I have heard that in britain, for a city to be a city it must have a cathedral (otherwise it is just a big town).
Is this the same in all or most other countries?
I have also heard that a country is a country if it has it’s own military. Is this true? Are there more requirements for a country to be able to call it’self a country?
I dunno about cities. Unca Cece had a few words to say about countries in this column.
Certainly not true in the U.S. Here a city is just a municipal entity defined by each individual state. (Usually by population, but other factors may come into play. When you have 50 states you have 50 ways of thinking.) And of course separation of church and state would deny any legal civic public definitions depending on a religious institution.
And I’m pretty sure a country is a country when it has a sovereign government, i.e. one that is in control of the territory it claims. Most countries don’t have armies, judging from the size of many of the ones in the U.N.
Not necessarily. Scotland is a country, although its parliament is not sovereign (and it didn’t even have a parliament of its own for a few hundred years).
Political science types use this term (along with “nation”) fairly flexibly, often indicating places that may have once been sovereign and aren’t any more, but still have a distinct culture/ ethnicity/ language, etc.
To be a city in England and Wales (not exactly sure about Scotland Ireland) it must either already have a Cathedral of the Church of England or Church in Wales or be gifted city status by the monarch. This results in anomolies like Wells, a small town in Somerset having city status because of its cathedral and Milton Keynes (population over 200k) being a town because the establishment still thinks that its a bit naff!
Just to clarify Pjen’s point, a UK town doesn’t need to have a cathedral to be classed as a city. Several towns were elevated to city status for the Queens’ Golden Jubilee last year. Among the candidates mentioned in this report, Stirling doesn’t have a cathedral (although nearby Dunblane does), nor does Ayr (although it used to have a Catholic one), Paisley does, Dumfries does, Preston doesn’t, Newport does, Lisburn does, Newry has a Catholic cathedral.
There were 42 English towns competing with Preston, and most of those don’t have cathedrals. Brighton/Hove (no cathedral), Wolverhampton (no cathedral*) and Inverness (cathedral) were all granted city status for the Millennium.
Another “qualification” that is sometimes mentioned is whether or not the town has a university, but even that doesn’t always work, and there are several polytechnics and colleges that were converted to universities over the past few years without their locations becoming cities.
*Wolverhampton parish church has been referred to as its cathedral but only since the town’s status was upgraded in 2000.
As far as I know, the only qualification is having a royal charter. If the Queen says a town is a city, it’s a city (well, if the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs tells the Queen to say it’s a city, but you know what I mean). A few of the most ancient cities in Britain are cities through “ancient prescriptive usage”, i.e. just because they’ve always been cities, but most are cities because they were made cities by the monarch.
Historically it was connected with whether or not a city had a Cathedral - upon the creation of a bishopric the King would also make the place a city, but there is no formal connection. There are cities without cathedrals (the first, incidentally, was Birmingham) and there are cathedrals in towns (such as Blackburn).
In fact, the Dept for Constitutional Affairs doesn’t offer any criteria at all saying “the use of specific criteria could lead to a town claiming city status as of right: which in turn could devalue the honour.” http://www.lcd.gov.uk/constitution/city/citygj.htm
A country is a bit of a nebulous concept - somewhere between a nation and a state. A nation is a people - Scotland, for example, is a nation. A state is a an entity in international affairs, what we would normally call a “country”. However, as Ruadh says, “country” is a word you can use for different things - Scotland is normally referred to as a country - so it’s less confusing to use “nation” or “state”.
To be a State you need a couple of things -
A military isn’t strictly necessary - there are countries that don’t have any military forces such as Tuvalu or Nauru, but obviously if a country isn’t capable of defending itself from invaders it may not last very long as an independent state.
In purely statutory terms, the south of Ireland has five cities - Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford. This is due to the legal meaning of city here being bound up with having a ‘City Council’, formerly called Corporations. Informally though, places like Kilkenny are usually referred to as cities based on things like Cathedrals and Royal Charters, even though the municipal authority does not have the powers of a City Council.
ruadh: Is Scotland actually considered to be a country or merely a constituent state of the country of the United Kingdom?
Yes, this is a serious query (and my Dad’s family hails from Glasgow, btw (not that it matters, but I felt the need to mention that)).
In the U.S. (and I believe this is true for Canada and Australia as well), each state has a statutory definition of what constitutes a “city,” as opposed to village, town, or borough, and those places which have complied with the statute are what constitute cities. (I suspect some states require a separate act of the state legislature to confer cityhood on the particular prospective city in question.) [For Canada, read “province” for state.]
