Hello and willkommen, my friends, to another edition of La sagesse rassemblée. As you can tell, Collected Wisdom is in something of an international mood this week, in keeping with our first item.
THE QUESTION: Why are the spellings of place names changed when used by other countries? asks Henry Skoczylas of London, Ont. “For example, the English call their capital London, but the French call the same city Londres, and the Poles call their capital Warszawa, while we call it Warsaw.”
THE ANSWER: There are a variety of reasons, writes Michael Moore of Toronto.
Some place names, he says, are very old spellings derived from even older pronunciations. “For instance, the main city in what is now Italy was Roma, a Latin name. The Germanics, including those living in what is now England, would not have pronounced the ‘a.' When they got around to writing it down – much later – they wrote it the way they pronounced it: Rome.” Another reason, he writes, was the result of colonization, particularly by the English, who went around the world spelling local names the way they thought they sounded – or ought to sound. “Since this was left up to sea captains and army officers, rather than linguists, we have some pretty strange ways of spelling the names of other people's homes. But we stick to them because we English-speakers treat ours as the language to which the rest of the world ought to conform.” He writes that other place names are translations into English. For instance, we call the Dutch seat of government The Hague “because we English could not possibly manage Den Haag. And besides, the English and the Dutch did not like one another very much for centuries.”
In an interesting footnote, Paul Harrison of Ottawa says that while the city of London, England, is known in French as Londres, “Mr. Skoczylas's considerably younger home town of London, Ont., is actually referred to in French as ‘London.' ”
THE QUESTION: When was the last year that Canada had zero national debt? Katherine Stuart of North Bay, Ont., wants to know.
THE ANSWER: “Canada has never had zero national debt,” writes Michael G. Kelly of Ottawa. He says at the time of Confederation in 1867, under the terms of the British North America Act, Canada took on the liabilities of its four constituent provinces.
Bill Gunn of Bayfield, N.S., agrees. He says the Statistics Canada publication Historical Statistics of Canada shows that even in 1867, the federal government had a net debt of $94-million. “With very few exceptions,” he says, “it has only trended upward since then.”
HELP WANTED
- Why do so many hockey goalies wear the numbers 1, 30 and 31? asks
Jo Foley
of Nanaimo, B.C. Erica Milligan
of Kelowna, B.C., writes: Why do our fingers get wrinkly when submerged in water for prolonged periods but other parts of our body – hands, arms, stomach – don't?Liz Montgomery
of Whitby, Ont., has noticed that standard-issue Ontario licence plates never seem to have Gs in them. Why?
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