Tariq Panja reports for the NY Times (archived) about a man with a difficult job:
There is perhaps no one in the world who has paid closer attention to the diction and pronunciation of the former England soccer captain John Terry over the past month than Lassaad Tounakti, a 52-year-old Tunisian with a gift for languages, a passion for cologne and an accidental television career.
For Tounakti, understanding the minute details of the way Terry speaks is no casual affair. His ability to understand Terry’s every utterance has been a vital part of one of the World Cup’s toughest, and least forgiving, man-to-man assignments: As the main interpreter for beIN Sports, Tounakti has since the start of the tournament served as the voice of Terry and other retired stars hired by BeIN as it has transmitted the tournament night after night to Arabic-speaking viewers across the Middle East and North Africa. […]
Interpreting their words — quickly, precisely and live on the air — requires an extraordinary fluency in not only languages but soccer. For Tounakti, it means translating every word of Arabic into English in the ears of the former soccer stars before flicking a switch — literally and in his mind — and immediately rendering their thoughts, delivered in English, back into Arabic.
Every voice is different. The English diction of Kaká, a World Cup-winning Brazilian, is different from that of the Dutch soccer great Ruud Gullit, and the nuances of their pronunciations are different from those of the former Germany captain Lothar Matthäus.
Because of the sheer volume of coverage it is providing, beIN is employing four staff interpreters and supplementing them with freelancers for the World Cup. Most interpreters work in a rotation, but there are some accents, some ways of speaking, that require just a little bit more expert handling. Terry’s thick East London accent is one of those. […]
Tounakti’s career as the Arabic voice of beIN’s imported experts was in many ways accidental. As a delegation from Qatar prepared to fly to Zurich in December 2010 to make its final pitch to host the 2022 World Cup, beIN realized it did not have an interpreter who spoke both French and English. Tounakti, a university professor with a doctorate in linguistics and experience interpreting for the country’s emir, was enlisted for the trip […]
Last week, in the street separating two buildings in beIN’s complex in Doha, Peter Schmeichel, a former Denmark and Manchester United goalkeeper who is one of the company’s longtime analysts, arrived for an evening shift in the studio accompanied by Jermaine Jones, a German-born former U.S. midfielder.
In a chance meeting, Schmeichel and Tounakti exchanged a bit of banter before discussing the ways a show with live translation compares with a broadcast in which the guests speak the same language. “You prefer not to have it translated because there’s always going to be a little delay and you feel it kind of upsets the rhythm a little bit,” said Schmeichel, a regular presence on British television and beIN’s English-language channels. “But it works.” […]
The discussion moved to idiomatic expressions and the challenges they posed: One in particular, a phrase long used as shorthand to gauge a player’s true quality in England — “Yes, but can he do it on a cold, rainy night in Stoke?” — can cause mirth, and no small degree of confusion. “What do you exactly mean when you say this?” Tounakti said. Schmeichel laughed and suggested it might translate as “a hot Wednesday in Mecca.” He then departed for the studio. “I will do it with you next time, Peter. Inshallah,” Tounakti said as they parted. The rest of the night, he knew, would be all about John Terry. […]
Terry’s speech, Tounakti said, is full of glottal sounds, making it harder for some nonnative British speakers to immediately understand every word. To make his point, he started into a quick burst of what he believes Terry to sound like. “The other guys wouldn’t be able to interpret him,” Tounakti said, explaining that the difficulty is not because of the quality of Terry’s English but rather a combination of his speech patterns, language and pronunciation. It can make capturing the nuance of his insights and analysis difficult for interpreters with less experience. […]
BeIN’s broadcast began with the host speaking Arabic and Tounakti speaking English for his audience of one, Terry. The host spoke continuously for several minutes before turning to Terry and asking him a question. Tounakti interpreted it for Terry and then switched to Arabic as Terry explained how this year’s England squad appeared to be more united than the ones he played for a decade ago. The back-and-forth went on for several minutes, before the first commercial break offered a chance to check in with Terry. There was a small issue with the volume in Terry’s earpiece that was quickly resolved. And on they went.
There were 60 more minutes before the match began. By the end of the evening, after the 40-minute postgame show was over, Tounakti had been interpreting for more than two hours. He interpreted for Terry for most of it, but also for Matthäus at halftime and for various England and Senegal players and their coaches during so-called flash interviews after the game.
Thanks, Bonnie! (Longtime readers will know that I am a supporter of Argentina, so I will not be monitoring this blog for a few hours this afternoon as I try to will the albiceleste into defeating the dogged Croatians.)
I am a supporter of Argentina
Youbetcha. At this point I am my grandfather’s grandson … yr Ariannin am byth!
We haven’t used our tagine much since the finicky kids were born, and this very weekend my wife tried to get rid of it. I told her not just yet. I root for underdogs and if Morocco makes the final, I’ll be using the tagine again Saturday night to get in the spirit.
Recipe suggestions encouraged.
I can certainly think of worse reasons for supporting a national team than cuisine. What shall I do if the final tuns out to be Argentina-France? Do I go with my heart or my stomach?
The long-standing meme “Yes, but can he do it on a cold, rainy night in Stoke?” comes from Scottish pundit Andy Gray’s comment back in 2010 suggesting that Argentina’s Lionel Messi, who was dominating in Europe already with FC Barcelona, would struggle in England’s Premier League. Messi has proved himself repeatedly against English opposition since then, though he has never actually been tested in miserable weather at the Britannia Stadium on a Tuesday night.
As I said, it’s a meme; I can’t recall seeing it repeated without at least a hint of irony. As memes go it has had a long shelf life, and I can see it outlasting Messi’s playing career.
I think the meme of (not) going to an unglamorous place in bad weather was originally a barb aimed at fans* rather than players.
*So Called Fans, who only supported the team in the good times at sold out home matches against famous opponents, as opposed to Real Fans, who had been there through the lean years when they were slogging in half-empty dumps in the lower divisions.
a cold, rainy night in Stoke
“Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.”
I can certainly think of worse reasons for supporting a national team than cuisine. What shall I do if the final tuns out to be Argentina-France? Do I go with my heart or my stomach?
I myself have a fondness for France and the French, and have on more than one occasion have been heard to emit a cry of “Allez les bleus!” But it’s hard to root for a colonial master over their former colonial subjects, not to mention that they won last time around, so I’m rooting for Maroc tomorrow. And whoever wins that donnybrook will have to settle for second place come Sunday. Argentina hasn’t won it all since the Mano de Dios — it’s time!
Morocco’s team does seem to have overperformed (compared to ex ante expectations) more than anyone else. How much of that is a story of heroic virtue and pluck versus a story of soccer games at this high level being essentially random coin-flips as to whether the objectively “better” team will actually score more goals on the particular occasion is unclear to me. I find it interesting that the “Morocco” team is primarily a children-of-the-diaspora team. Of the 11 players who started the game against Portugal (chosen as a convenient sample of the larger group), only 4 were born in Morocco, with the others born variously in Belgium, Canada, France (2), the Netherlands (2), and Spain. The Canada-born fellow returned to Morocco at age 3 and learned to play there. The others appear to all be examples of some uncertain mix of ancestral loyalties, European failure to integrate immigrants socially/culturally, and/or individual opportunism. The linguistic angle is to wonder what language(s) they speak to each other on the field and on the sideline. French?*
NB that the Morocco-born-and-raised players having day jobs playing professional soccer in foreign countries where the pay is better than it is at home is a quite different phenomenon, assuming those fellows merely have work permits for the country where they are presently employed rather than passports.
*The team’s coach is not one of those imported-foreigner coaches common for non-Western nations with soccer aspirations but is himself an echt Moroccan. Except he was born and raised in France.
Not to mention Cheddira, who pulled off the unlikely feat of coming in as a sub in the 65th minute and still managing to be sent off for two cardable offences. He’s Italian born, raised and has played for 5 Italian clubs in his 24 years. Loyalty, nationalism and identity may not matter as much to many of these kids as you’d think. You’ll see countries try to cap some of these kids early, before they have time to decide to play for someone else. Here are some snippets from the wiki page of Tony Musah, the “American” midfielder.
>Musah was born in New York City while his Ghanaian mother was on vacation in the United States. His father is also Ghanaian. He moved to Italy after his birth, living in Castelfranco Veneto and later starting his career at Giorgione Calcio 2000. In 2012, at age nine, he moved to London and joined Arsenal’s Academy
>As a youth, Musah was eligible to play for the United States, Ghana, Italy, and England.
> [He] made his international debut with England’s under-15s in 2016 and subsequently represented England up to the under-18 level. He was also called up to the under-19 squad in October 2020.
>Musah accepted a call-up to the United States senior squad on November 2, 2020, to play in friendlies against Wales and Panama later that month
As I understand it, the age-bracket call-ups don’t count, but once you’ve played for the full national team, even in a friendly, you can’t switch.
I’ve played with two guys who’ve been capped, one for the US and one for Canada. But the game and the world were different then. (Among other things, as I watch McAlister play a pointless square pass from the top of the penalty box, there were guys who could hit shots from 25 yards in those days. Grrr.) In particular, I point to the idea that Musah “started his career” before he was 9 years old. That seems sadly accurate. The sister of one of my daughter’s teammates gets on a plane every 2nd week to play in other cities. She’s 14 now but started with this club two years ago.
I’d guess that 99% of people capped in the 80s had spent most of their lives in the country they played for. I believe the Premier League, or rather the Football League, had a limit on the number of non-British players a club could have on the field back then.
3-0! Bring on the final, baby!
And what if the way to your heart is through your stomach?
All this eligibility @#$**# is going to go away eventually, I predict. Nobody expects everyone who plays for the (rolls random numbers …) Chicago Cubs to be born and raised in Chicago, nor should they. Hopefully it will become a free-agency system rather than one of national horse trades.
That let-the-best-set-of-mercenaries-win approach works fine when cities (or clubs, since many large European cities have more than one) are the relevant unit of competition: that’s, in soccer, the UEFA Champions League, whose most recent tournament featured (in the round of 16) four “English” teams, three “Spanish” ones, two “French” ones, two “Italian” ones, two “Portuguese” ones, one Dutch one, one “German” one, and one “Austrian” one, each I assume fielding many non-citizen players. Not sure if that model still works if nation-states are the theoretical unit of competition.
Why Dutch team didn’t deserve the scare quotes? Anyway, in the context of the Champions League all those country labels are meaningful. They show in what national leagues the teams play. And an attempt to remove them from national championships was a huge flop.
I’ve got a soft spot for Croatia for no reason at all – because I took a liking to their distinctive strip the first time they played as a country, I think.
But my metaphorical money has been on France from the beginning, as far as pure prediction goes – and I’ve never quite forgiven Morocco for a certain match in 1998…
@D.O.: a pure editing glitch. The “Dutch” club was Ajax, whose as-currently-shown-on-wikipedia roster (possibly changed since that tournament) has 13 out of 24 players of Dutch nationality for FIFA purposes. That’s certainly more than chance! The remaining 11 are of 9 different (FIFA) nationalities, with only Argentina and Mexico having two representatives each and the rest being singletons.
France has played consistently well throughout the whole tournament.
Ordinarily I’d go for the underdog. But Morocco fans have shown an unsportsmanlike side by whistling and booing every time the opposing team touches the ball.
Morocco has certainly punched above its weight in this World Cup. I wonder how much of this is due to ‘home ground’ advantage?
