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- The colony of New France was not completely sold during the Louisiana purchase, and part of North America is still under French control. - The Azores were an outpost of the Carthagian Empire. twoday has a new favorite as of 14:11 on Nov 4, 2015 |
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Nov 4, 2015 13:57
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:Do you have a better source than that? Googling just returns a bunch of psuedo-archaeology/ancient aliens sites and I'm not great at reading Portugeuse but looking at APIA's site they seem to be a tiny amateur organization that holds to a lot of fringe theories. Yeah, not really, sadly. I was in the Azores recently and was amazed by all the stone work and started looking into the history of the island. There are some scattered medieval bits of evidence that point to knowledge of the islands before the Portuguese arrived. Apparently that archaeologist linked in the first article is getting some funding from the Azorean government to do some digs, but it will likely be a few years before we see any results of that.
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Nov 5, 2015 12:41
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Ok, I am determined to solve this. sooterkin PRONUNCIATION: (SOO-tuhr-kin) MEANING: noun: 1. A sweetheart or mistress. 2. An afterbirth formerly believed to be gotten by Dutch women by warming themselves on stoves. 3. Something imperfect or unsuccessful. I found this in a Bengali-English Dictionary:  This features a quote from John Cleveland, who talks about it as a hairy dirty placenta that Dutch women expel at birth alongside their normal child. Apparently it was also used as slang for black people in the Dutch-speaking part of North America in the late 18th century. I also found this discussion: quote:Sooterkin probably derives from the hypothetical Old Dutch *soetekijn, from soet "sweet". Having entered English, the soot- portion quickly lost its "sweet" connotation and became confused with soot thus, in 1795, it was used to mean "a chimney-sweep". The word could also mean simply "Dutchman", though. Ok, so here we see that there are 3 different meanings of the word and that the etymology is Dutch. Etymonline lists it as first being used in 1680, just after the 3rd anglo-Dutch war. At around this time there were all sorts of insults about Dutch people being made in Europe and North America, in and around the recently conquered colony of New Netherland which still had a broad majority of Dutch-speaking residents. A lot of phrases such as Double Dutch (nonsense), Dutch Wife (whore), Dutch courage (booze), and others date from this time. Other common insults for the Dutch from this time was Frogs (which makes sense because the Dutch were amphibious, as much at home on their ships as on land) and Yankees (from the common Dutch name Jan-Kees). It could have been the same, that "Sooterkin" was a generic name for Dutch women, since the name "Soeteken" was a name used by Flemish and Frisian women in that time. Looking more at the Etymology: Zoet (or soet in old spelling) means sweet, and "een zoeter kind" is an old timey conjugation of the now obsolete neuter-gendered "kind" (which means child), so zoeterkind = sweet child. This could be a term of endearment, say from a mother to her son or daughter. This could also be the source of the meaning of "Sweetheart" in english It must have taken on the connotation of being related to "soot" after entering English, though, since the Dutch word for this is "roet." I'm guessing that went like this: some English person asked another English person what a sooterkin is, and the other said "its a rat like child made of soot that comes out of Dutch women's sooty terrible vaginas because they use those stupid stoves under their skirts." This would follow with the general trend of constantly insulting the Dutch that was in vogue at the time. The stoves in question:   quote:The Dutch used to be known for a certain kind of foot warmer found alongside other household furniture: a pierced box with an earthenware or metal pot holding glowing coals inside. They called it a stoof (stove). These foot stoves were also common in northern Germany. A stone slab was an alternative to the wooden top with holes. Similar foot-warming “boxes” were known in other countries too: see this French chaufferette. In Britain open fires were the most popular way of warming yourself indoors and foot warmers were not much used in the home, but some craftspeople had an earthenware pot of coals for heating their workshop, and this might be placed under a footstool. In bitter winter weather women carried to meeting little foot-stoves – metal boxes which stood on legs and were filled with hot coals at home, and a second time during the morning from the hearthstone of a neighbouring farm-house or a noon-house. These foot-warmers helped to make endurable to the goodwives the icy chill of the meeting-house; and round their mother’s foot-stove the shivering little children sat on their low crickets, warming their half-frozen fingers. and from this the myth grew that soot accumulated in their vaginas. Or maybe their placentas actually were black and sooty, who knows. Or maybe if they sat on this thing for too long they accumulated too much smoke in their pussies, and this induced a miscarriage that came out all black and smokey like a South Carolina rib roast, and that is where we get the get the third and final meaning of "an abortive attempt". Who knows. I give up. Edit: quote:John Maubray (1700–1732) was a Scottish physician, who practised in London as an early teacher of midwives. He wrote a book called "The Female Physician" published in 1724, and became chairman of the Charitable Corporation. twoday has a new favorite as of 13:40 on Nov 6, 2015 |
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Nov 6, 2015 13:27
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Trin Tragula posted:
New Zealand is named after Zeeland, in the Netherlands. Fun fact: The Dutch navigator Abel Tasman discovered much of Australia on his voyage of exploration there in 1642. Captain Cook was the next known European to visit and discovered even more when he went there in 1769. According to Cook's records, he was referring to two Dutch sources at the time he made his voyage. What the second source was remains unclear, and we have no record of it, but they have recently found a Dutch wreck off the coast of New Zealand that seems to be undocumented, and may have been a part of the second expedition which Cook was referring to. twoday has a new favorite as of 02:59 on Nov 7, 2015 |
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Nov 7, 2015 02:57
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Frostwerks posted:Not just that but it is exceedingly likely that medieval Bologna looked preeeetttyyy close to this back in the day: Imagine their calves!
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Nov 12, 2015 12:51
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So this article was recently published about the obscure historical fun fact which I have become obsessed with. Great artwork too! 
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Oct 25, 2016 17:32
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Let's pretend for a moment that Vikings and native Americans don't exist. Ok? Moving on. Columbus didn't discover America. Especially not North America. Ol' Columbo never even stepped foot in North America proper. You probably heard that he looked at an Orange and thought about how it was round and realized the earth is round and then argued with everyone (everyone was a flatearther) but he convinced them otherwise (take that, pope!). This is a fairy tale. He wouldn't have had an orange. Oranges came from Asia, and the trade route to Asia was cut off when the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1452, that's why the Europeans were looking for a shortcut to Asia in the first place. Also, nobody was flatearthers; the ancient Greeks had calculated that the earth was round and everybody believed them. They just thought the voyage was too far to survive. And he wasn't some genius who came up with this idea to explore westward into the Atlantic; the Portuguese had been doing that for 70 years before his voyage. They discovered and settled the Azores in the early 1400's and kept on going. One guy related to the Azores named João Vaz Corte-Real sailed west and ended up in a place he called the Land of Cod. He described it as an island in about the same location as Newfoundland, in 1473. There's not much information about this (probably because the Portuguese didn't want other people to know where they were getting all this cod) and whatever was written was probably destroyed in the great Earthquake of Lisbon in the 1700's.  Anyway, his son, Gaspar Corte-Real, followed in his father's footsteps and ended up in the same place: quote:He reached Greenland, believing it to be east Asia, but chose not to land. He set out on a second voyage to Greenland in 1501, with his brother Miguel Corte-Real and three caravels. Encountering frozen sea, they changed course to the south and reached land, believed to be Labrador and Newfoundland. There they captured 57 native men, who would later be sold as slaves. Gaspar then sent his brother and two ships back to Portugal before continuing southwards. Nothing more was heard of Gaspar Corte-Real after 1501. His brother Miguel attempted to find him in 1502, but he too never returned. So what happened to Gaspar and Miguel? The leading theory is that they hosed up and died at sea. There is another possibility, that Gaspar settled there, and Miguel found him and decided to stay too. There is even some evidence that supports this. There is a bizarre rock in Massachusetts called the Dighton Rock, covered in rock carvings.  The carvings weren't white like that, someone just added paint to some of the markings, but a lot has faded. Here's another interpretation:  And another:  There have been a lot of interpretations of it. One says: quote:Delabarre stated that the markings were abbreviated Latin, and the message, translated into English, read as follows: I, Miguel Cortereal, 1511. In this place, by the will of God, I became a chief of the Indians. Samuel Eliot Morison dismissed this evidence in his 1971 book The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages. (I have a copy of that book, the guy dismisses everything, often without any real reason.)  Compare to this rock carving made by the Portuguese explorer Diago Cao in Africa in 1485:  And the theory goes that Corte Real wrote on the stone, and after he died, the Indians started doing the same, so over time it was covered in all kinds of markings. What really happened to them? Who knows. Anyway Columbus was a hack, possibly an ex-con, and known genocidal rear end in a top hat, and heard about land to the west from sources such as cod Fishermen in Bristol, and from Azorean sources. He even wrote in his diary that he had heard of two brown skinned people in a canoe washing up on the island of Flores in the Azores, and that was one of his reasons for suspecting there was land to the west. He likely knew of the voyage of Corte-Real the elder, and may have even seen a map, and it seems likely that North America was discovered by the Portuguese in 1473. twoday has a new favorite as of 01:34 on Aug 15, 2017 |
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Aug 15, 2017 01:01
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