2022: HOLD MY TEA! đŸ”

That sounds very British :smirk:

2 Likes

It does feel like Britain should have a queen and not a king at this point, right? It’s been so long king wouldn’t seem right.

3 Likes

The national anthem will take some getting used to

5 Likes

For us in the Netherlands it was also a bit weird to have a king instead of a queen in 2013. Our previous king died in 1890.
You’ll get used to it in a couple of years.

4 Likes

By the way, over here your king Charles is called Carl. Because of some dumb tradition that rulers names should take Christian biblical names. Thus James is Yakov and Louis is Ludovic. I don’t get it, why not have the same name. But some people like to keep silly traditions so they can correct other people.

3 Likes

Did he suddenly become Carl, or was he called that way before his mother’s death?
What do you mean by “rulers”? Only monarchs? How is Charles de Gaulle called in Russia?

1 Like

How is Ludovic biblical though? :sweat_smile:

1 Like

Yeah, it applies for monarchs, apparently. He was Charles and now he’s not. So Charles de Gaulle is still that. On French manner with sh sound without s.

I think I read something on the internet and it turned out to be not completely correct. Upon further reading it seems it all comes from the fact that long ago official correspondence was in Latin. So Charles is Carolus. And in turn Louis is Ludovicus, but you know “us” is annoying so Peter I got rid of it on German manner or something. And maybe Latin has something to do with bible names, idk.

Basically some historical nonsense and now we have to put up with it.

3 Likes

I think it’s similar in many countries, though not consistently.

The Dutch king name Willem is William in English, Wilhelm in German, Guillaume in French. However, for the German emperors Wilhelm we typically use the German version of the name. And I notice that our current king Willem-Alexander is not called William-Alexander in English.

Kings named Louis in French and English are called Lodewijk in Dutch and Ludwig in German.
Kings named Charles in English and French are called Karel in Dutch, including Karel de Grote (Charlemagne), but the son of Elizabeth II is already known as Charles here, so I don’t think we will suddenly start calling him Karel III.

Biblical names also have Dutch versions (sometimes more than one version). James = Jakob/Sjaak, John = Jan/Johan/Hans, Luke = Lukas/Luuk.

1 Like

Note that biblical names can be originally Hebrew names, Roman names, Greek names, or other.

4 Likes

I’m French and I can’t recall ever seeing or hearing king Willem called “Guillaume”. We did occasionally add an accent on the name of his mother though, and wrote her name BĂ©atrix instead of Beatrix. Probably a mistake more than something done consistently. But I’ve never seen or heard the French name BĂ©atrice.

3 Likes

That being said, French newspapers tend to mostly pretend that the UK is the only kingdom in Europe today, so we don’t see the name of the Dutch queen or king very often in writing anyway.

3 Likes

I wonder, what do you call Jesus / Yeshua in Russian?

I wonder, what do you call Jesus / Yeshua in Dutch?

.
.
.

(Stay tuned for more easily searchable questions I decided to ask a human instead)

4 Likes

We call him Jezus (IPA: /je:zəs/)

2 Likes

John Fairbairn posted a nice story today about Queen Elizabeth II and go on the L19 forums:

I have told this story before but it seems a good time to repeat it. Very many of the tributes to the Queen stress her sense of humour [
] there is even one from the world of go - this one.

I was in Guilin, China, and I visited a department store where I noticed some weiqi equipment for sale. When I went over to have a look I was staggered to see, on the counter, flyers that depicted a very important British lady with a weiqi set. The flyer was the one below.

The flyer did not mention who this person was, and I was therefore curious as to whether ordinary Chinese knew her. So I asked the sales assistant, and soon a gaggle of other people, curious about me the foreigner, gathered round. But none of them knew the lady’s identity. So I gave them a clue: she was the most important lady in Britain.

When I returned to England, intrigued, I contacted Buckingham Palace to find out how the Queen had come to be looking at weiqi stones. I soon discovered it was a diplomatic gift of yunzi stones made to The Queen and the Duke when they visited Kunming on a State Visit in October 1986. I knew that the usual procedure for dealing with diplomatic gifts was to put them away in a warehouse called the Queen’s Warehouse [
] Whenever a dignitary from the donor country next came to Britain, the idea is that gift stored there is brought out and displayed as if it was personally treasured. I wanted a photograph of these stones. But they could not be found in the warehouse.

After further investigation I was eventually told that the Queen, taking up her entitlement to keep favoured items for herself, had selected these yunzi stones to be displayed in her palace at Sandringham. What I was also told, on condition of anonymity, was that as the yunzi pieces looked just like sweeties, she would put them in a bowl, hoping unsuspecting guests would try to suck and bite them. I have no idea whether this is true, but it certainly seems to fit in with the many examples of humour we have been hearing about.

12 Likes

I know we aren’t supposed to say that some people are just too stupid, but if someone actually believed QEII drank generic bagged tea, well


Celebrity Memorabilia Queen Elizabeth II Regina Britannia Teabag Extremely Rare | eBay?

3 Likes

Lipton WTF? Everyone knows that the Queen only used twinings teabags


4 Likes

I want to believe you rushed to your cupboard in under 9,9s/100m to get this photo and nothing can make be believe otherwise.

3 Likes

Sorry if that's a bit obscure

In House of Cards, 1990s English TV mini series, Francis Urquhart’s catchphrase “You might very well think that; but I couldn’t possibly comment” (meaning “Yes, but I’ll deny everything if challenged”) has become part of the English political language.

5 Likes

Say it with a Go move :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes