Voltaire & Baudouin I

David A. Daniel dad at POKERWIZ.COM
Thu Jul 14 18:29:02 UTC 2011


Wilson, haven't you ever felt like picking a nit? But, not so fast! He is
called King of the Belgians in English because that is what he is called in
French and Flemish. Seems to be a Belgian thing, but when I lived there in
the 70's I got no good answers to my questions about "Belgians" vs.
"Belgium". But, I was just looking over the Belgian monarchy's website to
see if there were answers there, and noticed they refer to "The King of the
French" (in English, French, Flemish and German), so maybe that's just the
way they like to say it. I also saw, on one page, where it actually said,
"King of Belgium" (in English, the other languages still go with Belgians) -
so it looks like their site designer/translator made the same mistake JL
made. ;)
DAD


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On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 11:06 AM, David A. Daniel <dad at pokerwiz.com> wrote:
> Just FYI, there's no such thing as the King of Belgium. He is King of the
> Belgians.
> DAD
>

David! That's just plain nitpicking! Is the king of the Belgians not
also the king of Belgium, in some non-empty sense, regardless of the
exact manner in which he is to be titled in English?

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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