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At least Czechs and Slovaks still have the disgusting Kofola, to surprise unwary travelers
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Nov 1, 2021 11:59
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Phlegmish posted:At least Czechs and Slovaks still have the disgusting Kofola, to surprise unwary travelers Kofola is great, actually. Yes I'm Czech why do you ask. (but no seriously it's far better than most off-brand coke drinks)
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Nov 1, 2021 12:02
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Well, we were shithead college kids back then, maybe I should go back and try it now.
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Nov 1, 2021 12:05
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Honj Steak posted:One feature of globalised capitalism is that people are increasingly consuming the same stuff anywhere in the world. Travelling actually gets quite a bit more boring because of that. So do you want everybody to stay in place while you get to travel?
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Nov 1, 2021 15:26
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SlothfulCobra posted:So do you want everybody to stay in place while you get to travel? Yes. This would be fantastic
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Nov 1, 2021 15:30
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they still don't have mcdonalds in albania if that matters to you at all.
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Nov 1, 2021 17:32
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It's kinda fun seeing ubiquitous crap like McDonald's vary country-to-country tbh.
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Nov 1, 2021 17:37
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:It's kinda fun seeing ubiquitous crap like McDonald's vary country-to-country tbh.
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Nov 1, 2021 18:23
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And how only Dutch McD has the McKroket.
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Nov 1, 2021 22:28
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Which of us hasn't sat in public in a foreign land, sunburned, sweating, stuffing our faces with french fries, wearing an American flag t shirt??
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Nov 1, 2021 23:01
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I was reading about mutual intelligibility and found this map here: As I understand it the regional dialects of Switzerland is harder for speakers of regular German to understand even though they learn standard German in school, so I feel the map should maybe account for that as well as Austrian German being different, I'm not sure how different it is but I feel it's different enough to be accounted for, especially since Norwegian is counted as two languages even though Nynorsk and Bokmål are just two different writing standards, not different languages. I'm pretty sure there's more errors in this map but those are just the ones that stand out for me. Also Åland, Gotland and Bornholm are gone in this map for some reason. Fake edit: I just realized Stockholm is missing in this map as well, seems like the Baltic sea have completely submerged it, to be honest I feel it's an improvement but still. Kamrat fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Nov 1, 2021 |
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Nov 1, 2021 23:39
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The romance arrows should point the other way  I think I've said it before in this thread, but I can understand spanish and italian decently well and read them really well, whereas flipping it, everyone native to those languages I've talked to finds french to be a throaty mess not suitable for human speech.
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Nov 1, 2021 23:52
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Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic are often grouped together as West Norse, Swedish and Danish East Norse. But Norwegians understand Swedish and Danish fairly well, while Faroese and Icelandic are incomprehensible. Faroese and Icelanders understand Danish pretty well because they learn it in school I think, probably the former more so than the latter.
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Nov 2, 2021 01:23
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How close are (Irish) Gaelic and Welsh really? I always thought they belonged to quite different groups of Celtic languages. e: specifically, I would assume Welsh is closer to Breton.
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Nov 2, 2021 01:27
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Kamrat posted:As I understand it the regional dialects of Switzerland is harder for speakers of regular German to understand even though they learn standard German in school, so I feel the map should maybe account for that as well as Austrian German being different, I'm not sure how different it is but I feel it's different enough to be accounted for The German part makes me doubt the entire map. I'm not a native speaker, but I learned standard German pretty well in school and Swiss German is completely incomprehensible nonsense. It may as well be another language. Austrians and Bavarians are very hard to understand. Dutch is somewhat difficult to understand when spoken, but fairly easy to read.
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Nov 2, 2021 01:27
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Yeah Swiss German is crazy different, talk to anyone outside of a train station and it's incomprehensible until you reveal that you are not local, then they will speak "standard" German for you. Bavarian/Austrian are weird sounding to me but not incomprehensible, it's more like a very thick accent with some funny dialect words but not the different beast that Swiss German is.
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Nov 2, 2021 01:30
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I find reading German to be strangely annoying, because it's close enough to Dutch that you will instinctively try to read it 'as is', without mentally translating, but it's also different enough that that's not actually possible without knowing the language well, and you end up getting frustrated. Particularly, it is full of false friends, words that are clearly etymologically related to ones I know in my native language, but that have come to mean something else entirely. I really should get around to learning German properly when I have the time.
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Nov 2, 2021 01:40
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Phlegmish posted:How close are (Irish) Gaelic and Welsh really? I always thought they belonged to quite different groups of Celtic languages. About as close as latin and greek afaik. Related yes. Sibling languages no. Irish and scottish gaelic are one group, welsh, cornish, breton, and manx are the other.
