conuly

Oh man, I don't get it D:

From:

dr-graffenberg.livejournal.com

Me neither.

From:

conuly

Well, my mother lol'd anyway. And I get it, but I don't think I could adaquately explain it. You know how explaining jokes doesn't work ever.

From:

Well, if you explained it then I could at least get the residue of humor, then?

The :3c that comes after the laughing?

From:

conuly

The "One Belgian" is presumably Jewish. As Wikipedia says, Jews are a small minority in Belgium - some 50,000 people out of a population of 10.5 million. (It is apparently half the population that there was prior to the Holocaust, but many of those seem to have been refugees from Germany.)

So the way to identify as Belgian instead of dividing yourself into Flemish or Walloon would seem to be outside the normal system of dividing the population entirely. Of course, all the Flemish and Walloon soldiers are Belgian too. Alternatively, this soldier doesn't identify himself as Belgian but as Jewish first, it's just that "Jewish" wasn't given as an option.

Comments to the entry I linked to say that a common joke among Belgian Jews is that the only real Belgians are Jews and the King.

From:

Ah ha :D

hah :3

From:

dandelion.livejournal.com

I took it to be the only one who actually identifies as Belgian is an immigrant.

From:

conuly

Although I don't think that this is the common interpretation of this exact joke, I think it's the more common interpretation of similar ones.

From:

feebeeglee.livejournal.com

Heh!

From:

I thought of you when I read that on Language Log!

From:

conuly

Me too!

From:

You thought of yourself, too? Or you thought of me?

(English needs something along the lines of Lojban's {go'i} vs. {go'ira'o}.)

From:

conuly

Myself.

English needs a lot of things as far as pronouns go. And orthography, as long as we're on the subject of fixing my native langauge.

From:

Ah, orthography -- a bit of a sticky subject.

The main problem I see is that the current orthography is a little morphophonemic: related words are (sometimes? often?) spelled similarly, which helps you see the relationship. (Favourite example: the "a" in "photograph, photography, photographic".) Going to a purely phonetic/phonemic spelling would obscure that.

Which might not be a completely terrible thing, but probably not completely inconsequential, either.

Plus, written English is a bit of a compromise dialect in that it doesn't completely fit any spoken variety completely; if you're going to fix the spelling, you'd need to either pick a specific variety (and make the spelling a worse fit for many other varieties) or make up a new variety - in which case you might as well use the current one since basing the written form on *another* variety nobody speaks seems a bit pointless to me. (Things might be a bit different if there were already several written varieties of English, corresponding to various spoken ones, and you wanted to make a compromise standard à la Rumantsch Grischun. But there's pretty much only one form of written English - the differences along the lines of theatre/theater, colour/color etc. are pretty minor.)

So if you picked an existing spoken variety, which one will you pick? One with lots of phoneme differences (so that speakers of most other varieties will have to learn by heart, as now, which words are spelled which way if they contain phonemes that have merged in their variety, à la cot/caught or pen/pin or horse/hoarse or witch/which), or one with few (so that speakers of other varieties may feel that their speech is represented only underdifferentiatedly)?

It might work if there were one prestige dialect that most people agreed was suitable for a standard language, but I don't think such a thing exists -- *maybe* one prestige dialect per major country using English, but not globally (e.g. RP or Estuary English or ... probably wouldn't serve Americans well, nor would General American serve the English well, and that's not even considering Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Indians, ....)

It's a bit of a lost cause IMO.

From:

I knew the exact same story except with Hungarian immigrants instead of Jews, how scary is that?!

From:

conuly

Hungarian immigrants where?

And as I said, I suspect the joke's passed around all the time with fill-in-the-blanks. It's too good to pass up :)

But it's weird how you first read or hear about something, and then suddenly it's everywhere. Weirdest was when I first heard about whale sharks while watching Diego with Evangeline, and then twenty minutes later read about them in a Thursday Next book.

From:

In Belgium, oddly enough! Everything else is identical, except at the end the guy who asked about "Belgians" is revealed to be a Hungarian.

