Whorelord posted:

anyone whose actually seen/heard welsh knows that the welsh deserve to be beaten up

Guavanaut posted:

The UK does not have any official language. Individual provinces may recognize official languages, but the deep seated aversion of the Briton to putting anything concrete in writing leaves the country as a whole with only a de facto language. The same was true for the flag except aboard ship until just under 100 years ago.

Certainly not any good ones, you can tell because Australia.

Carbon dioxide posted:

In the Netherlands, in The Hague I believe, there's an exclave of The Hague to the east that kinda is directly connected, some canal between the two parts also belongs to the city of The Hague.

North and South of that canal are two different, separate municipalities. There's a bridge across the canal connecting the two municipalities.

I tried looking it up once, but I couldn't find anywhere which of the three municipalities/cities is responsible for the upkeep of the bridge.

fishmech posted:

Dutch Engineer posted:

None of them are. The province of Zuid-Holland is responsible for the upkeep of the Geestbrug.

twoday posted:

Last one was 43.5%. Some water boards let you vote by post, or online, so that keeps the level up I guess.

Here is the wikipedia link about the strange institution of Dutch Water Boards in case anyone is curious.

duckmaster posted:

"Provinces"

Guavanaut posted:

What's your preferred word for subdivisions of a sovereign state that often lack significant legislative autonomy?

Prefectures? Oblasts?

Guavanaut posted:

Counties aren't allowed to define official languages. Wales is able to do so, and is made of multiple counties, but lacks the legislative autonomy to really be called a state or country. Principality is a good one if you want to annoy people from there, but that isn't always the best metric for accuracy.

Rumda posted:

But Wales does have significant autonomy compared to the rest of Britain that have also had its native languages beaten out.

Whorelord posted:

they have less than scotland and probably a bit less than northern ireland, but welsh is weirdly the most widely spoken gaelic language in the uk

Carbon dioxide posted:

That's a way higher percentage than I expected. I thought it was around 5% because in most places the water board elections are barely advertised and the only way to vote is by sending a letter to the election office.

Also Water Board 24 (on that map, it seems two others merged since the map was made so it's 23 now), Blija Buitendijks, is a special one. The water boards used to be way smaller and a lot of them merged to get the current list. But the people running Blija Buitendijks didn't agree with the wishes of Water Board Fryslân so they refused to merge.

The thing is, Blija Buitendijks is a small nature reserve area beyond the Wadden Sea dike, that floods at high tide. Its population is zero. So as far as I can tell, because there's no population, these board members elect themselves. Their main meeting hall seems to be a farm shed in the nearby village.

twoday posted:

I would like to point out that the canal is not under the jurisdiction of any municipality, but under the Water Board of Delfland.



The water boards are a completely parallel set of administrative entities that deal with water, and are broken up into different areas that don't exactly match up with the provinces. They have their own elections and in these elections they have their own special water-based political parties. Last year I voted for the Party for The Water Animals. I speak for the ducks.

Guavanaut posted:

What's your preferred word for subdivisions of a sovereign state that often lack significant legislative autonomy?

Prefectures? Oblasts?

Guavanaut posted:

They're not real countries though, so that's just confusing.

Rumda posted:

Country is not a synonym of Independent Nation-state

alnilam posted:

Nor is nation a synonym of nation-state

Guavanaut posted:

Historically you're right, it just means 'a bunch of land' like "I'm spending a weekend in the country," but nowadays when used without qualification the term implies sovereignty, in the same way that 'state' unqualified usually means 'top level subdivision of a federal country, especially with more legislative power than a province or territory' and not 'a sovereign nation-state'.

DarkCrawler posted:

To be fair though, talking about the Countries of UK you always have to go "...and Northern Ireland". Which just goes to tell how stupid Northern Ireland is

Guavanaut posted:

Historically you're right, it just means 'a bunch of land' like "I'm spending a weekend in the country," but nowadays when used without qualification the term implies sovereignty, in the same way that 'state' unqualified usually means 'top level subdivision of a federal country, especially with more legislative power than a province or territory' and not 'a sovereign nation-state'.

The UK can just call them nations then, like the rugby already does. Everyone's happy (except the United Nations ).

Dutch Engineer posted:

Strictly speaking, jurisdiction of the canal (and for that matter, nearly all the canals in the Hague) is shared between Delfland and the municipality, depending on the issue at hand. The water board has jurisdiction over the water, and the municipality has jurisdiction over the ground and quay walls. For example, if you want to build a large pier or temporary structure in the water, you will need a permit from both the water board and the municipality.

cheerfullydrab posted:

That's not true at all.

Guavanaut posted:

How would you define country then? Because 'top level administrative subdivision of a sovereign state' is not the first thing that would come into my head when someone said it.


(Grey countries use weird names like Republic, Länder, Popularate, or Country for their top level subdivisions.)

Kopijeger posted:

Why are some countries brown when there is no brown in the key?

Jaramin posted:

Countries where there is only one recognized 'state'?

Kopijeger posted:

Why are some countries brown when there is no brown in the key?

Ras Het posted:

I don't think "top level administrative subdivision" is a particularly helpful concept for a lot of countries actually.

As for the semantics, here's Wiktionary:

Guavanaut posted:

Language should do its best to reflect descriptively how people talk, and a bwca loses its helmet and dies every time someone says "Do I need a passport to go to Wales? But it's a different country."

Ras Het posted:

What

twoday posted:

Good username/post combo.

This sparked my curiosity and I looked into the legislation in New Amsterdam regarding the maintainable of the canals there.

It doesn't seem that any water board was ever established, but at some point Governor Stuyvesant issued an edict saying that maintainable of the canal walls was a responsibility of whoever owned the house adjacent to the canal. So if your house was on the water you had to build the quay wall. And he also issued an edict ordered people to upgrade it at some point. I'm wondering how this looked in reality, if they just built the whole thing at once and charged the owners for the cost, or if people would have built their own sections piecemeal. Is that even possible, from a technical point of view? I assume they would have had to dam off the whole thing and drain it to build the walls. But I like the idea that at some point it resembled poorly planned American suburbs today, where you see part of a sidewalk in front of one house that abruptly stops at the property line of the next house, where the owner has neglected this responsibility.

Guavanaut posted:

There's a ton of smaller ones like parish or prefecture or zone that are only used by a handful of countries as the top level administrative subdivision, but you can really cover most of them with 'province', 'state', or some derivative thereof. I will even take Popularate over Country for a subdivision.