The choose-for-life rule is meant to prevent “national horse trades”, and i does a fairly good job at it. Players simply can’t move for any amount of money after they made their adult choice. The only exception I’m aware of is if national federations are split or become realigned (usually because their nations do).
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t horse-trading going on on a personal level with players who have yet to play an international match. Second-tier Brazilians and exceptional talents from fourth-tier nations carry passports from aspiring nations all over the world. Should this be avoided? I think so. Or at least I think it should be made more difficult. I wish nationality was defined by childhood federation membership.
But countries smaller than 1 million should be allowed to join forces. The new Trinidad and Tobago, Belize and Jamaica team could be a power.
That’s how it works in cricket — the West Indies includes players from across the Caribbean, and they have been a international powerhouse at times (I don’t follow cricket closely enough any more to know how good they are now).
@Ryan: As I understand it, the age-bracket call-ups don’t count, but once you’ve played for the full national team, even in a friendly, you can’t switch.
Appearances in friendly matches don’t count. Diego Costa famously played a couple of friendlies for Brazil before switching to Spain. Within the last couple of years, the rules have been further relaxed so that even appearances in up to three competitive matches before turning 21 wouldn’t count, provided that none of those were in World Cup finals or continental finals like the Euros or Copa America.
An interesting tidbit from the NYT story “Joy and Anxiety Collide as Moroccans Look to World Cup Match With France“:
Notably, The City has three: Beşiktaş, Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray.
I’m pretty sure many of the Moroccan national team players, especially those from the diaspora, struggle with Arabic and will be more comfortable with Amazigh. And those who do speak Arabic will speak Darija or Moroccan Arabic, which is impenetrable to most of the Arab world, so many still need translators. Netherlands-born Hakim Ziyech is a Riffian speaker I think. There was a clip where he listened to a long question in Arabic before responding, “English please.”
There are reports that players are communicating mostly in English due to the diverse language backgrounds.
The Republic of Ireland began using diaspora players in the 1960s when FIFA introduced the “granny rule”, which was meant to cut down on oriundi from South America being poached by Italy and Spain but somehow made it easier for British-born players with Irish passports to qualify for the FAI team. The most notorious incident was in 1973, when Terry Mancini was lining up for his first cap and whispered a complaint about how long the Polish national anthem was dragging on, only to be told “that’s our anthem”. Plastic Paddies peaked under Jack Charlton (1986-96) but a few are still there. Jack Grealish and Declan Rice, who played for England at this World Cup, had played friendlies for Ireland when they were young and foolish.
My nightmare scenario for the final has now come to pass.
Many World cups ago (everyone can figure out how many, but true fans would just know) I watched a cup final Germany-Italy in a large company of strangers, and was asked for whom I was rooting. I don’t think there was a real preference, but I said “Germany”. One of the strangers asked “Why are you rooting for fascists?”, but another stranger rejoined “The others are fascists too”.
Italy = primo fascists ; Germany = über-fascists
Not sure if that model still works if nation-states are the theoretical unit of competition.
Well, to compare the sublime with the ridiculous[*], consider the Miss World competition. The competitors represent nation-states, but the requirement is merely that of being a citizen of the country you represent. The age range for eligibility is 17–27, which means that it is in principle possible to compete for eleven different countries during your career as a would-be Miss World.
(The other requirements are that one must be female, unmarried, and nulliparous (Ireland further requires that its candidate never have gone through a marriage ceremony that is not legally binding), and that one has no criminal record or is otherwise of bad repute. Transwomen are eligible if the country they represent makes them so. In many countries, including the U.S., the candidate is chosen by a modeling agency rather than a national competition.)
[*] As a male American born and bred and of a certain age, I absolutely decline to state which I think is which.
@D.O.: So this year one may choose between Vichyistes & Peronistas … (The Ustashites having been relegated to the 3d-place game …)
I guess it will do, in a pinch. But neither Perón nor Pétain bothered much anyone outside their borders. I am sure my watching party would approve of whomever I might would have been (I am completely lost in the correct choice of “tense” for this hypothetical) supporting in this final.
whomever I might would have been (I am completely lost in the correct choice of “tense” for this hypothetical) supporting in this final.
whomever I might have been supporting in this final.
“Terry explained how this year’s England squad appeared to be more united than the ones he played for a decade ago.” … largely due to Terry’s own malign influence. His character is every bit as bad as his speech.
2-0 ARG at the half — one goal by Messi, one by Di Maria, exactly how I would have wished it to go. France looking shapeless. Back in an hour or so…
¡Argentina, Sí!
Congratulations!
Diolch yn fawr, as they say in Argentina.
Thanks! That game nearly killed me — my long-suffering wife threatened to hide out in the bedroom after France tied it up, but fortunately she stuck around to share the agony and ultimate triumph. What a game!!
Congratulations! That was a fantastic final!
They’re calling it the best ever, and who am I to disagree?
Lots of big dots and one little dot, moving around within a rectangle. I’ll never get team sports. But I’m glad for those who have had a good time.
Das Runde muss in das Eckige – “the round thing has to go into the thing with the corners”.
Messi is leaving me with a lot of language-related questions. Why do the Argentines find his qué miras, bobo that funny? And why did Messi say Vamos Argentina, la concha de su madre in the full stadium after the final? I mean, I understand the literal translation but how did it evolve to a phrase to cheer on a football team?
Argentines love sweariness, especially in their sporting heroes — it’s a pibe thing. Fuck yeah! (as we norteamericanos say).
“Whatcha lookin’ at, Bubba”…?
qué miras, bobo is a 16C Benedectine thing, sez here:
# La frase que Leo Messi popularizó en pleno Mundial de Catar luce desde el siglo XVI en el monasterio de Samos. Un medallón de piedra muestra esa inscripción con letras rojas ordenadas de forma jeroglífica en el templo situado en la comarca de Sarria, al sur de la provincia de Lugo.
…
En el monasterio habitado más antiguo de España, ocupado por monjes benedictinos, se encuentra la frase con la que Pedro Rodrigues [vease al enlace, ed.] quiso alertar a los visitantes para que disfrutasen de la visita sin distraerse con nimiedades. En el Mundial de Catar 2022, antes de coronarse al fin campeón, Messi empleó los mismos términos para silenciar al neerlandés Wout Weghorst tras un intensísimo partido que solo se resolvió en favor de Argentina en la tanda de penaltis. #
Word of my day: nimiedad
L’Équipe:
Et ce sont les français qui disent ça!
Of course. Even in defeat, France is glorious.
(Just as well, really.)
Judging from street names in Paris, the French attitude to history is “history is good”, plain and simple.
(…except for Vichy.)
(…except for Vichy.)
And Alesia.
Alesia amnesia.
qué miras, bobo
“Whatcha lookin’ at, Bubba”…?
More like, “Whatcha lookin’ at, dummy.”
A “bobo” is someone who is dumb or slow. It also kind of implies that the person tends to stare which is why it’s the kind of word that parents use to scold children who watch too much television: “¡No seas bobo en frente de la televisión!”
Men also tend to be “bobos” in front of a pretty woman.
P.S. this message was from Pancho, not “Panchi”. Fat fingers + iPhone = Frequent misspellings.
That was then. Alesia has now joined the “history is good” program, complete with a street (and métro station) in Paris.
qué miras, bobo
Doesn’t Messi use his native Rioplatense voseo forms (along with debuccalization/loss of final s)?
Just a few days later, still trying to slow down my heart beat:
@bertil and @Xerib, and others — One of the things that surprised me when I first heard “qué mirá bobo” was what appeared to be a complete elision of the final “s” “in mirás” — last time I was in Buenos Aires, many decades ago, the final “s”, even (particularly?) in front of a consonant, would leave a clearly distinguishable aspirated sound, if not actually a sibilant. I hear nothing, am I the only one? Is Messi’s pronunciation a new RioPlatense one, or is it influenced by Catalá? I’d love to know the answer. It can be repeated ad infinitum at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqZM63MjhtU
Also, he doesn’t say “andá pa’llá”, he says “andá payá” with a very strong “y”, with an almost dental sound.
As to “concha de tu madre” (that is, “conchetumadre”), I’m surprised no one has remarked that this is exactly the same insult as Hebrew “כוס אמאך”, obviously a calque from Arabic, just as the Spanish one is.
Insults transcend cultures 🙂
I’m still waiting for him to say “la rrrremil puta que te parió”, which was so common in my day (’60s) – has it fallen into desuetude?
Preconsonantal /s/ in Rioplatense can be realised as [s], [h] or ∅ depending on a bunch of factors. The null realisation is stigmatised in formal speech, but perfectly commonplace.
Rioplatense, like most Spanish dialects, neutralised the /ʎ/ vs /ʝ/ distinction centuries ago. The result of the merger is typically pronounced [ʒ~ʃ], a phenomenon often called rehilamiento.
I just have to record my deep pleasure that Argentina won the Copa América final last night, its third major championship in a row (Copa 2021, World Cup 2022, now another Copa). 🇦🇷 ! Don’t mind me, just resume your regularly scheduled non-sports discussions.
Rioplatense, like most Spanish dialects, neutralised the /ʎ/ vs /ʝ/ distinction centuries ago. The result of the merger is typically pronounced [ʒ~ʃ], a phenomenon often called rehilamiento.
I recently saw the strange but wonderful Argentine movie Trenque Lauquen (directed by Laura Citarella) and was gobsmacked to hear everyone but the old farts pronounce ll/y exclusively as [ʃ]. I knew intellectually that that was a thing, but I wasn’t prepared to experience it. I am, of course, an old fart myself.
Just watched Cape Verde hold mighty Spain (favored to win it all) to a draw — most exciting 0-0 game I can remember.
I wondered which thread would become the official World Cup thread. I was prepared to hijack the IRAQI ARABIC thread tomorrow night.
Some of the excitement in the World Cup group stage is that it’s too short to even out the odd mishap, so even the favorites need luck. Now Spain are up against the wall in their remaining games, and Cape Verde has a fighting chance to reach the knockout stage. (It’s also a reminder that all the smaller nations came to the World Cup through tough campaigns and are — quite literally — qualified to play at this level.)
Yes indeed, and it’s always a thrill to see an underdog bite an overdog!
(To those who don’t want to hear about sports: just ignore this thread. I’ve got to have somewhere to share my enthusiasm and/or dismay.)
I don’t understand the “qualified to play at this level” claim. What does it mean that’s not tautological? If the rules used for selecting a 48-team tournament field mean that some teams that are not even ranked in the world’s top 60 or top 80 teams are going to play teams ranked in the world’s top 10, well, those are the rules, and teams entitled by the rules to play are indeed entitled by the rules to play. (Per our prior discussion of World Cup teams with interesting creoles, neither Curacao nor Haiti did as well as the Caboverdeans.)
But I do have a language question: consider the actually-existing headline “Cabo Verde pulls off historic World Cup upset.” Is a non-victory that still dramatically exceeded ex ante expectations within the semantic scope of “upset” or must a true upset be an actual win, in which case this headline would need to be understood as parallel to what is I guess technically hyperbole in statements like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Beats_Yale_29%E2%80%9329?
I don’t understand the “qualified to play at this level” claim. What does it mean that’s not tautological?
It means some teams or players are out of their depth and have no business playing with the big boys (or girls). Surely you are familiar with this phenomenon.
Is a non-victory that still dramatically exceeded ex ante expectations within the semantic scope of “upset”
Yes, as can be seen here.
Is there a kind of expectation that is not an “ex ante” expectation ?
