[HN Gopher] The Battle Line at Louvain
___________________________________________________________________
The Battle Line at Louvain
Author : chmaynard
Score : 109 points
Date : 2024-11-15 13:55 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.privatdozent.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.privatdozent.co)
| chmaynard wrote:
| Final sentence:
|
| To this day, the burning of the library in Louvain remains a
| battle line, which we should be weary [sic] to ever cross again,
| for as Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) so eloquently once stated,
| "where they burn books, they will also burn people".
| nerdponx wrote:
| The wary/weary mixup is so strange to me, especially because it
| seems relatively new (last 5-10 years at most).
| pavlov wrote:
| It's not that strange?
|
| The words are homophones and both express a reticent
| emotional state.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Where in the world are you that weary and wary are
| homophones? Genuinely interested, I can't think of a
| dialect where that's the case.
| Majestic121 wrote:
| As a non-native speaker, 'to be wary' is not really in my
| vocabulary, while 'to be weary' seems much more common,
| and both sound pretty close to each other even if there
| is a difference even with my accent, so I could see
| myself making the mistake.
|
| It looks similar to than/then, but than/then is much more
| jarring to me for some reason.
| pavlov wrote:
| They are not homophones? I'm not a native speaker and
| I've simply always assumed they are. I lived in London
| and the US for many years, but these are not common words
| in speech so I never got corrected.
|
| I guess that must mean "wear" and "weary" have a
| different pronunciation for "ea".
|
| This vowel digraph remains my eternal nemesis... Ever
| since I learned as a child that "bear" doesn't rhyme with
| "fear" and found myself faced with the overwhelming
| realization that I will never speak this language 100%
| correctly, no matter how much effort I put into reading
| and writing.
| marssaxman wrote:
| > I guess that must mean "wear" and "weary" have a
| different pronunciation for "ea".
|
| Indeed so! "Wear" and "ware" are homophones, having the
| same vowel sound as "wary".
|
| "Weary", on the other hand, rhymes with "cheery" or
| "dreary".
|
| > I will never speak this language 100% correctly
|
| I am a middle-aged native speaker, an avid lifelong
| reader with a love for the language, and I _still_
| occasionally discover that I am mispronouncing words I
| have known for years.
| mannykannot wrote:
| While they do both often express a reticent emotional
| state, the cause of that state is different: for 'weary',
| it is exhaustion from past events, while for 'wary', the
| concern is to avoid undesirable events in the future.
|
| There is arguably some overlap where someone is being wary
| because they are weary of similar situations turning out
| badly all too often in the past.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| It's similar to dominant/dominate and should've/should of.
|
| People these days...
| blacksqr wrote:
| My wife started using the word this way about 20 years ago, I
| also heard it on TV ads at the time.
|
| I always assumed it was a confused fusion of "wary" and
| "leery".
| nerdponx wrote:
| I always assumed it was just a misspelling of "wary" by
| analogy to "wear". You're telling me that people actually
| _say_ "weary" when they mean "wary"? That's very different
| from what I thought.
| blacksqr wrote:
| > people actually say "weary" when they mean "wary"?
|
| Yes, that's my experience.
| trgn wrote:
| On the flipside. American universities supported a rebuild of the
| library and today still it is one of the most magnificent
| libraries you will see anywhere in the world.
| net01 wrote:
| Now we need an article about KULouvian splitting with UCLouvain
| and building a new town and university from scratch in less than
| 3 years, a true engineering marvel.
|
| Related that library was split into 2 because of this:
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/when-was-the-leuven-li...
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| You also need to learn that the Flemish wanted so much to get
| rid of the French only classes that in 1916 they created a
| Dutch speaking university... with the help of the German that
| destroyed Leuven the year before.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Bissing_university
| AlexanderDhoore wrote:
| Leuven. It's a Dutch speaking town. The university is KU Leuven.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KU_Leuven
| Yeul wrote:
| It is now. Belgian history is the true definition of insanity.
| There were Belgians who were quite happy to see this university
| go up in flames.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Yes, it is, but you can't rewrite history.
|
| It was internationaly called Louvain before the international
| recognition for Leuven only camed after the events of 1968.
