Most of this map (from Brilliant Maps) has nothing to do with language, but the few bits that do are funny enough I thought I’d post them here:
Bulgaria: Still use the Russian alphabet?
Portugal: Do you speak Brazilian right?
Turkey: Can you translate this Arabic sentence?
And yes, it’s odd they include Turkey but not Russia in “Europe.” Via Des Small at Facebook; he says “There’s nothing for Danmark, sadly, but perhaps that’s part of the joke. (There’s no need to make fun of Belgium, obviously.)”
it’s odd they include Turkey but not Russia
What about Finland innit.
I guess they couldn’t think of anything funny to say about Finns.
That’s not how to irritate a Norwegian.
OK, how do you irritate a Norwegian?
Technically speaking, Bulgarians ARE using the modern Russian Cyrillic, the so called “civil script” reformed by Peter the Great in early 18th century.
In 1945, Bulgarians even removed several letters following the Bolshevik spelling reform of 1918.
“Whaling is really not something a civilized nation would do.”
“What’s the Nobel Peace Prize?”
(“Oh, that thing in Stockholm!”)
“This country is really ugly.”
“… since Christopher Columbus discovered America.”
“Bokmål/Nynorsk [depending on audience] is the most beautiful language in the world. You people don’t appreciate it enough.”
“Flagvawing kids on the 17th of May gives me the creeps.”
The mapmaker seem to have a very broad definition for “irritate”, ranging from teasing (“las Malvinas son argentinas”) to actual fighting words liable to provoke real anger in the wrong crowd (“Polish death camps”).
Bbbut, “las Malvinas son argentinas” had provoked an actual war, while the other thing had not as of yet.
What D.O. said.
Flagvawing
That’s a new one. I even corrected an error, in that word before posting, but apparently not well enough.
Trond, “You people don’t appreciate Bokmål enough. It’s the most beautiful language in the world,” said no one. Ever. That would be like a Liverpudlian saying London is the most beautiful city in Europe or a Welsh person saying Londoners don’t appreciate Cockney enough.
I know. But said by a foreigner it would irritate the right people.
I once irriteed a marseillaise by speaking well of Paris.
You can try to irritate Israelis by asking them about bagels and Yiddish, I suppose. Particularly non-ashkenazis.
I just ran across this quote from the Montreal Gazette, which would certainly have irritated Tolstoy:
That’s a new one.
I regularly try to spell “wave” as “vawe” (usually in compounds). It’s not immediately obvious in terms of mental pronunciation, but it looks weird enough that I can at least see that something is wrong.
The guys who worry that new generation can’t read long novels probably never heard of Worm (Page count: 7,000 -1,680,000 words) – popular web novel three and a half times longer than War and Peace.
Millions of teenagers born this century manage to read such oversized books without slightest trouble.
My favourite from Yanko Tsvetkov’s Atlas of Prejudice, if only for its elegant simplicity, is The World According to Ancient China.
Can’t find a good direct link, but it’s easily googleable.
The guys who worry that new generation can’t read long novels probably never heard of Worm – popular web novel three and a half times longer than War and Peace.
I have yet to read Worm (too depressing for my liking), but I have read several lengthy Worm fanfics, one of which, Taylor Varga, is in fact longer than Worm itself.
/ˈwaʊvɛlz/ WOW-vels for ‘vowels’ is the example I remember from a Persian teacher who had no particular reason to have good English pronunciation. I’m surprised not to see more of the confusion, there are not that many major world languages out there with both phonemic /v/ and phonemic /w/.
Cyrillic was invented in Bulgaria, so at best you can say the Russians are using Bulgarian Cyrillic.
Cyrillic was invented in Bulgaria, so at best you can say the Russians are using Bulgarian Cyrillic.
…So it was. I always thought that it was invented in Solun (i.e. Thessaloniki, now in South Macedonia), but apparently that was actually Glagolitic.
