Högertrafikomläggningen
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
An hour or two after traffic switched, TV broadcast from Svinesund, the biggest of the road crossings to Norway, and a major route for road haulage, and a reporter said something like "here we have the driver of a Norwegian 18-wheeler, <name>. Well, <name>, what do think of the big reform?" Norwegian, looking a little dense and speaking slowly: "Uh, what reform?" There was big signage everywhere. The reporter tried dropping a hint, the Norwegian truck driver refused to have noticed any change in the driving rules. Camera showed the very big 18-wheeler. The reporter dropped increasingly clearer hints and looked discomfited, the Norwegian still said "no, what reform, is anything new?" and eventually they cut the interview and switched back to the studio.
In Norway we have the exact same jokes about the Swedes.
One quip which did the rounds in the papers prior to the Swedes starting to drive on the right was that they would perform the switch in several phases - first heavy traffic, then cars a month later...
This is a fairly recent development. When I moved to Sweden in the 1970s, it was so bad I learned Swedish at accelerated rate in order to avoid the kneejerk compulsion of many (if not most) Swedes to tell their favorite jokes about how dumb Norwegians seemed to be. No doubt a consequence of century-old rivalry and the fact that Sweden during the early part of the last century was the larger, richer, most industrialized and organized society in comparison. And they believed much of it to be actually true, in the way that derogatory humor always evokes some degree of "no smoke without fire." To this day, I meet swedes who are surprised at hearing that bananas are not actually called "gulebøj" in Norway (bended yellow) - a reference to how Norwegian is not as anglicized as Swedish, as there has been a pushback against this trend in Norway historically. As Norway has become progressively richer these jokes in Sweden about Norwgians have more or less disappeared however.
The notion that Norwegians nowadays have the same jokes about Swedes is something I hear repeated, but it saddens me nonetheless because it doesn't rhyme with the spirit I remember from my childhood. If true, then it means that a fair number of my present (Swedish) countrymen are being denigrated, perhaps because Norway can now pride themselves on being the richest (real) country in the world per capita, so rich that a lot of swedes migrate here to take the worst paid jobs in restaurants and in hospitals. They are popular as employees because they understand the language and are hard working. And probably because they can take denigrating jokes, maybe because well, they used to do it too. But it's not all that funny, really.
I learned later that many of the jokes were translated American "Polish jokes".
Well, not everybody's idea of good fun I guess, friendly nations or not.
But what do I know, I only visit Norway once in a blue moon nowadays. I have actually yet to hear a good "swede joke" at all actually; maybe they are just a myth?
Perhaps most of the good Swede jokes moved to Minnesota?
(seriously, a bunch of the intra-scandinavian humor seems to be of Scandahoovian-American origin. Like the "10,000 Swedes chased through the weeds / by one Norwegian" thing.)
No joke can run forever.
Yeah, the prevailing notion in Sweden is now that Norway is so much better off that we swedes should declare war on Norway.
After which we promptly surrender, and all our problems become Norway's problems instead.
Relevant context is that Norway was the junior partner of a personal union with Sweden for most of the nineteenth century and until 1905. Also Sweden and Finland was one and the same realm for six centuries or so until 1809.
The Basque person in the joke is always called Patxi, a stereotypical Basque name (kind of like calling an Irish person "Paddy").
Also 83% is really a lot... While seemingly obviously correct now, the vast majority didn't see it that way then. I can only assume that If I was there I would be against it too.
Nowadays with mass media and powerful almost immediate public reaction to government, such "you'll thank me later" moves seem less likely, and arguably, we are worse off for it.
The problem isn't mass media, the problem is that they did use this card many times over the past decades to promote neoliberal policies, and in retrospect it's clear that nobody is thanking them.
The main lesson is that you can indeed force things on people, and when you do so for good reasons you'll be thanked later, but you must do it wisely and be sure that people will thank you, otherwise you're just destroying public's confidence in politicians (which doesn't matter to the neoliberals anyway, since they don't think State is a valuable institustion in the first place…)
The relatively smooth changeover saw a temporary reduction in the number of accidents... These initial improvements did not last, however. The number of motor insurance claims returned to "normal" over the next six weeks
Iceland saw a similar effect on "H-dagurinn" when they made the switch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dagurinn):
Traffic accident rates briefly dropped as drivers overcompensated for the increased risk from driving on the unfamiliar side of the road, before returning to the level following the trend prior to the changeover.
