthaal
Neethan atharku ejamaanan
if the hand has just (limited) money within it...
you are the master of that money...


Kazhuthu varaikkum kasu irunthal
Athuthan unakku ejamaanan.
but when the money is up to your neck...
it is now that money that is your master!


Vazhvin artham purinthuvidu
Vazhkkaiyai vaari kudithuvidu
one must realise (from all this) the meaning of life...
to then drink its true essence!

but this message is found in many old poems and verses in our languages of the south
This was just another way it was brought out in a song (some brilliant music by AR Rahman, great vocals by SPB which along with rajinikanth acting, made this movie quite popular in places like Japan too heh)

wonder if @Joe Shearer can translate a later verse:

Vaanam Unakku, Bhoomiyum unakku
Varappugalodu sandaigal edharkku?
Vaazhachcholvadhu iyarkkaiada!
Vaazhvil thunbam seyarkkaida!

btw one comment i found in one of its YT videos lol:

View attachment 37454

BTW, the great thing about Tamil is how agglutinative it is....another dimension of poetic meter is unlocked by it compared to whats available further north.

Its part of reason there is impression Tamil, Malayalam et al. are spoken very fast to northerners ears, as @Oscar brought up earlier in another thread (when he tried to learn some lol)

But really it isn't, there is inflectional additions at same meaning rate, auto-conjugation and so on proceeds in the head with fluency with no difficulty...these things just dont arise in more analytic/fusional languages (like in Indo-European family)

I actually compared this deeply with some Turkish friends as Turkish is agglutinative too (and also considered extremely "fast talking" by those not used to agglutination)



On my bookshelf are two high quality books on linguistics that really expanded my knowledge and deeper interest in the subject (after it really got sparked some years back, when my deep dives into history kept showing great intersection with evolution of languages), I keep going back to both frequently. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the subject at large.

First one is a very good comprehensive map and guide to the largest view of the subject (i.e the universals):

View attachment 37455

Amazon.com

The second one works with the fieldwork involved with endangered languages and it explains the application of general terms so well as a result.
View attachment 37457

Amazon.com

Brilliant as usual for us layman.

 

[Harbyharb]

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/portals/7/hot%20spots/documents/russia/2017-07-the-russian-way-of-war-grau-bartles.pdf

I highly recommend this for everyone interested in actually understanding the reality around the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, as this serves as an excellent reference spot for where the Russian military stands at the start of the SMO. This, combined with observations made regarding the changes and adaptations made during the conflict, would provide you with a more realistic expectation of what might happen than most speculations being thrown around the media.

 

[Fatman17]

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/portals/7/hot%20spots/documents/russia/2017-07-the-russian-way-of-war-grau-bartles.pdf

I highly recommend this for everyone interested in actually understanding the reality around the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, as this serves as an excellent reference spot for where the Russian military stands at the start of the SMO. This, combined with observations made regarding the changes and adaptations made during the conflict, would provide you with a more realistic expectation of what might happen than most speculations being thrown around the media.

What is your take/conclusion on it.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Vaanam Unakku, Bhoomiyum unakku
Varappugalodu sandaigal edharkku?
Vaazhachcholvadhu iyarkkaiada!
Vaazhvil thunbam seyarkkaida!

The Heavens are yours, the Earth is yours
Why the Shandigai?*
Being natural it is
Suffering too much is not


*What is Shandigai? To me, it is a loud quarrel, an argument that almost always leads to a fight.

For someone who has only a tenuous grip on the spoken language, encountering a Tamil word transliterated into Roman is very confusing.
'Konjam'? Huh? What? Oh, kuncham! Why didn't you say so in the first place?

We keep forgetting that in Roman Tamil, 'o' and 'u' are the same, 'j' and 'ch' are the same.

Again, the change of tense from irukka to irukkaida totally throws the unwary.

The best way to get an approximation and then drill down is to memorise each line, shut one's eyes and repeat it, grab the Eureka moment, and go with that.

At the end, reading the entire lyrics, one is deeply moved. It is so true, so bitterly, so belatedly true.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Kaiyil konjam kaasu irunthaal
Neethan atharku ejamaanan

This is where formal Tamil throws the unwary stranger.

Kaile kunchu kaasu
Neena adaku yajamana

That is easy; yup, OK.
Then we hit the grammatical version!

It gets worse.

Yajamaan? That isn't used in Bengal in common speech any more, hasn't been for centuries; it is a north Indian (= Ganga-Yamuna Doab) thing, and has survived in Tamil and Kannada (don't know about Telugu, have a very uneasy relationship with that language, and don't fall for those heroes who say Kannada and Telugu are almost the same thing).