That said, as far as I understand it, the chain of transmission went like this:
– ~9th century: Cyrillic invented in Preslav, Bulgaria
– ~10th century: Cyrillic borrowed by the Russians
– late 14th century: Bulgaria occupied by the Ottomans, Cyrillic starts to go out of use
– 1708: Cyrillic reformed in Russia, many obsolete letters eliminated
– 1877: Bulgaria liberated from Ottoman rule by Russians, adopts Russian-style Cyrillic [with one exception – Ѫ, eliminated in Russia in 1708]
– 1918: several more obsolete letters eliminated in Russia
– 1944-45: Bulgaria “liberated” from “Nazi occupation” by (Soviet) Russians, adopts the 1918 Russian spelling reforms [and gets rid of Ѫ]
So it is true both that Russia is using Bulgarian Cyrillic, and that Bulgaria is (kind of) using Russian Cyrillic (technically still not “the Russian alphabet”, as three of the Russian letters are not used in Bulgarian).
SFREader: it was mostly about what kind of printing presses were available in the early 19th century at first, with the civil script.
And after the occupation in 1944 it was about subordination, so that you could type the same text in both Bulgarian and Bolshevik Russian on the same typewriter. Ѫ was replaced by Ы, which had become redundant in Middle Bulgarian, merged with И, and Ѣ was replaced with Э (no relation, Э was made up for Russian and its specific take on palatalization). Both letters were still needed because of variant pronunciations in different Bulgarian dialects. They had to make up rules as to what letter you replace them with in different phonetic environments that do not correspond with any Bulgarian dialect and still have not been appropriated in everyday speech.
I, personally, ignore the 1945 reform when I want to make a statement against Soviet colonialism.
Actually a bourgeois spelling reform of 1917, but not implemented until the general chaos was over.
Those with only a native /v/ either go for /v/ consistently, or consistently hypercorrect to /w/. Those with only a native /w/ tend to keep the distinction by replacing /v/ with /b/… or at least the Japanese do.
That just might be how to irritate a North Macedonian. 🙂
(Cyrillic is sometimes claimed to have been invented by Clement of Ohrid… where everyone probably speaks Albanian now, which also just might be how to irritate a North Macedonian. Oh well.)
Product of irritated Austrians. Amusingly, I found one not available in Austria, only in Germany and Switzerland…
Actually a bourgeois spelling reform of 1917
Cf. bezyatie.
I don’t know how to irritate Americans in general. However, it’s shockingly common for American citizens from New Mexico to be asked about their citizenship, passports, etc.
I’m not sure if Des is praising Danes for unflappability or being condescending. But that is fine.
How to irritate Hawaiians: “have you ever visited he United States?”
How to irritate Canadians: you can’t. They are too polite.
Ivan Derzhanski’s “History of Bulgarian Orthography”. It’s a bit hard to read because it’s all in ASCII; I keep meaning to recode the whole thing in Unicode plain text, but I never manage to get a round tuit.
The Spanish word for the electronic tweet.
Bbbut, “las Malvinas son argentinas” had provoked an actual war
Yes, a war the British won decisively several decades ago, D.O. Which is why bringing up that issue in 2019 tends not to make British very upset, if they care at all. The Falklands are hardly a flashpoint in British political life at this point.
The phrase “Polish Death Camps” helped elect one of the most right wing illiberal political parties in Europe to power in Poland just a few years ago. It is more than an irritant.
Albanian in Ohrid? I think you might be confusing it with another part of Macedonia.
Yes, Macedonia. Modern Greeks called themselves Romans until not very long ago but they have the chutzpah to tell other nations what they should call themselves
Mostly OT – How to irritate a Romance linguist (content warning: Voynich)
You’re right, only 5.4% of the people in the region were counted as Albanians in the census of 2002.
Come on, that was a bilateral agreement. Personally I think “North Macedonia” actually sounds a lot more irredentist than “Macedonia”, but if two countries agree on that as a compromise, I’m happy for them…
Well, there’s precedent. The old Duchy of Brabant was divided along religious and linguistic/cultural lines in the post-Napoleonic settlement, giving the United Kingdom of the Netherlands three provinces: North, Central, and South Brabant. When the union split for good in 1839, Protestant and batavophone North Brabant went with the Netherlands, where it remains today. Central Brabant, also batavophone but Catholic, was renamed Antwerp after its primate city, and South Brabant, Catholic but linguistically mixed, inherited the unqualified name Brabant. Nobody thought that was revanchist, but it was a little ironic that North Brabant and Brabant weren’t even adjacent.
