In article ,
Sacha wrote:
On 8/1/05 16:37, in article , "Kay"
wrote:
snip
Incidentally, I asked my French niece about what a pig is known as in French
- the animal, rather than the meat and she is firm that it is 'cochon'.

That's what I remembered from O level french buit I wouldn't back my o
level french knowledge against anyone else's knowledge of french, let
alone a french woman's.

Of course, it's still possible that a local dialect would talk of "un porc"
but 'proper' French is "un cochon". In Jersey French, for example, a snail
is called 'un colînmachon' *and* 'un escargot' but in good French it's 'un
escargot'.

I don't think that's it, nor do I think that the teacher is right.

If a teacher was asked the same question for English, the normal
answer would be 'pig', but there would be absolutely nothing WRONG
with 'swine'. It is just not the normal word nowadays.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

In article ,
Franz Heymann wrote:

"Kay" wrote in message
...

[snip]

The meat has the name of the animal in the language of the
conquering
classes who ate it, while the animal retains the language of the
conquered who grew it.

At least it works for boeuf and mouton, but I'm not sure where pork
comes from - the latin? - is it the modern french that has moved
away?

And when did you last see a piece of mutton for sale, or offered on a
menu?

We had some 12 days ago. It has been relegalised.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

In article , Franz Heymann
writes

"Kay" wrote in message
...

[snip]

The meat has the name of the animal in the language of the
conquering
classes who ate it, while the animal retains the language of the
conquered who grew it.

At least it works for boeuf and mouton, but I'm not sure where pork
comes from - the latin? - is it the modern french that has moved
away?

And when did you last see a piece of mutton for sale, or offered on a
menu?

We buy mutton at least twice a month :-)
--
Kay
"Do not insult the crocodile until you have crossed the river"

On 8/1/05 19:18, in article , "Franz
Heymann" wrote:


"Kay" wrote in message
...

[snip]

The meat has the name of the animal in the language of the
conquering
classes who ate it, while the animal retains the language of the
conquered who grew it.

At least it works for boeuf and mouton, but I'm not sure where pork
comes from - the latin? - is it the modern french that has moved
away?

And when did you last see a piece of mutton for sale, or offered on a
menu?

Franz



Frequently at our butcher but not on a menu, no.
--
Sacha
www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
(remove the weeds to email me)

"Stuart" wrote in message
...
A tidal wave is something completely
different to a tsunami, but a lot of people don't seem to realise
this.

For the last time, it is not.

Get hold of a dictionary and look up the meaning.

Maybe its a common use of it, but its not correct, as those of us
with
degrees in geology know. It may have become an alternative name for
those
who don't know better, but the original meaning is quite different.

The geology students in my College did not do enough applied
mathematics to solve the deep water equations

Franz

"Stuart" wrote in message
k...
When did everybody start calling a tidal wave a tsunami and why?

When they learnt the difference. A tidal wave is something
completely
different to a tsunami, but a lot of people don't seem to realise
this.


If you were to crack a book on hydrodynamics you will find that there
are essentially four different types of wave in an ideal non-viscous
liquid

Capillary waves
Surface waves
Deep water waves
Solitons

(actually, there are also linear combinations of the first two)

Capillary waves are what you get if you induce a wave by vibrating a
tuning fork witih one tine just touching the liquid
Surface waves are what you normally see on the surface of the ocean
before they break near the shore. That includes the so-called "Giant
waves". These are simply distinguished by having a very large
amplitude of oscillation. In both those types of wave any "piece" of
water moves vertically up and down.
In the case of a deep water wave, any *piece" of water executes a
circular motion, with the diameter of the circle equal to the depth of
the water.
Both tidal waves and tsunamis are synonyms for deep water waves.
In the open ocean with a constant depth, a deep water wave is
essentially harmless and may pass practically unnoticed. It only
becomes dangerous when it meets a sloping ocean floor, so that the
nornal circular motion can no longer be accomodated. It is at that
stage that it begins to "suck" in water ahead of it and begins to pile
up in height.

Solitons are peculiar beasts in which certain specifically-shaped
transient surface disturbances can move unchanged in shape.

Franz

"Charlie Pridham" wrote in message
...

"Franz Heymann" wrote in message
...

"Sacha" wrote in message
k...
On 3/1/05 11:30, in article ,
"Cerumen"
wrote:


wrote in message
...
On Sun, 2 Jan 2005 16:09:33 -0000, "Bob Hobden"

wrote:

The main risk is the big piece of rock which is expected to
fall
off
an island in the Canaries, generate a tidal wave that will
wipe
out
the East Coats of the USA and not do a lot of good to the low
countries.

Apparently a tsunami hit the west coast of Ireland in 1775 ?
after
a
seismic event near the Azores and Canaries causing some
considerable
damage..

A recent article I read somewhere said that if the predicted bit
of
La Palma
falls off in one slab the resulting tsunami will lead to the
disappearance
of the Isles of Scilly (among other damage!)

As well as New York

Franz

Lots of people have said that, but it seems unlikely.

I am afraid that if the whole chunk og rock comes adrift in one go, it
is a dead cert. It is only a matter of when.