From:

lizziey.livejournal.com

This is how it was with "Seth". Well, I mean, I knew the name, obviously, but had never met someone named Seth. Within a month, I had met a dozen or so guys named Seth, and I was kinda pissed. :/

(thankfully, he is the ONLY Seth in his class!! 3 Jaydens, 2 Jaylens, 2 Brooklyns, and 2 Madisons, but only 1 Seth. :D I did well I think!)

From:

Oh man, I don't get it D:

From: (Anonymous)

Me neither.

From:

conuly

Well, my mother lol'd anyway. And I get it, but I don't think I could adaquately explain it. You know how explaining jokes doesn't work ever.

From:

Well, if you explained it then I could at least get the residue of humor, then?

The :3c that comes after the laughing?

From:

conuly

The "One Belgian" is presumably Jewish. As Wikipedia says, Jews are a small minority in Belgium - some 50,000 people out of a population of 10.5 million. (It is apparently half the population that there was prior to the Holocaust, but many of those seem to have been refugees from Germany.)

So the way to identify as Belgian instead of dividing yourself into Flemish or Walloon would seem to be outside the normal system of dividing the population entirely. Of course, all the Flemish and Walloon soldiers are Belgian too. Alternatively, this soldier doesn't identify himself as Belgian but as Jewish first, it's just that "Jewish" wasn't given as an option.

Comments to the entry I linked to say that a common joke among Belgian Jews is that the only real Belgians are Jews and the King.

From:

Ah ha :D

hah :3

From:

dandelion.livejournal.com

I took it to be the only one who actually identifies as Belgian is an immigrant.

From:

conuly

Although I don't think that this is the common interpretation of this exact joke, I think it's the more common interpretation of similar ones.

From:

feebeeglee.livejournal.com

Heh!

From:

I thought of you when I read that on Language Log!

From:

conuly

Me too!

From:

You thought of yourself, too? Or you thought of me?

(English needs something along the lines of Lojban's {go'i} vs. {go'ira'o}.)

From:

conuly

Myself.

English needs a lot of things as far as pronouns go. And orthography, as long as we're on the subject of fixing my native langauge.

From:

Ah, orthography -- a bit of a sticky subject.

The main problem I see is that the current orthography is a little morphophonemic: related words are (sometimes? often?) spelled similarly, which helps you see the relationship. (Favourite example: the "a" in "photograph, photography, photographic".) Going to a purely phonetic/phonemic spelling would obscure that.

Which might not be a completely terrible thing, but probably not completely inconsequential, either.

Plus, written English is a bit of a compromise dialect in that it doesn't completely fit any spoken variety completely; if you're going to fix the spelling, you'd need to either pick a specific variety (and make the spelling a worse fit for many other varieties) or make up a new variety - in which case you might as well use the current one since basing the written form on *another* variety nobody speaks seems a bit pointless to me. (Things might be a bit different if there were already several written varieties of English, corresponding to various spoken ones, and you wanted to make a compromise standard à la Rumantsch Grischun. But there's pretty much only one form of written English - the differences along the lines of theatre/theater, colour/color etc. are pretty minor.)

So if you picked an existing spoken variety, which one will you pick? One with lots of phoneme differences (so that speakers of most other varieties will have to learn by heart, as now, which words are spelled which way if they contain phonemes that have merged in their variety, à la cot/caught or pen/pin or horse/hoarse or witch/which), or one with few (so that speakers of other varieties may feel that their speech is represented only underdifferentiatedly)?

It might work if there were one prestige dialect that most people agreed was suitable for a standard language, but I don't think such a thing exists -- *maybe* one prestige dialect per major country using English, but not globally (e.g. RP or Estuary English or ... probably wouldn't serve Americans well, nor would General American serve the English well, and that's not even considering Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Indians, ....)

It's a bit of a lost cause IMO.

From:

I knew the exact same story except with Hungarian immigrants instead of Jews, how scary is that?!

From:

conuly

Hungarian immigrants where?

And as I said, I suspect the joke's passed around all the time with fill-in-the-blanks. It's too good to pass up :)

But it's weird how you first read or hear about something, and then suddenly it's everywhere. Weirdest was when I first heard about whale sharks while watching Diego with Evangeline, and then twenty minutes later read about them in a Thursday Next book.

From: