Discussion for article #244459
Sex attacks by illegals on women on NY eve. In at least 6 cities in Germany, Austria, Switzerland. No limit on the number of additional illegals to come. Of the illegals from Syria, 80% are young male cowards too chicken to defend their own mothers and sisters from ISIS. Of the illegals who are not from Syria but pretending to be, they are from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iraq, Iran, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosova. Itās going to be a horrible mess in Germany, Austria, Sweden, and the other countries who are under this delusion of illegals as a good. Over the next 2 months, the situation will be worse and worse, and some mass actions are going to begin happening.
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Merkel is beginning to see she didnāt understand the extent of the displeasure this migration would cause
Since basically she opened the door, and just let ever single illegal in, of course she does not understand. You cannot understand a process that you simply refuse to even monitor. If I was a young woman in Kƶln (misspelled as āCologneā in non-German sites), Bielefeld, or some of the other cities in which these assaults have occurred, I would now be extremely nervous. The impact is to make the native Germans totally uncomfortable in their own towns. Anger is growing and will continue. A woman in Kƶln was doing a totally nude protest, saying that regardless of what persons wear, you are not allowed to molest them.
I guess the silly season is underway everywhere.
"A right-wing demonstrator with a tattoo reading : āProud and Freeā marches in Cologne, "
āProud and Freeā? I have no idea what that means.
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The accepted English spelling is Cologne, has been for centuries.
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One great advantage of a modern age is that we do not have to accept the incorrect and culturally oblivious errors of centuries past.
Just because you donāt like it doesnāt make it wrong. Most English speakers have no idea how to type diacritics, much less how to pronounce them. Or even what they are, for that matter.
Let me know when you start typing āGƶteborgā for Gothenburg. Please include an IPA phonetic transcription of the pronunciation for non-Swedes.
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Enuf your doom and gloom horseshit predictions. You havenāt been right once. You live in South Dakota for Godās sake.
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So did George McGovern. He contributed to my State Senate campaign during his 90th birthday party. SD is not so bad, especially when itās nice and cold like today.
We will see how accurate I am on this - I have been pretty sure that some disaster would occur, and have predicted that so far. I did predict that Merkel would be gone in December, and that didnāt happen. But more terrible shit is coming, and you can write that down. 800,000 guys who think that a bare ankle makes you into a whore, no jobs, no German, sitting around in tents talking shit to each other, PEGIDA getting riled up - fun fun fun, and you can write that down.
āAnd I need to kill you.ā
Iām puzzled about why some of the protestersā signs are in English. I canāt help but think that the Trump and/or Cruz campaigns are behind this.
Itās one thing to Anglicize the name of a foreign city when the alphabet is different. After all, whatās the ācorrectā spelling of Beijing? But when it comes to European cities, itās a real mystery. We donāt mangle the names of any French cities that I can think of offhand. We donāt treat the Low Countries too badly. Most German cities come away unscathed, with the notable exception of Kƶln (forget the diacriticals - an English keyboard doesnāt provide a handy way of entering them).
The shit really hits the fan when we arrive in Italy, however. I mean, really - Florence, Naples, Venice, Rome?
Itās partly historical. The names were mangled in the past, and remained mangled.
Itās also partly the British. They reserved for themselves the use of names which were more comfortable to the English ear and tongue. Many German cities have mangled names (Kƶln), and partly this is due to the diacritical. Your comment about Italian city names is also good, as so many (āFirenzaā to āFlorenceā - how is that even possible?)
When translating from a different alphabet, the matter is never clear. When going from the cyrillic to the latin, you have many choices to be made - tsar, czar being one example. The cyrillic letter is unambiguous. In other case, such as Beograd (the capital of Serbia, name meaning āwhite cityā), the cyrillic is clear and unambiguous. How did it become Belgrade? I have no idea - the āaā in āBeogradā is the short āaā as in āappleā not the long āaā as in ārateā. When we were there a year ago, everyone said āBeogradā.
Today, persons can use correct spelling. I keep my version of character map tethered to my task bar, and can easily get any character I wish, so if I wish to spell āŠŠµŠ¾Š³ŃŠ°Š“ā, it is easy to do so.
Oh, thatās an easy one - everything today is done for the international press coverage, and English is the lingua franca of the moment. No one in those crowds cares about Trump or Cruz - i doubt that 1 in 50 of those German folks have ever heard of any of the American contender - can you name a single German politician save Merkel? I cannot.
Adenauer, Schmidt, Kohl, Brandt, Pieck, Ulbricht, Honecker, Hindenburg, Bethmann-Hollweg, Bismarck. And of courseā¦ wait for itā¦ Hitler!!!
Am I giving away my age? 
Exactly 18 of the Cologne arrestees were determined to be refugees seeking asylum. Itās truly amazing how, in a city of more than one million people, these 18 arrestees have taken on titanic proportions ā not unlike the āthousands and thousandsā of Muslims celebrating 9/11 in Jersey City.
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Boy, thereās no mistaking the vibrations coming off that Iron Cross. I donāt really care how far back it dates in German history ā once the Nazis started using it as a military decoration, that pretty much signaled the end of its legitimate use. Unless, of course, you consider being a Nazi as legitimate.
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800,000 potential marauders and rapists ā wow! Thereās nothing quite as useless as a weak generalization about hundreds of thousands of people based on the actions of less than twenty.
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As Nick says below, itās historical, although I would substitute āmainlyā for āpartlyā ā todayās computer keyboards being a very recent blip in a process that has gone on for millennia.
Not sure the Dutch would agree with you about using a part of their country (Holland) for the whole (Netherlands), as so many still do, and not just English speakers.
It seems that the further they got away from home, the more the Brits āmangledā, as you both call it. āLeghornā (nowadays Livorno) is my all-time favorite. It was quite a natural process, though, when you come to think of it, as many distant place-names came down to us through the French (and before that Latin), hence Florence, which at least conveys the significance of the name, which āFirenzeā decidedly does not.
In any case the Italians should be the last to complain: Parigi, Londra, Stoccarda, Francoforte, Monaco (which does double duty for Munich and Monte Carlo)ā¦ I could go on forever. They do, though, occasionally, especially in the cases of Turin (Torino) and Milan (Milano). Maybe they feel put-upon for having been laughed at for āNuova Yorkā and āFlorƬdaā. 
This discussion has conveniently ignored country names: do we really want all countries with Latin alphabets to refer to us as the United States instead of Etats-Unis, Stati Uniti, Vereinigten Staaten, etc., and be saddled in turn with Deutschland, Sverige, and the like? That really would result in mangling on a colossal scale. And donāt forget the host of adjectives (not to mention recipe titles) derived from place-names. āStatunitenseā, for example, which is a hell of a lot more accurate and respectful of our neighbors than our wholesale appropriation of āAmericanā. And now that Italians are finally starting to give up āPechinoā for āBeijingā, what the hell are they supposed to call the damned dog, a ābeijingeseā? Other types of confusion are possible, too, as in the case of āRomaā, that being the PC plural of Rom, whom Italians persist in calling gypsies (āzingariā).
Personally I think of these old names as historical treasures to be preserved, but to each his own. Languages evolve, and place names along with them, and we will undoubtedly see more of it. I certainly reject the proposition that Shakespeare was āculturally obliviousā (āPaduaā, āMantuaā, etc.).
Btw, Nick, how did it go at the perfume shop when you asked for that bottle of Kƶlnischwasser for your wife this Christmas? 