Nope, you city it
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@LaoC said in Nope, you city it:
@Gąska said in Nope, you city it:
@LaoC you sure it's Bavarian? Google says Franconian.
Fun fact: German for Franconian is Fränkisch, but Frankish is yet another language.
Politically it's a part of Bavaria and the dialects are closely related, although the people would say they're under Bavarian occupation.
They are. Since the era of Napoleon.
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@nerd4sale said in Nope, you city it:
And depending on your definition of culture, you could say that we have anywhere from 1 to 17 million cultures in the Netherlands. 2 seems quite arbitrary, and tbh I don't even know which 2 you would mean.
Gouda, Edam, Maasdam, Boerenkaas, Leyden, ...
What? This originated in a food-related thread.
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@dkf said in Nope, you city it:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Nope, you eat it:
The stereotype is that Americans don't care about Important Cultural Knowledge like "Where is Vienna?"
FWIW, it's in northern Virginia.
Also Lima (pronounced Lie-mah) is in Ohio.
As is Russia (pronounced roosh-uh)
And Versailles (ver-sails)
London (London, hey look they got that one right!)
And a whole bunch of other ones
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@sloosecannon said in Nope, you city it:
@dkf said in Nope, you city it:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Nope, you eat it:
The stereotype is that Americans don't care about Important Cultural Knowledge like "Where is Vienna?"
FWIW, it's in northern Virginia.
Also Lima (pronounced Lie-mah) is in Ohio.
As is Russia (pronounced roosh-uh)
And Versailles (ver-sails)
London (London, hey look they got that one right!)
And a whole bunch of other ones
Yes, and Moscow and Egypt are only about a mile or so apart, not too far from here.
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@nerd4sale said in Nope, you city it:
you could say that we have anywhere from 1 to 17 million cultures in the Netherlands. 2 seems quite arbitrary, and tbh I don't even know which 2 you would mean.
I suspect @Gąska meant Dutch and Frisian. I myself would rather, if forced to divide the country into just two cultures, put it at either Brabanders and everyone else, or Hollanders and everyone else, but I suppose people from other parts of the country than mine, would have different opinions still about this.
Which neatly shows one of the problems being discussed in this thread, I suppose.
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@nerd4sale said in Nope, you city it:
But it seems there are more languages I didn't even think of (i.e. English and Papiamento).
Heh, those are the ones I thought you meant :)
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@sloosecannon Ontario, Canada has a handful of municipalities named for other, more well known international cities:
- Athens
- Cambridge
- Hanover
- London
- Paris
- Perth
- Waterloo
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Are you sure they're actually named after the international cities, and not after the USA cities that are themselves named after the international cities?
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@Zerosquare USA is international
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@Zerosquare can't be, they don't have "New" in front of them.
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@Arantor There's also York, but that hasn't been its own city in a while, as it is in the middle of Toronto. Confusingly, there's also the York Region, north of the city of Toronto but still in the Greater Toronto Area, which everyone outside Toronto just calls Toronto
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The UK has more than one New York too.
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@loopback0 And probably all less
than the USA New York.
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@Gąska said in Nope, you city it:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Nope, you eat it:
@Gąska said in Nope, you eat it:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Nope, you eat it:
@Gąska said in Nope, you eat it:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Nope, you eat it:
Because there's about 200 countries
We were talking Europe. Stop
all the fucking time.Fine. Wikipedia says that there's "about 50" countries in Europe. I think that it's too much to ask that every educated person memorize all 50 European capitals, especially if they don't have any specific dealings with any country in Europe.
Rome, Madrid, Lisbon, Dublin, Reykjavik, Paris, Berlin, London, Warsaw, Kiev, Minsk, Prague, Bratislava, Bren, Budapest, Vienna, Brussels, Oslo, Stockholm, Bucharest, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Vilnius. And Moscow if you insist. I skipped the Balkans of course, and the many city-states cuz come on. Yes, I still missed a few. I'm pretty bad at geography. But if you're worse than me, a high school dropout - how can you call yourself educated?
I'm educated in computer science and software engineering, in the specific field that my employer's customers are in (I'm not going to identify this for fear of doxxing myself), in how American government works, and in how human nature works.
I have a working level of knowledge, but not a great knowledge, of biology, chemistry, and physics, and classical English literature (i.e. the most famous of Shakespeare's plays - Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and sort of Othello.)