Is there an ex post facto expectation in law, i.e., the defendant or plaintiff coulda shoulda woulda been expected to expect what happened to damage the plaintiff or defendant to happen, based on some principle of general reasoning, and then coulda shoulda woulda been able to prevent the damage?
My phrasing might have been redundancy for emphasis, but of course expectations are constantly being revised at least in fluid situations where people are paying attention. The odds that Spain would fail to beat Cape Verde are said to have been <10% before the game began, but I assume they began to move up materially as the clock kept ticking away without Spain managing to score. So I could implausibly claim (nunc pro tunc) to have meant pre-kickoff expectations.
This thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upset_(competition) claims that an unexpected tie/draw can be an "upset" but cites nothing for that and gives no examples. I remain skeptical, while making due allowance for hyperbole. (Does the semantic scope of every word implicitly include the scope of plausible hyperbolic uses?)
Cape Verde having fairly high per-capita soccer achievement for a small country seemed to initially make sense as a potential cultural legacy of empire, what with two Lusophone countries (Brazil and the imperial metropole) having top-ten teams. But after CV it looks like a long way down for Lusophones: #88 Angola, #103 Mozambique, #132 Guinea-Bissau, #193 Macau, #195 Sao T & P, & #201 East Timor, which is barely ahead of the world’s last-place “official” team (#211 San Marino) and presumably would be an underdog against your stronger unrecognized “national” teams like Northern Cyprus. So maybe there’s not any Lusophonic magic factor after all?
This thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upset_(competition) claims that an unexpected tie/draw can be an “upset” but cites nothing for that and gives no examples. I remain skeptical, while making due allowance for hyperbole.
I’m not sure why you’re privileging your ex ante guesses over the usage of actual fans and sportswriters. If a headline calls it an upset (as did the broadcasters I was watching) and Wikipedia agrees and I, a fan, find nothing odd about it, is that not sufficient?
I wondered which thread would become the official World Cup thread.
I chose this one because it records the triumph of Argentina and I am hoping the magic will rub off on this year’s team.
If a draw can be an upset, can a surprisingly narrow defeat be one? Such doubts do not afflict the synonym “giant killing”.
I wouldn’t think so, because a defeat is a defeat, however embarrassing. The tie deprived Spain of a much-needed point.
I found it a surprising usage and would thus be interested in evidence of its actual use prior to yesterday. Doing some research of my own, one can indeed find scattered instances of “upset tie” in the context of football, back when ties in football were still a thing, e.g. the 1985 N.Y. Times story about Rutgers’ “surprising and exciting 28-28 tie … with highly favored Florida” celebrates the unknown backup quarterback who came off the bench in the fourth quarter and “took his team on two long touchdown drives of 65 and 86 yards to gain the upset tie and snap Florida’s 10-game winning streak.”
It has been so long since overtime became routine in college football (which lagged pro football in that regard) that I guess I cannot accurately tell you whether that use of “upset” would have struck me as peculiar/unexpected at the time.
Although maybe “upset tie” if considered a fixed phrase is modest evidence that an upset is a win unless explicitly otherwise specified?
An Egyptian soccer player came up in pub quiz tonight while, we were informed, Egypt was playing against Belgium.
“Predictions are very difficult, especially about the future.”
I once grew tired hearing about Tunisian professors who went to Qatar or KSA.
A friend of mine studied linguistics in Tunis in 10s. She liked some professors, she didn’t like some others and some others didn’t like her (or her headscarf). Wonderfully, it’s those professors who she liked who went to the peninsula. As result she hated the education she was [not] receiving.
This professor was itnerpreting for idiot emir in 2010, so Tunisian students liked him in 00s.
i’m not sure that the u.s. sports usage for “upset” really takes the possibility of a tie into account at all – simply because none of the major commercial sports allow them. so an upset is more or less definitionally a win, but that translates into “not having been beaten” when the usage encounters a tie.
France-Senegal is 0-0 at the half; France doesn’t seem very involved (and Mbappé is downright sloppy) — have they forgotten that Senegal beat them a few World Cups ago? Anyway, I come to report on this bit from the NYT live blog:
Nice to get some Hattic material from the games.
When France won the World Cup in 2018, they managed to beat Croatia in the final despite the Croats’ unsporting refusal to speak to each other in French. But I guess maybe the question should be whether when Belgium was against France in the semi-finals its team was capable of managing internal communications in Dutch to promote operational security?
Clearly all non-French teams should learn Wolof. (The French, as is well known, are constitutionally incapable of learning it.)
Norway should be safe then. They can pick up Wolof from the Senegalese in game 2 before meeting France in game 3.
Argh, now I cannot find the online version of this anecdote which I have probably linked to before – perhaps the relevant college classmate got rid of his antique blog when he transitioned to substack? In any event, it’s a story about the perils of assuming no one else on the subway/metro car (this was either in Paris or Brussels) can understand Wolof simply because they all have white skin. Perhaps it generalizes to soccer fields? Summary: two fellows of apparent Senegalese origin are chatting with each other when a very attractive young woman boards the train and they proceed to have a very explicit conversation about what they would like to do with her body, all of which is understood by a white passenger (college classmate of both me and the erstwhile blogger) who had spent a few years in Senegal with the Peace Corps. But he (the eavesdropper) tries to stay stonefaced and not let on that he understands. Eventually the woman gets off and at the stop after that another white fellow dressed like a Catholic priest who perhaps had also spent time in Senegal gets up to leave and on his way out says to the guys in reasonably fluent Wolof did you really mean that part about such-and-such, causing some consternation. Our classmate continued to remain impassive, although it was a challenge. I told him afterwards that he should have gone over to the guys and said to them in Wolof the equivalent of wow, can you believe that priest understood Wolof? (Classmate FWIW is also fluent in French but is not “French” but rather grew up in I think New Jersey with Walloon parents.)
Looks learnable.
Grammaire wolofe came out in 1826… and Wolof even has consistent final stress. Hm. I may have said too much.
He should have. What a missed opportunity.
The Wolof-on-the-subway story is still online, on a blog updated as recently as 2025, right where it was linked from here by JWB in 2009 among other occasions, and copy-pasted without linking in 2015.
The thing about such stories is that I find remarks like the one uttered a bit silly (or artificial) but I’m unable to come up with a better one.
Norway one goal up against Iraq at half time. I thank the half-time whistle for that. Iraq had deserved at least one goal more.
the colloquial mix of slang and Arabic words frequent in Wolof will be almost impossible for the French to decipher
Unlike the regular sociolinguistically unmarked inherited vocabulary, which is presumably instantly recognisable due to French’s North Atlantic origins.
Notable among Wolof loans into French is the racist epithet bougnoule (i.e. b-u ñuul “sg_class_1-linker black”).
If a draw can be an upset, can a surprisingly narrow defeat be one?
Scotland’s 2-1 loss to Brazil in 1998 certainly felt like one (or whatever the obverse of one is) at the time – to score, and not be overrun, was a very good result. (Sadly the next two matches were more disappointing!)
However I think ‘upset’ is more often used for knockout matches, which would potentially cover a draw which led to a rematch, but not an expected loss. (The three matches per team in the World Cup group stages makes them a good bit closer to knockout than any one of the 38 matches per team in an ordinary league – a loss to a team near the bottom of the league there might be a surprise or a disappointment, but is it an upset? I’d have to pay more attention to football headlines to be sure…)
@jen
That match was notable for me because the UK commentators stated at the end of the first half that Scotland was unlucky that the score was 2-0. Having watched the same match as these commentators, I felt rather that Brazil was unlucky that the score was not 4-0 at that point.
@jen: I think in a league game it would depend on the stakes – a favorite losing to or only getting a draw with a “cannon fodder” team at the beginning of the season would be just a disgrace, while such a defeat or draw near the end of the season when the favorite is tied with another favorite for the championship and needs every point would be an upset.
In my American experience, which may be out of date, only the result of the game determines whether it’s an “upset”, not the effect on the standings or the teams’ chances to keep their seasons going. (The exception is that I don’t think you’d use “upset” for an “exhibition” game that the teams aren’t particularly trying to win).
I was idly wondering whether it’s cromulent to use “upset” in the context of baseball — given that it’s not unusual for the strongest major-league team in a given season to lose 40% of its games, losing any particular game to a generally-weaker team is just not that surprising a game-specific outcome. And it turns out that there’s a book subtitled “The Biggest Upsets in World Series History” which seems to apply “upset” not to individual games but to the outcomes of a series as a whole. So, e.g., in the author’s opinion the Mets’ victory over the Orioles in the 1969 WS was an “upset,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean that any of the Mets’ four victories were upsets considered in isolation, because it wasn’t like there was a strong conventional-wisdom expectation that Baltimore would win the series in four straight games. (Over the last century-plus the team that lost the WS still managed to win at least one game approximately five times out of six.)
Jerry Friedman: I agree with Jerry Friedman about what defines an upset. I think the differences Hans is talking about are ones of pragmatics. That a game was an upset is just more relevant when something hangs in the balance. The Mets getting blown out at home by the Expos 9-1 on September 8, 1986 was an upset, but it was unlikely to be referred to as one very much—because it was a meaningless loss for the Mets, who were in first place by twenty-one games and because (as J.W. Brewer notes) even the best teams in baseball lose dozens of games every season, including losses to much weaker teams.
Just want to register my jubilation over Argentina’s 3-0 win over Algeria — the game was in some sense meaningless, since Argentina is going to advance no matter what (they actually lost their first match against Saudi Arabia four years ago, and went on to win it all), but to see Messi get his first ever hat trick in a World Cup and tie Klose for the most goals scored was a thrill.
@Brett, JF: as far as I can tell, in soccer there is a much bigger expectation that top teams win most of their games, especially against low-league-table teams, than in most American ball games, as you don’t have the mechanisms that are meant to even out the odds inside leagues, like the draft. Tactics like I read about recently like trying to lose games to allow a team to pick better players don’t make sense at all in the system according to which soccer leagues are run.
@Hans: within North American sports there’s also a mathematical pattern going on. Major-league baseball teams play by a considerable margin the largest number of different games/year (162), and that somehow makes the distribution of win-loss records cluster closer to the middle of the bell curve.* For basketball and ice hockey the number is almost exactly half of that (currently 82) and the highest-performing teams in a given year often have a percentage of wins completely outside the right tail of the baseball distribution. And football has the fewest (now up to 17 regular-season games per season), making even higher winning percentages for a team having a hot streak not uncommon. The last undefeated regular season in the NFL was apparently almost 20 years ago, but last year the best teams won 14 out of 17 and the year before someone won 15. FWIW in what is branded as our “Major League” Soccer, last year’s best regular-season performance was 20-8-6,** which might be not that impressive in certain other countries. Or maybe the MLS tries harder to promote “parity” like its North American competitors in other sports.
*Only thrice in the last 70 years has an MLB team won 70% or more of its games, and one of those two was in the 2020 season when COVID meant the total number of games was cut in half, predictably creating an opening for anomalous results.
**Or 20-6-8 per the conventions used in certain other parts of the soccer world.
In the big soccer leagues in Europe the difference in budgets and resources between the top teams and even middle-ranked teams in the same leaague are stupendous; depending on the country, the major European leagues have 2-3 teams that predictably become champion and when none of them makes it, it’s a sensation (in Germany it’s even more extreme – it’s a surprise when Munich doesn’t become champion, and in case they don’t, an even bigger surprise if the champion isn’t Dortmund). My impression is that there is more fluidity in the leagues with more big-money whales, like the Premier league.