It really seemed like chaos to me. Didn't see a single bingle.
We had a good laugh and drove away from the airport. We soon discovered that the raised middle finger was international. :)
"Have you heared: Britain wants to switch to right-hand traffic?"
...
"Yes, but they want to do it step by step."
???
"They want to start with lorries first."
As a cyclist I wish we had the same rule where I live. Far too often a car parked on the street will not see me when they try to exit their spot, as it's only when half the front of the car is in the cycle lane they actually can see past the other car.
I believe many Norwegians have received parking tickets when visiting Sweden because if this difference. I wasn't aware of this myself until recently.
Sometimes things just get weird.
I did it the other day and it felt illegal.
It’s not something you will immediately notice by just looking at the road, you have to think of the full picture.
Imagine a fork vs a merge. You have buffer zones for off-ramps. Tight merges. Psychology of drivers. Reaction to signage. All this alters the flow of traffic and create undesired bottlenecks.
In the bigger cities you can still find a few examples of such originally left roads around, with less ideal flow. Usually around tunnels where rework is difficult.
In Stockholm, plans had been made as early as the 1940's to gradually replace the tram network with the metro, and that did in fact happen. Today's green and red metro lines do in fact use old tram line alignments to a pretty significant extent (the younger blue line was all new and mostly blasted out of the bedrock deep underground). In 1957 the city council formally decided that the tram networks should be gone by the mid-1970's, at which time most of the infrastructure and rolling stock would have been considered end-of-life. All H-day did was accelerate this by a couple of years. Two suburban lines were kept though and they survive to this day, but at least up until the 1990's their future was kind of uncertain. Things finally changed in the mid-90's, and new light rail alignments started to get built again.
I'd guess in London it's the opposite (has been a while, cannot remember).
This is probably why the adjustment was so smooth.
When you have two multi lane one way roads going opposite ways and want add a two-way connection between them then you often want to put lanes the opposite of normal way. Another example is all roads connecting Chiang Mai's old city outer and inner circle road. The country is left-handed but those connecting roads are right handed, the opposite of Stockholm intersection
I haven't seen any historical maps of the road so I no longer have any reason to believe it stems from that. I was just going based on that (flawed) logic.
“American territories are under American sovereignty and, consequently, may be treated as part of the United States proper in some ways and not others (i.e., territories belong to, but are not considered to be a part of, the United States). Unincorporated territories in particular are not considered to be integral parts of the United States, and the Constitution of the United States applies only partially in those territories.”
(This kind of stuff can be very convolutrd. There are parts of France that aren’t in the EU, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_France: “Overseas France (French: France d'outre-mer, also France ultramarine)[note 3] consists of 13 French territories outside Europe, mostly the remains of the French colonial empire that remained a part of the French state under various statuses after decolonization. Most, but not all, are part of the European Union”)
They already used left-hand drive vehicles but rode on the left?? That's just ridiculous and obvious why they switched...
Driving on the right
Speaking English
The metric system
The 2024-06-09 date format
The Celsius scale
The 24-hour clockIf you mean teaching english as a second language, I can agree. If you mean switching over to it as the primary language I hard disagree.
My children are natively fluent in two languages. Neither of their languages is a second language.
Which language should I tell them is their primary language?
Where did I say that everyone should speak only English? I do not care what language people speak.
> Are you trying to make a point or..?
Why are you being unkind? Or hostile, or whatever this is?
I was asking a question. I understand that people think they will lose something if they speak a different language. My native language is not the same as any of my ancestors from just a few generations ago, and I want to know what difference it makes?
And it doesn't matter what your ancestors spoke, of course. But it does matter what those around you speak, now. Neither the person you originally responded to or me have mentioned ancestors.
