Aug 1st 1914: Germany Declares War On Russia...

[Rincewind]

I almost forgot to reply to this. Even though you were making a joke, you may have struck closer to fact than you thought. Any organisation or company in Belgium that plans to operate nationally is faced with the problem of dealing with two languages, Dutch and French, and three if you want to be very politically correct and add German. And then deciding which order to put those languages in. People tend to get annoyed when some outfit or other systematically puts French first and Dutch second, or the other way round, for instance. Because English is a neutral language, in the context of Belgium, it avoids that problem.

For instance, the supermarket chain where I buy most of my groceries has recently switched to labelling all its own-brand products in English, in big type, and then other languages in much smaller type underneath. Sitting right next to me is a plastic bottle with a label prominently saying "Sparkling mineral water". Underneath that, in much smaller letters, it says "Bruisend mineraalwater / Eau Minérale gazeuse / Kohlensäuhrehaltiges Mineralwasser".
That exhausts the official languages of Belgium. But it even goes on to say "Apa minerala carbogogazoasa" (there should be diacritics on three of those A's, but I can't get my keyboard to reproduce them) and "Gazirana mirelna voda". I don't even know what languages those are. And then there are two more lines, one in the cyrillic alphabet, so I assume it's Russian, and one in the Greek one, neither of which I will attempt to transcribe.

I think Jesus showed great wisdom in always just using English.

It must be difficult to keep everybody happy!

When I lived in Germany, it seemed to me that many businesses used English for emphasis. For example - and I never went there, so cannot comment on the veracity of the claim - one place was advertised literally as "The hottest night spot in town!"

 

[Craig B]

It must be difficult to keep everybody happy!

When I lived in Germany, it seemed to me that many businesses used English for emphasis. For example - and I never went there, so cannot comment on the veracity of the claim - one place was advertised literally as "The hottest night spot in town!"

One place where you see very little of this is Antwerp. Almost every single thing is in Dutch, as far as I remember.

 

[FromBelgiumWithLove]

One place where you see very little of this is Antwerp. Almost every single thing is in Dutch, as far as I remember.

I don't know when you were here (because Antwerp is my here), but there is an awful lot of English on display in Antwerp. Of course the local language is Dutch, and many things officially coming from the authorities, such as street signage, have by law to be in Dutch. But let me give a few recent examples of semi-official events, by which I mean things organised with city authorities involved.

A yearly sporting event is called the "Antwerp 10 miles and marathon". That's not a translation, it's the real name. (http://www.sport.be/runningtour/antwerpmarathon/2014/nl/) The yearly gay pride event, which took place a few weeks ago, is called "Antwerp Pride", in English, and that name is printed on the huge number of rainbow flags that festoon the city center while it is taking place (it's over as I write this, but the flags were still up as of yesterday). This year marked the first time a uniformed delegation from the local police took part in the parade. They were associated with an organisation called "Rainbow Cops Belgium" (http://www.rainbow-cops-belgium.be/). Once again, an example of a Belgian organisation which has both Dutch and French-speaking members, and uses a name in neutral English to avoid calling itself by either a Dutch or a French name.

In Antwerp, there's also the strange phenomenon that its first local football team (soccer to Americans), and the first football team in all of Belgium, which is why it has registration number 1 in the football association, has always had an English name. It was initially called just the Antwerp Football Club, then when it was granted the privilege to call itself "Royal", it became the Royal Antwerp Football Club. So they even translated the honorific into English. (http://www.rafc.be/). Although that nomenclature arose because the people who founded the club were actually British, and brought the game along with them to Antwerp.

 

[FromBelgiumWithLove]

For instance, the supermarket chain where I buy most of my groceries has recently switched to labelling all its own-brand products in English, in big type, and then other languages in much smaller type underneath. Sitting right next to me is a plastic bottle with a label prominently saying "Sparkling mineral water". Underneath that, in much smaller letters, it says "Bruisend mineraalwater / Eau Minérale gazeuse / Kohlensäuhrehaltiges Mineralwasser".
That exhausts the official languages of Belgium. But it even goes on to say "Apa minerala carbogogazoasa" (there should be diacritics on three of those A's, but I can't get my keyboard to reproduce them) and "Gazirana mirelna voda". I don't even know what languages those are. And then there are two more lines, one in the cyrillic alphabet, so I assume it's Russian, and one in the Greek one, neither of which I will attempt to transcribe.

Sorry for responding to myself, but I just took a closer look at that label, and it turns out there is some more information in even smaller print on it, at the back of the bottle, which identifies the languages, using two-letter national codes. The two I couldn't identify are apparently Romanian and Slovak respectively. The one written in the cyrillic alphabet which I assumed to be Russian turns out to be Bulgarian. The one written in the greek alphabet is indeed Greek.