@Hans: Which is more oligarchic, that scenario in which only the entrenched/privileged few ever win, or the North American approach where the oligarchs owning all the various teams collectively decide that they will collectively make more money if they agree among themselves on parity-promoting rules tending to encourage competition and create a wider variety of champions, thereby enticing more fans to spend more money on the sport?
Another upset tie: Congo 1 – Portugal 1! This is turning out to be quite a Mundial.
Ah, ambiguity! I thought for a moment (because I don’t pay that close attention …) that Congo-Brazzaville was one of the beneficiaries of the expansion of the field to 48, but alas no.
@JWB: I don’t want to pronounce on that. I can only say that, judging from the reaction of fans to the attempt of top European clubs to set up their own American style closed league, European fans seem to prefer a de-facto oligarchy which allows at least an occasional chance for an underdog to upset the apple cart to a formalized oligarchy that no outside team can enter.
More linguistic confusion – a ‘tie’ to me is a fixture (generally in newspaper language), while the thing when two people score the same number of goals (or other points) is a ‘draw’. Which of course can also be the occasion when they pull all the team names out of some kind of metaphorical hat.
I am pleased to see that I announced my liking for Croatia four years ago, so I can support them with impunity tonight. Although I’ve predicted a draw in the BBC’s prediction game, which was foolish…
Unchecked fact: It’s called a draw because in knockout tournaments with no means of resolution of equal scores, you go on to draw a winner.
Just want to register my jubilation over Argentina’s 3-0 win over Algeria
Though I wish no ill to Algeria, as the proud grandson of an Argentine, I too rejoice. Yr Ariannin am byth!
European fans simultaneously want less money in sports to give better chances to outsiders and more money in sports to give better chances for their own team. These are not contradictory.
Trond: The OED says ‘The semantic development of this sense is not entirely clear, but may have been via an unattested original sense ‘to withdraw from, abandon, give up (a contest)’.’
I was interested to see that some of the quotations were about battles – I had always thought that a ‘drawn battle’ was drawn out, lengthy, rather than inconclusive. You learn something every day…
[Playing the dork who kills the conversation:] Mundial or Mondial?
More linguistic confusion – a ‘tie’ to me is a fixture (generally in newspaper language), while the thing when two people score the same number of goals (or other points) is a ‘draw’.
Yes, and apologies for the confusion – in theory I know that, but in practice my Yank “tie” is so deeply ingrained it comes out automatically.
My wife asked me who I predicted to win in England-Croatia, and I said “Who the hell knows?”
Oh, I didn’t mean that you shouldn’t use your word – I misread it for a second, but no more. I was only mildly amused that both words had two relevant meanings.
Yes, I’m amused by that as well.
At the moment ENG-CRO is 1-1, but if that holds it won’t be any kind of an upset, just a garden-variety tie/draw.
This prompted me to look up where German Patt “stalemate” comes from. Well, from French, which has it from Italian, where things get murky or even assez fantaisiste.
stand pat in English?
For whatever reason the fixed phrase “win, lose or draw” is perfectly idiomatic in AmEng, while “win, lose or tie” is so rare the ngram viewer doesn’t want to graph it for me. Perhaps a survival from an earlier period?
Must be.
That’s an interesting one. No etymology given in Wiktionary; in turn it’s a bit too young to be the/a source of the German.
If you look elsewhere in wiktionary, that “pat” is said to be cognate with the German verb “platzen.” It’s the same “pat” as in “to have it down pat,” for example.
Conceivably “win, lose, or draw” originated in chess or checkers or some other game where “draw” is still the normal term in America, though somehow I associated “win, lose. or draw” with people who are more interested in sports with scores than in board games with victory conditions.
What is Jerry implying about these guys? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win,_Lose_or_Draw_(album)
No discussion of draw vs tie can fail to mention that in cricket, they are two different outcomes.
My fake etymology for draw is that, in the early years of the FA Cup, if a match ended equal then both sides entered the draw for the next round of matches.
While many of the England and Scotland teams have family ties to Ireland (Declan Rice even played for Ireland when he was young and foolish) the only homegrown Irishman at the World Cup is playing for Cape Verde. Pico Abú!
Nate Silver is claiming that the extra teams added to expand the field from 32 to 48 are mostly good enough to be there, but that this leads to various unbalanced quirks in tournament structure and they should just go ahead and expand the field to 64. Which is of interest here only because he has calculated to his own satisfaction which teams would have been added to this year’s field as #49 through #64 in “merit” or whatever you want to call it. Suriname might be the most interesting of those in purely linguistic terms (call McWhorter for comment!), although I guess Wales and Kosovo might also have some fans. And then there’s the UAE, whose national soccer team is quite heavily stocked with hard-working immigrants from diverse origins (i.e. mercenaries/ringers, as the haters would put it) who may not be very fluent in Gulf Arabic but do have a nice variety of L1’s, raising I guess the question of what the team’s working language is and whether their opponents can understand it.
@JWB: Living in the UAE, I would guess that the working language is a language with a quirky orthography originating on a peripheral European island.
This Dubai-born fellow is “eligible to represent France, United Arab Emirates, Senegal and Cameroon” in international soccer. Who cares about dual citizenship when you can have quadruple? I assume he speaks several languages at perhaps varying levels of fluency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_Ndiaye
Billong to Four Countries!
As they take a hydration break in the second half (USA 2 – AUS 0, go team!), I want to register my extreme displeasure at the announcers saying (or trying to say) “Türkiye” instead of “Turkey,” which is the English name for the country. What, they’re afraid of offending that asshole Erdoğan? How did he get authority over the English language?
He’s a kleptocrat, and FIFA is fabulously corrupt, so they surely understand each other quite well.
Do the announcers have to obey FIFA in such matters?
In any case, the US were lucky to hold on to their lead (game is over now) — they looked dominant in the first half but hapless verging on shambolic in the second. Of course, it didn’t help that the Socceroos were acting as if it were Australian rules football. Yellow cards were handed out like candy. Ah well, through to the elimination stage!
“Türkiye” instead of “Turkey”
Perhaps Trump will decide that it is henceforth to be called “Americatolia” by all right-thinking Americans (and everyone else who doesn’t want to incur 1000% tariffs on their country.)
What, they’re afraid of offending that asshole Erdoğan?
These international sporting events — or rather the holders of their TV rights — usually stipulate naming and pronunciation for ‘international’ audiences (and therefore commentators) that override local practices.
Socceroos were acting as if it were Australian rules football.
All forms of the games with odd-shaped balls in the Southern Hemisphere deploy nicknames for players and commentators — who are mostly ex-players. There was outrage in NZ during one Rugby (Union) World Cup when NZ commentators were forbidden from using NZ nicknames for NZ players — even for their broadcast to NZ. We all made a drama of going about asking “who is this Jeff Wilson?” and why isn’t ‘Goldie’ on the team?
I was, of course, very much hoping that Scotland would score with 70 seconds left to restore the symmetry of things, but it wasn’t to be.
Huh. Brazilian soccer players traditionally wear their nicknames on their clothes, and the commentators use these, uh, uncommented. Does anybody even know Ronaldo’s last name, let alone Ronaldinho’s?
I don’t think those names used professionally by Brazilian soccer players are usefully thought of as “nicknames” any more than “Leo” is a nickname for the current Pope (regular name: Robert).
But here’s an amusing instance of debauched World Cup tourists bringing attention to a lexical difference between regional varieties of English: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/jobby-means-poop-us-media-103939138.html
Further soccer onomastics: one of Egypt’s goals against New Zealand was scored by the mononymous Trézéguet, whose name did not strike me as very Egyptian-sounding. But that turns out to be a (Brazil-style?) nom de plume, with his birth name being Mahmoud Ahmed Ibrahim Hassan. The name was supposedly bestowed upon the young Hassan by a coach who thought his playing style resembled that of the once-prominent player David Trezeguet, who was born in France to an Argentine father (Jorge T.) who was also a soccer player.
And there’s Cape Verde’s Vozinha, the goalkeeper who’s become famous (at 40!) for keeping opponents out of his team’s goal so efficiently that they’ve unexpectedly achieved two draws and actually have a chance to advance to the elimination stage; his legal name is Josimar José Évora Dias, but it says Vozinha on his kit and that’s what the announcers call him, and that’s the only identification on his ESPN page — I was actually confused when I read a game story that used his legal name.
Sure but “Vozinha” sounds as cromulently Lusophone-adjacent as his legal name, whereas the Egyptian guy’s stage name (nom de pitch?) has a different ethnolinguistic signal from his legal name.
naming and pronunciation for ‘international’ audiences (and therefore commentators) that override local practices
so, back to “The Sublime Porte” it is!
Halftime at ARG-AUS. The big shock early in the half was when Argentina was awarded a penalty, Messi (who else?) took it… and missed wide. I seem to have been the only person in the world who wasn’t surprised — not that I expected it, mind you, but still vivid in my mind is the 2014 final against Germany when Messi had a perfect chance to score but kicked it wide in exactly the same way. But nobody thought that would be the end of it, and sure enough at the 38-minute mark Messi scored a goal so beautiful it nearly brought tears to my eyes. A fine way to become the leading Mundial goal scorer of all time!
Yeah, that was a beaut. The situational awareness of number 16 was almost the best part, once he let the pass pass on to Messi it would have been a scandal if he had missed.
I’m bracing myself for the game late tonight. Tomorrow will be a bad day for the Norwegian economy.
I’ll probably watch France against Iraq as well, just to get a sense of the level.
And Messi scored another just as splendid at literally the last minute, and then had a chance at a hat trick when he took a free kick awarded when I thought time had run out but no luck. Still, Argentina now have five goals in the tournament, all of them by Messi. And he said he was retiring from international play almost a decade ago!
This certainly looks like Messi’s tournament. Let’s see what Mbappé does to Iraq today — and Kane to Ghana tomorrow. But Argentina are set to meet England early in the knock-outs, and with a little bit of bad luck, France could end up on that side of the board as well, so some of the main contenders may inevitably leave early,
Europeans staying up way past their bedtimes should take a break from soccer and catch a glimpse of America by tuning into the play-by-play for the final and deciding game of the Division I college baseball tournament, which will determine whether the North Carolina Tar Heels or the Oklahoma Sooners are this year’s champions now that the other 62 teams in the original tournament field have been eliminated from contention and UNC & OU have each won a game of the championship series. First pitch at 1800 local time in Omaha, which will be 0100 Tuesday CEST.
Congratulations to Trond and his fellow sleep-deprived Norwegians. Is Erling Haaland the scariest thing in football?
Go Ghana!
Today was a fun day at work. Remarkably many yawning faces and repetitions of the last two minutes of discussion*.
The whole Norwegian team is scary. The attack scares the world, the defence scares Norway. There’s something in it for everyone.
* Yes, even when compared to your average Teams meeting.
My colleagues in Saudi Arabia tell me that most companies give their employees the first half of the day off on days when the national team played during the night. Maybe something to emulate elsewhere.
I’m sure that there were plenty of people who made a night of it, but everyone I talked to after the first (2am) Scotland match seemed to have gone to bed at 10 or so and got up again for 2. It added to the excitement, in a way – lots of people stay up late from time to time, but actually getting up for a part of the night is rare.
(But fortunately for us the next day was Sunday.)
Any Kusaas (or other Northerner) in the Ghanese squad? What do their names tell?