|
| That's why the "Louvain shall be our battle cry" became a
| popular march in Britain. [1]
|
| And why it was called so in Australia. [2].
|
| I guess that's why most of the English articles about Leuven
| includes the French name.
|
| 1. https://theo.kuleuven.be/apps/press/ecsi/belgian-culture-
| and... 2. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/15533652.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| The French university was re-founded in Louvain-la-Neuve, an
| atypical and fairly successful planned city. It has some small
| community character and a whimsical architecture that's more
| trying to be cozy rather than impressive. Recommended for
| architecture enthusiasts.
| sgt101 wrote:
| Very interesting to note that Oxford wasn't extensively bombed in
| ww2 despite being a manufacturing hub. I wonder what role this
| incident had in that choice.
| paganel wrote:
| Take that with a huge grain of salt, but I've read recently
| that Hitler was thinking of making Oxford Britain's capital if
| the German invasion would have successfully happened, so
| because of that he didn't bomb it. I cannot remember the exact
| sources for that.
|
| On firmer ground when it comes to sources, I'm now reading E.
| H. Carr's _Conditions of Peace_ [1] (written in 1942, so during
| WW2) and at some point he was also suggesting moving UK 's
| capital from London further to the North, he was thinking
| somewhere in Midlands, if I remember right. It turns out that
| even back then some of the British people were fully aware of
| London's negative pull caused by its oversize.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditions_of_Peace
| Aeolun wrote:
| It's really jarring reading about a place I know and having it's
| name inexplicably changed to French. Why?
| burkaman wrote:
| It seems like a lot of primary sources for this article used
| the French name. Even if it was incorrect, maybe that was how
| it was commonly referred to outside of Belgium at the time?
|
| - https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1502002700
|
| - https://www.hi.uni-stuttgart.de/wgt/ww-
| one/Start/Weissbluten...
|
| - https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25122278.pdf?acceptTC=true
| Insanity wrote:
| Belgium was in an odd state of bilingualism at the time.
| While the people of the area would speak Flemish ("Dutch"),
| those in positions of power and education institutions would
| use French as the Lingua Franca.
|
| I was born in Leuven and lived there for 30 years of my life
| - it would be pretty odd to see contemporary references as
| "Louvain" by those local to it.
| elric wrote:
| Because you don't know the place or its history as well as you
| seem to think you do. Flamingantism is a scourge upon Belgium.
|
| Louvain is fine in English. Much like ruuban is the correct
| form in Japanese.
|
| There's a whole article full of interesting historical context.
| Yet you comment on the perceived (and incorrect, thus imagined)
| slight against your mother tongue. This is a good example of
| why Belgium is such a hot mess. We'd rather spend time
| bickering about irrelevant nonsense than in addressing real
| problems.
| eadmund wrote:
| > Louvain ("Leuven")
|
| The correct name of the city is Leuven: it is a Flemish city, not
| a Wallonian one. Using French names for Flemish cities is just
| wrong.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| These are called _exonyms_ and there 's nothing wrong with
| them. The Italian city of _Firenze_ is anglicized as
| _Florence_. The anglicized _Jesus Christ_ is latinized as
| _Iesus Christus_ , hellenized as _Iesous Christos_ ,
| aramaicized as _Yeshua Mshiha_. People do this all the time
| with tons of words and especially with proper nouns. It 's
| completely normal and okay.
| eadmund wrote:
| I love exonyms when they are native. As you note, the English
| name for the Italian city is Florence (so too the proper
| English words are Turkey, Kiev and Peking, not Turkiye, Kyiv
| or Beijing).
|
| I see no reason at all to use the _French_ name for a
| _Flemish_ city when writing in _English_. When writing in
| French, sure.
| seszett wrote:
| But Florence is the French name of that city. Or Rome. I
| don't really understand the difference with Louvain.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| What was it called in 1914?
| hyperman1 wrote:
| Both. Belgium is multi-lingual (NL,FR,DE), so most cities
| and bigger towns have 2 or 3 names. In fact, today, most
| streets in Brussels have 2 names. So do a lot of big
| local companies
|
| Most local inhabitants would have called it Leuven, as it
| is a Flemish city. The rich people at that time, both
| inside and outside the city, heavily promoted French, and
| pushed only the French names in politics and
| international communication.