Luxembourg was split at the same time, the francophone east becoming a province of Belgium (which it still is) and the germanophone west becoming a Grand Duchy in personal union with the Netherlands. However, the Grand Duchy was Salic or Semi-Salic, so the personal union broke up in 1890 when the Dutch began their very successful run of queens. (My fave moment in Victoria was when Bertie, at age ten or so and told that he will be king one day, replies scornfully: “England doesn’t have kings. It has queens.” He was nearly right: in the 200 years since Victoria’s accession, the UK has had a queen 65% of the time, despite Bertie’s personal nine years as Edward VII.)
Finally, in 1995 Brabant was divided into Flemish Brabant, part of the Flemish Region and Community; Brussels, physically an enclave of Flemish Brabant and officially bilingual but heavily francophone in fact, and Walloon Brabant, part of the French Region and Community. (The people of Brussels are part of the Flemish or French Community according to their language, but belong neither to the French nor the Flemish Region.) Ironically, much of Flemish Brabant is a bedroom community for Brussels, so it too is mostly francophone except around Leuven. So once again there is no Brabant any more.
How much can our attention spans shrink? Many warn we are already incapable of reading weighty novels like War and Peace.
As I look around at the popular media landscape of 2019, the most obvious conclusion is that it is an absolute non-starter to try to get people interested in huge multi-volume novels with hundreds of characters, all with unfamiliar, difficult-to-spell names, engaged in enormous and seemingly unending continental warfare.
Yes, how would you have time to participate in discussions about language if you spent time on that sort of thing?
Surely you mean “francophone west” and “germanophone east.”
I never manage to get a round tuit.
Aha!
I have enough square tuits to write long LH comments, especially in the morning when it helps me to wake up (and undoubtedly seduces me into errors from time to time). But cyrillizing text is a much bigger deal, since I can’t touch-type Cyrillic even if I install a phonetic keyboard, and a virtual keyboard is way too hard for me to use.
East and west for me are subtypes of left and right, which I can distinguish as bodily directions now (as a child I had to look at my thumbs, because only the left one bore a thumb-sucking callus), but the wrong word still comes out of my mouth/fingers more often than not.
Presumably “North Macedonia” was somewhat less troublesome, irredentismwise, than hypothetical alternatives like “East Albania” or “Southwest Bulgaria.” Maybe “Central Rumelia”? That could have nicely suggested that each and every polity adjoining the Former FYROM (and maybe even a few farther afield?) was at risk of losing territory to a restored Greater Rumelia.
Romania and Rumelia would be a nicely confusing pair to match Slovakia and Slovenia.
North Macedonia:
Is it a fruit salad?
East and west for me are subtypes of left and right,
I’ve always thought it really peculiar that aeroplanes are directed to turn left or right rather than being instructed by compass directions. As long as they’re horizontal it makes total sense spatially, but it’s still weird.
which I can distinguish as bodily directions now (as a child I had to look at my thumbs, because only the left one bore a thumb-sucking callus)
Me too! In my case it was a scar on my right thigh. Sixty years later I still sometimes consult my leg for left & right.
but the wrong word still comes out of my mouth/fingers more often than not.
Me too!
vawe
wovels
The case I most typically trip on this on is “wery vell”.
Annoying Finns, some popular approaches: “So how do you deal with all the polar bears?”; “Moomins / Nokia / Marimekko is such a great product of Japanese culture”; “Ei saa peittaa!”
“Ei saa peittaa!”
What’s the story with that?
the wrong word still comes out of my mouth/fingers more often than not
Happens all the time.
Google:
“Hakushu Higashi (east)”
About 18 results
“Hakushu Higashi (west)”
About 86 results
And higashi means ‘east’ (nishi is ‘west’).
«Je dépense donc je suis » – Descartes de Crédit
I felt we should all be aware of this well-used French pun, along the lines of ‘When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.’
