there is an old story that exists in numerous variants and goes roughly like this:
A town’s electricity generator failed and various engineers were unable to fix it, so an elderly electrician was summoned. He examined the generator carefully, then tapped it lightly once with a hammer, and power was instantly restored. He submitted his bill for $1,000 and as he was asked for the explanation, answered: “Tapping — $1. Knowing where to tap — $999.”
First of all - most people also in the US obviously don't know that there are exceptions from the First Amendment, excluding certain categories of speech from protection. Second, the First Amendment at the time it was created had a much more limiting interpretation of this freedom - e.g. insults were actually punishable.
Additionally - freedom of speech has never been absolute - it was limited in Ancient Greece, where it originated, it was limited as it was declared in the French Revolution (which was used as the template for the First Amendment), and in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights - which provides the internationally valid definition of freedom of speech, its scope is also limited.
As opposed to the US, in Germany, the legal system is built consistently from the most generally valid principles to the most specific ones. The most universally valid principle is the one of the human dignity - this is why it's prominently placed in the first sentence of the German Basic/Fundamental Law. Everything else is more or less directly derived from the First Law, making them subordinate to it - thus if freedom of speech violates someone's dignity, the dignity is more important and has to take precedence, limiting the freedom of speech.
And this is consistent and concordant with the international definition.
Humphrey Davy, the British chemist who performed early work to isolate the element, and who initially named it, called it 'aluminum'. Americans mostly followed him, but the British changed later at the complaints of the French, Swedish, and Germans that it used essentially English roots rather than Latin ones. Which, considering that we now have elements named such things as Tennessine, seems to be a bit of an argument that doesn't quite apply anymore.
The suffix "-io-", which becomes "-ium" in accusative/nominative neuter Latin nouns, is extremely ancient. It is inherited from the common Indo-European language.
This suffix is used to derive nouns or adjectives from other nouns, where the derived nouns are understood to have some kind of relationship with the base nouns.
A great number of the names of chemical elements use the Latin variant of this suffix, i.e. "-ium", to derive the name of the element either from the name of the substance from which it has been extracted, or from the name of some characteristic property of the element or from some mythological name or from some person or place that is intended to be honored by this choice.
The name of aluminium comes from the name of the aluminium sulfate in Latin, which was "alumin-".
So "aluminium" means "something that is not aluminium sulfate, but it is related to aluminium sulfate".
On the other hand, "aluminum", which lacks the derivation suffix, just means "aluminium sulfate" (which has become "alum" in English), but the noun has been converted from the 3rd Latin declension to the 2nd Latin declension. Such conversion between declensions were not unusual even for native Latin speakers.
So this is definitely a grammar mistake, which is annoying for those who understand the meaning of words, because it creates an exception that must be remembered, instead of applying the general rule.
In general the British and American scientists have always been much more lax in observing grammar rules than the continental Europeans. So there are also other chemical elements where the English names differ from the correct names. For instance the name of the chemical element "silicium" is derived from Latin "silic-" (flint), from which it is extracted, but in English it has been changed to "silicon", for the silly reason to make it rhyme with "carbon", despite the fact that most chemical properties of silicon resemble more those of boron or of phosphorus or of germanium, than those of carbon (because valence is only 1 of the 3 main properties that determine chemical behavior, electronegativity and ionic/atomic size are equally important). (Carbon is one of the few elements that were known in pure form already in the Ancient World, so its name is not derived from another noun.) ("Boron" has also been changed in English to make it rhyme with "carbon", which is equally baseless.)
Except Davy said he named it after platinum, except with an alum- prefix instead of the silver plat- prefix, as it was to be considered a new precious metal out of what had previously just been considered impurities like platinum relatively contemporaneously had.
...and the SAE system like me (older American here) then you would be able to provide the answers that confuse your audience the most when they ask about volumes, velocities, dimensions, etc. and you would have as much fun in life as I have had. Your metric system is for people who need to have things simplified in order for them to be understandable and relatable. It's about as dumbed down as you can make something. Lowest common denominator type stuff. Americans have always thrived on challenge and that is why we stupidly cling to the complexity of the SAE system of units. It fits so we sits.
"Queen" came from "The king and his queen". There is no common word for Queen in Germanic languages, and for what ever reason Queen became synonymous with royalty. Originally it just mean "the king and his woman", but I don't know when it changed. Certainly we had more than one word for "adult female human" in old English.
The translator's curse of a language having lots of synonyms, the subtleties of which don't map directly on to English. None of those seem particularly similar to queen/kvinne?
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting abusive comments and ignoring our requests to stop.
You can't comment like this on HN, not matter who you're replying to or what it's about. We understand this is an issue that gets people upset, but the guidelines still have to be observed if there's any point having them at all, and this kind of taunting and hounding is well beyond the pale. Enough.
this is exactly what other countries do since ages - US, UK, France - just to name a few - they all have territories under their control, but not integrated into the state itself, with population having different, but usually lesser rights than the population of the state proper.
on the other hand, the situation in so-called palestinian territories is completely different. Gaza strip was officially annexed by Egypt, West Bank was officially annexed by Jordan - so the official government would be these countries, and if we're talking about Apartheid, then it would be committed by these countries.
A town’s electricity generator failed and various engineers were unable to fix it, so an elderly electrician was summoned. He examined the generator carefully, then tapped it lightly once with a hammer, and power was instantly restored. He submitted his bill for $1,000 and as he was asked for the explanation, answered: “Tapping — $1. Knowing where to tap — $999.”
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