I was wondering that too! (So far England have had almost continuous possession but haven’t been able to break through Ghana’s defense. Or defence, if you will.)
No obvious Kusaasi names. Those with Muslim names are likely to be northerners by descent, though very probably from the very substantial northerner zongos (Muslim trader settlements) in southern cities. They’re not particularly likely to be Kusaasi, few of whom are Muslim.
Apart from that, the names with obvious ethnic associations that I recognise are southern (mostly Akan, unsurprisingly.)
Well done Ghana! That 0-0 was a terrific result — but not an upset.
Is Erling Haaland the scariest thing in football?
And is he related to Deb Haaland, the U.S.’s first Indigenous cabinet secretary, now out of that office but likely to be the next governor of my state (New Mexico)?
There’s no doubt that Deb Haaland’s last name is of Norwegian origin and the same as Erling’s, and like many Norwegian surnames, it’s definitely a farmname. but unlike with e.g. Pete Hegseth, I can’t remember seeing any news stories about her ancestral farm.
Unfortunately Håland/Haaland is not an uncommon name. Farmnames using the land element are quite old, usually dated to the iron age. This means that the farm may have been among the larger properties locally, but the effect of that is that it may have been divided into smaller units by the same name several times through its history. “Land” names are often also descriptive and thus quite generic in sense (Håland meaning “highland” or rather “high terrain”). This means that they can be quite common, and that many unrelated families from different parts of the country can carry the same name.
Update: I could of course JFGI. Her paternal line stem from Kvitsøy in Rogaland, i.e. the same province but not the same parish as Erling.
Update 2: One understands that “high” is a relative term.
Update 3: It’s no surprise that it is in Rogaland or vicinities. Without doing a count, i will claim that the majority of Håland farms are situated in the southwestern parts of the country.
Ms. Haaland is an interesting reminder that “indigeneity” is in the eye of the beholder, or is socially-constructed or however you want to put it. Two of Ms. Haaland’s predecessors in the very same Cabinet office (Secretary of the Interior) were descendants of the old “Hispano” community of New Mexico (which extended northward into bits of current Colorado), who are I take it not consistently or uniformly held out as “indigenous” even though they are not typically of 100% Iberian ancestry any more than Ms. Haaland is of 100% Scandinavian ancestry.
An interesting wiki-tidbit about the traditional language(s) of the Laguna Pueblo, of which Ms. Haaland is an enrolled member via her maternal ancestry: “Keres is now considered a language isolate. In the past, Edward Sapir grouped it together with a Hokan–Siouan stock. Morris Swadesh suggested a connection with Wichita. Joseph Greenberg grouped Keres with Siouan, Yuchi, Caddoan, and Iroquoian in a superstock called Keresiouan. None of these proposals has been validated by subsequent linguistic research.”
ETA: and an onomastic wiki-tidbit: “The Irish surname Riley was adopted by many members of the Laguna tribe in the 1800s, for legal use in European-American culture, while they retained their Laguna names for tribal use. [citation needed]”
Ms. Haaland is an interesting reminder that “indigeneity” is in the eye of the beholder, or is socially-constructed or however you want to put it.
In this case, legally constructed, since as you said Deb Haaland is an enrolled member of a tribe, Laguna Pueblo. (Pueblo names are anarthrous in these parts.) Not to say that it isn’t also socially constructed and personally identified.
I was surprised to see at Wikipedia that Manuel Lujan, Jr., one of those Secretaries of the Interior you mentioned, was born on a pueblo (San Ildefonso, usually called San I in English), and so was his father. Also his relative Ben Lujan (Speaker of the N.M. House of Representatives at the time of his death, and father of my senior senator, Ben Ray Lujan) was born on Nambe Pueblo. Maybe if I knew more about who lived where here then in those days, I wouldn’t be so surprised.
@Trond: Thanks for the details.
When did the Iron Age end in Norway?
While we’re doing tidbits, Wikipedia says “Keresan” is pronounced /ˈkɛrəsən/, but I’m sure I remember hearing a native speaker pronounce it /kəˈrisən/. (He was one of a company of members of either Laguna or Santa Ana Pueblo who were installing wiring and other network stuff for my employer, and we got into a brief conversation.)
Interesting! The OED (1976 entry) gives only /ˈkɛrəsən/, and M-W and AHD have the same, but I can easily imagine the population so designated developing their own version, in which case it should certainly be added to the dictionaries.
In common archaeological periodization the Iron Age ends in ~1000 CE, i.e. its final phase is the Viking Age. But outside of that scientific context, it’s uncommon to include the Viking Age.
I think most land farms were settled after 500 CE, maybe (very much my speculation) partly as a wave when clients or retainers of Migration Era strongmen gained indepence after the 536 CE disruption.
The surname of our other superstar, Martin Ødegaard, is easier to date. Variations on this name are also present in almost every parish. It means “deserted farm”, and it is a common name for farms that were deserted (with their original name lost) and eventually resettled after the Black Death. Personally I think the name change has more to do with tax incentives for resettlement. The ødegårdsmenn would not risk that the tax-exempted status was forgotten — or hoped that it would continue for as long as the tax collectors thought it was recent information.
@Jerry: a formal legal status like “currently an enrolled member of a federally-recognized tribe” is very much socially constructed! I do accept that sometimes people use “socially constructed” as a pejorative with a narrower meaning like “not to be taken seriously because it’s just made up,” but that was not the usage I had intended. Having cabinet members that are enrolled M’s of F-RT’s is now a bipartisan thing, of course, with Pres. Trump’s new Secretary of Homeland Security (formerly one of the senators from Oklahoma) being an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation.
Oh, and I appreciate the tip re anarthrousness.
It means “deserted farm”
Pushtosh′.
No, no! It really does!
Huh. I don’t remember that post and discussion. For some reason i never really took part in it, even if it should be right up my alley.
Pooh-Bah.
Oh, sorry. Anyway, here’s a speaker, indeed a teacher, saying /ˈkɛrəsən/, and here’s a speaker saying /kəˈrisən/.
@Trond: Thanks again. I guess I could have Googled the periodization on my own.
@J.W.: I see what you mean. The difference I had in mind is that practically all beholders (not a D&D reference) will agree on whether someone is an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe, but there’s room for disagreement on whether someone is a “real Indian/Native” by other definitions.
Wouldn’t be much to talk about if everybody just googled everything on their own. Sometimes you ask because you think the askee will enjoy the question. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that anyone else should have googled the geographic origins of Ms. Haaland’s surname rather than ask me!
The Handbook of North American Indians (9:234, 1979, here) says,
Note 2 in that final Curtis reference (here) says, following a comparative wordlist which contains Cochiti <Kĕ́rĭs> and Jemez <Kílĭsh>:
Thanks, very interesting!
For me too, especially since I’ve been to a lot of the places discussed there and known people from some.
Wow, that Germany-Ecuador game was unexpectedly good. I hadn’t planned to watch it, but when I checked my phone and saw it was tied up 1-1 well into the second half I turned it on, and was hooked from then on. Terrific play by La Tri, rewarded when Gonzalo Plata’s toe-flick goal at the 77-minute mark put them ahead. They should theoretically have been sitting pretty easy at that point, since they’re great at defending, but they made the last ten minutes more suspenseful than necessary by getting excited and making ridiculous kicks that turned the ball over to Germany. But they held on, the crowd (almost entirely pro-Ecuador) went wild, and I sat back satisfied.
No offense to German Hatters — Germany didn’t need the win, and Ecuador did!
Sure, sure but how’s Türkiye going to do against the Birleşik Devletler?
No offense to German Hatters — Germany didn’t need the win, and Ecuador did!
No offense taken. Of course, Ecuador only won because I didn’t watch 😉
The game started at midnight on a work night, so I decided to go to bed instead of watching it, considering that no win was needed for the German side.
“Türkiye” instead of “Turkey”
Victor Mather has a surprisingly good NY Times piece (archived) on this issue:
It concludes by discussing “the matter of a certain galliform native to the Western Hemisphere.”
Another nation that has taken to insisting on not having its name translated when used in English prose is Timor-Leste alias East Timor. Although since its national soccer team is currently ranked 201st-best in the world it is unlikely to need to have its name said by World Cup announcers any time soon. Then there’s the possibly-conceptually-related oddity of “ZA” being fairly widely used as an initialism for “South Africa,” which matches the standard-Dutch “Zuid-Afrika” but NOT the Afrikaans “Suid-Afrika.”
Türkiye is still referred to as la République de Turquie by the French gov’t in its most formal/official/bureaucratic register. https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFARTI000049219191 It may well be that the Turkish regime wishes to change standard usage in English while not caring nearly so much about standard usage in French, German, Timorese or Esperanto? Although you can apparently find Türkiye in French-language UN documents as well as documents from other transnational bureaucracies like the OCDE/OECD. Maybe the UN has also changed the name in its Spanish-language documents but Russian wikipedia asserts re UN practice that “На арабском, китайском и русском осталось старое название.”
The google ngram viewer shows a very steep upward spike in “Czechia” starting around 2014 (after a much more modest rise immediately following the dissolution of Czechoslovakia), but I haven’t dug into the underlying hits to assess how much that might be an artifact of dirty data.
I don’t know why there’s so much resistance to “Czechia”; I’m not pointing fingers, since I feel it myself. It’s perfectly parallel to “Slovakia” and is shorter than “Czech Republic.”
It may well be that the Turkish regime wishes to change standard usage in English while not caring nearly so much about standard usage in French, German, Timorese or Esperanto?
Maybe because “Turquie” and the like aren’t insults?
Why not revive “Great[er] Moravia”?
I think that was when the Czech government made its preference public.
In German it’s been Tschechien ever since independence, because the traditional Tschechei (f.) is supposedly too strongly associated with WWII. Slowakei (f.) remains. I’ve also seen Tsjechië in Dutch.
That extended far into Slovakia and Hungary; it would make the Czech goverment sound like a bunch of mad dentists*.
* irre Dentisten
(…usually Zahnärzte, but historians make an exception for the joke)
irre Dentisten
Love it!
Cf. DANTESQUE DENTISTS.
The best time for Czechia to have been promoted as a term would have been after the split in 1992, but at the time Czechs did not generally accept Česko as an acceptable short form for Česká republika (this was definitely the case when I lived there in 95-96) and so ‘Czech Republic” became the standard English version in parallel (some Anglophone residents just used “Czech” as a noun rather than anything like Czechia). So habits formed which make Czechia now seem unfamiliar. But most other languages adopted single-word names in 1993 or soon thereafter, German Tschechien being an obvious example.
Here in the New World, you can’t turn the Dominican Republic into “Dominica” because that’s already in use as the name of a totally separate island nation-state elsewhere in the Caribbean. In NYC* English, however, one does frequently hear “the Dominican” (always arthrous) as an informal-register short-form for the former. I don’t know whether or not that short-form calques a parallel form in Spanish.
*Possibly outside NYC as well, although the high local percentage of Dominican-Americans makes the referent more salient here and thus more likely to come up in informal-register conversations.
Tschechien — I always try to avoid using that, because to my ears it sounds like a bad joke.
Here in the New World, you can’t turn the Dominican Republic into “Dominica” because that’s already in use as the name of a totally separate island nation-state elsewhere in the Caribbean.
Although they could be differentiated in speech, because the name of the totally separate island nation-state is pronounced Domi-NEE-ca (/ˌdɒmɪˈniːkə/).