Nobody can know everything, and if you're not in Europe, the capitals of minor European countries are sort of trivia.
But there are certain things that just should be known by everybody who considers themselves educated. This seems to be one of the differences between American and European cultures. Americans seem to think (assuming you're a representative American) that educated literally means someone who undergone education. For Europeans, an educated man is one with general knowledge in a few particular fields. Literature, history, arts to some extent, at least high school-level maths, physics, chemistry and biology (by European standards; Americans learn significantly less in high schools and are far more specialized), basic world politics, and enough grasp of scientific method to understand importance of good research. And enough geography to not make a fool of themselves when someone says "I'm from <one of the major cities of the world>".
Maybe you're right about what "a representative American" would think and maybe you're not. I don't know. I've been using "an educated man" in the same sense that you're calling the European sense - there's a list of things that you have to know, and if you know them, you're "educated." It doesn't matter whether you learned them in a university or not, only that you know the things on the list.
We're arguing about what goes on the list, and in particular the criteria to make a city a major world city.
Even though Vienna is that old, Austria isn't that old. Austria has continuously been an independent country since 1946, but there were other countries called Austria with the same general area before World War II.
As a Pole, I'm contractually obliged to be very mad at you for what you just said here. As you may or may not be aware, there were long periods in Polish history where there was no officially recognized Polish state. There was that one time the Piast dynasty divided the Crown into 100 tiny duchies, but other than that, it was always due to a foreign invasion. Most significantly, the partitions of the late 18th century which removed Poland from the maps (schools love that phrase) until the end of WW1. And during that entire time, there were nationalist revolutions all the fucking time. About one major revolution every 30 years on average. And between the revolutions people kept fighting to keep the national spirit alive. Some of the best Polish poets lived in the time there was no Poland, and they are 100% genuine Poles who strongly identified with Poland.
OK, so take the Poles. For one thing, Warsaw is a more important city in my life than Vienna because I know more ethnically Polish people (not just you, but not not you either) than I do ethnic Austrians.
Warsaw is the capital of an independent country called Poland today, but there were fairly recent times (during my lifetime, anyway), where that wasn't true.
In addition to being the capital city of an independent country, Warsaw is the cultural center of the Polish people, right? It remained that cultural center even when it wasn't the seat of government of an independent country, right? Did Warsaw become a more important city in 1989 than it had been the year before?
My people, the Americans, have our cultural center, our economic center, and our seat of government in three different cities. I'd argue that the government one is the least important of the three.
Let's use another example, since we're on the topic of Austrians. What was the most important city in France in 1942? Depending on which group of people you're going to call "the government," the seat of government was either London or Vichy. That doesn't matter, because the answer is Paris.
The TLDR is that simply being a capital vs. not isn't enough to make a city toggle between "important" and "not important."
And obviously the concept of a "country" with a "capital city" would have been blurry for the first thousand years of Vienna's existence.
Country - yes (modern rules don't allow stacking). But the capital city is an ancient concept that was implemented by every European monarchy after Charlemagne (and Austria was created after Charlemagne).
Right, but Vienna existed for 800 years before Charlemagne. Vienna was part of the Roman Empire in 300 AD. You couldn't call it a "capital" then, could you?
Of course the lines are going to be blurry, and not everyone agrees where they are, and things change over time, and the differences are minimal anyway thanks to globalism, and they're all Germans at heart still.
Fine. But I've never heard someone say that there's an exact number of cultures in a given country.
In Europe, the rule of thumb is: 1 culture per country; 1 culture per sub-country inside federal countries (UK, Germany, Belgium; Russia is an exception due to Soviet purges); 1 culture per commonly spoken language in multi-lingual countries (e.g. Netherlands has 4); 1 culture per a serious national independence movement (e.g. Catalonians and Basques in Spain). For some reason, societies naturally separate themselves along those boundaries.
I guess that doesn't happen as much here as it does in Europe.
I guess we don't have any sub countries, except maybe Texas. The number of languages is at least probably countable, although I don't know what it is. (I'd bet there's at least 30 languages in the US that have a million speakers.) And we have two serious national independence movements, although only one is active at a time.
So at least 32, in a country that's four times the size of Germany, which has 15? Sounds fair.
Trolleybus aside, thanks for the rule of thumb.
