Is it? He was born Cristoforo Colombo in Italy
One might wonder why he’s called Colón in Spanish
Is he just “Christopher the Colonizer,” like “Peter the Great”?
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sounds like “Ivan Hirst” was a big part of the problem, then.
Huh. Depending on the details of the parade, I think I can get behind the KKK’s proposed immigration reform.
I thought Petit Colon were those fancy chocoltes, but if what you say is true, maybe I won’t have one.
It continues.
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Good to know. Vielen dank
This is just bad linguistics
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Not really, no. It’s completely outlandish. The letters spelling “NEGER” are way out of line. People of African decent are a very small minority here, so condemnation of the N-word doesn’t hold the same importance as it does in the US, but it’s still considered racist and certainly off limits. I really don’t know what happened there. Did they hire a guy who was racist and tried to drop his message? Did somebody try to make some kind of ironic play on racist motives and failed miserably?
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Well, they are certainly not. There’s a lot of hidden racism, anti-semitism… people like to commend us Germans how well we have “reformed”, but part of that doesn’t really go deep - there were huge taboos on expressing racist attitudes, but they were there, right under the surface. With time passing, German re-unification, and conservative’s desire for a “clean slate”, some of these taboos are falling and an ugly side shows that some didn’t believe existed anymore.
However. Linking this ad to VW’s Nazi past doesn’t make sense. All large German car makers contributed to the war efforts. BMW built aircraft engines, Mercedes built aircraft engines and Hitler’s state cars, the German Ford subsidiary built trucks for the Wehrmacht - and sent the profits via Switzerland back into the USA right until 1941. M.A.N. built the diesel engines for the Nazi submarine fleet. The chemical industry, then united as “IG Farben” ran full scale concentration camps for their forced labor “needs”. And in the unlikely case you haven’t heard about what the German IBM subsidiary did (while transferring profits to the US just like Ford) - by all means read the book by Edwin Black, it’s an eye-opener. Long story short, Volkswagen was a company under Nazi rule much like every other company under Nazi rule, gladly contributing to the “Endsieg”, and then keeping quiet about it for half a century or longer. I don’t think their culture is neither better nor worse than any other German car maker’s.
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Hell yes.
That they tried to bury it with the usual non-apology first makes me angry.
They are quoted throughout German media as having posted “Wie ihr euch vorstellen könnt, sind wir überrascht und schockiert, dass unsere Instagram-Story derart missverstanden werden kann” on Instagram in a first reaction. “As you can imagine, we are surprised and shocked that our Instagram story can be misunderstood in that way” can be very much understood as “well, it’s somehow there if you squint and try really, really hard to see it, and we are surprised and shocked that someone would squint that hard.”
Nope. Has been referred to as Cristóvão Colom (as well as Colon) in Portugal already. Colón in Castillia. Lost in translation. He supposedly was Genovese, and I got interested and looked up what they spoke there. Ligurian, Cristoffa Corombo. Colombo in ‘higher’ ‘Italian’. Not sure if a linguist is amongst us, but I bet @Mindysan33 can tell us something about local and regional language use and names from a professional historician’s perspective. Vowel shifts are definitely usual, and latinisation (Christopherus Columbus) of course was a must in a time when Latin was still both the language of power & knowledge.
Effectively, that wasn’t nostalgia. That was continuity. And not only in business, but very much so in government. (That said, Germany did change after the war, and some of those who I, personally, would not have allowed back in power if I would have had to make that decision clearly made a difference to the positive in later events. Richard von Weizsäcker comes to mind.)
True. Well, Germans love to be right, and what better way to be right than actually writing it up for everyone to see? German speaking countries do not have the debating club culture like anglophones. That function basically has been one of the Stammtisch, and German language Wikipedia. (And I am not even being sarcastic about the Stammtisch.)
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I can say with regards to Columbus, that the reason the US has a Columbus day in the first place was thanks to Italian American immigrants lobbying for it.
I remember a while back hearing a rumor that some believed that Columbus was actually Polish, but not sure how much truth there is to that, but Italians in general claim him here in the States pretty strongly and take umbrage at the changed attitude about columbus, that he was not particularly heroic, but a dick who abused everyone around him, especially the Taino people.
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I don’t think anyone in this topic actually thinks they are.
But they are the one car maker involved here.
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And the brand (as distinct from the company) was promoted at the beginning as a symbol of the benefits of the Third Reich’s new populist order in a way that existing luxury brands like BMW and Mercedes were not. That’s an amazingly toxic legacy to overcome, and how the brand name survived between 1945 and 1959 (when the famous DDB ad campaigns for the Beetle started) is a fascinating story that (in my opinion) partially involves post-war Germany’s commitment to not hiding its sordid recent past.
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Linguist here. These are regional variations on the late Latin version we know him by in Anglohphonia: Columbus (n sg).
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I know we are derailing, but I’m curious: something to do with sound shift?
I’m only vaguely familiar with some shifts in Germanic languages, but this seems related.
W, V and B spring to mind. Apt, in this case. Could VW be BB? Oh glob, I am melting. Evolution of languages makes my brain hurt, as a biologist…
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