Well, maybe you could try to rebrand the Dom. Rep. as “Dominicana,” but I don’t know how stable that would be …
I thought you New Yorkers always called it “the DR”.
@Jerry: I can’t swear that “the Dominican” is actually more common than “the DR,” but it seems more noteworthy to me because a clipped short form seems like not as regular/productive a morphological process as using initials as the short form?
ETA: Plus the repurposing of an adjective as a noun is not unusual but still not an entirely productive process, I should think. I don’t think anyone uses “the French” as the short form of “the French Republic” or arthrous “the Czech” for Czechia. Maybe the now-archaic-sounding “the Argentine” would be a prior instance?
When I was living in a Dominican neighborhood (around 57th and B’way) I heard “the Dominican” a lot; I don’t remember “the DR.” (I drank the locally preferred brew, Presidente, which I remember as excellent.)
The DR and the Caribbean island once known as Wai‘tu kubuli in Kalinago do have to share the written adjective form “Dominican” but disambiguated in speech with the stress difference. One time that a stress-accent would be very useful in English spelling. But the Anglophone Caribbean is stacked with non-obvious pronunciations; Antigua, St Lucia and Nevis just for starters…
Wiktionary seems to agree with me that “Saint Lucia” (the island and nation-state) is pronounced the obvious way. Is there a variant local pronunciation it is unaware of? Or is the claim that the or at least a standard AmEng pronunciation of “Lucia” as a normal given name (/ˈluː.ʃə/) is itself non-obvious? I had a Great-Aunt Lucia (born 1894, my paternal grandmother’s oldest sister), and have thus known that one all my life, which I guess could make me oblivious to non-obviousness.
I’ve seen them do it, but not often, because Česko still refers to Bohemia specifically, as usually opposed to Moravia and that corner of Silesia.
It was a neologism out of nowhere in 1993 and did strike me as odd but regular at the time.
Well, the Spanish version of the name is Lucía, and many Americans are probably familiar with the Italian song “Santa Lucia” (which also has penultimate stress), so yes, I think /ˈluː.ʃə/ is nonobvious to many. I don’t think of “Lucia” as an English name at all; how did your great-aunt come by it?
/ˈluː.ʃə/) which is indeed the norm is sufficiently non-obvious to most that I have heard alternative versions of various kinds, though I’m struggling to recall the exact details. And other islands also suffer; after the invasion of Grenada it took the BBC 24 hours to stop rhyming it with the Spanish city (or perhaps more relevantly, their commercial rival Granada Television), despite the then-recent colonial history.
But the Anglophone Caribbean is stacked with non-obvious pronunciations; Antigua, St Lucia and Nevis just for starters…
I had all three of those wrong. I blame 1776 for making me think “Antigua” had a /w/.
@hat: you are out of touch with current baby-naming trends, as “Lucia” was the 83rd-most-popular name for newborn U.S. girls in 2025, with over 3,000 newborn recipients per the SSA database, which is likely an alltime high. That same database puts it at a much more modest #510 for my great-aunt’s year of birth. The name spent most of the 20th century bouncing around a fairly narrow range between 700th-most-popular and 500th-most-popular, with higher placements very rare, until its recent dramatic rise – #473 in 2003, #242 in 2013, #109 in 2023.
Note FWIW that “Lucinda” was more popular than “Lucia” in the mid-20th century – peaking in 1953 which happens to have been the year of birth of the fine singer/songwriter Lucinda Williams, but then declined steeply and fell out of the top 1000 after 1987. Perhaps there’s only room in the naming culture for one major Lucy-alternative at a time?
I don’t know why my great-grandparents chose the names they did, but her youngest sister (my grandmother) was Marguerite, and “Lucia” seems an “elegant” alternative to the more-common “Lucy” in pretty much the same way “Marguerite” is an alternative to the more-common “Margaret.” The middle sister (who died fairly young way back in the 1920’s) was Mariea, which I guess was a variant of Maria or Mariah?
I’m rather jealous that there is someone out there who looks at the pronunciations of the various island nations of the Caribbean and thinks it’s obvious.
“Saint Loosha? Granayda? Anteega? Well, yes. That’s intuitive. How else would one say it?”
EDIT: I know your comment was in jest, J. W., but I am amused that you playfully berated Hat for not being acquainted with approximately one hundred two year olds. Presumably, if Lucia is at an all-time high, that’s good reason for us old people to not feel its presence!
@hat: you are out of touch with current baby-naming trends
That is incontestable, and I thank you for the update.
It seems by the way that you can find British people online pronouncing the name of the late painter Lucian Freud both as /ˈluː.sɪən/ and as /ˈluː.ʃən/. But I assume only the latter works as the demonym for denizens of the Caribbean island.
It never occurred to me to say anything but /ˈluː.ʃən/ for the name of the late painter. I am glad to know of another shibboleth I have presumably failed.
@hat: I spent about five minutes on youtube trying without success to find a clip of the man himself saying his own name and there’s lots of interview footage but of course he was so famous (for the assumed audiences, at least) he doesn’t need to be filmed introducing himself. Shibbolethwise I would not exclude the possibility that he would agree with you (and me). Apparently it’s /ly.sjɛ̃/ in French, and who knows what might happen in the mouths of Brits who are trying to simulate that.
Though the OED pronounces both “musician” and “Confucian” with three syllables, it gives the following for “Saint Lucian”:
/snt ˈluːʃn/
snt LOO-shuhn
/snt ˈluːʃiən/
snt LOO-shee-uhn
/snt ˈluːsiən/
snt LOO-see-uhn
@jwb
Not the man himself, but maybe the next best thing?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fi8uaYywda0&pp=0gcJCUECo7VqN5tD
ˈluːsiən, ~0.11
Yes, if his daughter says /ˈluː.sɪən/ that’s authoritative as far as I’m concerned.
Norway is looking pretty dire against France, but when you rest all your best players because you’ve already won through to the elimination round, I guess that’s to be expected.
Back to foreign preferences in toponyms: the current Vietnamese regime claims in the English-language version of its website to be the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, which the UN seems to indulge in English while the U.S. State Dep’t continues to use joined-up Vietnam.* Unless the two-word spelling is meant to force a different stress pattern, this difference wouldn’t affect a sports announcer on tv.
*As of 60 years ago when there was more frequently occasion to refer to it, there was supposedly no uniform federal style, with different parts of the U.S. government variously using Vietnam, Viet-Nam, and Viet Nam. The 19th-century American diplomat Edmund Roberts reportedly used Wietnam with a “w,” but alas died of dysentery in Macao/Macau/etc. before he could successfully conclude negotiations with the then-emperor.
I mean, there are people who pronounce issue with [sj], and others who abbreviate it to ish even in writing, both in England…
That’s Lucien; Lucian must lead to confusion.
Huh. Any connections to Poland? In German it’s uniformly Vietnam… though that far back I have no idea.
I mean, there are people who pronounce issue with [sj], and others who abbreviate it to ish even in writing, both in England…
But this is a personal name we’re talking about, and it has only one correct (used by the person) pronunciation.
Hat: Norway is looking pretty dire against France, but when you rest all your best players because you’ve already won through to the elimination round, I guess that’s to be expected.
I’m much more optimistic now than after the first two matches. This was a much needed training match for the reserves, and several players were tested in unusual positions. They used the first half just to learn eachother’s moves. Still, they were as good as the French in long stretches of the match.
Edit: I had obviously hoped to see Haaland, Ødegaard, et al. against Mbappé and the full French crew. But this was surprisingly satisfying.
True!
Hmm. Take a personal name like “Charles,” which has at least two standard pronunciations among L1 Anglophones: one rhotic and one non-rhotic. Rhotic speakers do not generally feel obligated to use a non-rhotic pronunciation when addressing or referring to a non-rhotic bearer of the name, or vice versa. As to the name at hand, wiktionary claims there’s a “now rare” alternative with first syllable /’lju/. That might be one where one could not depend on a bearer’s own daughter to say it “correctly” if they were too far gone in yod-dropping.
Lucian Freud was born in Germany and lived there until he was 11. How do we think he pronounced his own name back then?
ETA: “Lucian” was the 462nd-most-common name for newborn boys in the US in 2025 while “Lucien” was the 899th-most-common. About 2.5 of the former for each 1 of the latter. Don’t know if there’s any systematic pronunciation difference but I wouldn’t necessarily expect one.
I don’t think anyone uses “the French” as the short form of “the French Republic” or arthrous “the Czech” for Czechia.
Clipping place-names of the form “the [Attributive] [Common Noun]” to “the [Attributive]” often works where the Common Noun is “Ocean” or “Sea”. For “Islands” and “Mountains”, you can often omit the class by pluralising the attributive.
For political common nouns it does seem rarer. I can think of “the Vatican [City]” and “the Cape [Province]”. Slightly different are “Queen’s [County]” and “Saudi [Arabia]”, Contrast “the [United] States”, “the [United Arab] Emirates”.
One state that insists on NOT using the native language name in other languages is Éire. One might argue that the Constitution specifies the English name is Ireland, but I strongly suspect e.g. the French embassy would hate to receive correspondence referring to Éire rather than Irlande.
But those are marked British, while the US and Caribbean pronunciations have only LOO-shuhn. I wonder if the last two British pronunciations are recently developed spelling pronunciations, since the print edition (1986) had only (ˈluːʃən). Have UK/St.-L ties been weakening since independence?
(The LOO-shuhn pronunciation was totally nonobvious to me. Shows what I know.)
According to trivia quizzes, St. Lucia is the only country in the world named after a woman.
Say that to my aunt Mozambique.
I don’t think there are all that many named after individual (non-divine) men, now I start thinking about it. “Rhodesia”, until the people themselves managed to get a say in the matter …
Megalomaniac rulers mosly seem to content themselves with renaming cities after themselves (or months, in advanced cases.)
Bolivia … there’s one …
Mauritius. Arguably Kiribati. Half St. Kitts and Nevis. Half São Tomé e Príncipe.
Edit: i didn’t mention half St. Vincent and the Grenadines, but that’s named after a band.
St. Vincent and the Grenadines
Saw them once when they were opening for Chadwick and the Neutrons.
Is there no armed faction seeking independence for female-namesake St. Helena?
Bolivia was out there before Rhodesia. And the Philippines. And Mauritius. (Maybe island nations are especially good for this pattern even if not named for saints?* And consider the Solomon Islands, now a sovereign monarchy.) You can say the State of Israel was named most immediately after a collective people, but the people’s name is said to have anciently come from the founding patriarch, although I guess some skeptics have been suspicious about how he had two different names as if one had been retconned. And of course the United States of Amerigo.
I guess Dominica, mentioned upthread, is named after a divine personage (via a day-of-the-week).
My “non-divine” was an epicycle intended to rule out saints, but even so, I must grant you the non-divine Vespucci and your other unholy examples.
“Solomon Islands” seems to have been some sort of advertising gimmick, like “Greenland.”
@Hat: But this is a personal name we’re talking about, and it has only one correct (used by the person) pronunciation.
To amplify what J.W. said about “Charles”, I pronounce my name to rhyme with “Mary” and “marry”, but I don’t think Londoners or even New Yorkers are wrong when they don’t rhyme it with either. So I don’t think the only correct pronunciation of my name is the one I use. This is somewhat different from pronunciations of “Lucian”, but not entirely.
According to Wikipedia, Lucian Freud had fourteen acknowledged children. I wonder whether they all pronounce his given name the same way.
