Unfortunate geographic losers

[Bestbank Tiger]

Funny enough, in my last Civilization III game, the Germans ended up just like Sintinelese. They were somehow unfortunate enough to spawn on a tiny isolated island without resources (I made a custom map and I somehow missed a player spawn point on some 4 tile island of nothing but hills and tundra). By the time I discovered them, I was getting ready to move into the industrial era and they were basically still at the beginning of the game. I decided to run an experiment with them and protect them from any other civilization, but not interfere in their affairs to see where they would be at by the end of the game. Basically by the time I had nukes they were in the early middle ages. Poor Bismarck in that one.

Heh...I did something like that in a Civ II game once. India respawned very late in the game (I was already in the Space Age.) Gandhi came to me and said his civilization was being threatened by the evil...can't remember who it was, but he wanted me to declare war. I had just launched my spaceship and had a small, primarily defensive military so I wasn't about to get into a war. But I did rush build a couple of nukes and give them to him. Next thing I knew, a traveler's report said the war had ended...I wonder why

I remember that most because of the irony. Gandhi threatening an enemy with nukes.

 

[Traitorfish]

Half my games with Gandhi ended with him threatening me with nukes. I think it's because I generally left him alone until the point he didn't have much other option.

 

[Oerdin]

Negrito ('little black person') is considered to be rather impolite, being racist and all. Kind of like 'bushman', 'pygmy', 'negro' or 'n-bomb' in that respect. Orang asli ('original inhabitant') is considered to be rather more polite and a great deal more useful because it tells us something that 'he-looks-like-an-african' doesn't. But w/e. I'm aware of all those points, which doesn't change what I said.

It's the official name of the ethnic group in English.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito

 

[Masada]

It's not an 'official' name of an 'ethnic' group at all. It's a derogative term ('little black people' hur hur) that's fallen out of good academic usage but which, for whatever reason, keeps crawling back out of the academic recesses. I suspect it's because there isn't in existence an appropriate pressure group devoted to stamping out this kind of thing. There should be.

On another point, there's no such thing as a 'negrito' 'ethnic' group. About half speak languages that fall somewhere in the Mon-Khmer sub-branch of the Austro-Asitiac language family; while the other half speak some variation of Austronesian including Proto-Malay or one of a dozen or so languages in Philippine–Gorontalo. There's almost no cultural similarities, with members of the Aeta sharing more in common with their Igorot neighbours than with say Senoic speakers in the Malay Peninsula. As the language and culture suggests, there's no common linkage between groups. Thus dies the 'negrito' as an ethnic group argument.

What 'negrito' instead refers to is a whole bunch of distinct, ethnic groupings who are thought to share some Australoid racial characteristics. That's the linkage. It isn't ethnic; it's racial. It's also pointless because of intermarriage and the aforementioned linguistic and cultural assimilation; thus a 'negrito' might speak a whole other language (not covered above) and be fully assimilated into a parent population with nobody, least of all him, the wiser. We just happen to use 'negrito' to refer to those people who for whatever reason happened to look or act like Spaniards thought little black Africans (read: stupid naked savages) would act.

 

[Traitorfish]

Since when did ethnic groups have "official names" "in English", anyway?

 

[Masada]

Point well made. But I figured I should reject the point on more substantive grounds.