Speaking as an Anglo Scot who has travelled to a great many countries around the world, it is very,very much more common then in most countries.
There are many countries that have a lot more violent crime then the U.K., but alcohol fuelled fighting for the sake of it, not so much.
Totally loved the observation about Scots not needing to travel abroad for football related reasons !
It’s quite possible to be irritated with someone else’s “chip on the shoulder” attitudes. You can accuse me of the same if you want, but I’d rather we got along, and it seems to me that the Scots in general don’t make that easy. Of the Scots I’ve met, very few have missed the opportunity to make some comment if it’s at all relevant. You even brought attention to it yourself:
So much so that England is littered with Scots who are quite happy to live here. They’re clearly not all phobic. I know a good half dozen, and I don’t have a particularly wide social group. Certainly more numerous than Irish people, and there are plenty of them in England, too.
How do phonebooks work in Punjab? The majority of people are Sikhs and all Sikh men have the last name Singh and all Sikh women have the last name Kaur. Do the phonebooks just skip the last names and alphabetize everyone by their first name? And how do they include the Hindus and Muslims living there who do have last names?
I have never seen a Panjabi phone book but in general phone books have never been very widely used in India. In the city, most businesses display their phone numbers on the shop’s main sign.
As a an addicted fan along with so many others of the Swedish tv series The Bridge, and previously the Icelandic comedy Nightshift, can any Scandinavians give me more insight into "in " jokes about the different cultures etc.
I’ve visited Denmark and Sweden several times, though a few years ago now, and Iceland once, Norway never.
I remember that the Danes and the Swedes both accused each other of being mean with money, and the Swedes were supposed to be “cold” and the Danes very laid back.
Also just how different are the languages ?
Much is made in the series about I think, Danes being able to understand Swedish but not vice versa, (Or perhaps its the other way round ).
And how understandable is Norweigan and Icelandic,to the other Norse nationalities ?
Is Greenland Danish a different dialect from Danish Danish.
Are the differences of the sort between a Scotsman talking to an Englishman, or more pronounced then that ?
Any other background information would be appreciated.
Am hooked on Scandinavian Noir now, going to watch The Killing when I get an opportunity, also The Girl with the Dragon tatoo.
Tak !
I didn’t mean it just for phone books. How would they handle any situation where they had to form a list of people?
You should check out the webcomic Scandinavia and the World. It’s done by a Dane, Humon, and it’s about the national stereotypes (which Humon annotates so the rest of us can get the jokes).
Or in South Korea, which has only a handful of surnames. Or Vietnam, where about half the people have the surname Nguyen.
This is liable to vary from one country to another:
Are there countries that don’t bother to list eye and hair color on IDs? In countries where 99% of the population has brown eyes and black hair, it doesn’t seem very much use unless you’re dealing with the tiny minority.
Actually the name situation in India is far more complicated than you could imagine.
But first I’ll say that you don’t have the rule quite right. “Singh” must be among a Sikh man’s names. It isn’t always the last name. A lot of Sikhs have a different family, tribe, clan, or caste name at the end. The same is true for “Kaur” and women. In fact, I don’t encounter too many Sikh women who even bother including the “Kaur” in their legal names. I’m sure it’s more common among less cosmopolitan Sikhs.
But the larger issue is that in India as a whole, there are no rules regarding names. Some groups use family names like in Anglo-American culture. Some have no family names. Some have caste, clan, or tribal names. Some use patronymics. It’s all a big jumble. Any official document on which it is necessary to precisely identify someone will ask for further information, like father’s name and village.
Formal bodies also have a tendency to enforce their own rules regarding names. For example, Calcutta University always changes family names like Banerji, Chatterji, Ganguli, and Mukherji to Bandyopadhyay, Chattopadhyay, Gangopadhyay, and Mukhopadyay for their official records. And the government of Maharashtra gives all girls a patronymic, even if they come from a family or ethnic group that doesn’t use patronymics.
Why?
