Castle Aching

[Northroader]

Belgian?????

[Regularity]

8 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

 

This won't do. Beethoven was a Belgian.

 

 

10 minutes ago, Northroader said:

Belgian?????

Yes, he was born and bred in the well-known Belgian city of Bonn...

[Northroader]

He’ll be saying next Tin Tin was in the Hitler Jugend.

[drmditch]

Re: Company structures and family membership. I keep meaning to explore this more. Clearly the MSLR/GCR had several prominent families, and nepotism (and 'filism' (?) as in giving your son a job) clearly held sway. I think that the role and influence of the Directors at all levels of railway operations, especially in the NER, would make an interesting study.

 

Perhaps Mr Edwardian should emulate this? Does the WNR board include other Edwardians? 

[wagonman]

12 hours ago, Hroth said:

 

As was suggested as a car merchandising slogan,

"Berlin to Warsaw on one tank...."

 

(I think you might guess who came up with that one!)

 

 

Nigel Farage? Adolf Hitler? (not much difference there...)

 

The 'Ode to Joy' is a much nicer anthem than the UK's miserable dirge – which isn't even a 'National' anthem, merely a paean to the royal family. Why can't we have something suitably stirring like 'I vow to thee my country' set to music by Holst. Might even get out of my chair for that one. Occasionally.

 

 

[wagonman]

47 minutes ago, drmditch said:

Re: Company structures and family membership. I keep meaning to explore this more. Clearly the MSLR/GCR had several prominent families, and nepotism (and 'filism' (?) as in giving your son a job) clearly held sway. I think that the role and influence of the Directors at all levels of railway operations, especially in the NER, would make an interesting study.

 

Perhaps Mr Edwardian should emulate this? Does the WNR board include other Edwardians? 

 

Surely, given the time frame, they're all Edwardians by definition?

 

 

[Northroader]

Doubtful if it was just family connections, more likely if they shook hands in slightly differing ways?

[Hroth]

11 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

This won't do. Beethoven was a Belgian.

He kept that quiet!

 

[Hroth]

39 minutes ago, wagonman said:

The 'Ode to Joy' is a much nicer anthem than the UK's miserable dirge

 

The basic rhythm of "God save the Queen/King" is that of a Galliard, a rather energetic leaping dance.  It would sound a lot better with an increase in tempo.....

 

 

[Compound2632]

8 hours ago, drmditch said:

Re: Company structures and family membership. I keep meaning to explore this more. Clearly the MSLR/GCR had several prominent families, and nepotism (and 'filism' (?) as in giving your son a job) clearly held sway. I think that the role and influence of the Directors at all levels of railway operations, especially in the NER, would make an interesting study.

 

Perhaps Mr Edwardian should emulate this? Does the WNR board include other Edwardians? 

 

I read a tale* of Reginald Farrer, one of the pioneers of British alpine gardening and very definitely Edwardian (b. 1880, d. 1920), returning from a plant-hunting expedition in some remote east Asian mountain range to his home at Ingleton. He'd got as far as Skipton, but had missed the last train to Ingleton. So he requested a special, which he got. (At the usual rate of 5s/mile plus the first class fare, I suppose.) I suspect his request might not been met with such ready compliance (not having given the stipulated 5 hours minimum notice), had not he been related to Lord Thomas Cecil Farrer, a director of the Midland Railway.

 

*in the Bulletin of the Alpine Garden Society.

 

[brack]

10 hours ago, Regularity said:

 

Yes, he was born and bred in the well-known Belgian city of Bonn...

His grandfather, also called Ludwig van Beethoven was Belgian though.

Which does make it technically correct to say that Ludwig van Beethoven was Belgian (or at least from the area we currently know as belgium).

Are we not still pre-grouping pedants? Surely to any self respecting pedant technically correct is the best sort of correctness.

[Edwardian]

1 hour ago, brack said:

His grandfather, also called Ludwig van Beethoven was Belgian though.

Which does make it technically correct to say that Ludwig van Beethoven was Belgian (or at least from the area we currently know as belgium).

Are we not still pre-grouping pedants? Surely to any self respecting pedant technically correct is the best sort of correctness.

 

In the way Boris Johnson is Muslim, presumably.

 

 

[nick_bastable]

27 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

In the way Boris Johnson is Muslim, presumably.

 

 

the naughty step for you sir blacking this esteemed thread with a mention of that name and I do not refer to peoples religious believes 

 

Nick

[brack]

46 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

In the way Boris Johnson is Muslim, presumably.

 

 

No, I meant that a ludwig van beethoven was belgian, just not the one people assumed was under discussion. In the same way that it is entirely correct to describe London as an important city on the banks of the river Thames, close to the US border.

 

As for the gentleman to whom you refer, I believe he was recently described as "A dangerous fanatical ideologue preying upon the disaffected and vulnerable through his oratory, persuading them to leave civilisation for some utopian dream which bears little relationship to reality and which turns out to be little more than a pack of lies, where food is scarce and people hide amongst the ruins of once pleasant places."

By an ISIS spokesman.

 

Or I might have just made up a quote, I daresay Boris would understand...