|
| Even today, this is a very touchy subject.
| thiscatis wrote:
| They are wrong. This is like calling Gdansk, Danzig.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You mean like calling the Netherlands, Holandia?
|
| There's _a lot_ of exonyms in Polish in everyday use.
| bloak wrote:
| It's normal, but it causes some problems: people using the
| wrong exonym or failing to find something they're looking
| for. And it seems to be gradually going out of fashion.
|
| Which places in Belgium have an English Wikipedia page with
| an exonym as the page title? I can find Brussels, Bruges,
| Ghent, Ostend. Are there others?
|
| I wouldn't be very surprised if a couple of those went out of
| fashion in English over the coming decades, just like
| "Brunswick", "Francfort" and "Aix-la-Chapelle" went out of
| fashion. And "Basle" is on the way out, isn't it?
| nsavage wrote:
| A bit off topic, but you had me curious: the first exonym
| that I could think about was Quebec City, which is called
| in French Ville de Quebec. The interesting part though is
| that the official name of the city in both languages is
| Quebec, lacking the Ville or the City. Is this an exonym
| though, since its Canadians who have come up with both?
| Probably depends on who you speak to.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Antwerp.
| praptak wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with exonyms _in principle_. However
| using "Florence" instead of "Florencja" in a Polish text
| would sound weird.
|
| If you add historical conflict to it then it can get much
| worse. "Warschau" in a non-German text would make many Polish
| people angry because of memories of forced Germanization.
| PeterCorless wrote:
| Total aside: I have been playing Crusader Kings repeatedly
| using Leuven as the home city for my character's dynasty. I
| don't know why I zeroed in on the city, but I have done over 30
| run-throughs so far. (Yes, that is a little obsessive.)
|
| First starting as Count of Leuven, then building up to become
| Duke of Brabant, then King of Lotharingia, then the Holy Roman
| Emperor.
|
| Now, having this historical context, I want to visit.
| numerobis wrote:
| Back then, a large proportion of Flemish intellectuals
| (including my grandparents) were French-speaking, which is a
| reason why there were so many French students and professors in
| Leuven/Louvain. Therefore I think that, in the context of the
| article, the "wrongness" of calling the city Louvain is not as
| clear-cut as you suggest.
| fvdessen wrote:
| My great grandfather was the vice rector of the university at the
| time, as an historian he took the initiative to covertly collect
| evidence of all the nazi crimes, evidence which was used in the
| nuremberg trials.
|
| But more interestingly, there was a nationalist movement in
| Belgium at the the time, and a debate on which language to use at
| the university. The international language (french) or the local
| language (flemish). He was of the opinion that both had their
| place, which put him in opposition to the nationalists. Since he
| was one of the founders of the flemish literature movement, and
| the prime expert on flemish history he was hard to attack
| directly by the nationalists. So they denounced him to the
| gestapo, hoping they would get rid of him while keeping their
| hands clean. Fortunately for me it didn't work, as the nazis were
| also reliant on his academic work for their pan-germanic
| narrative and refused to attack him directly as well.
|
| Nowadays we see as well western nationalist movements with
| ambivalent support for murderous regimes such as Russia, and I
| think this support comes in no small part from the idea that
| those regimes can be used to do the dirty work that they are too
| cowardly to do themselves
| atemerev wrote:
| To do -- how? by invading their countries and establishing a
| police state? That's a little too much even for so called
| "nationalists". I think it's just plain old bribery and
| propaganda.
|
| As a Russian who emigrated a long time ago for political
| reasons, signed countless anti-Kremlin petitions, and sent
| money to support Ukraine and her people, I am scared how many
| people support this regime for reasons unknown. I don't know
| any other possible reason except selling one's soul for money.
| fvdessen wrote:
| The flemish nationalists supported the nazis long before they
| invaded. I don't think Russia will invade the USA any time
| soon, but it can invade other countries and throw liberals
| out of windows over there, normalizing the practice and
| diminishing the power of liberalism worldwide
| markvdb wrote:
| > The flemish nationalists supported the nazis long before
| they invaded.
