I got confused this morning (which actually isn't noteworthy: according to someone close to me:
American papers: "Merkel heads for Egypt as part of four-day Middle East trip aimed ..."
German papers: ""Merkel reist in die Golfstaaten und spricht über den Nahost-Friedensprozess" = "Merkel travles to the Gulf states and talks about the Near East peace process."
Obviously, instead of Middle East we seem to use the term Gulf states, at least for a part of Middle East.
But where is "Near East"?
Different in BE and AE?
Walter Hinteler wrote:But where is "Near East"?
Well as a BE speaker I would say somewhere between Paderborn and Lippstadt.
My home/native town in that case.
I could agree here.
quite right
I had forgotten you were West of there
I'm not sure we use the term "near east" much. I can't remember seeing it.
But we should, since we've got a middle east and a far east.
Odd. Merkwuerdig.
I have a feeling Near East was used for Lebanon, Syria and the far end of the Med and Middle East for Arabia, Oman etc, in the Old Days; but I may be parlant through my chapeau.
This says I don't know what I'm talking about, again: googling
N E- 89,000,000 hits
M E- 234,000,000 hits
F E- 105,000,000 hits
Where's merkwuerdig, or is that what you have to do in your garden after next door's cats have been there?
And - quite interesting - from the US State Department website:
Quote:The Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA), headed by Assistant Secretary C. David Welch, deals with U.S. foreign policy and U.S. diplomatic relations with Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Regional policy issues that NEA handles include Iraq, Middle East peace, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and political and economic reform.
But most department heads are Bush "yes" men and women. Descriptions of departments have very little meaning to the reality when a tyrant runs our government.
Walter Hinteler wrote:And - quite interesting - from the US State Department website:
Quote:The Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA), headed by Assistant Secretary C. David Welch, deals with U.S. foreign policy and U.S. diplomatic relations with Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Regional policy issues that NEA handles include Iraq, Middle East peace, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and political and economic reform.
For North American west coasters, even middle North Americans, the Far East is definitely the Near East, and the Near East is definitely the Far East, eh Walter?
Chicago - O'Hare to Dubai 7,246
Chicago - O'Hare to Tokyo 6,274
Did we just accept the names from BrE?
Could this become a new pet peeve for a whole raft of NaE speakers?
Magellan's expedition came near to starvation before making landfall in what we call the Philippine Islands. The use of the terms "near East" and "far East" are not exclusive productions of British English, and any such contention is historically naive or historically uninformed. The Portuguese, in fact, were the first to sail beyond what we usually refer to as "the middle East," which makes a further distinction between what is to the east from a western European perspective.
When DaGama sailed boldly (in the terms of his times) across the Indian Ocean, and landed at Goa, the "East" ceased to be far in comparison to India, then the source of the productions of "the East." Of course, Marco Polo and his father and uncle had already visited China in the ear of the Yuan dynasty, although much of Europe considered Polo to be an outrageous liar. Reading Polo today shows that he was rather circumspect and cautious in his descriptions.
The "far East" becomes the "far East" because, by the time the Portuguese established a colony at Macao, a sense of global proportion was dawning on the Europeans. The Dutch were the next to follow the Portuguese to the East--the British were very late to the game. Referring to the distances to "the East" on the basis of air travel miles is rather foolish. The terms derive from times when wooden ships propelled by the wind through the use of sail were the prevalent method for long-distance transport. Magellan quite by accident passed the southern end of South America at a time when the weather was very kind to him. For almost all of the year, the straits which he navigated are nearly impassable to sailing vessels because of the prevailing winds, the frequent storms and danger of the passage. Rounding Cape Horn is only slightly less risky--the navigator cannot afford an error of any significance because of prevailing currents and winds.
Therefore, from the perspective of those who sailed past the Cape of Good Hope, the middle or near East are much, much closer than China or Japan, which constitute the "far East" on the basis of the distance which it was necessary to sail to get there.
It is reasonable to ascribe to these terms a European perspective, but not an exclusively British perspective. The distances were as daunting to North Americans sailing to China in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries as they were to the English, or to any other European.
and of course as soon as the polar ice is gone, the far east is going to get a lot nearer.
JTT wrote:
JTT wrote:Steve 41oo wrote:JTT wrote:
I couldn't possibly explain it to one who has a preconceived notion of what it SHOULD mean, Steve.
I could possibly explain it to one who has a preconceived notion of what it SHOULD mean, Steve.
Are these two sentences opposite in meaning because one sentence uses the negative form <couldn't> and the other uses the positive form <could>?
Yes. Absolutely they are. I'm not being a pedant here. One can play all sorts of games with words without affecting meaning. But there are certain basic rules - the "not" operator being one - that you cant leave out without fundamentally changing the meaning of the sentence.
I don't believe for a second that you're trying to be pedantic here.
1. I could explain it to a person who has a preconceived notion of what it SHOULD mean, Steve.
2. I cooooould possibly explain it to a person who has a preconceived notion of what it SHOULD mean, Steve.
3. I cooooooooooould possssssibly explain it to a person who has a preconceived notion of what it SHOULD mean, Steve.
Steve, do sentences 1, 2 & 3 all express the same level of certainty?
Am I to assume that this issue is now resolved in your mind, Steve; that you've seen the light?
Glad to hear there's lux in your part of Blighty, McT, here too but The North is threatened today. Do you think it's OK for BBC weatherpeople to say "Come Sunday"? It sounds like a folksy bit of English "She's seventeen come Sunday" etc. and not at all natural. I think it's down to their scriptwriters who want to seem jolly and informal and a tad peasanty.
I think it's okay, doesn't jar with me. It does sound like it might be said by a rustic on The Archers, though. Or, American of course.
What are the short alternatives? "on Sunday", "next Sunday"...these are almost the same. No, I don't mind it.
I've always thought of an expression such as 'come Sunday' as a homely and comfortable Americanism. I think it'd give me a slight jar to hear a BBC announcer, speaking posh, use it.