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@hungrier said in Nope, you city it:
Funny, except New York (both the city and the colony that preceded the state) was founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam and was later taken over by the British military.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Nope, you city it:
I guess we don't have any sub countries, except maybe Texas.
Yeehaw!
And the People's Republic of Commiefornia.
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@HardwareGeek said in Nope, you city it:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Nope, you city it:
I guess we don't have any sub countries, except maybe Texas.
Yeehaw!
And the People's Republic of Commiefornia.
Remember the part about how we have two secession movements, with only one active at a time?
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Nope, you city it:
@Gąska said in Nope, you city it:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Nope, you eat it:
@Gąska said in Nope, you eat it:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Nope, you eat it:
@Gąska said in Nope, you eat it:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Nope, you eat it:
Because there's about 200 countries
We were talking Europe. Stop
all the fucking time.Fine. Wikipedia says that there's "about 50" countries in Europe. I think that it's too much to ask that every educated person memorize all 50 European capitals, especially if they don't have any specific dealings with any country in Europe.
Rome, Madrid, Lisbon, Dublin, Reykjavik, Paris, Berlin, London, Warsaw, Kiev, Minsk, Prague, Bratislava, Bren, Budapest, Vienna, Brussels, Oslo, Stockholm, Bucharest, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Vilnius. And Moscow if you insist. I skipped the Balkans of course, and the many city-states cuz come on. Yes, I still missed a few. I'm pretty bad at geography. But if you're worse than me, a high school dropout - how can you call yourself educated?
I'm educated in computer science and software engineering, in the specific field that my employer's customers are in (I'm not going to identify this for fear of doxxing myself), in how American government works, and in how human nature works.
I have a working level of knowledge, but not a great knowledge, of biology, chemistry, and physics, and classical English literature (i.e. the most famous of Shakespeare's plays - Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and sort of Othello.)
Nobody can know everything, and if you're not in Europe, the capitals of minor European countries are sort of trivia.
But there are certain things that just should be known by everybody who considers themselves educated. This seems to be one of the differences between American and European cultures. Americans seem to think (assuming you're a representative American) that educated literally means someone who undergone education. For Europeans, an educated man is one with general knowledge in a few particular fields. Literature, history, arts to some extent, at least high school-level maths, physics, chemistry and biology (by European standards; Americans learn significantly less in high schools and are far more specialized), basic world politics, and enough grasp of scientific method to understand importance of good research. And enough geography to not make a fool of themselves when someone says "I'm from <one of the major cities of the world>".
Maybe you're right about what "a representative American" would think and maybe you're not. I don't know. I've been using "an educated man" in the same sense that you're calling the European sense - there's a list of things that you have to know, and if you know them, you're "educated." It doesn't matter whether you learned them in a university or not, only that you know the things on the list.
We're arguing about what goes on the list, and in particular the criteria to make a city a major world city.
I know there's at least one American who thinks you can still call yourself an educated man (and an engineer!) without knowing what torque is. So there's that.
Even though Vienna is that old, Austria isn't that old. Austria has continuously been an independent country since 1946, but there were other countries called Austria with the same general area before World War II.
As a Pole, I'm contractually obliged to be very mad at you for what you just said here. As you may or may not be aware, there were long periods in Polish history where there was no officially recognized Polish state. There was that one time the Piast dynasty divided the Crown into 100 tiny duchies, but other than that, it was always due to a foreign invasion. Most significantly, the partitions of the late 18th century which removed Poland from the maps (schools love that phrase) until the end of WW1. And during that entire time, there were nationalist revolutions all the fucking time. About one major revolution every 30 years on average. And between the revolutions people kept fighting to keep the national spirit alive. Some of the best Polish poets lived in the time there was no Poland, and they are 100% genuine Poles who strongly identified with Poland.
OK, so take the Poles. For one thing, Warsaw is a more important city in my life than Vienna because I know more ethnically Polish people (not just you, but not not you either) than I do ethnic Austrians.
Warsaw is the capital of an independent country called Poland today, but there were fairly recent times (during my lifetime, anyway), where that wasn't true.
Polish People's Republic was technically independent. We all know it was one big lie, but I'm invoking this level of pendantry only because you invoked that level of pendantry earlier by saying Austria only dates back to 1946.In addition to being the capital city of an independent country, Warsaw is the cultural center of the Polish people, right? It remained that cultural center even when it wasn't the seat of government of an independent country, right? Did Warsaw become a more important city in 1989 than it had been the year before?