The actual origin of the water is also on there. Identified as:
"Source KASTELL - 43555 / Essen - Germany".

So we're back to Germany where this thread started. It's nice to be on-topic once again.

 

[Craig B]

It's nice to be on-topic once again.

Yes. Today is the centenary of the beginning of the Russian defeat at Tannenberg.

By the evening of 28 August, the full extent of the danger to the Russians was evident. Their I Corps on the left and VI Corps on the right were both retreating. Meanwhile the center was having serious supply problems and could no longer hope to maintain an offensive. Samsonov had no option but to order a retreat to the southeast and attempt to reorganize near the border. Meanwhile, he asked Rennenkampf to ignore Königsberg and turn southwest to help.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tannenberg#Main_battle_.2826.E2.80.9330_August.29

 

[FromBelgiumWithLove]

It must be difficult to keep everybody happy.

Sometimes, it can be quite easy. During the tedious celebration of the Belgian national holiday, of course the national anthem has to be sung. In 2012, a girls' choir was enlisted for the purpose. And they solved the problem of everyone having to listen to the anthem three times over, in the three official languages, by keeping switching between Dutch, French and German on a sentence-by-sentence basis, so they only sung it once, reducing it to just a minute or so. King Albert II (who was on his last time officiating at the national holiday, since he abdicated before noon on the 2013 one), seemed quite pleased with it. If you're interested, you can see it, with subtitles, at:

http://youtu.be/HUTQ7gn7910

ETA: If wikipedia is to be trusted, this shortened trilingual version of the national anthem has been somewhat officialised. But the article isn't very clear about the specifics.

 

[Craig B]

Sometimes, it can be quite easy. During the tedious celebration of the Belgian national holiday, of course the national anthem has to be sung. In 2012, a girls' choir was enlisted for the purpose. And they solved the problem of everyone having to listen to the anthem three times over, in the three official languages, by keeping switching between Dutch, French and German on a sentence-by-sentence basis, so they only sung it once, reducing it to just a minute or so.

Is it any wonder that the Anthem of Europe has NO official lyrics?

 

[FromBelgiumWithLove]

Is it any wonder that the Anthem of Europe has NO official lyrics?

At the 100 years commemoration of the beginning of WW1 at the war memorial in Liège, the choir sang it using only la-la-la, instead of real words. It was a really ridiculous moment in an otherwise quite moving ceremony.

 

[Craig B]

At the 100 years commemoration of the beginning of WW1 at the war memorial in Liège, the choir sang it using only la-la-la, instead of real words. It was a really ridiculous moment in an otherwise quite moving ceremony.

They should have remained silent.

ETA Have we gone off topic again?

 

[catsmate]

I almost forgot to reply to this. Even though you were making a joke, you may have struck closer to fact than you thought. Any organisation or company in Belgium that plans to operate nationally is faced with the problem of dealing with two languages, Dutch and French, and three if you want to be very politically correct and add German. And then deciding which order to put those languages in. People tend to get annoyed when some outfit or other systematically puts French first and Dutch second, or the other way round, for instance. Because English is a neutral language, in the context of Belgium, it avoids that problem.

For instance, the supermarket chain where I buy most of my groceries has recently switched to labelling all its own-brand products in English, in big type, and then other languages in much smaller type underneath. Sitting right next to me is a plastic bottle with a label prominently saying "Sparkling mineral water". Underneath that, in much smaller letters, it says "Bruisend mineraalwater / Eau Minérale gazeuse / Kohlensäuhrehaltiges Mineralwasser".
That exhausts the official languages of Belgium. But it even goes on to say "Apa minerala carbogogazoasa" (there should be diacritics on three of those A's, but I can't get my keyboard to reproduce them) and "Gazirana mirelna voda". I don't even know what languages those are. And then there are two more lines, one in the cyrillic alphabet, so I assume it's Russian, and one in the Greek one, neither of which I will attempt to transcribe.

I think Jesus showed great wisdom in always just using English.

Maybe it's time to abolish Belgium...

Yes. As you have shown, there is only one English, but lots of different kinds of Foreign. So why bother learning any of them?

The USA would disagree.


Well today is the centenary of the First Battle of Heligoland Bight.

 

[Craig B]

Originally Posted by Craig B. Yes. As you have shown, there is only one English, but lots of different kinds of Foreign. So why bother learning any of them?

The USA would disagree.

You mean the people of the USA learn lots of Foreign? Good!

 

[FromBelgiumWithLove]

They should have remained silent.

The two commentators of the Belgian TV channel VRT I watched it on agreed with you, and so did I. They should have either sung the original German text (since that was what Beethoven put to music), as a further symbolic gesture of reconciliation to Germany, or have the choir remain silent and just have it played instrumentally.