Annoying Finns, some popular approaches
And furoshiki, a great Finnish invention:
The lineup consists of five patterns: Taimi (red), Satama (black), Nuppu (blue), Aika (green) and Kesa (pink). Patterns are based on the Finlandia Series of patterns designed by Juho Viitasalo. The patterns have been used in smart phone cases and other lifestyle products. The blue Nuppu pattern was used as the logo of Essence of Finnish Design and Culture exhibition in Japan in 2012. A limited-edition version of Nuppu furoshiki were sold at the event.
https://viitasalo.com/juho/furoshiki.php
The Norway? Is that in Denmark? prize goes to Marina Hyde in the Guardian for:
Finally, Lost in Showbiz is very pleased to introduce the first new celebrity of its summer collection: the LA-based shaman Durek. His real name is Derek – but so what, because he’s in a multidimensional relationship with Princess Martha Louise of Denmark, and the “twin flames” want the world to know it.
Not only have they announced it in a pair of highly idiosyncratic Instagram posts, but they will this weekend embark on a whirlwind tour of Norway entitled The Princess and the Shaman. In five cities, they will take paying ticket-holders “on a journey into the mysteries of life”.
…Truly, it would be the greatest royal wedding ever!
She’s Norwegian. And No, it wouldn’t. She retired from being a princess several years ago.
She has princeased ?
Princess or not, there’s an emerging consensus that he’s now shaman Durex.
What’s the story with that?
Some decades back (60s–70s ish), there apparently used to be a Finnish heater brand popular in Central Europe, which included printed on the item itself the instructions ei saa peittää ‘do not cover’. This then ended up as the only Finnish phrase a lot of people knew. Fast forward a bit and this has been already since the 90s at least something a lot of Europeans will immediately blurt out as soon as they learn that their interlocutor is a Finn, as if it were a greeting or some other phrasebook entry … which seems to be as much of a meme by now as much as anything serving any communicative purpose. The phrase has no renown whatsoever in Finland itself, and for people who’ve not travelled much, it will be exactly as strange as running into a stranger in (rolls RNG) New Caledonia happily telling you “do not cover!” upon learning that you speak English.
Luxembourg was split at the same time
I discover that this event was in fact the Third Partition of Luxembourg, which peeled away half the population at the time. The First Partition delivered 10% of the land area to France, the Second Partition in 1814 gave Prussia 24% of what was left (though some was reconveyed in 1919), and 65% of what was left passed to Belgium, leaving the Grand Duchy less than a quarter of its original size. For a place first mentioned by Julius Caesar, that’s quite a comedown.
Romania and Rumelia would be a nicely confusing pair to match Slovakia and Slovenia.
Or Syldavia and Slobbovia. The historian of the former is at pains to tell us (albeit only in a footnote) that King Ottokar, whose scepter was a requirement for his descendants to keep their thrones, had no connection whatever with the Přemyslid Ottokars, dukes and kings of Bohemia.
“So how do you deal with all the polar bears?”
I note that there are polar bears in Finland … three of them … in Ranua Wildlife Park, which sounds to me like it should be in Polynesia, but is in fact in Lappi province, otherwise known as “the northern third of the whole country”, though less than 4% of the population lives there.
She retired from being a princess several years ago.
Well, sort of. She no longer has the title Royal Highness and she does pay income tax, but she is still fourth in line for the Norwegian throne.
a stranger in (rolls RNG) New Caledonia happily telling you “do not cover!” upon learning that you speak English.
More likely he would earnestly warn you to keep away from direct fire or flame.
“do not cover!”
There’s an old SF novel — must be old because I haven’t read any remotely new SF — where people shout “quant. suff!” as an expression of approbation (unless it’s an expression of disapprobation).
I want to say it’s by Alfred Bester but I could be completely wrong.
You are right! The Stars My Destination.
As I look around at the popular media landscape of 2019, the most obvious conclusion is that it is an absolute non-starter to try to get people interested in huge multi-volume novels with hundreds of characters, all with unfamiliar, difficult-to-spell names, engaged in enormous and seemingly unending continental warfare.
True. However, perhaps such a tale could be adapted for modern sensibilities through the addition of copious sex and magic. Maybe add in a zombie or two for good measure.
