Martin Wisse @ #55
disenchanted by how crowded the [Netherlands] is
On occasion, whole families to move from the Netherlands to the less-populated parts of Norway, so they can escape the crowding and urban sprawl in their homeland. Some local councils actively seek them out, perhaps ironically because they've got a dwindling population - all the young people are moving to the towns to be students and have jobs and things like that.
Not many of them manage to stay on for long in the wilderness, though.
ethan @ 226: Isn't Ø pronounced about the same way as eu in French or ö in German?
Yeah. French 'eu' is a schwa, I think, but German (and Swedish and Finnish) ö is the same letter, just written with a different symbol.
R.M. Koske @ 172: [struck-through o to represent the letter and a plain o to represent the numeral]
don delny @ 189: I forget where it originates. Pre WWII military, maybe? Or just those darn Norwegians?
Don't blame us - we abhor the practice. Ø is the 28th letter of the alphabet and shouldn't be confused with O or the number 0. (I misspell my last name because it's an old Usenet habit and I can never be sure how it goes through on the web. Besides, you foreigners can't pronounce Øvrebø anyway.)
lightning @ 128: There is a special circle of Hell reserved for whoever decided that we have to enter Web forms in a small, proportional sans-serif font. Courier may not be the world's prettiest font, but at least you can tell the difference between "l", "I", and "1", or between " " and " ".
They could share their circle with the people who make their text-input interfaces have the cursor a single pixel wide, like the text box I'm typing in now. With black on white, it's just on the right side of functional. Any other colour combination and it's useless. I've got the vision of a hawk, but I still sometimes resort to typing random letters to find the bloody cursor.
There are no alpacas in Danmark - and what colour is an alpaca anyway?
Chris @ 77: I wonder if the Norse for leech is etymologically close to the German, and "blood eagle" is some kind of English mistranslation? Probably not.
In modern Norwegian, leech is "igle" - so yes, probably cognate with or loaned from the German "egel". I'm failing at finding an etymology for it, I'm afraid.
It's pretty clear from the Wikipedia page on Blood Eagle that it's referring to the bird - it's named "ara" and "örn" in the Norse texts, the latter still being the word for eagle.
Carolina @ 36: I learned to type two spaces after a period, in elementary school -- on a computer. I'm in my mid-twenties; I don't know when they stopped teaching that.
I'd never heard of two spaces after a period before I got on Usenet, and I learned typing on actual typewriters (admittedly electronic ones) in the late 80s.
I'm pretty sure two spaces after a period has never been the style in Norway. Is it an American thing?
My parents also had the same last name before they married - the concept of a hereditary last name is only a few generations old in Norway, and they were neighbours. I doubt she'd have kept her maiden name upon marriage if she'd needed to choose, but keeping it as a middle name has been pretty common.
Is "knickers" a false-plurality, like the old "pant"-vs-"pants" argument?
Are there dialects of English where they use pants singular rather than in pairs?
I know that in Danish and eastern Norwegian they'll talk about a pair of pants - "et par bukser", while in western Norway we'll say a pant - "ei bukse". Around my parts, eyeglasses come in pairs, but there's apparently places where they too are singular.
Serge @ 278: As for counting in one's native language, thanks. I guess it's a common habit.
I have a tendency to read numbers and single letters in the native language - so whenever some idiot writes leetspeak or similar, I have to read it very slowly and carefully. Of course, when they write like that it's unlikely they have anything interesting to say.
The Book of Revelations, Barker is a good choice, but I'd have wanted to see Hunter S. Thompson (script) and Ralph Steadman (art).
Wouldn't be too far from their normal fare, anyway...
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