However, that pales in comparison to what the transition means, not speaking the same language as your grandparents. You get a huge gulf of distance from relatives who, for the majority of humanity, are some of their most beloved and close relationships.
If you have multiple, that's fine, but your disregarding the reality for 90%+ of people if you don't think most people have a language that is their "primary".
> It does not matter to me which language I use to communicate. Why should it?
For most people language is tied to their culture and history. I'm just saying that we should not mandate that people use a certain language as their "primary". It would be nice if we had a global way to passably communicate though.
I just think that people are more worried about the homogenization of language than they need to be. In fact, with how quickly culture is homogenizing around the world, I think that it is even possible that language differences outlast cultural differences over the medium term. Teenagers in a lot of the world I have been to in the past years dress/behave/express themselves ... not very differently.
Everywhere I go in the world, old shit is different, but modern shit is depressingly the same, or really similar anyway.
That seems like a very reductive take. Of course trends and culture is more global since we now communicate globally, but there are definitely regional cultures and values and those are expressed many different ways.
If I travel from my small european city to a city in the american midwest or a city in nigeria that are going to be massive differences regardless if the teens are doing the same tiktok dance or whatever metric of homogenization you pick. But in all of those places I almost everyone I will meet can speak english.
Very few in my generation speak three languages, even in my rather international field. Yet my older colleagues speak french, German and Spanish like it is nothing. And my international colleagues often speak 4+ languages.
I am fine with English being a de facto Lingua Franca, but I can't help feeling something has been lost.
I have always been curious about French internet culture as well. It seems like the French internet is a bubble I will never have access to.
It should go beyond that, a second official language, so that all signs, documents and government interactions should be just as valid in both languages.
The language has more characters than what fits on a keyboard, right? I wonder how typing on a keyboard feels. I guess only people who have experience in writing Mandarin and English can compare the feeling.
Nassim Taleb wrote about this in https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict....
No daylight savings time
Seriously, I think the planet has bigger problems than discussing about DST.
On a serious note: compared to the other inconsistencies, this seems like a very minor one. If we wanted to standardize time, we should agree on ONE timezone across the world. But of course that seems almost impossible: Having to convince 8 billion people on a change that has little benefit in their everyday life.
In terms of working or traveling between time zones, it seem like it would be much harder to remember the fact that, for instance, people in New York stop work when the clock says 17:00 and people in LA work until 20:00, than to remember that they are three time zones apart.
It's like in the old days before railroads when every town had it's own time, but even worse.
No thanks
> 2024-06-09 date format
That doesnt infer what you want. Are you saying you want YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-DD-MM
Also: one of these is an ISO standard format. The other one is a format that no one would use. (DD/MM YYYY is in use, but no one would write YYYY-DD-MM.)
MM-DD-YYYY?
So it would stand to reason that an American commenter may be meaning
YYYY-DD-MM
And guessing based on todays date, tell that to commenters who check this post in 6 months
1970_01_01
2024_06_09
2024_12_31
16383_12_31
5 bits for DD [0, 31] + 4 bits for MM [0, 15] + 14 or more bits for year [0, 16_383] = 23 bits.
Some people just want to watch the world burn
Having worked in an international organization where most people communicated in English and most people were ESL, going back to a company where my native language was the norm was a huge benefit in clarity of communications.
Languages certainly form how we think, a universal language undoubtedly leads to worse communication and worse ideas.
First languages do change with time so it does happen, and it can be induced to happen. My grandparents all spoke English as a first language, but if you go back a few more generations only one of my great (or possibly great great) grandparents ancestors would have done.
I (native dane) work in robotics. Our company has a disproportionate amount of non-danes employed, who also are not native english speakers. I've been reading and writing english since I was very young, but having almost never spoken it makes face-to-face communication challenging. And not only that, but I encounter colleagues conversing in Hindi, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Greek etc. Any of those conversations is one I'm locked out of, and unable to contribute to. It's really a Tower Of Babel type of situation here. Effective communication is a frustrating chore, especially since we're talking about highly technical subjects. Upper management thinks our diversity is a strength, but I'm just not seeing it from where I'm sitting.
In my next job, this is a situation I will seek to avoid.