Having progressed through both stages I can confidently state that I now interchange them freely… “Works very well”, oh boy, there’s a 1/2³=1/8 chance that will come out correctly.
The meaning is more like “Amen!”
John Cowan: I seem to remember I talked to Ivan Derzhanski about fifteen years ago about Lojban.
As the noted conlang reviewer Dothraky Porer might have put it (but almost certainly didn’t):
These are not books to be tossed aside lightly. They should be throne with great force.
(One might make some sort of ludic competition of it)
How many people actually read War and Peace anyway? I would suggest it is a relatively small segment of the population (not vanishingly small, but relatively small), generally skewed towards those who are into that sort of stuff. I wager that far more people read pulp fiction (including detective novels, etc.) than read War and Peace. Has the Internet shrunk the readership of War and Peace amongst those who earlier might have read it? That is the question.
@Y: Canadian politeness just means that we don’t *show* you how irritated we are.
There are too many immigrants here for that to be true anyway (I’m one of them).
John Cowan: I just randomly visited Mark R.’s site and saw your name. Your take on the culture test for NY. I’ve never been to North America, and the people I know from there (from/have lived in) are from/have/are living in either New England, California, Arizona, Vancouver, Chicago, or Detroit, or Memphis, or Toronto. But I don’t know anyone who has lived in New York.
EDIT: you should tell Mark to fix the encoding: “In particular, you don’t look at people when you pass them in the street — being ignored is the only kind of privacy many New Yorkers have.”
That’s an em dash (—), and it looks fine to me. How does this one look to you?
JC: —
LH’s em dashes come through just fine.
@John Cowan: Your em-dash looks fine here, but messed up when Gary quotes it.
If I view the page [ https://zompist.com/nyccult.html ] in Firefox, I see “Latin Small Letter A with Circumflex,Euro Sign,Right Double Quotation Mark” sequences in various places.
If I view the page in Chromium, I see perfectly cromulent mdash characters in those same locations.
In Firefox, if I use the right mouse button menu and choose “View Page Info”, I see that the “Text Encoding:” says “windows-1252”.
In Firefox, I have the top menu enabled. I can do View->Text Encoding, and see that it says “Western”, with “Unicode” as an option. If I change to Unicode, the “Latin Small Letter A with Circumflex,Euro Sign,Right Double Quotation Mark” sequences all mysteriously change to mdash characters.
If you view the page source, many errors can be seen (bold red markup). If you hover over a bold red tag, a title-tag tooltip comes up explaining why the browser thinks that there’s a problem. For example:
The first line has a tooltip saying: “
Saw “<?”. Probable cause: Attempt to use an XML processing instruction in HTML. (XML processing instructions are not supported in HTML”The second line (the opening HTML tag) has a tooltip saying: “
Start tag seen without seeing a doctype first. Expected “<!DOCTYPE html>“.And so on and so forth.
If I load the page with the Console, the first error states:
The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared. The document will render with garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range. The character encoding of the page must be declared in the document or in the transfer protocol.Headers for languagehat.com. Note explicit Content-Type declaration that characters are UTF-8
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Sun, 19 May 2019 06:08:17 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie
Cache-Control: max-age=3, must-revalidate
Headers for zompist.com. Note absence of Content-Type.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 19 May 2019 04:28:56 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.39
Last-Modified: Sat, 22 Sep 2018 06:49:03 GMT
ETag: "40a6-5767026db2fd4"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 16550
Content-Type: text/html
Yet why does Firefox default to windows-1252? Aha. There’s a parameter, visible in about:config:
intl.fallbackCharsetList.ISO-8859-1, set to windows-1252
It looks like changing Firefox’s default behavior is kind of hairy. Changing the Apache server looks much easier:
Of course, that won’t fix the broken HTML on the pages.
Actually the page uses an XML declaration to specify UTF-8 encoding, but it’s served as text/html so Firefox rightfully ignores that and gives you the warning about “<?”. Which is new. Life is hard. And then the
<HEAD>tag is not the first thing in the document, which it would have been if the XML tag had been interpreted as such, so you get the next warning.Adding
<meta charset="utf-8"/>to the top of the page (after the<head>tag, but within the first 1024 bytes) is probably what can be implemented with the least access to server internals.The
<HTML>tag, I mean. And putting in the<!DOCTYPE html>that it asks for will give you more consistent results across browsers, though it may not be the same results as now…How to irritate Hawaiians: “have you ever visited he United States?”