To create a tsunami
requires a high energy shock wave,

No. That is not so. Any large, localised disturbance will do the
trick.

a bit of land falling in would, however
large not be moving fast enough for the damage to be transmitted any
distance, although there would certainly be a large wave locally
much as
when large icebergs break off.

I would rather listen to the physicists who have done the
calculations. They actually do know the magnitude of the wave which
would occur if the whole cracked chunk of rock fell into the ocean in
one go.
In a deep ocean with a flat bottom, a tsunami is actually a relatively
slow, stately occurrence. All hell begins to break loose when it
reaches a sloping shoreline.

Franz

"Sacha" wrote in message
k...
On 4/1/05 9:11, in article
,
"Charlie Pridham" wrote:
snip

Lots of people have said that, but it seems unlikely. To create a
tsunami
requires a high energy shock wave, a bit of land falling in would,
however
large not be moving fast enough for the damage to be transmitted
any
distance, although there would certainly be a large wave locally
much as
when large icebergs break off.

But isn't the chunk of La Palma predicted to fall into the sea
following
volcanic action?

Not necessarily. It is said that a really severe rainstorm might do
the trick It is already making small but ominous movements now , and
the lubrication provided by filling the cracks with water might just
trigger the lot to slip off.. There is no doubt that it will fall
into the sea some time. The real unanswerable question is whether it
will slide off in one fell swoop or piecemeal.

Franz

"Charlie Pridham" wrote in message
...

"Dave" wrote in message
...
A recent article I read somewhere said that if the predicted
bit of
La Palma
falls off in one slab the resulting tsunami will lead to the
disappearance
of the Isles of Scilly (among other damage!)
Charlie Pridham writes

Lots of people have said that, but it seems unlikely. To create a
tsunami
requires a high energy shock wave, a bit of land falling in
would,
however
large not be moving fast enough for the damage to be transmitted
any
distance, although there would certainly be a large wave locally
much as
when large icebergs break off.

I think you confuse speed with energy. If you drop a very very
large
mass (say 5000 million tons) a few hundred feet (and I think in
the case
of the canaries it drops a long way down to the ocean floor) then
the
*energy* released is converted into a (relatively) smaller mass of
water
travelling *very* fast. I don't know what the conversion factor is
but
say 1% of the mass travelling at say 20 times the speed would
still be
quite significant.
--
David
I may be wrong but I am not confused! :~) once the rock mass was in
the
water the effect would be slight however far it falls, it can after
all only
fall and accelerate at 9.81m/s2 .

That is quite wrong. The rock hits the water quite fast, with a large
amount of energy. As it sinks in the water, it gives its enrergy to
the water, spreadover a large range in depths. These are just what is
neded to excite a deep water wave.

and I still think you would be hard
pressed to even detect it in New York

You could not be more wrong on this issue if you tried.
Please desist from making qualitative speculations from the side
lines. As has been said before, there are actually model experiments
being performed under conditions where the scaling laws are known.
The results from those are more important than your wishful thinking.

were it to happen, (a similar sized
lump arriving from space would be travelling at a much higher speed
and
would indeed cause allsorts of problems were it to hit ocean).

The movement
of a tectonic plate can in some instances be at very high speed

coupled with
the total mass on the move gives a huge amount more energy and even
then not
all underwater quakes produces these waves.

Franz

"Tumbleweed" wrote in message
...

"goldfinch" wrote in message
...


Not under our wonderful new legislation. No, it is much
closer to
home.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.
---------------
OK. I have been wondering what you meant, Nick, and hoping that
someone
else
would ask ;-)

Then today on the news we hear that our insane government had
plans to
blow
up the channel tunnel with a nuclear bomb if the Russians were
to try
and
invade us. The resulting massive waves would devastate most of
the S.E.
coastal area. We only know this now because of the freedom of
information
act.



No they didnt.

Do you write newspaper headlines as well?Or just read the daily
mail?

(translating 'some officials considered a bomb but it was never
implemented'
into 'government had plans to swamp SE with massive waves'.)

Not that there would have been any 'massive waves' anyway, maybe
a small
ripple. (raspberry?)

--
Tumbleweed

-------------
I heard it on the BBC 1 news at 6 pm today. Obviously it was
never
implemented ;-)

Probably more than a ripple though, being close enough to the
shore even
if
it was in the middle of the channel.


Not if it was going to make the tunnel unusable for only 3 years.
And the middle of the channel is 10 miles from the shore.
They had tests in the nevada desert *much* nearer than that from las
vegas
in the 50's, not even a tremor felt in LV.

The chunnel is ideally situated for being the origin of a particularly
vicious deep water wave.
The Nevada desert has no water.

Franz

"Nick Maclaren" wrote in message
...
In article ,
wrote:
On 5 Jan 2005 11:51:10 GMT, (Nick Maclaren)
wrote:
In article ,
wrote:

but there wasn't a channel tunnel in 1974, or was there a secret
one
we didn't know about?

There was one in 1874! It wasn't complete - which doesn't stop
the
government planning how to blow it up if it were ever completed.