|
| s/The/Some/
| wisemang wrote:
| Look up tankies[0] --- people who support these atrocities by
| imperialists and other problematic regimes because they're so
| conditioned against the US / Western nations that they assume
| anyone acting against the west's interests must be doing
| good.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/0lcBplljoD8
| atemerev wrote:
| I am aware of the phenomenon; the interesting part is the
| word "conditioned". By whom? And, eventually, who paid for
| the conditioning? (I think it mostly ends with the usual
| suspects, Russia, China and Iran).
| wisemang wrote:
| Possibly at least somewhat. I think it also comes from
| getting disillusioned by legitimately terrible things
| done by the US in the name of "democracy" e.g. Latin
| American death squads in the 70s/80s, Iraq war and war on
| terror, etc.
|
| People can't seem to hold the idea of multiple countries
| being problematic and doing objectionable things.
| Certainly information ops from your usual suspects feed
| into this.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Conditioning doesn't need to be something one does to
| another. You can condition yourself by just dabbling in
| something and then going down the rabbit hole.
| davedx wrote:
| Like Elon being conditioned by his own social media
| website.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I imagine a lot of that happened well before he got
| involved with Twitter. He was just better at hiding it
| and likely had a PR team covering for him
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| North Korea also has large scale, effective info-
| operations, though aimed mostly at US/SK/Japan. also more
| ideological overlap with the "tanky" world view than
| anyone else
| notanote wrote:
| To be sure, the burning of the library happened during the
| early days of WW1, which had neither nazis, gestapo, nor
| Nuremberg trials.
| fvdessen wrote:
| It was burned down twice, in 1914 and 1940
| PeterStuer wrote:
| The library was rebuilt with American aid. If you walk around the
| building today you will see all the plaques of contributing
| institutions embedded in the walls.
|
| In August of 1914, during World War I, Leuven was looted by
| German troops. In the night of the 25th to 26th of August, they
| set fire to a large part of the city, effectively destroying
| about half of it. The Germans set fire to the 14th century
| University Hall and its library wing. The University library
| burned, and with it about 300,000 books, about 1000 incunabula
| and a huge collection of manuscripts, including the University's
| founding bull from 1425.
|
| The Germans had aimed to punish Leuven after alleging the
| presence of snipers in the city. They claimed that the sacking of
| Leuven was a fair reprisal. Their 'punisment' of Leuven destroyed
| more than 1000 buildings and cost more than 200 lives.
|
| When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, soon after the
| restoration of Leuven's new library, Belgium found itself neutral
| once again.
|
| After the retreat of the British and with German forces entering
| the city, on the 17th of May 1940 the new University library was
| set aflame after an artillery barrage. Molten glass from the
| above floors flowed into the cellars, past the steel doors, and
| destroyed the collections. The entire building was gutted. Not
| even twelve years after its opening, the new University library
| was reduced to rubble and its collections were ravaged once more.
| The occupying forces accused the British of having set the
| library ablaze on purpose to allow them to later blame the
| Germans. No access to the ruin or objective investigations were
| allowed. Joseph Goebbels, German propaganda minister, paid the
| ruined library a visit to push the German version of events. At
| the Nuremberg tribunal it was found that the library burned after
| German artillery had struck it. Only 21,000 of the original
| 900,000 pieces in the library collection were left. Hundreds of
| manuscripts (including some that had survived the 1914 fire) and
| everything from before 1501 was destroyed.
|
| https://ghum.kuleuven.be/ggs/research/america-europefund/aef...
| firebot wrote:
| "Where they burn books, they will also burn people" -- Heinrich
| Heine
| thiscatis wrote:
| The correct name of this city is Leuven.
| kgwgk wrote:
| The World Health Organization thinks it's Louvain - or at least
| it thought so in 2004.
|
| https://eucliduniversity.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/who_...
| numerobis wrote:
| This is the name of the city today, but this has not always
| been the case. In the past, Leuven was a bilingual city, and to
| many of the people who lived there, the city was known as
| Louvain.
| numbers_guy wrote:
| The situation in 2024 is much more confusing. Because it seems to
| me that the political side that styles itself to be against the
| far-right, is also very much in favour of curtailing free speech
| and reigning in internet platforms where people share news and
| political opinions. So who is burning the books? Everyone? I'm so
| confused.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-11-15 23:00 UTC)