I don’t know often that question is asked in practice in Hawaii, but in Tenerife (and doubtless in the other Canaries) visitors do often get ask how far from Spain they are.
I once irriteed a marseillaise by speaking well of Paris.
I’m a Marseillais by adoption. I don’t think most people mind if you say nice things about Paris, but it’s best not to say nice things about Parisians. If you’re a supporter of Paris St Germain you should keep quite about it, so don’t say “PSG is the greatest football team in the universe.”
Last week, I was talking to a colleague who is a L1 Spanish speaker from Puerto Rico. He was telling us about the animosity between the bilingual native Puerto Rican kids and the military brats on the island when he was growing up. However, he referred to the L1 English speakers as “American kids.” He is, of course, an American citizen himself, a fact of which he can hardly be unaware, since he has lived on the mainland for eight years and travels internationally with an American passport.
As I was thinking about how long this colleague had lived outside Puerto Rico, I realized that I now know professional faculty colleagues who were born after the end of the Cold War. When I started as a professor, it was jarring to have students that age, although it looks like this summer, I will probably have my first students born after 9/11.
How many people actually read War and Peace anyway?
I managed to get my cousin to read it. She was fourteen at that time, so when she asked what it was about, I explained that it was a love story.
and told her about Pierre and Natasha.
She apparently liked my explanation and finished it in a week.
Really loved it.
I suggest publishers should market War and Peace as just another Regency era romance paperback and put it on the shelves between Jane Eyre and Mansfield Park…
Hey, there are battle parts too. They say that schoolboys read the battle parts and schoolgirls the romantic parts. So it’s basically Harry Potter of 19c.
However, he referred to the L1 English speakers as “American kids.” He is, of course, an American citizen himself,
Sometimes American just means ‘mainstream’ or ‘other’. My father was born in South Philadelphia in 1904, then heavily Irish. He told me that he rarely saw an American until he went to college.
Finland: “I love the Vikings!”
Denmark: “The Grimms’ fairy tales are my favorite!”
This then ended up as the only Finnish phrase a lot of people knew. Fast forward a bit and this has been already since the 90s at least something a lot of Europeans will immediately blurt out as soon as they learn that their interlocutor is a Finn, as if it were a greeting or some other phrasebook entry
That reminded me of the (probably made-up) story about a German guy who, when meeting an Italian opera singer, blurted out the only Italian sentence he knew: Durante le fermate nelle stazioni è vietato servirsi della ritirata (it’s a sentece you’ll find as part of multilingual signage in German trains).
@hans
I remember also “È pericoloso sporgersi” which may now be obsolete, since most train windows no longer open.
Me too. I think they went with the other one for the story because it’s funnier that way.
Speaking of Finland, how about its summer 2032 Olympic bid?
Lapland town of Salla highlights climate crisis with 2032 Olympics campaign
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jan/26/lapland-salla-highlights-climate-crisis-with-2032-olympics-campaign
the only Finnish phrase a lot of people knew
It could have been worse: what if the only phrase they knew had been “Hakkaa päälle!”
One of the two battle slogans of the Great Northern Empire, no doubt (I don’t know what the Swedish one is).
John Cowan : “Ivan Derzhanski’s “History of Bulgarian Orthography”*. It’s a bit hard to read because it’s all in ASCII; I keep meaning to recode the whole thing in Unicode plain text, but I never manage to get a round tuit.”
* http://www.math.bas.bg/ml/iad/BgOrthist.txt
It’s nice even if it simplifies a lot — I might try; is it OK if I post it here as a comment? It’s not short.
Why post it here as a comment? You just linked to it; people can follow the link. It does look useful.
I meant convert Ivan’s document to IPA Unicode from SAMPA, like John said he didn’t have time to do, and eventually post the result, possibly, some time, if I get around to doing it.