No because it was the capital of PPR, and earlier the capital of Hitler's General Government, and earlier the capital of 2nd Polish Republic, and earlier the capital of Kingdom of Poland as part of Russian empire, and earlier the capital of Napoleon's Duchy of Warsaw which was Poland in everything but name. In the 429 years since the capital was moved to Warsaw for the first time, it wasn't a capital of some kind of Polish state only for 12 years, 1795 through 1807 (1812 if you really don't want to count Duchy of Warsaw).
Let's use another example, since we're on the topic of Austrians. What was the most important city in France in 1942? Depending on which group of people you're going to call "the government," the seat of government was either London or Vichy. That doesn't matter, because the answer is Paris.
Vichy France's constitution said the capital is Paris.
The TLDR is that simply being a capital vs. not isn't enough to make a city toggle between "important" and "not important."
In principle agreed. In practice, it's an extremely good rule of thumb for Europe, just like national and intranational borders are a good rule of thumb for cultural divisions. I don't know why, there's just something about Europeans that makes them flock around the capital instead of on the coastline.
And obviously the concept of a "country" with a "capital city" would have been blurry for the first thousand years of Vienna's existence.
Country - yes (modern rules don't allow stacking). But the capital city is an ancient concept that was implemented by every European monarchy after Charlemagne (and Austria was created after Charlemagne).
Right, but Vienna existed for 800 years before Charlemagne. Vienna was part of the Roman Empire in 300 AD. You couldn't call it a "capital" then, could you?
This is one of those few rare cases where you could've said this Roman Empire and that other Roman Empire were two completely different countries and you wouldn't be wrong in the slightest under any interpretation. They even had a different name!
Also, moving a capital is a thing. That doesn't make either the old capital in the past nor the new capital in the future any less of a capital. See for example Poland, which had three capitals throughout its history (Gniezno, then Krakow, then Warsaw). Fun fact: the guy who moved it to Warsaw wasn't even Polish.
Another fun fact: through some very interesting hysterical raisins, Russia claims to be the legal descendant of the ancient Roman Empire. If you say ancient Rome is the same as HRE, it's only fair if you also say Russia is the same as ancient Rome. But that breaks commutativity property of equality, since HRE and Russia existed at the same time.
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@Gąska said in Nope, you city it:
through some very interesting hysterical raisins, Russia claims to be the legal descendant of the ancient Roman Empire.
Don't believe everything Russia claims.
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@HardwareGeek Greeks agree (or at least agreed at the time). Are Greeks trustworthy?
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@Gąska said in Nope, you city it:
Are Greeks trustworthy?
Depends. Are they giving you a big wooden horse?
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@HardwareGeek said in Nope, you city it:
@Arantor said in Nope, you eat it:
I know that NY city is in NY state
Ah, but what state is Kansas City in?
Trick question.
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@Karla Yes.
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@topspin said in Nope, you city it:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Nope, you eat it:
In any case, where's Phoenix?
In AZ.
What can you tell me about it?
It's too hot. Like seriously, way too hot.
And close to our beloved
.Is Phoenix a more important city than Vienna?
Nothing that hot can possibly be important.
But it is a dry heat.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Nope, you city it:
@Gąska said in Nope, you eat it:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Nope, you eat it:
Because there's about 200 countries
We were talking Europe. Stop
all the fucking time.Fine. Wikipedia says that there's "about 50" countries in Europe. I think that it's too much to ask that every educated person memorize all 50 European capitals, especially if they don't have any specific dealings with any country in Europe.
Also, when I said Vienna was "the 9th largest European city", I probably should have been including Moscow. So it's really the 10th, and not in the top 5 or 6.
But it's a capital. Brussels and Amsterdam aren't in the top 10 either but it's still pretty important to know. And you should've at least heard of Prague, Stockholm, Dublin and Lisboa if you want to be seen as educated.
I've heard of the first three. I was about to accuse you of including a fake one on the list, but I looked it up and the English transliteration for the capital of Portugal is "Libson," so fine. 4 of 4.
I don't necessarily expect people to match any of the three to to the right country beyond "It's somewhere in Europe." But there's "about 50" US states, and I don't expect Europeans to match those capitals to those states either.
Do the Austrians speak a disinct language from the Germans?
Yes.
The page that starts with:
Austrian German... is the variety of German language written and spoken in Austria?