It would need a bit of foresight to anticipate a tunnel and the
invention of the atom bomb :-)

No foresight needed for the first - look up the history of the
tunnel - it was first proposed in the 18th century and preliminary
work started in the 19th.

The atom bomb was also speculated in the 19th century, but I now
forget the reference.

Impossible.
The structure of the atom was only discovered well into the 20th
century, and the energy equivalence of mass was only suggested in
1905.

Anyway, you don't need one to blow up a
small construction like the tunnel, nor even modern explosives;
ordinary gunpowder will do.

True.

Franz

"Kay" wrote in message
...
In article , Douglas
Douglas.1i[color=blue][i]
writes

Kay Wrote:
In article ,
writes
Douglas, I don't know what you are posting with,
*****
A computer? ;-)
*****
but you must notice
that it's impossible to identify your part of the text when you
reply
to posts?


I'm slow here to get the hang of things, but I usually show my
reply by
warking it with stars.

I tend to reply to bits of the message individually instead of
saying
it all at the end.

i'm sure I will improve eventually.

Hey! Not one single bit of what you quoted was written by me,
despite
the attribution!

You're absolutely right to reply to each bit individually - that's
the
convention in this newsgroup, and makes it a lot easier to follow
the
argument than with the top posting convention generally used in
business
emails.

If you were posting here directly instead of via garden banter, you
would be using a newsreader program. I use Turnpike (as do many
others)
and when I hit 'reply' it automatically inserts '' before each line
of
the text I am replying to (with more ''s for each successive
previous
poster) - Therefore the number of ''s at the beginning of the line
tells you which person said what. This is a general newsgroup
convention
and is what allows us to see who said what when we're all
interleaving
replies.

In addition, when I read a post, Turnpike displays all text with a
''
in red and just the last author's contribution, with no '', in
black.

So when your posts turn up with '' at the beginning of each line,
they
are displayed in red. It's compounded by the fact your posts have
the
same number of '' as the previous poster - so, as was said above,
it is
totally impossible to identify your contribution ... or was, until
you
explained your personal convention of using stars.

I don't know how gardenbanter works, but other people seem to have
managed to suss out how to get the ''s working - perhaps you could
ask
in gardenbanter how they do it?

Or, why use gardenbanter at all? why not subscribe to urg directly
like the vast majority of urglers?

Franz

"Douglas" wrote in message
...

Nick Maclaren Wrote:
In article ,
wrote:-

but there wasn't a channel tunnel in 1974, or was there a secret
one
we didn't know about?-


*****

I have not read on here, so I'm probably repeating what has
already
been said:

There was a building attempt in 1974, but, as usual, we Brits got
scared and pulled out after several miles had been dug, much to
the
dismay of the French.

Douglas, in a spirit of helpfulness I would like to ask how those ""
at the beginning of your lines come to be there. Do you put them
there?
It really is a pain in the backside trying to make sense of who said
what once you have contributed something to a thread.

If there is another urgler who posts from garbenbanter, please let us
know if you have ever had any difficulty with the attribution marks

Franz

"Tim Challenger" wrote in message
news:1104832182.7eab743324810ae0059abdfe5cb57dda@t eranews...
On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 20:28:29 +0000 (UTC), Franz Heymann wrote:

wrote in message
...
On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 15:53:00 +0100, Tim Challenger
wrote:

On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 14:40:51 +0000 (UTC), Mike wrote:

They say when it goes, that will be the end of New
York.

I believe that if that is the case, 'something' would have been
done by now
if 'any time now' relates to this year!!

And what would you suggest that "they" do? Get a couple of big
sticks and
prop it up? You'd need a lot of string and blu-tac to hold back
500
billion
tons of rock.

Don't let science ruin a good discussion, that's Franz's job. :-)

{:-))

I would recommend that they start making plans for evacuating New
York. They wil have around 10 hours warning. Perhaps theyhave
already made plans, but can't make them public because of the
grand
panic which would follow immediately after the announcement.

Franz

Thanks Franz, knew we could rely on you ;-)

Glad to be of service.
{:-))

Franz
--
Tim C.

In article ,
says...
In article 1104840072.98438ddeea2045e62f46ffa1c2f70c96@teran ews, Tim
Challenger wrote:


I'd have thought that as most English speakers speak English, they might be
more likely to know what the work tidalwave means that tsunami.

'Tsunami' now *is* the English word for it, just as 'gong' is the
English word for the thing you bang when dinner's ready (from Malay), a
'tycoon' is a big businessman (Japanese), and a tattoo is what your
daughter gets against your wishes (Tahitian), and which you may well
think is 'taboo' (Tongan).

Try asking people under the age of 15 what they'd call a tsunami, and
they'll use the new word, not the old. Languages change all the time,
and one of the nice things about English is that people are happy to
adapt. Remember, 'pork', 'beef' and 'mutton' were all foreign words
once. But not any more.

I still talk about 'motoring' up to London, listening to the
'wireless', and 'taking luncheon', but I only do it to amuse myself and
irritate my children.

Agreed, although I think that in a few years time, my daughter will know
that when daddy is listening to the wireless, he's watching her packets
on the 'net.

Warwick-- living in two worlds