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Comment by entropie | Hacker News Reader

I live in Leipzig.

The best thing is IMHO that we have the Grüner GÜrtel ("green belt") which is a pretty large area of real primeval forest right crossing through the town and suround the city core.

In future outer leipzig will be surrounded by seas (7 Seen gebiet) which emerged from old mining holes and are all connected with each other.

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"surrounded by lakes", not seas. European languages are weird for lakes and seas. French mer != Dutch meer. German see != English sea.

I'm surprised at the German case -- isn't U-boat a colloquial term for Unterseeboot?

Yup. German is really weird because you have both „die See“ (the sea) and „der See“ (the lake)

Then there's the Ostsee (Eastern Sea (Baltic Sea)) and the Nordsee (Northern Sea).

And the Mare [ma:rə], round crater lakes (near Bonn), and a few lakes called Meer like Steinhuder Meer (which looks like Steinhude Sea but really means Steinhude Lake), das Kaspische Meer, das Tote Meer. Then you have das Eismeer, die Weltmeere, die Ozeane, die Sieben Seen (Sieben Meere) (ambiguous as mentioned, the first could refer to seven lakes or all of the world's oceans). And the fact that the sea to the top left of Germany is the Nordsee but the one to the top right is the Ostsee is puzzling. Fun fact: the moniker 'North Sea' has only in the 20th c become commonplace among all the languages surrounding it; on old Dutch maps, back when the IJsselmeer was called the Zuiderzee, it's more commonly marked up as De West Zee (also occ. Nord Zee, Duitse Zee / Oceanus Germanicus).

Your right, of course.

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