This is really rude of them, and it's something management should work very hard to fix. Because as you say, in addition to being rude it's terribly inefficient for the company. If they employ people from all over the world, they should probably mandate English as the only allowed language in just about any situation.
If you have speakers of different languages in a conversation or group, it's just common sense to use a language everyone can understand and use.
Yes, it's easier for Danes to speak Danish when four out of five in the group understand it, but standing around there being the fifth person who can't understand a word of what's being said is not a nice experience.
I had that happen on occasion, every time it felt pretty exclusionary and somewhat rude, so I tried to always speak in english if that was the only common language among people tangentially involved in a conversation.
But even that is certainly not ideal, it has been pretty clear to me that, even though I have absolutely no problem speaking and understanding English, talking to a native speaker in my native language leads to much quicker and clearer communication.
It's economics: https://seekingalpha.com/article/564881-how-germany-benefite...
https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...
Did it happen last month?
Did it happen last year?
I feel like that's the order I ask questions if wonder when something happened.
More people in India drive on the left than North America and Europe put together.
That’s the opposite of what we should do. If a plant monoculture is susceptible to diseases, then a language monoculture is susceptible to mind-viruses. What would the world look like now if every country spoke German in 1933?
Same language is a result of cultural similarity much more so than a cause for it. If there is no political or cultural pressure to speak the same language, they relatively quickly diverge.
They do so by turning "he has a point" into "who is this funny little moustache guy and why does he sound so angry?"
To be clear, I'm not saying freedom of press between countries should be eliminated (quite the contrary!), only that diversity of languages should be preserved. In my opinion, this does two things:
1. Allows more diverse ideas to come into being, as language directly affects on one's way of thinking.
2. Slows the spread of dangerous ideas, due to some of their appeal (or the charisma of their advocates) being lost in translation.
For argument 1, that is known as the Sappir-Whorf hypothesis, is mostly discredited, at least in its stronger versions. By and large, people speaking the same language have a huge variety of differences of ideas, but you can also find areas with remarkable cultural similarity between people speaking different languages.
For an example of why this is not true in practice, look at Canada. The French speaking parts of Canada have far more in common with the rest of Canada and with the USA then they do with France, and even more so compared to Guinea or French Guiana.
The reason why language diversity should be preserved instead is that it gives access to a trove of cultural history that would be lost and forgotten, at least outside of scholarly circles, if it people could no longer understand it. This is by far the most problematic for oral cultural history, but even for written culture it is highly relevant.
For example, Westerners often label Japan as "xenophobic" (as did Biden recently), while the Japanese themselves do not see themselves as such. I theorize this is at least partly because the Japanese counterpart of "xenophobia" literally translates back as "foreigner hatred", which is a much stronger expression than "foreign-fear". This makes any argument using that expression sound ridiculous. "I'm not refusing to rent my house out to you because I hate you; I just don't know where you're coming from, what your lifestyle is like, and whether you pose a flight risk." This is within the gravity well of "xenophobia"; it is not within the gravity well of "外国人嫌悪". It is much harder to make the same argument when the language itself is working against you.
As to your other comment, a populist tells people what they want to hear. Any actual "cause" is only a means to an end for them. And Hitler was so good at being a populist that people wept at his speeches and became wholly subservient to his agenda. I think this was mostly due to his mastery of the language. It was the advertising slogans, not whatever he was selling. Had he had a larger audience to speak to, he would have changed the narrative accordingly.
One of the more infamous notions of purely cognitive S-W that dorm peddle that is entirely discredited is the idea that people who speak gendered languages tend to associate "feminine qualities" with feminine nouns describing even inanimate objects, and "masculine qualities" with the reverse. This has been measured in various ways and is simply false.
I would bet that your example of "foreigner hatred" vs "xenophobia" would also turn out to be wrong if studied. The much, much more likely reason Japanese people don't consider themselves xenophobic is that people don't typically think of themselves as holding bad views. I would bet lots of English-speaking white nationalists also don't consider themselves xenophobic for the same reason.