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Nov 2, 2021 02:10
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:About as close as latin and greek afaik. Related yes. Sibling languages no. Irish and scottish gaelic are one group, welsh, cornish, breton, and manx are the other. Greek is not a Romance language my man.
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Nov 2, 2021 03:38
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Grape posted:Greek is not a Romance language my man. Where the gently caress did I say greek was a romance language? It's indo-euro and has a lot of similarities to latin. It's not romance. Although I looked at a language tree just now and it isn't the greatest comparison. Greek and latin are more distinct than welsh and irish. It's more like english and swedish, clearly linked but not nearly the same.
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Nov 2, 2021 04:35
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Someone put out a "realistic" high-speed rail map for the United States https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/1440360816214044673  This spawned quite a bit of discourse (check the quote retweets if you want to see dozens of people lamenting the death of American ambition), cause this is the most depressing imaginary rail map anyone's posted since these hypothetical HSR maps became a trend.
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Nov 2, 2021 05:45
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The U.S. has famously never had an interest in connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic coast.
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Nov 2, 2021 05:51
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This comes up around the CA HSR. Setting aside the issues of implementation, which are legion, certain sorts of dipshits are like, "It should just follow I-5 through the west valley desert between SF and LA rather than going through the Central Valley." The idea that transit infrastructure should only connect existing metros rather than integrating wider-flung regions with said metros is classic blindered city bullshit. In the case of California, there are 9 million people in the Central Valley who would benefit from having easier access to the coastal population centers, in the same way the people in between SF and Portland would, and in the same way people in between Houston, Atlanta, and Chicago would. Jfc, Chicago is the only city on that map that's on the Mississippi. This is ridiculous. e: Don't worry he updated it https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/1440781283714424839 Kenning fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Nov 2, 2021 |
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Nov 2, 2021 08:12
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Kamrat posted:I was reading about mutual intelligibility and found this map here: I refuse to believe that Danish is intelligible to anyone outside of Denmark. Perhaps Skåne. (insert kamelåsa video here). Losing Åland would be a problem, as we get our potato chips from there.
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Nov 2, 2021 09:19
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Kamrat posted:since Norwegian is counted as two languages even though Nynorsk and Bokmål are just two different writing standards, not different languages. Nynorsk/Bokmål has been a shorthand for the dialect groups that use them for about as long as the terms existed.
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Nov 2, 2021 09:38
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if any major country is going to fall apart on the basis of regionalism, it’s India lol. It already happened (and then happened to the country which splintered).
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Nov 2, 2021 10:04
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Kenning posted:This comes up around the CA HSR. Setting aside the issues of implementation, which are legion, certain sorts of dipshits are like, "It should just follow I-5 through the west valley desert between SF and LA rather than going through the Central Valley." The idea that transit infrastructure should only connect existing metros rather than integrating wider-flung regions with said metros is classic blindered city bullshit. In the case of California, there are 9 million people in the Central Valley who would benefit from having easier access to the coastal population centers, in the same way the people in between SF and Portland would, and in the same way people in between Houston, Atlanta, and Chicago would. The US: must have sustainable ridership so the trains can turn a profit Also the US: appropriates ten gigagillion dollars for more tanks as the army yells "please, we do not need more tanks, they're going straight to the desert warehouse"
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Nov 2, 2021 10:08
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Kenning posted:This comes up around the CA HSR. Setting aside the issues of implementation, which are legion, certain sorts of dipshits are like, "It should just follow I-5 through the west valley desert between SF and LA rather than going through the Central Valley." The idea that transit infrastructure should only connect existing metros rather than integrating wider-flung regions with said metros is classic blindered city bullshit. In the case of California, there are 9 million people in the Central Valley who would benefit from having easier access to the coastal population centers, in the same way the people in between SF and Portland would, and in the same way people in between Houston, Atlanta, and Chicago would. They're not wrong though? A key feature of HSR is that the trains don't stop for every town along the way because the easiest way to go fast is to not stand still. Look at France or Germany, they're quite happy to skip towns along HSR routes.  What you're proposing here is that California (and other places) should build regular regional/intercity passenger rail systems instead of HSR. Jasper Tin Neck fucked around with this message at 12:22 on Nov 2, 2021 |
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Nov 2, 2021 11:05
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Meanwhile, there are plans for a Beijing-Moscow HSR line, not to mention all the connective work being done in Europe to get through some pretty difficult terrain to connect urban centres. Also, Morocco has more HSR than the USA, plus Egypt is building more.