It’s kind of complicated, but basically what it comes down to is that the university considers the latter forms to be the “real” forms of those particular names and the former to be Anglicizations. Almost any serious literary form in Bengali, whether a literary magazine or a film, will often apply the same rule. For example, one of the most famous serious Bengali actors of the latter half of the 20th century is known in English as Soumitra Chatterjee, but in Satyajit Ray’s films he’s always credited (in Bengali) as Soumitra Chattopadhyay.
In Bengali, with rare exceptions, there’s only one way to write a name. You can’t really invent new spellings, for example, or have variations on spelling.
Born in the US in 1961, so I was around for much of the end of the Cold War.
We got filled with stories about the evil menace of communism, mainly just after WW2 through the end of the 50s it was seriously nasty - a few politicians started an inquisition [McCarthy Era] that seriously trashed civil rights in the US. Lots of apocalyptic literature and films got made. They tried innoculating us with fear starting in school.
I bet your Grandmother was interesting. We didn’t have anywhere near the hardship in the US, we didn’t get physically invaded [well mostly, the Japanese actually landed on one of the Aleutian Islands, and launched some airborn firebombs at us, and the Germans actually landed some spies a couple times. We had submarines and some other vessels off the US coastline at one point. I think there are a few German subs sunk in US waters.]
There were females in the soviet military, just like there were in the US military. I was offered a chance to attend our Army officer academy [West Point] but turned it down. Shortly after that I broke my back in an accident and was rendered unable to join the military even if I had wanted to.
I joined the Republican Party [I flipped a coin to pick] because to vote in certain elections you need to be registered to a party.
We lived for 5 years in military housing, and then Mom, my brother, sister and I were moved back to one of the family houses in the US when Dad went to Saigon for 3 years, and then he was rotated back to the US for his ‘twilight tour’.
Other than 5 years I really don’t remember, and another year at a school in France in high school I have always lived in the US, though we do vacation outside the US.
Hm. I like certain aspects of living in the states, though sometimes I get very frustrated at the people who don’t bother voting or otherwise participating in government. Then they complain about some aspect or another. If you don’t participate, you have no right to complain. I also get upset at some of the idiots who seem to think that there are government conspiracies everywhere, and other morons who feel that gays shouldn’t have the same right to be happy because they have some ancient cult telling them that their diety said so [when there really isn’t anything in the bible about gay sex being evil … ] or them trying to tell females what they can and can not do with their bodies, again because of some ancient cult.
This is what the Icelandic phone book does, since most Icelanders do not have surnames as the rest of us understand them. The phone book alphabetizes people by first name, then patronymic (or matronymic), and uses address and occupation to sort out people with the same name combinations.
As for stereotypes within Scandinavia, I thought it was Norwegians who were supposed to be the skinflints? Also to have a funny mix of being pietistic and being like a kid in the candy store with our relatively newfound oil wealth.
Norwegians and Swedes both call the other dumb, and tell frequently identical jokes about how dumb the other guys are. Norwegians stereotype Finns as not being the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, either, but also obsessed with fighting, sex, and alcohol, not necessarily in that order. Danes are mostly seen as laid-back and happier than the rest of the Nordic folks, and… well, those people consider Gammel Dansk a breakfast drink. That can’t be quite normal.
Or yeah, read Scandinavia and the World.
There are countries that list eye and hair color on IDs?.. Never heard of that… What if you want to dye your hair or use contacts? Does that cause any kind of problem?
I didn’t say “every single Scottish person who has ever lived hates the English” I said “all the Scots people I know”, the numerical values of those two are slightly different 
Only slightly mind 
So… any dumb questions you want to ask an Israeli?
A lot of state-issued IDs in the United States, such as driver’s licenses list hair color, eye color and weight. I guess you’re supposed to give the answers that will match your appearance, even if it’s not natural.
If you’re using contacts in a state-issued ID (in the US) because of vision problems, it is also noted in said ID. There is a part that lists some dissabilities (restrictions) by code, including hearing and vision problems. For example, in mine it says I need to drive with either glasses or contact lenses. Even if my eyes were different from the stated color (they aren’t), if I’m stopped someone can more easily figure out it is because of my contact lenses.