Bengal was Islamicised very early in the day, beyond any idea that northerners have. We even wrote right to left in some parts. It was the Krishnanagar Pandits who stared incredulously at William Carey, then exchanged swift glances and converted Bengali into a flat, concrete parking lot.

[If some resentment shows through, it is because my version of Bengali is significantly different from the Standard Bengali that those thieves from Krishnanagar managed to pass off to the idiot Sahibs, and my version is a main version and a subsidiary version. Those were my grandfathers, and my grandmothers spoke differently.]

 

[Harbyharb]

What is your take/conclusion on it.

It is definitely the best non-Russian material in the subject (pre-SMO Russian military). I highly recommend it as it really cleared out many misconceptions and allowed me to have several revelations when incorporating my other observations.

One of the authors, Dr.L.W.Grau, is one of the most esteemed scholar in the US regarding Russian military advancements. His publications carries a lot of weight.

 

[Joe Shearer]

I discussed with few other friends in various other places since and we tied it in the end to larger linguistics even. Let me summarise some of it:

One famous Tamil song (Oruvan oruvan from movie "Muthu" 1995) has deep but simple core exploring avarice-greed.

I was very much impressed by it when I first heard it (my rough translations, of course inevitably losing most of the original lustre that happens in any such process):

mannin meethu manithanukaasai
manithan meethu mannukkaasai
this land/earth is money for man....
but (in the end) man is also money for the earth ...


mannthan kadaisiyil jaikkirathu
ithai manamthan unaru marukkirathu
yet it is the earth that triumphs in the end...
yet the mind forgets this!


Kaiyil konjam kaasu irunthaal
Neethan atharku ejamaanan
if the hand has just (limited) money within it...
you are the master of that money...


Kazhuthu varaikkum kasu irunthal
Athuthan unakku ejamaanan.
but when the money is up to your neck...
it is now that money that is your master!


Vazhvin artham purinthuvidu
Vazhkkaiyai vaari kudithuvidu
one must realise (from all this) the meaning of life...
to then drink its true essence!

but this message is found in many old poems and verses in our languages of the south
This was just another way it was brought out in a song (some brilliant music by AR Rahman, great vocals by SPB which along with rajinikanth acting, made this movie quite popular in places like Japan too heh)

wonder if @Joe Shearer can translate a later verse:

Vaanam Unakku, Bhoomiyum unakku
Varappugalodu sandaigal edharkku?
Vaazhachcholvadhu iyarkkaiada!
Vaazhvil thunbam seyarkkaida!

btw one comment i found in one of its YT videos lol:

View attachment 37454

BTW, the great thing about Tamil is how agglutinative it is....another dimension of poetic meter is unlocked by it compared to whats available further north.

Its part of reason there is impression Tamil, Malayalam et al. are spoken very fast to northerners ears, as @Oscar brought up earlier in another thread (when he tried to learn some lol)

But really it isn't, there is inflectional additions at same meaning rate, auto-conjugation and so on proceeds in the head with fluency with no difficulty...these things just dont arise in more analytic/fusional languages (like in Indo-European family)

I actually compared this deeply with some Turkish friends as Turkish is agglutinative too (and also considered extremely "fast talking" by those not used to agglutination)



On my bookshelf are two high quality books on linguistics that really expanded my knowledge and deeper interest in the subject (after it really got sparked some years back, when my deep dives into history kept showing great intersection with evolution of languages), I keep going back to both frequently. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the subject at large.

First one is a very good comprehensive map and guide to the largest view of the subject (i.e the universals):

View attachment 37455

Amazon.com

The second one works with the fieldwork involved with endangered languages and it explains the application of general terms so well as a result.
View attachment 37457

Amazon.com

The movie script is straight out of western opera!

The prince who is childless leaves his property to his kinsman, but then has a child. The kinsman, worried about his legacy, forges documents and takes possession of the estate. A disappointed prince hands over his son to his sister-in-law, the wife of the kinsman, and wanders away to lead a life in obscurity. So the true heir grows to mature years as the coachman, and the kinsman's son is now the prince. And the plot continues.

Il Trovatore? Rigoletto? with shades of Tales of Hoffman? even a possible brief flirtation with Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail?

Listening to Oruvan Oruvan was such a shock, compared to what the mind conjured up around the text. But then 1995.

@Nilgiri

Comrade, how OLD were you when you watched it first?

 

[Nilgiri]

The Heavens are yours, the Earth is yours
Why the Shandigai?*
Being natural it is
Suffering too much is not

Not bad you are on the right track.

Sky and earth are yours, so why the fights with those (you come across)?

The next two lines use life (vaazh- (gai) stem)

Vaazhacholvadhu iyarkkaiada!
life tells you live naturally!

