The Big(?) Issues Thread

[Josiah]

Wriggling marshmellows? Ew...

[Astral Omega]

Maybe it's just so that the toasters seem fancy... so they can charge more for them?

Or maybe it's easier to make toasters that have a higher setting because it's easier to make them that way. I mena they dont have to add in extra electrical components.. or... something... *wishes she paid more attention in physics when talking about transistros or whatever those variable... things... are...*

[Doodleshark]

Whoops... I meant to post in the awesome videos thread, but for some reason posted here instead... hehehe... *Throws a smoke bomb and disappears.*

[PoikSpirit]

What, more ohms?
To create more heat, you need either more resistance in the wires, or more current which mean less resistors to limit amperage which I find more plausible. So yeah, I guess it could be that, except that you still have to put low and high resistors in. I think it'd be cheaper just to put the higher resistance resistors in.

[Astral Omega]

No there's this one that like... a variable resistor or something?... idk Maybe it's easier or cheaper or soemthing to just put one of them in, and instead of limiting it, just use the full extent of the thing.

I'm probably making less and less sense...

We should probably just conclude this at "Some people like eating dough and some like eating charcoal so toaster companies want to make money by selling toasters that cater for everyone"

No wait! I have a better conclusion..

"People are weird" then end^^

[Josiah]

And the next issue up for discussion...

Why does every language call countries by different names? For example, we call Japan, Japan. Japanese call Japan Nihon (or Nipon depending on their accent). For another one, we call Germany, Germany. For Japanese it's doitsu, and for Germans it Deutschland Why don't we call countries by the same name that the natives do? After all, it's their country.

[NabMaster]

I've actually been wondering this too, it makes no sense to call a country a different name

[Saber Knight]

Ug. I was actaully thinking the same thing yesterday and earlier today.

Yeah, German is Aleman ((just imagine the accent is there....I think there's one) not sure what the word for Germany actually is, we only learned the adjective) in Spanish. It's all obnoxious....

[Astral Omega]

I don't really think there IS a solution or answer to this question, it's just one of those quirks of the world that make us all go "Wtf? " and we have to live with it.

So here I am in 호주 or maybe Australien or maybe it's l'Australia... agh.

(although according to this translator "Australia" in French and Spanish is "Australia"... but then one translator also said that it was 오스트레일리아 in Korean... and I know thats not right. I only used the translator as a memory Jogger from my years of Korean lessons that havn't stuck >.<.)

[BionicleMandi121]

I've wondered about this too. Of the three languages I know, "Japan" sounds nothing like "Nihon" or "ri ben" (can't romanize Chinese properly yet). "United States of America" definitely doesn't sound anything like "mei guo" @.@ ("Amerika" doesn't count).
Maybe some countries just can't pronounce the native names of a country, so they make up their own. However that just leads to the question of where did they get those names? And by extension, where do we get names for ANYTHING? If the evolution of language had been somewhat different, would we all be calling pencils by a different noun?
Ahem, off topic, sorry.
More proof that my mind tends to wander.
So that's my guess. People give new names to other countries when 1. they can't pronounce it or 2. they don't like the native name for whatever reason.

[PoikSpirit]

There's a solution to this: standardize Latin. I like it better than English, mostly because articles provide almost no actual meaning to any sentence. And of all the languages I've learned parts of, it's been the easiest. And since it's dead, it's unbiased to standardize it because it favors no one. No one speaks it fluently anymore (yet).
But in all honesty, the answer is: "mu."
Err... The answer is people are strange... And now I have that song stuck in my head. But all the cultures assigned names to the countries before asking the natives what they call it. Then we ignore them when they say "no Japan, Nihon." So the answer is people are jerks... That's not quite it.

[Josiah]

In Japan the US is typically called amerika, which is more or less correct, although technically America is the whole continent. But it can also be called beikoku, which translates to "land of rice". Which really makes no sense seeing how it's Asian countries like Japan and China (which, of course, has its own set of names) which have all the rice. BTW: when you look at the kanji that make up nihon (Japan's real name) it literally means something along the lines of "origin of the sun", which is why Japan is called the land of the rising sun.

[Siranae]

Land of the rice? Weird. But, at least now I know where Japan got its nickname!

Yeah, the whole different names thing is confusing and completely pointless. In spanish I have to remember the english names as well as the spanish names for the communities. You know what? I think the entire world should speak one language, and that language would be Hawaiian. Why? Because its got practically the smallest alphabet!

Though, it probably would take a while to convert the languages of over a hundred countries...

[Giga-Gar]

In Japan the US is typically called amerika, which is more or less correct, although technically America is the whole continent. But it can also be called beikoku, which translates to "land of rice". Which really makes no sense seeing how it's Asian countries like Japan and China (which, of course, has its own set of names) which have all the rice. BTW: when you look at the kanji that make up nihon (Japan's real name) it literally means something along the lines of "origin of the sun", which is why Japan is called the land of the rising sun.

They could be talking about Arkansas. That has a lot of rice. Or maybe they don't have a word for grain.

[Josiah]

Rice isn't the only major grain in Japan. It's the biggest, for sure, but they've got a long history with wheat and buckwheat too.