My paternal grandmother pronounced our surname as [‘ɛdɪʃə]. (I, of course, pronounce it [‘havərsɛd͡ʒ]. Admittedly, this is a spelling pronunciation.)
Si de Rómulo, Roma; de Bolívar, Bolivia – I had no idea…
Don’t forget Colombia.
And, less important on the world stage, the Cook Islands.
Saudi Arabia has been mentioned in this thread, but not in reference to [*checks*] Saud ibn Muhammad ibn Muqrin.
The Cook Islands are perhaps not 100% sovereign, depending on how you construe their continuing “free association” w/ New Zealand, but they do have their own “national” soccer team so they are at least as much of a “nation” as e.g. Wales. Or Curacao.
Rumors that a current East African polity was indirectly named for the legendary 17th-century explorer and/or slave-trader Ulrich Tanzanius* remain unconfirmed.
*A Latinized version of an obscure original surname that was either Danish or Low German.
I also recall a visiting speaker (in my Marshall University honors seminar in Asian studies) in the 1960s saying “Wietnam.”
I was idly wondering if Uzbekistan (not yet eliminated from advancing to the round of 32 but with perhaps the longest shot of all the teams that are as of this morning neither definitively in nor definitively out) was actually the world’s best -stan soccer team or had benefited from some quirk of the qualification process. It turns out that its current “FIFA/Coca-Cola Men’s World Ranking” is in fact the best of any -stan and quite some distance ahead of 2d-place Tajikistan. But that led me to discover that 3d-place Kyrgyzstan is “the Kyrgyz Republic” for FIFA purposes despite even the UN calling it Kyrgyzstan. Not sure what’s up with that.
Since I have in the past on multiple occasions complained about the gratuitous (in romanization) Kirghiz->Kyrgyz respelling, let me take this occasion to state for the record that respelling Kazakhstan as Qazaqstan and then trying to guilt-trip mainstream English-language media into playing along would be hilarious and I’m all in favor of it.
The Cook Islands are perhaps not 100% sovereign, depending on how you construe their continuing “free association” w/ New Zealand, …
They do not “meet the requirements for UN membership”. Cook Islanders automatically hold NZ Citizenship, so there’s far more living in NZ than in the Islands themselves. The Islands’ main source of income is tourism from NZ.
The Cook Islands are being very naughty boys. They (or rather a few of their politicians) have been making backroom deals with PRC for so-called ‘infrastructure investment’, “seabed mineral exploration agreements” without even mentioning it to NZ. (And we can all guess why that would be.)
Wow! We had family visiting (I got an early birthday present of Connemara Peated Single Malt Irish Whiskey and a 2-CD set containing reissues of John Surman’s first three albums), so I didn’t get to the Canada–South Africa game until about the 80th minute, but that turned out to be fine, since there was no score and it looked like neither side was excited about winning. Since it’s the first elimination game, there was going to have to be another 30-minute period and then probably pens, and I can’t say I was looking forward to it, but then — already into stoppage time — Stephen (/ˈstɛfən/ STEF-ən) Eustáquio got an absolutely brilliant goal and Les Rouges held on to win and proceed to the round of 16 for the first time. Lovely to see both the goal and the reaction of the long-suffering Canada fans.
Earlier today Brazil beat Japan deep into stoppage time, and now Germany and Paraguay go to penalties. … and Havertz misses the first!
Yes, poor Germany — that goal called back for a dubious foul will haunt them. Still, I’m always glad to see a Latin American team advance.
That Brazil-Japan game was a humdinger!
I didn’t watch the game, as it was at an ungodly hour here in Dubai on a work night, but a message from my daughter woke me before it went into penalties. I followed the drama on the live ticker on my phone. Well, at least we made it past the first round this time…
And then the Netherlands losing to Morocco. That one was always expected to be a tossup, but Paraguay beating Germany certainly counts as an upset – but it goes to show that anything can happen in the knockouts. Cup er cup as the saying goes*.
Coming up soon: Norway vs.
Ivory CoastCôte d’Ivoire. I’ll make an exception to my principle of rooting for the Non-European (not-really-an-)underdog.* Norw. cup “single knockout tournament”. The corresponding wisdom in winter sports is stafett er stafett (“relay race”).
I think Trond means vs. Elfenbe[i]nskysten. Just saw a few minutes of that out of the corner of my eye while I was at lunch. One thinks of Cd’I as a small country looking at the map, but it’s fairly densely populated and the total Ivoirian population at present exceeds that of Norway Sweden and Denmark combined – without even adjusting for all the elderly Scandinavians and the even greater disproportion of population currently of prime soccer-playing age.
Man, oh man. For most of the first half I thought Norway weren’t really interested — they just sort of pottered around and didn’t even try to get the ball to Haaland. Meanwhile, the Elephants were lively and aggressive and more than once looked likely to score. Suddenly, towards the end of the half, Norway awoke and attacked with commitment, and Antonio Nusa got an absolutely splendid goal. They kept it up, too; CIV are lucky it’s not 2-0 or 3-0. I look forward to an exciting second half, and fervently hope it doesn’t go to pens!
@JWB: Indeed. Also, the availability of eligible surplus top talent from France’s excellent youth sports system.
1:0 to Norway at half time. Not fair at all, up until the goal, but fairly exciting.
@Hat: Not uninterested. Really scared of fast counterattacks.
The first game in the knockouts not to be a draw after 90 minutes? That’s a wild hope!
I know, but when all else is vanished, hope remains!
And hope prevailed! Not an impressive goal from Haaland, but it doesn’t have to be impressive to win. Ja vi elsker! Bring on Brazil!
Hope prevails, but what a hopeless, wondrous way to get there! Now Brazil!
Men of the match: Not the top stars, but Ørjan Berg in the midfield, Kristoffer Ajer as center-half, and Ørjan Nyland, the goalkeeper.
Yes, Nyland was brilliant.
Fact: Norway is currently the only European team qualified for the round of 16.*
Fact 2: Norway has never lost to Brazil.
* Though France vs. Sweden guarantees one more tonight. And Portugal, Croatia, Spain, and Austria in the same branch of the tournament plan secures Europe a place in the quarterfinals. Though it seems unfair that Portugal and not Belgium got that Hapsburg seat.
I can’t imagine that the current Portuguese soccer team has any especial devotion to the historical legacy of the fairly brief period of Hapsburg rule in the 16th/17th centuries. (Apparently known as the Dinastia Filipina because all relevant Hapsburgs were in Portuguese named Filipe until the Braganzas evicted them.)
You go to the World Cup with the Hapsburgs you have, not the Hapsburgs you might want or wish to have at a later time.
Serendipitously, the two teams I’m now supporting are out to get my revenge for me…
(I feel like I *should* support Canada, for family reasons, but Norway is my favourite *place* left in!)
France are making it very clear why they’re the favorites to win it all. It’s only 2-0 (around the hour mark) but it could easily be 6-0; Sweden can thank their lucky stars for those near misses, not that it will make any difference.
France are a real joy to watch! pity Olise’s chilena went off the post
Further to Trond’s point about sources of Ivoirian-team talent (and this may also be relevant to what players’ L1’s are and aren’t):
“Of the 1,248 selected for the 2026 World Cup, nearly 8%, or 99 footballers, were born in France, according to analysis from Opta, verified by Le Monde. Among them, only 23 wear the French team’s jersey. The others are mainly spread across African national teams: 13 for Algeria, 11 for the Democratic Republic of Congo, 10 for Senegal, eight for Côte d’Ivoire, seven for Tunisia and six for Morocco. Haiti’s team includes 12, while Qatar and Spain each have just one.” [NB that this by my arithmetic leaves about a half dozen unaccounted for.]
The Netherlands also did well by that metric, but that’s more disproportionately because close to 100% of Curacao’s team was born there. But the one Irish-born-and-raised player for Cape Verde is generating more press coverage I’ve seen than any of those others, perhaps because Anglophone media is just gonna Anglophone.
My god, what a game! They crossed me up by starting at noon instead of one, so I missed the whole first half — imagine my surprise when I discovered the score was DRC 1-ENG 0. I was on tenterhooks the whole second half; the Leopards were doing absolutely brilliant defending, and their goalkeeper Mpasi wasn’t letting anything get by him. It looked like it was going to be a historic shocker… and then Harry Kane headed in the equalizer, and ten minutes later the winner, a perfect, unstoppable goal. I had heard a lot about how great he was, but I don’t think I had felt it in my bones until now. What a game, and what a World Cup! (Of course, England are unlikely to survive Azteca on Monday — Mexico simply doesn’t lose there — but they’ll enjoy their resurrection while they can.)
I meant to watch England and Congo, since the winner is a potential adversary in a very potential quarterfinal, but we have summer guests and decided to go out and eat. I got exactly three looks at my feed: after a quarter, during the half time break, and a few seconds after the final whistle.
And now Senegal are two up against Belgium! Iraq’s results in group I are starting to look decent.
Another barnburner! USA 2 – BIH 0, but that score doesn’t remotely reflect the game on the field, which was increasingly intense, especially after Balogun was sent off (completely ridiculous red card) and the US played the last half hour down a man. How am I supposed to get to sleep now?
Hardly fair for our team to have to play Bosnia AND Herzegovina at the same time. Seems like some sort of stunt intended to juice the TV ratings.
I’m rooting for Cape Verde. On a language note, the first time I saw the country’s team mentioned on TV here in Taiwan, it was 角維德, which threw me for a few seconds before I realized it was Cape Verde, in the Portuguese word order (and as in the English version), 角 being “cape” in this context and 維德 an attempt at the sound of “verde.” A few minutes later my wife read the name in the TV captions and said, 角維德是誰? “Who’s Jiao Wei-de?” But the next day all the TV news was using 維德角 in the standard Taiwan Mandarin form for the name of the country, Wei-de Jiao, “Verde Cape.”
I was too tired to report the final score, but 3:2 to Belgium after a wild last five minutes of ordinary time and a penalty near the end of extra time. Harsh.
We started watching Portugal-Croatia but the first half was so boring we gave up and watched a Vera instead. Just as well, because the ending of the game (goddam Ronaldo getting a goal, Gvardiol’s last-minute equalizer getting denied for bullshit reasons) would have pissed me off.
Tonight: Argentina!
It probably goes without saying that I am very happy Messi got a goal and Argentina are ahead 1-0 at the half. But the fact is I kind of hope it stays that way; with any other opponent I’d be rooting for them to run up the score, but like everybody else I’ve fallen in love with Cape Verde and their grizzled goalkeeper, and I don’t want them humiliated.
… and then Cape Verde scored!
Yeah, this is a little too much suspense. Come on, Messi, get another!
It’s been one-sided since the goal. Cape Verde can’t resist this forever. If they don’t make a goal on a freak counterattack before the full-time whistle, I think Argentina will crush them in extra time.
OK, this is fucking ridiculous. It’s 2-2 with fifteen minutes to play. Vozinha is amazing. Come on, pibes, don’t make me endure penalties!
It’s been pretty amazing since about the 75- minute mark.
One of the greatest Mundial games I’ve seen. I hope they don’t have as much trouble getting past Egypt…
That was heart-in-mouth for the whole game, the lead changing hands 5 times. Penaud, Attisogbe and Jalibert of course scored. But they couldn’t keep up with the Hurricanes’ dynamic trio, supplemented by Jordan just back from injury and playing unusually at Right Wing.
(This is what AntC is on about. Well done New Zealand!)
