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Comment by 11thEarlOfMar | Hacker News Reader

And a key plot point in Inglourious Basterds.

https://www.businessinsider.com/order-a-beer-like-a-german-2...

This scene is a particular pet peeve of mine (I know it's a movie, but everyone needs something to be picky about...).

The character played by Fassbender at one point explains his peculiar accent by being born and raised in a village near Piz Palü (an hommage by Tarantino to "White Hell of Piz Palü" a 1929 silent movie). However, this mountain is located in Switzerland, right by the italian border, far away from Germany. Still, his cover is blown by a tiny mistake on how he orders beer while everyone glances over the glaring inconsistency of his birthplace.

You could be born in Switzerland to German parents, thus being German (with a funny accent to boot). Germany (at the time) employed jus sanguinis (=your parents matter), not jus soli (=your place of birth matters).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

There had also been quite a few Swiss volunteers that fought in the army and the Waffen-SS.[1]

In the context of the special interest that the film devotes to the subject of language, locating the birthplace of the character near Piz Palü is also a very clever move. It is located in the canton of Graubünden (canton of the Grisons), which is the only trilingual Swiss canton (German, Italian and Romansh).

Another side-note: "White Hell of Piz Palü" is also directly quoted in the film: it is shown in the cinema where the finale takes place. And this again is an hommage to (among others) Leni Riefenstahl, who Tarantino admired very much. She played one of the main roles in "Piz Palü".

[1] https://www.e-periodica.ch/cntmng?pid=sol-003:1994:69::643 (In German)

You can watch the movie on YouTube: https://youtu.be/gJ8B4VH-5gk

Some of the scenes (landscape shots and the avalanche/crevasses action sequences) hold up quite well IMO.

Still, he would have grown up in a non-German speaking area (they speak either Romansh oder Italian there, depending on which exact village).

This could explain the accent/dialect, but it would definitely raise more eyebrows than ordering a beer with the wrong finger.

Not at the time, they still use jus sanguinis as most of European countries.

The bbc article claims in the UK (and “many countries in Europe”) start with the thumb, but the Inglorious Basterds scene seems to contradict that.

The business insider article also claims people start counting with their thumb in Portugal but I start with the index finger and while I’m not sure everyone else does it, I think using the 3 middle fingers to represent the number 3 (like the British spy) is far more common than using the thumb.

I'm Canadian and I'm assuming it's the same as Brits: We start counting with our thumb but if we represent a number less than 5 without counting then we do not use our thumb. That's why it doesn't contradict what happened in Inglourious Basterds.

English here, and yes counting starts with the thumb but going direct to two or three is just fingers. Middle three for three, not pinky and the next two or the shocker. This isn't universal, but in my experience by far the most common way.

Our spoken and written language is a mess of inconsistencies, why shouldn't our numeracy be!

Canuck here too, I grew up starting with index but I see lots of thumb starters.

If I start counting thumb-1, index-2, middle-3, i can't raise my ring finger without the pinky coming up to properly display 4 fingers up.

If I start counting index-1, middle-2, ring-3, my thumb holds down the pinky to display 3 fingers.

Until just now, I had never tried, so I assume it is a practice thing.

Edit: should have read further in the thread. i'm clearly not the only one

Funny I don't use either method to show or count three; I use my pinky (who I'd start counting) and the next two fingers.

Be careful: some people who are in other matters Very Very Smart will then insist you're flashing a 'white power' symbol.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/16/business/media/jeopardy-h...

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