Finally, I think your outlook on the level to which Hitler manipulated the German people is highly optimistic about human nature. I think it's unfortunately quite clear that people didn't need a lot of sophisticated convincing to do what they did in WWII, they wanted to do most of that and all they needed was someone who would allow and organize them. And to be clear, I'm not only speaking of the German people here - atrocities against Jewish people and other minorities were committed in many European countries where people didn't speak an ounce of German, they just needed to be let loose. Including, shamefully, my own country (Romania), to be clear that I'm not just pointing fingers at others.
That language affects thinking isn't the extraordinary claim, its contrary is. It is hard to believe that your method and efficiency of solving a problem is invariant to the format in which you represent that problem, especially when that format can be so varied.
> I think it's unfortunately quite clear that people didn't need a lot of sophisticated convincing to do what they did in WWII
They needed a decade of sophisticated propaganda and indoctrination, and even a change in the language itself, with words like "Übermensch" and "Lebensraum" being added to the dictionary. It didn't happen overnight.
I also don't know where you're getting the claim from that the countries where the Holocaust took place "didn't speak an ounce of German", given that a large part of it took place on former Austria-Hungary territory where German was presumably the most prevalent second language. But even supposing they didn't, how would that disprove my point? I'm not saying language barriers make you immune to mind-viruses, I'm saying they can slow down their spread. The effects of this one were devastating, but they could have been much more devastating without any language barrier whatsoever. Because one country I can realistically believe not to have spoken an ounce of German is the UK. And they had no shortage of like-minded individuals either, but the local moustache man, Mosley, while said to be a good orator, was no Hitler. I think the public having the ability to understand what Hitler was saying would have been demoralizing at best and galvanizing at worst. It definitely wouldn't have helped Churchill's cabinet, which at one point already had half the mind to strike a deal with him.
I'm aware that this is just a form of security through obscurity, but practice shows that security through obscurity often works. Might not be the strongest argument for preserving languages, but in my mind, a language monoculture is just like any other monoculture, with all its drawbacks.
However, in my opinion, the truth is that Hitler's ideas and the way they fit German culture at the time were far more powerful than his speech-giving skills. His speeches and style did not resonate with American or British or French audiences (to the extent that they didn't - he was in fact a pretty popular politician all over Europe before he began attacking them) not because they didn't understand German, but because they weren't Germans.
His speeches preyed on German bitterness after losing World War I, they preyed on German poverty because of the reparations, they preyed on German conceptions of national pride, and, of course, they preyed on German antisemitism and xenophobia more generally.
Many of those elements were not present in, say, France (who had defeated Germany in the recent war), so even if the French had spoken German, they certainly wouldn't have been swayed with arguments about how they had humiliated Germany, or about how Germany needs more "living space". The Spanish or the Polish would not have been swayed by Hitler's notion that blond blue-eyed Germans are the chosen people who rightfully rule the world. And the Japanese would have barely even understood what he was talking about, even if they had all been native German speakers.
And conversely, Hitler had no shortage of allies before and during WWII, not because Mussolini or Hirohito or Stalin were such fine speakers of German that they were mesmerized by his carefully crafted speeches, but because they liked his actual ideas and plans for conquest, regardless of language.
Up until WWII, a huge part of the scientific discourse was held in German. The language's relevance had waned a bit by 1933, but it was still a widely spoken and understood language in Europe, much more so than today.
Driving on the left
Speaking creole
The metric system
The 09/06/2024 date format
The Kelvin scale
The french decimal time system
The AuthaGraph projectionLet's standardize that to the Newspeak version of English for clarity and to make hackers happy.
Not worth discussing until some serious improvements to the spelling system. Currently learning it requires learning two obnoxiously independent systems, the written and the spoken.
We need to understand that the language you are able to think in - limits your thinking.
Some languages have things you cannot translate into English.
These non translateable concepts do not exist in the Western world view point.
To understand it you must know, on a deeper level why a Swede values things being lagom, and this is surprisingly hard to put into words because it involves history, language, value systems, social patterns and even concepts like gratitude towards simple things. This word encapsulates a really big aspect of Swedish culture, making it impossible to translate accurately.