Hard to believe there’s no score after 67 minutes — both Brazil and Norway have wasted golden opportunities. I hope Trond is surviving this…
Oops
Double oops
I’m just about surviving. Honestly more excited now than when Scotland scored their one goal 😀
(And I forgot all about Scotland’s rugby match, despite being really a rugby fan. Pleased now I’ve seen the result!)
Surviving but hardly communicating! Haaland of course. But Nyland… He was already man of the match when he did that wild save running back against his own post.
Scotland’s rugby match
Yes, well done Scotland. And Wales. And Ireland. (I guess they were happier to play away from the searing heat in Europe.) Also good on Japan.
Good goalkeeping is generally undervalued, I think.
Congratulations, Trond!
Yes, hjertelige gratulasjoner!
Thanks, I did my best.
I’m too tired to do a surname analysis on Nyland tonight.
Terrific play by La Tri
TIL what many here already knew: Mexico’s national team is El Tri. (I had lunch at a Mexican restaurant, where the employees were wearing fan shirts and there was a TV showing pre-match coverage.)
Penaud, Attisogbe and Jalibert
The top three seeds in Ladies’ Singles are all out, and yet again the championship will be won by someone who hasn’t won it before. The Americans are doing well. In Gentlemen’s Singles and in the doubles categories, the story is quite different.
Of course, the big news on the women’s side is Naomi Osaka’s continued comeback, ihncluding beating the women’s number one, Aryna Sabalenka.
Yet another second-half collapse by the blood-and-bandages means Liam won’t be coming Leeside next month.
Late result: Trump scores own-goal! [**]
Can I start referring to him as “Baldy” Pevsner, or is that too obscure?
[**] The coverage around the world has been more instant and more damning than even his bombing Iran. I imagine this will torpedo the political hopes of Restore UK.
Surely the current language angle is the absence of Lusophone teams in the quarter-finals, with all three of the three contenders having failed to advance. At least in soccer. Maybe it’s otherwise in tennis? Probably not in rugby.
Belgium’s shirts are styled after Magritte, and say
sez the Grauniad live commentary.
(This is the first game I’ve watched, and only in the hope wotsisname breaks a leg. Are all soccer players these days total woosses? They wouldn’t survive any of those (quite legal) tackles from Saturday’s proper footy.)
USA lost. TBH the only thing they looked like winning was the Oscar for rolling on the ground and looking outraged.
To be fair to Balogun, he did the decent thing and avoided touching the ball.
The missing-language angle at Wimbledon is the nearly complete lack of Russophones in the quarterfinals. The only one left is Alexander “Sascha” Zverev of Germany, the second seed, who was ahead of Jiří Lehečka two sets to none when their match was suspended. If he wins as expected, his next opponent will be his recent kryptonite, the American Taylor Fritz.
The Great Lusophone Hope, João Fonseca (age 19) of Brazil, lost in the third round. The only Lusophone player left is Luisa Stefani, also of Brazil, in ladies’ doubles. She and her partner, Gabriela Dabrowski of Canada, were seeded second.
Well, if you want a lighter take on soccer and know Russian, I give you this.
That’s great. «The world’s smallest Messi! »
I’m amazed Russian kids even 13 years ago still had Beckenbauer jerseys.
Belgium inexplicably lost their place in the Hapsburg octant, but they will now face Spain in the quarterfinals for a final Habsburg showdown. Order restored.
Well, if you want a lighter take on soccer and know Russian, I give you this.
Thanks, that raised my spirits. (I bailed out on the US game after the own goal; why suffer unnecessarily?)
What the…
What the…..
(For the historical record: the first was for Egypt’s goal, the second for Messi missing his penalty.)
From the Guardian:
Indeed.
Good lord, Shobeir is an incredible goalkeeper.
At least Argentina started playing football. But so did Shobeir!
.
Edit: The World Cup of the goalkeepers, indeed.
We are on travel today, and I didn’t get to watch the first half, just follow it on my phone while we were out eating, but that was wild enough. I’m now benching myself for the second half on TV.
Oh, what a counterattack!
And what a VAR travesty.
And then what a counterattack!
Apologies to our host, but what a development!
Just following on my phone, but this really is the World Cup of surprises!
By the way, here in Dubai the beIN sports channel mentioned in the original post is what is shown in all public viewing areas I frequented so far.
Tʋʋm tʋʋma, Egipt dim la bɔɔl nwɛ’ɛdiba!
And just as I was about to predict Morocco vs. Egypt in the final, two quick goals for Argentina.
And then what a counterattack for Argentina!
(It took sone time to post that. I wasn’t allowed to repeat the exact same comment.)
Apologies to our host, but what a development!
No apologies needed — what a game!! I can’t count the number of times I shouted “Holy fucking shit!” Thank goodness my wife was napping; this game would have been too hard on her. And thank goodness it started at noon instead of 8 PM; I’d never have gotten to sleep. What a game!!!
I’m just glad you guys showed up; I was afraid I was the only one watching.
Llongyfarchiadau i’r Ariannin (ac i’r Aifft hefyd.)
We were all watching in Europe. Great game. Questionable refereeing but that seems to be par for the course this WC.
An Egypt victory would have made the remaining game (Switzerland-Colombia) unusually interesting because whether or not this would be the first WC quarter-finals in the history of quarter-finals to have zero New World teams among the eight would have been up for grabs. But now it’s not. I guess a Swiss victory would mean a quarter-finals field of 8 where an absolute majority of the 8 either are France or directly adjoin France (with or without intervening water). But I don’t know how historically unusual that sort of tight geographical clustering is or isn’t.
Questionable refereeing but that seems to be par for the course this WC.
Yup. (Does this have something to do with diversity mandates? I recall a referee from Uzbekistan who was particularly dire.)
Who could possibly object to expanding the pool of referee-producing nations from 32 to 48? (If that’s how they did it.) If nothing else, if you assume some regional variation in how refereeing is typically done (with each locale having a fairly stable approach that teams can be calibrated for), drawing referees from a wider array of origins for a Big Tournament will likely increase the scope of referee-to-referee stylistic variation, especially since the guy from Uzbekistan is unlikely to be specifically assigned to a matchup between teams that are both from countries where the local refereeing style is strongly Uzbekistan-like.
There were just 13 European teams in the round of 32. I saw that as confirmation that football is vecoming truly global, also at the absolute top level. Seven of them made it to the round of sixteen, which is to expect. Now there will be 5 or 6 in the round of 8.
There were only nine African teams, down to only two in the round of 16, and now only Morocco are through to the round of 8. But how close they all got!
Meanwhile, there were 8 teams in the round of 32 from the Americas combined, also at least a couple more than I would have expected. What’s more, seven out of those made it through to the round of 16. But in the quarterfinals there will only be one or two left.
Very different paths, very similar outcomes. We could make elaborate theories on that, or we could just say that it,s the kind of randomly skewed outcome you get from tossing a coin.
@trond
I would have said
Spain v Portugal
Argentina v Egypt
was a gift to Argentina (who might otherwise have had to play both Iberian sides). But look at what happened!
Of the nine Officially-from-Asia teams (dubiously including Australia but excluding Turkey) in the initial tournament field, only two made it to the round of 32 and zero to the round of 16. Asia (whether or not you include Australia or Turkey) has an absolute majority of the global population.
There has always been bad refereeing in the World Cup – both because of the different qualities of the play in their home leagues and because different football cultures have different refereeing cultures. But there’s a whole new type of bad calls now. It has to do with the number of interfering referees on the team and the surrender to incomplete technology. It seems that referees no longer trust their own judgment, and occasionally the better judgment of an assistant referee closer to the situation. Instead they wait for VAR to call. And it also has something to do with what we expext from the new technologically assisted teams – an honest misjudgment of a close call no longer exists.
It seems that referees no longer trust their own judgment, and occasionally the better judgment of an assistant referee closer to the situation. Instead they wait for VAR to call.
Yes, this is infuriating, and inevitably produces more bad feeling.
I’m sorry, I was away watching very Glaswegian Shakespeare instead. (I didn’t have time to go and see what the Duke of Wellington has on his head now.)
C’mon there were always complaints about bad refereeing, especially around penalties, but also offsides. We discussed at one time “Судью на мыло!” (“[Make] soap out of the ref”). And I’ve recently learned “I’m blind, I’m deaf, I wanna be a ref”. As personal stories go, I remember being a very long time ago on a soccer match where a dissapointed fan began singing “Jeeeeeewwwww” in response to a questionable ref’s call, but two policemen rose up and looked at him, I wouldn’t even say disapprovingly, but that was enough to calm the guy.
@D.O.: And I’ve recently learned “I’m blind, I’m deaf, I wanna be a ref”.
I just learned it from you.
Reminds me of the Afrikaner shouting to the umpire at a cricket match:
“Shook your head! Your eyes is stuck!”
The classical German chant is the Mafia-like Schiri*), wir wissen wo dein Auto steht “Ref, we know where your car is parked.”
*Short for Schiedsrichter.
Alleging the ref is incompetent is one thing, that he’s partial towards the other team (or not sufficiently intimidated to be partial towards your own) is something else*. The mafia-like chant is for the latter case. When I was going to Brann matches in Bergen in the late eighties, the version was Vi vet kor du bor, dommar! “We know where you live, ref!”. For the former case, Dommaren har drukke! “The ref has been drinking”. Neither is especially creative**, and I imagine both too be pretty widespread.
* Not mutually exclusive, obviously. The positions can be freely mixed and interchanged at any time.
** There was much creativity, but not those particular chants.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/LwuLs83Pxzc
From a linguistic variety perspective, Argentina’s big late-in-the-game comeback against Egypt deprived the world of a non-IE-speaking team in the quarter-finals for the first time in a while, at least if we characterize (being descriptive and non-judgmental) Morocco as a de facto Francophone team. First in how long? Well, Hungary was last in the quarter-finals 60 years ago. I assume south-of-Morocco teams like Senegal and Ghana that have done well more recently likewise in practice used a formerly-imperial IE tongue as an intra-team working language, but I could be wrong about that.
The final eight IE-speaking terms are reasonably balanced between Romance and Germanic, esp. if one takes advantage of the hermaphroditism of Belgium and Switzerland. But it was a terrible tournament for Slavophone teams, with Croatia’s star in decline and no one else’s on the rise.
Okay okay I had not focused on 2002, which was a peak year for non-IE teams with both South Korea and Turkey making it to the semi-finals and then meeting in the Pan-Turanian third-place game. But neither did well this year.
A goalless 1st half between France and Morocco. Not a bad goalkeeper, Morocco’s Bounou either – though he’ll have to share credit for that penalty save with the VAR team.
Edit: After 10 minutes there’s already been more forward action by Morocco than in the entire first half, but now France seems to be taking back control of the game.
Edit again: And then Mbappé.
…just to be sure: that’s a joke, right?
It means “internet”.
#Neuland
, wir zünden es an, drum fahr mit der Bahn!
“we’re setting it on fire, so go by train!” All sung twice to fill the tune.
He’s the emperor. His fame is relatively everlasting.
(And the video is awesome, even though I only actually understood 1/3 and guessed another 1/3 from context.)
The things I learn…
David M..: It means “internet”.
#Neuland
It certainly does. Placing it historically is somewhat more interesting, but not much: Nyland farms tend to be small and peripheral compared to other -land farms, indicating that they are younger settlements – which is pretty much what you’d expect from the lexical meaning. His middle name Håskjold is more interesting, etymologically speaking.
The same could perhaps be said of Haaland’s middle name Braut. But both will have to wait a little longer.