>> > > Just back from Warschau (Poland) - Thanks. And BTW: since Karfreitag
>>
>> > Where? Oh, you mean Warszawa. Warsaw. ;-)
>>
>> (You're just lucky that's one of the few polish words without lots of
>> accents etc.) Hmm do you want to start another War ? ;)
>>
>> If you live in a city like Munich you learn about the ways
>> of naming a city - and of coure how senseless it is to
>> belive in calling a thin worldwide with one single name.
Hmm. I generally try and name a city in a language that is spoken in that city
- so I am usually careful to write Muenchen, Nuernberg, Braunschweig for Munich,
Nuremberg and Brunswick. But I admit that I would probably simply have written
Warsaw for Warszawa.
The main difficulty is when the language doesn't use Latin characters. I
wouldn't even know how to write "Bangkok" in Thai, although I think I could
manage "Taipei" in Chinese. (But Taiwanese place names should be transliterated
according to the Wade-Giles system still used in Taiwan, rather than in PinYin
as on the mainland)
Polish is one of the less bad languages for accents - Czech is far worse, to the
extent that in the UK we generally use Polish spellings...
> Well, maybe you could explain it to me, I'm afraid I don't get it. :^)
> I always wondered why Munich sometimes gets shown as Munchen. I can't do
> those funny accented characters, (umlauts?) even if I knew what they meant,
> just as well, most people around here have enough difficulty with 26
> letters. I don't know how you guys cope with all the extras, not to mention
> all this masculine/feminine/neuter gender and case stuff. Confused the hell
> out of me.
Umlauts are reasonable enough. Gramatical gender is an anachronism that should
be abolished as soon as possible. But English spellings (whenther British or
American) have been in sore need of reform since before they were
standardised...
> Good things about living in a single island country that's larger than most
> of Europe.
>
> 1) Everybody speaks English. ('Cepting a few migrants/boat people....:^)
> They expose kids to other languages at school, but theres is no real
> need/pressure to learn one to a level where conversation is possible.
> (Who we gonna practice on/talk to?)
> Some do learn Indonesian or Japanese, but most don't bother.
What? Have we found in the Aussies a nation who are even worse at foreign
languages than the British? I never thought I'd live to see the day! ;-)
> 2) You don't need a passport to drive across the road. Or travel 2000km for
> that matter.
Well, we're like that in the UK, except that the island is smaller.
> 3) 240VAC 3 pin sockets are a national standard.
That doesn't seem to have helped us...
> CNN is about the nearest I get. Upside is that I can now read most of the
> Cyrillic alphabet after 4 weeks of watching snippets of Serbian TV news
> subtitles!
> (Well I can read Belgrad(e) Pristina and Novi Sad anyway)
Watch out! The Serbian alphabet is as different from the Russian alphabet (the
de facto standard for Cyrillic) as the Polish alphabet is from the English
alphabet...
(I have somewhere a Yugoslavian banknote. Everything is written on it in four
local languages - two using Cyrillic and two using Latin characters. The
languages are similar enough that AFAIK nothing needs to be said more than three
times...)
Philip.
Received on Fri Apr 16 1999 - 09:55:18 BST
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