Off topic slightly but intriguing: while North Carolina divides its legal municipalities into cities and towns, the boundaries of both are described as the “city limits.” In New England and New York, the distinction is “city” and “village,” and “town” is what is a “township” elsewhere – but possessed of a legal government, unlike the purely-geographic townships down here.
The Principality of Sealand is an excellent case in point:
People in Scotland refers to it as a country, and it competes as a country in certain sports events (international football (soccer) and rugby union, principally), and many of its citizens have aspirations to be an independent nation, but that doesn’t make it a country, any more than Quebec or Catalonia is.
England is also referred to as a country, but as with Scotland that’s more a question of categorisation. There is a case for arguing that England and Scotland are separate kingdoms, but even that isn’t a sure thing.
The word country has a fairly standard meaning of independent state, based on international recognition and/or recognition by the UN. Being a country doesn’t require an army: Switzerland recently held a referendum on whether to abolish its armed forces, and had the proposal passed it would still have been a country. Being able to set your own foreign policy and control your own borders is sometimes specified as the mark of being a sovereign state rather than a territory or dependency.
Costa Rica, Panama, and Haiti officially have no “military” - having an army is banned by the Constitution in each of these countries. This is of course a technicality - Panama, at least, has “police” that look, act, and are armed like military. They do not, however, AFAIK, have heavy weapons (tanks, etc.).
A “constituent state of the country of the United Kingdom”? I can absolutely assure you that is terminology that nobody uses :eek:
I spend a lot of time in Scotland. It is definitely considered a country by the people who live there, and usually also by those in the rest of the U.K., where what you call the “constituent states” are more commonly referred to as the “home countries”.
“Constituent country of the United Kingdom” might be closer to the mark for Scotland. But don’t go calling Wales a country…it’s the “Principality of Wales” to its inhabitants.
As for cities, I have heard a few historians claim that in England a habitation had to have a cathedral and a jail to be considered a city. This is obviously bogus, as few medieval cities in England actually did have jails. More to the point, though, was that even in “olden times” most people didn’t draw the distinction between cities and towns in England. I’ve seen 16th-century government documents (handwritten…gotta love that secretary hand!) refer to the “citie of Gyppeswich” (Ipswich), which wasn’t a city, and the “towne of Sarum” (Salisbury), which was.
Huh. You must hang out with different Welsh people than I do.
Now that I think about it … it wasn’t that Tory Welsh friend of yours that told you this, was it? 
In Australia (well, New South Wales at least), it is population-based. Reach a certain figure and you automatically become a city. There is one weirdness though - it is based on the local government area, not the actual town itself. When I was a kid in the 1970s, I lived in a seaside small town / large village called Terrigal. This town was a part of the large Gosford Shire. The seat of the local govt, Gosford town itself, was a large-ish town about seven miles away. No way in heck though that any sane person would have called it a city. Sometime around 1980, however, the entire Gosford Shire (inclusive of all the little towns and villages as well as Gosford town) managed to scrape by the magic population figure and Gosford Shire became Gosford City. So when you’re standing in the main street of Gosford, and all you can see around you are hills and wilderness, you’ll know why it’s a city. Over those hills are lots of other towns in Gosford Shire…oops, City. I think it’s cheating.
Then you get other weird things like Sydney, population in the millions, which in some ways, didn’t qualify as a city because it didn’t have enough people. The sprawling LA-style metropolitan area is referred to as “Sydney” by most people in everyday usage, but technically it is not one entity, but thirty or so local government areas, some of which have enough population to be cities in their own right (I live in the City of Bankstown - in the heart of Sydney suburbia), and others which fall below that population mark and are municipalities. Now, because officially “Sydney” only refers to the relatively small downtown area, and it is mostly business and not residential, there was the strange situation where there weren’t enough people living in Sydney for it to be a city, and should have been a mere municipality! It always has been a city though, because its status as state capital places it under slightly different rules to the other local government areas - it has a Lord Mayor rather than a Mayor, and a few other bits and pieces.
In my home state of Maryland, some of the largest population areas (including Silver Spring, Bethesda, and Wheaton) are neither cities nor towns nor … anything else, really. They’re just unincorporated communities.
Ummm…he was one of them. 
OK, you got me there…I always thought he was odd in saying that–of course, how can you get odder than a Welsh Tory, anyway…
FWIW, most of my Welsh mates used to refer to Wales as “our land” or “our nation.” One has to take into account, of course, that they and I were part of Coleg Jesu, Welsh nationalism’s easternmost stronghold.