The Destroyed Libraries of Louvain (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The Destroyed Libraries of Louvain (2012)

libraryhistorybuff.com

25 pointsbenbreen11 comments

This is as good an opportunity as any to mention how the library books were divided when the university was split into a Flemish and the newly created Walloon university:

“But the majority of works were just divided by shelfmark: Odds stayed in Leuven, evens left for Louvain-la-Neuve.”

(https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/when-was-the-leuven-li...)

A very Belgian solution! Would be interesting if one half would contain material of higher quality than the other. Maybe odd-lettered people created the more important works?

Hey, that's where I live!

Terrible history around our libraries. Happy it got rebuilt though. You can visit the Ladeuze tower, has quite a nice view of the city.

I thought that was Leuven.

Ladeuze is the name of the library (and square where it's located).

Leuven indeed.

Interesting history, but people in Leuven call this city Leuven and not Louvain. No need to use the french term in a flemish city where almost no one speaks french as their first language. In fact, french language was the subject of some amount of political struggle in the 1960s, resulting in the founding of the french speaking university in "Louvain-la-Neuve", a planned city that was built in (french speaking) Wallonia for this purpose. You can read more about the politically important language discussion that occured in the 1960s here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_of_the_Catholic_Universi...

Don't the English write Bâle instead of Basel sometimes? (An officially germaophone city.) It can be that English retains the French writing. Nothing wring with that.

I think we learned from Kyiv that we should tape some care not to let third parties write some place's history for them.

French imperialism used to be quite similar, after all.

Huh?

Writing Basel as Bâle would be silly and non-standard too, yes. Maybe "wrong" is too strong of a classification. But for example, I wouldn't immediately recognize it as Basel in a headline. FWIW Leuven refers to itself in English as Leuven on their own website: https://www.leuven.be/en

Also somewhat interesting to me is that for some reason people think Belgium is mainly a French speaking country, but in fact there are actually more Dutch speakers than French speakers (56% vs 38% native speakers according to Eurostat in 2015) - I have the sense referring to Flemish cities by their French name reflects that

Hard to say! Switzerland and Belgium are both minority francophone countries, so it's hard to use the argument of numbers to justify a French spelling. Maybe because French was a diplomatic language. Maybe because of the Normand invasion.

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