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Nov 2, 2021 11:21
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Phlegmish posted:Well, we were shithead college kids back then, maybe I should go back and try it now. it's very mild and kinda just inoffensive to be honest, I was mostly joking I don't mind drinking it though, especially in summer it can be nice
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Nov 2, 2021 11:28
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:The US: must have sustainable ridership so the trains can turn a profit I believe the tanks thing is because you need to produce a volume of tanks every year, or you lose the knowhow, practices, toolls, etc.. to craft tanks in volume. Kind of like some industries can't stop or restarting production is very expensive ( aluminum factory?). Yea tanks are produced and then store in the desert, where they rot. Tanks are not the most important asset in wars, infantry have many tools to destroy a tank and air forces even more. But are still in use in every conflict for the parties that have them.
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Nov 2, 2021 13:16
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Kamrat posted:I was reading about mutual intelligibility and found this map here: What's up with that random language in northern Greece -- looks like Italian or Romanian? It looks like it might be Aromanians, a group I'd never heard of but numbers approximately 30k according to Wikipedia? The map is weird not only for having Swiss German not highlighted separately (or Luxembourgish), but also including languages that are only spoken by like five people at home, like Welsh, but not others that are only spoken by a few thousand people in a couple villages, like Romansch. They also highlight huge regions for languages like Occitan and "Galloitalic" where you could live your entire life in those regions and never, ever hear those languages spoken even a single time. So Occitania gets a huge swath of a region where you'd never hear anything besides French, but Swiss German is lumped in with regular German? Yeah definitely makes me skeptical of the rest of the map. Neat idea, hard to do properly. E: I also like "Arabo" for North Africa... which also seems to be the same color as Syria, despite that North African Arabic and Middle Eastern Arabic are not mutually comprehensible, and yet Spanish and Italian get different colors. Poor Malta has sunken into the sea. Saladman fucked around with this message at 13:23 on Nov 2, 2021 |
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Nov 2, 2021 13:20
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PawParole posted:if any major country is going to fall apart on the basis of regionalism, it’s India lol. It already happened (and then happened to the country which splintered). India’s done a really really good job at building a national identity actually.
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Nov 2, 2021 13:24
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Saladman posted:... perhaps the color has something to do with the origin?, like all green descending from latin, latin languages
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Nov 2, 2021 13:30
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:India’s done a really really good job at building a national identity actually. Maybe, but if you compare it to China then it's really factitious. There might be exceptions in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang, but those aside you won't hear your average Chinese person saying they're not Chinese.
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Nov 2, 2021 13:32
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:They're not wrong though? A key feature of HSR is that the trains don't stop for every town along the way because the easiest way to go fast is to not stand still. Fresno isn’t a town the size of Metz. It’s a town the size of Lyon.
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Nov 2, 2021 13:36
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:India’s done a really really good job at building a national identity actually. Not in any objective sense, but considering what they have to work with, absolutely. Too bad it seems to be increasingly based on Hindu cultural nationalism.
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Nov 2, 2021 13:43
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Re: Swiss German, the map says it wants to depict dialect continua, and in that sense it is indeed not possible to draw a line between Swiss German and "standard" German. If you go strictly by local dialect (which is still spoken by plenty of people especially in southern Germany) then there is virtually no difference at all in speech when you cross the border either to Switzerland or Austria. The main issue here is that virtually everybody in Switzerland speaks dialect and a significant portion of people in Austria do as well, whereas dialect usage in Germany has been on the decline for decades now, generally going (with some exceptions) in a north-south line with the north having the least dialect speakers and the southern states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg the most, which all in all makes it seem like Swiss/Austrian German and German German are two fundamentally different things.
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Nov 2, 2021 13:56
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Platystemon posted:Fresno isn’t a town the size of Metz. It’s a town the size of Lyon. ...Which SNCF quite happily passes by, en route to Marseille or Montpellier.  The French way of building HSR is admittedly a bit extreme, but the point still stands that going through the Central Valley made it slower, opened CHSR up to a lot more delays and made it a lot more expensive. None of these help to make it a meaningful alternative to flying between the Bay Area and L.A. CA might very well be better served by a boring old Intercity service with better coverage. The fundamental issue is that when designing railways the trilemma is:
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Nov 2, 2021 14:07
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Platystemon posted:Fresno isn’t a town the size of Metz. It’s a town the size of Lyon. The entire Île-de-France region is like 66% of the NYC area population. French population densities are weird.
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Nov 2, 2021 14:13
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