Language! Narf!

Olaf Solstrand olaf at andebyonline.com
Fri May 23 05:37:05 CEST 2003


(sigh)

First, about Serbo-Croatian versus Jugoslavian: As this is NAMES, that can
vary from country to country and not only from language to language (as
Brazilian names may differ a little from Portuguese names and so on), I
don't see any wrong in showing NATIONALITY instead of LANGUAGE here, and
writing "Jugoslav" instead of "Serbo-Croatian": Besides: How many
10-year-olds in 1976 knew the term "Serbo-Croatian"?



> OK, and the lack of a Portuguese or was is a "Spanish" name for
Drakeborough
> tells me that some readctions haven't published some of Don Rosa's stories
> yet. But this is not why I look in such list of Character's names anyway.

...but that is why this list was printed.
(No, I won't explain that any further. Ole wrote an excellent post about
this - read that.)

And I have no idea why you show "Spanish" in quotation marks over here - but
I assume that is related to an old discussion I don't want to know about, so
I won't ask.



> You seem to forget that I was 10-12 years old at the time I first got
"Jeg,
> Mikke Mus", by then I was very interested to know the Swedish names, but I
> didn't have the internet to help me...

I knew kids that also were interested in knowing this - and they got their
answers by sending mail (plain old paper-mail) to Donald Duck & Co.



> Just that the interest, shown by people with Swedish names, for
> Rick's topic triggered a two and a half decade old irritation of mine.

...that's still no explanation to blame Swedish editors for a mistake made
by Norwegian editors - which serving its intention was no mistake at all.



> You seem to have completely misunderstand my logic.
>
> 1) The second Norwegian translation was "a problem" for Norwegians only.

...and the lack of Swedish and Finnish in the Norwegian edition was ALSO a
"problem" for Norwegians only. I sincerely doubt that Italians and Americans
were feeling that something was missing because there was no Swedish names
in their "Io Topolino" books.



> 2) I haven't given you any reason to assume I support the attitudes behind
> that second translation.

Oh - does that mean Stefan and Christina DID give you a reason to assume
they support the attitudes behind leaving out Swedish names in a Norwegian
book? All they did was showing interest for the _Chinese_ names! Are you
saying that when someone is showing interest for a distant language, that
means they despite their own language - and wants to keep that out of
foreign books? And, concidering this was a discussion about Chinese names,
should people have told Rich "shut up, we're not interested"?



> 3) In my posting I din't ask anyone to apologize for the missing languages
> in "Jeg, Mikke Mus".

No, but you certainly blamed all Swedes for this.



> I was *not* calling oher languages "rubble" - I was adressing strange
> alphabets and signs *only* as rubble.

1) That did NOT show from your first post - it seemed obvious that you were
refering to the languages themselves.
2) How is that better? You insulted all the users of a set of signs. How
would you react if someone called the latin alphabet "rubble"?



> > BTW, in the Swedish book the names in the
> > Norwegian "rubble" language have been replaced
> > by names in Swedish.
>
> Why can't read what I writes before making jokes out of it? What I called
> "rubble" was the arab alphabet and Asian signs - *not* any spoken
language.
> So what you are doing here can be seen as insulting all Norwegians here.

Not those of us who understand irony.



Olaf



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