If it's a "variety of German language" then it's not a district language from the one they speak in Germany.
Because the most recent time that I'm aware of that an Austrian was at the epicenter of an event that changed the entire world, he got himself elected Chancellor of Germany by appealing to German patriotism and nobody thought it was weird.
Just continuing the centuries long tradition of Austrian emperors ruling over German lands.
So, Vienna has been a city in Europe for about 2000 years. But it's been on and off between being the capital of an independent country and being conquered by a foreign power for most of that time. It's only been the capital of Austria continuously since 1946. Most US state capitals have been capitals for longer than that.
Germans themselves have nine different cultures. They're a federal country like USA.
This I'm seriously interested in.
Obviously the motorsports guys behind BMW and Mercedes and Porsche are a different culture than the shit porn guys. But I'm interested in knowing how they came up with "there's 9 cultures, rather than 8 or 10" and how they drew those boundaries.
You wouldn't happen to have any info on that, would you?
Whether you watch the Olympics or not, one probably should be familiar with the more recent ones (how recent I would say changes by age).
Fake edit I've realized I am way too late to this thread and probably shouldn't comment further until I finish reading. Because I'm sure everything I've posted thus far has been
ed.
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@Karla said in Nope, you city it:
@HardwareGeek said in Nope, you city it:
@Arantor said in Nope, you eat it:
I know that NY city is in NY state
Ah, but what state is Kansas City in?
Trick question.
Nah, that's one easy: "In a terrible state."
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@HardwareGeek said in Nope, you city it:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Nope, you city it:
I guess we don't have any sub countries, except maybe Texas.
Yeehaw!
And the People's Republic of Commiefornia.
The two halves of Oregon are rather that way too, with the east having lots of area and resentment but not much power or many people (and the west mostly trying to ignore them entirely).
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@Gąska said in Nope, you city it:
@BernieTheBernie said in Nope, you city it:
Stalin's dick
Yes he is.
That's the most Polish post I've seen from you yet.
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@GOG because he ignored the missing indefinite article?
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@Gąska said in Nope, you city it:
I don't know why, there's just something about Europeans that makes them flock around the capital instead of on the coastline.
Possibly all the wars and coastal raids that was a thing in Europe for a rather long time. Half of Europe not trying to kill eachother is a pretty rare state of affairs.
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@topspin said in Nope, you city it:
@GOG because he ignored the missing indefinite article?
Got it in one.
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@hungrier said in Nope, you city it:
@sloosecannon Ontario, Canada has a handful of municipalities named for other, more well known international cities:
- Athens
- Cambridge
- Hanover
- London
- Paris
- Perth
- Waterloo
@error_bot xkcd geoguessr
Edit: Looks like something is fucked with the bot again
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@error said in Nope, you city it:
Looks like something is fucked with the bot again
Ah, yes, the recent Node upgrade broke everything. (Don't Upgrade is :everywhere:)
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@error_bot xkcd geoguessr
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@HardwareGeek said in Nope, you city it:
@dkf said in Nope, you city it:
Moscow
That's in Idaho.
No in Genth
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@Gurth
They are all Ollanders any way you slice it
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@GOG said in Nope, you city it:
@topspin said in Nope, you city it:
@GOG because he ignored the missing indefinite article?
Got it in one.
That was what I assumed "people might think" is and was stumped trying to figure out what the other reason could be.
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@Gąska Thinking that Stalin was a dick? I mean: from our POV, he most certainly was. I don't think even our commies like Stalin.
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@GOG yeah but that's not particularly unique to Poland.
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@Gąska You don't get out on the internet much?
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@GOG said in Nope, you city it:
think even our commies like Stalin.
Reminds me some protests against an American War Criminal...
"Hitler, Stalin, Bush - the trinity of crime."
"Hey, why do you have our great Stalin with bad Hitler and bad Bush?"
There are still some Stalinists in West Germany...
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@Gąska said in Nope, you city it:
Germans themselves have nine different cultures. They're a federal country like USA.
There are 16 federal states. And saying that each state is one culture is... well... not universally accepted (for example, some Badensers are still salty about the Württemberg stuff).
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@Kamil-Podlesak he didn't say that's how he defined the different cultures, though.
I have no idea where the number comes from, but there's surely some reasonable definition that will get you that outcome.
Austrian German - Wikipedia
1214: Geoguessr - explain xkcd