I have to admit I was somewhat surprised by how moved I was by seeing a ceremony commemorating the German invasion of Belgium with music provided by a Belgian and a German military band playing together. The German president, Joachim Gauck (perhaps I should call him the Reverend Gauck, he is in still in theory a Lutheran minister) gave a very good speech, too.

ETA Have we gone off topic again?

I don't think so. Are discussions of commemorations of WW1 off topic in a thread about WW1?

 

[Craig B]

The two commentators of the Belgian TV channel VRT I watched it on agreed with you, and so did I. They should have either sung the original German text (since that was what Beethoven put to music)

It occurred to me that they might have done that. Then I thought, German is one of the official languages of Belgium, so its exclusive use in the Anthem would perhaps have infringed the principle of language equality applied in Belgium, especially in official gatherings.

 

[FromBelgiumWithLove]

It occurred to me that they might have done that. Then I thought, German is one of the official languages of Belgium, so its exclusive use in the Anthem would perhaps have infringed the principle of language equality applied in Belgium, especially in official gatherings.

There's really not that much of "language equality" required in Belgium. Most of the country is monolingual when it comes to government use of language anyway, and the freedom of citizens to use whatever language they like has always been part of the Constitution. Although there are a lot of additional unwritten traditions at the federal level of government. For instance, there is no legal obligation for a newly appointed prime minister to address Parliament in both Dutch and French before the crucial vote of confidence, but in practice he has to. A new King could legally take the his oath of office before Parliament in just one language, but in practice, he has to do it in all three.

But this event was an international commemoration, and all the guests invited to speak could use whatever language they liked. I don't think there's anybody in Belgium who would have any objections to having an arrangement of a part of Beethoven's ninth symphony, a.k.a. the European anthem, sung with the German lyrics Beethoven set it to. After all, the whole symphony is performed regularly, and AFAIK always with the original German lyrics being sung. There are lots of political sensitivies about language in Belgium, but we're not that sensitive.

There may be a much more trivial explanation as to why they went with the la-la-la nonsense, instead of proper words, making it sound like a bad 1970s Eurovision song contest entry. This was a choir of francophone schoolgirls from Wallonia. Maybe they tried to have the girls sing it in German first, but their pronuncation was so bad it ended up sounding so awful that instead they went for the lesser of two evils, and just using vocalisation. It's generally not easy to sing in a language you don't speak.

 

[Craig B]

Most of the country is monolingual when it comes to government use of language anyway

That's what I meant. And the language in Liège is French, not Dutch or German. But I accept what you say that this concern didn't affect the choir; that it may simply have been a factor of linguistic competence. I know a woman from Wallonia who speaks no Dutch. Says she and her peers paid no attention to the lessons she had in school. She has since moved to Brussels and has had problems there, as well she might, in that officially bilingual region.

 

[FromBelgiumWithLove]

I know a woman from Wallonia who speaks no Dutch. Says she and her peers paid no attention to the lessons she had in school.

A common tale. For a long time, francophone Belgians couldn't care less about learning Dutch, they expected the people from Flanders to learn French. It's not just confined to Dutch, though. Generally, the attitude towards languages other than your native one is markedly different in both parts of the country. (Warning: sweeping generalisation follows.) The Walloons have always looked south, and thought French was all they needed, and their educational system reflects that to this day. It's not confined to Dutch, they're also very bad at teaching English, for instance (that's not a personal prejudice of mine, it's borne out by proper statistics, and the government involved is well aware of it and trying to fix it.) In Flanders on the other hand, people have always thought learning not just French, but other European languages as well was vitally important. The generation of my grandparents often used the expression "knowing your languages", in the plural. They actually said "uw talen kennen", of course, I'm translating. That primarily referred to the traditional foursome Dutch-French-English-German, which everyone with a decent level of education was/is expected to have at least a basic working knowledge of. Although statistics also show that the knowledge of French among young people in Flanders is in decline, since they focus on English, and don't see much reason anymore to become fluent in French.

 

[catsmate]

Bumped for 05 September, the beginning of the First Battle of the Marne and the beginning (perhaps anyway) of the unravelling of German plans.

 

[Craig B]

Bumped for 05 September, the beginning of the First Battle of the Marne and the beginning (perhaps anyway) of the unravelling of German plans.

Yes, or at least the intrinsic defects of these plans started to become both evident and very costly on the ground.

 

[Damien Evans]

Bump because tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the battle of Lone Pine and the landings at Suvla Bay.

 

[erwinl]

For those, who want to watch the flow of battle, division by division, (and the lack of 'flow' after the stalemate has set in) there is this website.
http://www.carto1418.fr/index.php

It concentrates on the Western Front but is complete from august 1 1914 up to november 30th 1916.