> The Norway? Is that in Denmark? prize goes to Marina Hyde in the Guardian for:
Local news radio in Chicago today ran a piece stating that Swiss fans were celebrating today after Sweden beat the U.S.
I assume this is Swiss/Swedish confusion and that there’s no obscure situation in the bracket that actually made the Swiss cheer the Swedes?
@Ryan Sweden (with the yellow-on-blue national flag) beat USA 5-4 on penalties after 0-0 at full time.
Switzerland (with the white-on-red flag) lost to Spain 1-5. (I watched a little of it: Switzerland were completely out-classed.) And that was on Saturday before the USA game Sunday.
We’re at the knockout stages, so Sweden proceed to the next round; Switzerland are out.
U.S.A. were the cup holders, so quite a surprise they were knocked out so early.
I can’t find any reports (from Chicago or elsewhere) talking about Swiss fans celebrating anything. Perhaps wherever you saw it has corrected their reports already?
U.S.A. were the cup holders, so quite a surprise they were knocked out so early.
Theoretically a surprise based on ancient history, but not a surprise at all if you’ve been watching them. It’s a miracle they made it out of the group stage (as Carli Lloyd said, the goalpost was the player of the game against Portugal), and while they looked better against Sweden they couldn’t find the back of the net, even in pens (Megan Rapinoe, Sophia Smith, and Kelley O’Hara all missed!). Of course, Zećira Mušović was terrific for Sweden in goal.
Norway isn’t in Denmark, but Danmark is in Sweden. (Carl von Linné’s summer home while he was associated with the University of Uppsala was in Danmarks socken = ‘the parish of Danmark’).
Norrland is also in Sweden, but Finnmark is in Norway.
There are several instances of (agricultural) fields in Denmark being called things like Siberia because they were far away from everything. I can’t rule out that there’s a Norge somewhere as well, but I think people went for more exotic appellations.
EDIT: It turns out that Danmark south of Uppsala (attested 1291) was probably named for wetlands (dan) on the border (mark) between the petty kingdom in Uppsala and two other ones (Tiundaland and Attundaland). Nothing to do with Danes.
I meant convert Ivan’s document to IPA Unicode from SAMPA, like John said he didn’t have time to do, and eventually post the result, possibly, some time, if I get around to doing it.
That would be great, and I’m sure Ivan wouldn’t mind. You could send it to me and I’ll post it on my website, where there are no length issues, and I’ll link to it here again.
Excellent!
but not a surprise at all if you’ve been watching them. [U.S.A. womens’ soccer team]
Then you’re paying more attention than NZ/Aus sports reporters — or indeed most of the population.
FIFA have made a marketing disaster. (Although I suspect they’re not aiming to market to the locals.) Calling it a ‘Football competition’ when it’s clearly not Rugby is just confusing. The game is called Soccer round here.
And is known for being deadly dull. (Indeed it seems to have got a whole lot duller since I was a Brit going to games ~40 years ago.) That is, dull as a spectator sport: there’s plenty of amateur teams; but going to watch is not a thing.
Yes, yes, but let me irritate a few hundred million people by pointing out that Association football is the only kind of football where you use your foot to kick a ball.
The teams spend most of the time almost winning. Therefore, if you care about one of the teams, the suspense is unbearable. I’ve watched such people being on very loud emotional roller-coasters for a minute straight.
the only kind of football where you use your foot to kick a ball
You can kick the ball in Rugby too.
Hence the name: Rugby football.
It’s just that that’s not the only thing you can do.
One successfully irritated. Hundreds of millions more to go…
It’s just that that’s not the only thing you can do
It’s just that that’s not the only thing you can kick.
I heard a just-so story that the foot in the name of the medieval original football was because the players were on foot rather than on horseback. If the only other medieval ball game were polo, that story would be plausible.
Association football is the only kind of football where you use your foot to kick a ball.
Well, it’s the only kind where you only use your foot. Kicks are part of all football varieties with varying degrees of importance.
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I think converting Ivan’s document to Cyrillic, at least once past Proto-Slavic, is the more important point.
The only kind where the foot is the default. Headers and goalkeepers exist.