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mesdames et messieurs, le meilleur shitpost qui a jamais été shitpostu sur le board

FWIW— first panel: "Account of a performance given by the Japanese Noh at the stage of the Theater of Nations, a report by Gotlib"

8th panel— "Japanese Noh TODAY; Hindu Rama-Krishnu TOMORROW"

Last panel— "Took you long enough."

Last caption— "N.B. For better understanding of the story, we must note that <symbol> is a colloquial Japanese expression meaning 'Léon, a small dry white.'"

Curiously, Gotlib uses a few real characters (e.g. 吉 jí and 身 shēn) but most are unrecognizable (or perhaps just badly drawn). Also he's leaving out the kana.

Eskimos speak Morse what?

JAI LA RATE QUI SE DILATE LE STO
apparently.

anyway, why was this posted? it's horrifically racist

Is that Italian or something?

Why is the Hindu woman speaking in Arabic script rather than Devanagari?

Sumelic wrote:Why is the Hindu woman speaking in Arabic script rather than Devanagari?

finlay wrote:it's horrifically racist

Urdu [sometimes Persian] was "the language of India" back in the old days, rather than Hindi. I guess me knowing this means that I am also a racist.

EDIT: For clarification, I'm not sure if they made a distinction between Urdu and Hindi back then, but the use of the Arabic script was highly prevalent. During the Mughal Empire, for instance, the local languages weren't given much thrift, and most art, culture, administration, etc. were in Persian or Turkic, both written with the Arabic alphabet.

Eskimos speak Morse what?

The joke is that morse is also French for walrus.

zompist wrote:Curiously, Gotlib uses a few real characters (e.g. 吉 jí and 身 shēn) but most are unrecognizable (or perhaps just badly drawn). Also he's leaving out the kana.

Weird that you would give the chinese pronunciations, but I'm making out 結 and 褌 there ("tie the loincloth" perhaps)

finlay wrote:

zompist wrote:Curiously, Gotlib uses a few real characters (e.g. 吉 jí and 身 shēn) but most are unrecognizable (or perhaps just badly drawn). Also he's leaving out the kana.

Weird that you would give the chinese pronunciations, but I'm making out 結 and 褌 there ("tie the loincloth" perhaps)

I can read 結禈朋着衣 身佩 貫罩 at the beginning.

I suspect that's giving the author too much credit - the whole thing has lots of pointless additional strokes sprinked over it for seemingly no reason. The repeated symbol looks like 來, 火 and 太 all conceived a child together.

J'ai vu un post francais et je me pensais yay! Mais putain c'etait quoi cette merde? Et je parle pas japonais donc....

Racist? It's national stereotyping, and playing around with scripts. What's racist about that?
Going by the Russian, what the actors are saying is just snippets of text and doesn't make sense. Gotlib uses old Orthography, which was abolished after the October Revolution.

Xephyr wrote:Urdu [sometimes Persian] was "the language of India" back in the old days, rather than Hindi. I guess me knowing this means that I am also a racist.

EDIT: For clarification, I'm not sure if they made a distinction between Urdu and Hindi back then, but the use of the Arabic script was highly prevalent. During the Mughal Empire, for instance, the local languages weren't given much thrift, and most art, culture, administration, etc. were in Persian or Turkic, both written with the Arabic alphabet.

The language used to be known in English at least as 'Hindustani'; 'Hindi' and 'Urdu' were recognised terms, but for sociolects rather than languages - Urdu was the way that the court spoke, and the Hindi was how the people spoke.

But yeah, both Persian and Urdu-written-in-Arabic were used for cultured communication.

So, when did Devanagari become prevalent in India?

I assume Devanagari was still in use in some contexts, but my understanding is that the development of Hindi's high-register variants (which is where it's really distinct from Urdu anyway, in its preference for Sanskrit rather than Perso-Arabic borrowings) and presumably also promotion of writing in Devanagari came along with the Hindu nationalist project.