banned for we won the war, so speak English!... or Spanish...

and I got it Oatesy, if it makes you feel any better. Granted, that's not where the Huns are from. Try the Turks.

Meh, Eastern Europe, Asia, same thing.

Banned for destroying my joke.

Banned because my school runs a program called Honor Flight that flies WWII veterans to the memorial in DC. I have nothing wrong with the program, but they have these obnoxious shirts with the slogan

Not only is it generally fawning, propagandistic, and stupid, but it's also factually wrong. I challenge you to find one conquering power that actually completely replaced the language in any of its conquered territories. I know it's never happened to America. (I'm differentiating conquering powers from imperialistic powers here. Imperialistic powers spread their language quite a lot, but they also usually seize territory that is not formally held by a group the power recognizes. Conquering powers like the Nazis or Napoleon wanted to "unify" their domain, but part of that involved admitting that areas were controlled by someone else at the moment). The point being, that soldiers have done absolutely nothing to preserve the English language in America. In fact, if it hadn't been for American soldiers, we might actually be speaking real English.

banned for not counting the Aztec.

Okay, let's go with the 'we recognize you as a country' idea, just for laughs.

The territory of Cornwall was recognized by Wessex as a separate kingdom and the two clashed, resulting in Cornwall falling. The people of Cornwall, as was true of Whales, Scotland and Ireland, spoke a Celtic dialect. The people of Wessex spoke a Germanic dialect, predominantly a form of Anglo-Saxon. I will not argue that it didn't take some time, but the last person to natively speak that dialect died some time ago. Now it's like learning Latin, no one really uses it.

Francois de Premiere decided to unite France under him, requiring him to take in all the surrounding kingdoms. In the north, the Normans spread a mixture of Northern Germanic and Franconian and in the south there were a variety of latinizations of Franconian and Gallic, much like the strata of languages present today in Spain. In fact, many of the territory gained once belonged to factions which have since merged into Spain. He, in fact, united this kingdom and made his form of French the standard, even creating a political office to oversee the standardization of the language and its use. The other languages did take some time to die off and as new territories were acquired, they too had to be changed, but the use of French is very much standard and it is, to this day, carefully watched over to keep the use of slang and culturally absorbed terms to a minimum. The persistence of the government in maintaining this ideal has actually led to a great deal of unhappiness, both in the desire to develop a greater freedom of speech and to adapt to the growing influence of external powers.

I'm not saying it's common, but I think it's been occasionally pulled off. Especially in the case of near genocidal groups such as the Bennin and their subjugation of the Ife in Nigeria.

Banned for forgetting the Inca. Their royals appear to have been at least as snooty as the French, Spanish, Germans, or Brits.

banned for he wanted me to ignore power struggles between nations that did not recognize each other as legitimate powers. Granted, that accounts for almost every struggle to ever happen. No one fights unless they think the other side is wrong.

Native Americans largely fit under the 'Europe did not recognize' category.

Banned for not getting that I was twitting you for being weird enough to have a sense of history.

Also banned because your excuse doesn't cover the Incas, much less the remnant Maya and whoever else we know too little about because their cultures were decimated by European diseases, domestic animals, and war toys. 

Banned because history is really quite fun. I have a whole book of odd battles, treaties, etc. and another whole book that lists the strange ways famous people have died.

banned for pushing me into history rant.

Swicord, again, he said I could not count those not recognized as legitimate by their enemies. I did not make the rules nor any excuse. And none of the explanations above should taken as a framework for all historical events. They're case studies.

and history was my minor. I better damn well understand something of it.

 

banned for it was a local desease that did the aztecs in not an european one.

Banned because I don't know about the Aztecs, but smallpox definitely cut a huge swath through the West Hemisphere Indians. What bothers me is that people seem to think that the Europeans spread the disease deliberately. Although they did little to share information about the disease or methods of prevention, they didn't exactly release a bunch of arisol canisters either.



Banned 'for me too.' I was trying to remain properly playful, and have always considered my poli sci/gummint degrees to be more or less the signs of my failures as an attempted historian.

The one thing I know for sure is that we know barely more than nothing about the civs that occupied the Americas before my European ancestors started fucking around with things in what I consider to be my native hemisphere. 

@danielost: banned for imprecision about the cross-pond pathogen questions. My reading so far puts the Euro trash way ahead when it comes to disease-assisted territory acquisition. Small pox, cholera, etc., are all Euro-Asian as best I can tell. What am I missing? 

banned for excessive pontification on history

even if it is interesting

@Oastey - I got the joke I just inserted my own. But then I realized (now) that with you being young and British (I am assuming) that you don't know about Dan Quayle and the potato/potatoe spelling goof.

 

banned for it was a double hit of junta virus, a north American mouse disease  that killed the Aztecs.   what little the European disease did for them came later, after the Europeans arrived.  well that is the Europeans arrived between the two outbreaks.  as for the rest of north America yes it was European diseases.  and as far as i know only the us army deliberately infected Indians with small pox.

banned for young or not, he might have missed it just cause it was American news, and not much in the way of news at that.

And during the French and Indian War, there were quite a few tribes decimated by the trading of purposefully infected linens.

banned for man has dominated man to his injury since the beginning and continues to do so

banned for ryating out man.

banned for having lost danie's man

banned for I was just pointing out that there were purposeful incidents of biological warfare used against native.

Fucking Na'vi shoulda been choked out with the common cold. Fucking blue monkeys.

Has anybody realised how many kinds of wrong it is that the main character fell for an alien? Sure, he was in a similar body, but with underlying human genetic traits, and a human mind. In his human form he has no regrets about it.

Banned because it's like he fucked a rabbit! But even worse because the Na'vi won't even share any of his evolutionary ancestors!

Same applies for you too Mass Effect. Any Commander Shephard who jumps on a Quarian (or vice-versa) needs counselling.

banned for talking about a fake person like it is a real person.

Banned because he was real enough for me to kill him off as soon as it was convenient.

I actually don't really see it that way. The Na'vi are so impossibly humanoid. Besides, the movie implies that Avatars come with built-in Na'vi instincts and muscle memory that would probably fill in any gaps.

I don't find it any sicker than the usual Human-on-Human garbage.

banned for calling human love garbage.

banned for that is typical of him

he will learn

Banned for not having picked up that Scout finds sex repulsive.