[drmditch]

Re: Ludvig van Beethoven. Yes born in Bonn, but spent most of his working life in Vienna. So born as a subject of the Elector of Cologne (or more properly of course Kohn - but I can't find an umlaut on this keyboard - why do the English insist on re-spelling other peoples place names?), and of course thereby also a subject of the Holy Roman Empire,. He worked and died in the capital city (Wien) of that empire. Although, of course by the time of his death Napoleon had abolished said institution as being neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire. Was Ludwig at the time of his death a subject of the Oestereichischer Kaiser? That empire morphed in to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in about 1867 if my memory serves me correctly.  I suspect, if asked, Herr Beethoven would have classed himself as a German (in the romantic concept  of course. Germany as a state not existing until 1871.)

 

Re: National Anthems. I think that the tune that F J Haydn wrote (based on a Croatian original according to my copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Music) is one of the best around. It was written for Kaiser Franz (Gotte erhalt Franz den Kaiser, unsern guten Kaiser Franz) so that Vienna might have something equivalent to 'God Save the King' which had impressed Haydn when London theatre audiences sang it at the end of performances. It is a shame of course that it was hi-jacked by the 1848 Frankfurt Convention for the words of the 'Deutschland Lied', of which some of the verses now banned did not mean what they were later taken to mean!

 

I hope that the unfortunate politicisation of that tune does not set a precedent for the animosities surrounding the EU and Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' theme. If we are unlucky some idiots will be trying to exclude the 9th Symphony from the Proms.

 

By-the-by I think that the other verses of 'God save the Queen' make much more sense than the first one. 'Confound their knavish tricks, upset their Politics' sounds very appropriate at the moment, depending on who 'they' are. I like a good bit of 18th century nationalism and 'Rule Brittania'. Not that we'll do that any more with our navy as shrunken as it is. There might be a link there back to working conditions of sailors mentioned a bit up thread but I'm supposed to be working on my railway.

 

 

[Andy Hayter]

46 minutes ago, drmditch said:

Re: Ludvig van Beethoven. Yes born in Bonn, but spent most of his working life in Vienna. So born as a subject of the Elector of Cologne (or more properly of course Kohn - but I can't find an umlaut on this keyboard - why do the English insist on re-spelling other peoples place names?), and of course thereby also a subject of the Holy Roman Empire,. He worked and died in the capital city (Wien) of that empire. A

 

 

Good point drmditch, but firstly you need to understand that Köln  was Cöln until a certain National Socialist party re-spelled many German towns to Germanify them in the 1930s.  [On my keyboard mapping ö is alt148 on the number keyboard. - took me ages to find it.]  

 

But the UK is not alone.  Trieves, Mayence, Londres - French aberrations for Trier, Mainz and London.  And I think Cologne comes from French re-spelling, which the English adopted.  

Bergen is Mons in Flemish.

Genf is Geneva in German - not sure if that applies to German Swiss.

and if we get into non latin scripts ---- Mockba anyone?

 

Where do we draw the line?  A weekend in Roma or Wien?  Or Beograd? 

[Schooner]

I enjoyed every line of that post, drmditch, thank you!

[St Enodoc]

1 hour ago, Andy Hayter said:

A weekend in Roma or Wien?  Or Beograd? 

Wagga Wagga is nice although a little chilly at this time of year...

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

6 hours ago, Andy Hayter said:

 

And I think Cologne comes from French re-spelling, which the English adopted.  

 

 

Well the name is derived from the Latin name Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium because it was founded as a Roman colony. So in practical terms you have a colony named Colony. 

[Edwardian]

9 hours ago, drmditch said:

... why do the English insist on re-spelling other peoples place names? 

 

I don't know, but I think I'll holiday in Leghorn this year.

 

9 hours ago, drmditch said:

 

By-the-by I think that the other verses of 'God save the Queen' make much more sense than the first one. 'Confound their knavish tricks, upset their Politics' sounds very appropriate at the moment, depending on who 'they' are. 

 

 

The task of filling up the blanks I'd rather leave to you
But it really doesn't matter whom you put upon the list
For they'd none of 'em be missed — they'd none of 'em be missed!
 

[Hroth]

Its not just the English in these Sceptered Isles that rename places for their own cultural reasons.....

 

(And I'm not just thinking of the renaming of places that English-speaking folk renamed/transliterated to suit their own tongues)

[sem34090]

Leningrad...

[Edwardian]

Königsberg

[Andy Hayter]

Breslau - not sure I can spell the current Polish name - Wroclaw?

[Nearholmer]

Ireland: chock full of places that were given English names by phonetic equivalent of the original name, which have then been translated back slightly differently, then re-phoneticised again later.

 

It results in some very weird things like rivers that that are called RiverRiverSomething.

 

Actually, thinking about it, the various English River Avons are River Rivers.

 

Avon, Afon, Abhain, Owen etc

 

And, that’s without the shamelessly colonial names that have now been largely got rid of, and the originally English ones, not phonetic translations, that have then been given Irish equivalents, or the ones where the intermediate English version was a genuine translation, sometimes slightly wrong, rather than a phonetic equivalent.

 

Or, the propensity to give the same geographic feature different names according to where it is viewed from - rivers that change names at townland (parish) boundaries, and hills called one thing looking from the north, and another when looking south.

 

Entire, fat, books exist giving Irish place-name etymologies.

 

Poland ........ ten times more complicated!

Edited July 4, 2019 by Nearholmer