Vaazhvil thunbam seyarkkaida!
life's pains/suffering/sorrow are (man)-made

This is direct (losing the Tamil context)....so translation can be made more poetic in English (or other receiving language) as need be.

*What is Shandigai? To me, it is a loud quarrel, an argument that almost always leads to a fight.

சண்டை(கள் ) fight(s).....but yes it can contextually be almost any kind of quarrel/argument/conflict level....I suppose just like fight can too....i.e both verbal and physical types.

sha, its Sanskrit sound and thus traditionally has a grantha letter...(ஷ ) ...though when closed/connector it has k start like ksh in draksha (grape), lakshmi etc

So I wouldn't transliterate it as shandai/shandigal, but just candai/candigal....or use s to replace the c since its soft c.

though ksh has fashionably been changed to ch sound "tamil purism" in recent era too (Tamil has changed a lot in 20th century in certain conventions).

In candai (சண்டை), yes the ச drops from standard cha to just ca (like an s sound)...one just "knows" when it happens in Tamil (and many other languages, especially agglutinative ones with their own character/phonology set matching/overlap histories).

For someone who has only a tenuous grip on the spoken language, encountering a Tamil word transliterated into Roman is very confusing.
'Konjam'? Huh? What? Oh, kuncham! Why didn't you say so in the first place?

We keep forgetting that in Roman Tamil, 'o' and 'u' are the same, 'j' and 'ch' are the same.

o being the "oh" vowel (there is this special n which is nya when open and inj/inch ஞ் when closed).......ku etc I tend to use for the other o (u and oo sounds) letters/sounds (கு )

கொஞ்சம் ,(little/few amount) i would transliterate as konjcham technically (the ch just becomes a bit redundant for english transliteration given j and ch are both similar like you say...nj here is a connector to the ch as its spoken in Tamil).

ஞ் is still seen preserved across great span of time/distance like with exported loanwords such as ginger (injee) and congee etc.

Again, the change of tense from irukka to irukkaida totally throws the unwary.

Poetic meter (syllable matching etc) and also the verses are directly (impolite/affectionate personal register, there's no time for politeness) almost commanding the listener to remember the utter obviousness of the truth it contains.

i.e when the sky and earth are yours (already)....and you know fighting with others is wrong (in this great expanse of opportunity)..... da (you!) best realise the virtue of these natural truths and that pain/sorrow are all man made (heavy materialism and purely materially guided decisions etc).

Very carpe diem kind of command.

The best way to get an approximation and then drill down is to memorise each line, shut one's eyes and repeat it, grab the Eureka moment, and go with that.

At the end, reading the entire lyrics, one is deeply moved. It is so true, so bitterly, so belatedly true.

Indeed!

 

[Nilgiri]

The movie script is straight out of western opera!

The prince who is childless leaves his property to his kinsman, but then has a child. The kinsman, worried about his legacy, forges documents and takes possession of the estate. A disappointed prince hands over his son to his sister-in-law, the wife of the kinsman, and wanders away to lead a life in obscurity. So the true heir grows to mature years as the coachman, and the kinsman's son is now the prince. And the plot continues.

Il Trovatore? Rigoletto? with shades of Tales of Hoffman? even a possible brief flirtation with Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail?

Listening to Oruvan Oruvan was such a shock, compared to what the mind conjured up around the text. But then 1995.

@Nilgiri

Comrade, how OLD were you when you watched it first?

Movie was ok to me....I only really remember the songs mostly. I think it must have been when I was around 12 years old when I heard the song ~98 on some SPB tape relative gave me after I really gained appreciation for his voice on few road trips we did around summer vacation in coimbatore-BLR-mysore, Kerala and also Kaveri area. SPB was really setting things alight in the 1990s in all kind of ways with AR Rahman and other composers. It was really great era of music to follow onto the earlier era.

It was only later I watched the movie, I think in singapore it came on the tamil channel at some point or my dad got the VCD of it somewhere, I forget.

He (SPB) more than any other to me (that too with his unique sound, though he wasted it on some mediocre and bleh songs too) the great spirit of earlier apex of male vocalists in the A+ tier (TMS, PBS, Sirgazhi, AM Raja, Balamurli Krishna, Yesudas in no particular order and off top of my head, there are many other great male vocalists that didnt quite get same popular muster)...Sirgazhi is perhaps in a special A++ tier (I tend to agree with immediate family on this consensus from long debates)...though such arguments can be made for the others too.

 

[Joe Shearer]

சண்டை(கள் ) fight(s).....but yes it can contextually be almost any kind of quarrel/argument/conflict level....I suppose just like fight can too....i.e both verbal and physical types.

My wife uses it even for loud arguments within the (extended) family! But that's in their heavily Kannadicised Hebbar Iyengar Tamil.