Just so. Argentinia too was often The Argentine, not so much now.
I seem to remember reading about a fusion of The Gambia and Senegal into a single country, Senegambia. Was I somehow inadvertently high when I read that and reading an imaginary article, or was this in the works and got sidelined (or is still in the works, but in the future)?
There was a ‘Senegambian’ confederation between 1982 and 1989, which was disbanded when the then Gambian President, Jawara, wanted a bigger say. This confederation was seen with trepidation by the Gambians because they thought it would eventually end up in The Gambia being absorbed into Senegal - which is not entirely far-fetched, as you might guess from the geographical layout of both countries. The confederation was sort of forced upon the Gambia following the 1981 coup in that country, at which time Senegal came in to save the day and restore rule to the democratically elected Jawara.
Ah…okay. I don’t feel TOO bad about missing that, since I only graduated high school in 1989, but I do have that “Wait…what?” feeling that I missed something that actually HAPPENED so completely. Welcome to American education…
Is there any real export market in cassava or yams (the African kind)? We in the States don’t eat those things much, and I bet Europe is the same way. Other African countries are probably pretty well self-sufficient in cassava and yams. Peanuts and their oils, on the other hand, are pretty widely consumed in the U.S. and Europe.
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As a data point i will say that “The Lebanon” is by far the most common form used in Ireland. The Irish army has a long history of serving there on UN missions that only ended in the lasts couple of years. The Irish media always referred to it as “The Lebanon”.
I think it’s already commendable to know there has been such a thing as Senegambia. I doubt that more than 25% of the population of any western country (or any country outside of Africa, for that matter) even know there’s such a country as The Gambia, let alone where it is situated in relation with Senegal.
I don’t think the American education is particularly to blame in this case (or at least not any more than any other education system).
You mean articles, not prepositions. Russian and Ukrainian have plenty of prepositions, including “u” (or “y” in Cyrillic) – hence the belief that the name “Ukraine” is from Old East Slavic ukraina “borderland”, from u “by, at” and the Slavic root kraj “edge; region”.
But I know that you know this and simply misspoke. One could hardly choose your username (which I love, by the way) without knowing the Czech preposition “u”. Otherwise, how would you find the pubs?
:smack: I knew that. Stupid me. What I meant is, since there’s no articles in most Slavic languages, the entire Ukraine vs The Ukraine debate is moot in those languages.
Don’t feel so bad. I think if you would survey knowledge on Gambian affairs worldwide - but not in The Gambia, you’d probably end up in the top .0001%. I was astonished someone brought this up.
I have never seen, much less consumed a yam or a cassave, so I don’t think there’s much of an export market, but I was thinking much more about internal consumption. I mean, this is one of the poorest countries even inside Africa, there’s the occasional drought and famine. Why grow peanuts? I mean, I like peanuts, but I don’t think there really good for nutritional value or anything.
Just a nitpick, but you meant articles, not prepositions in the above. Russian and Ukrainian have no articles (the, a and an in English.) Prepositions are a different part of speech (e.g. for, with, by, of, to)
There was some discussion above about the fact that The Gambia is composed of just the river and some areas around it. This brings to mind a bit of trivia about how the Senegal-Gambia border was determined. Back in the 1890s, they (the British and French negotiators, I assume) decided that the eastern part of the border would be a fixed distance from the river and that distance would be the maximum range of a certain British warship (which I assume was the longest range of any British warship at the time.) That range was 10 miles, I believe, so eastern section is a 20-mile wide worm-shaped area centered on the river.
When I first heard about this, I had the notion that they actually sent the warship up the river and had it lob cannon balls to either side and wherever those landed would be the boundary markers. Of course, they didn’t actually do that – they just drew the line at that 10-mile distance.
Actually, like many legumes they are an extremely nutritious food and in Africa they are crucial to the diet of a large number of people.
http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=101
Aside from a lot of protein and fats, they also contain vitamins and minerals.
Peanut-based foods are often given as supplements to treat e.g. Kwashiorkor and other malnutrition diseases.
:smack:
See post above, we all make mistakes, how long must a man suffer for typing the wrong word?
That’s an interesting anecdote, though, I’m definitely going to research that!
Presumably you mean the northern and southern borders, not the eastern border, which was at some point up the river.
That puzzled me for a moment, too, to the point where I was looking online for maps of the country, but I did eventually realize that dtilque meant the border for the eastern part of the country where the river narrows, and not the eastern border.
Exactly. The border around the eastern part of the country where the border is a squiggly line rather than the western part where it’s straight lines.
My atlas shows that the Gambia River actually extends some ways into Senegal to the east. No doubt there was some other factor (most likely navigibility) that determined how much of the river was used as a basis for the boundary.
Where I was, people ate peanut products with every meal- breakfast was millet porridge with peanut butter and lemon juice, lunch and dinner were millet balls with a sauce made from peanut butter, greens, and a small amount of meat, fish or cowpeas. Peanut snack food (salted, sweet, mashed and dried) were consumed throughout the day. Peanut oil was the standard cooking oil. I’d venture the majority of protein and fat calories came from peanuts. Even peanut greens were a common sauce ingredient.
Peanuts are a fairly nutritious crop. Areas with high peanut consumption see lower rates of kwashiorkor even when food is scarce. On the other hand, areas that rely on tropical tubers have high malnutrition rates even when there is plenty of food.
But perhaps most importantly, peanuts grow where other stuff doesn’t. Peanuts can grow in the bone dry soil you find in the sahel region. Yams and cassavas are wet, tropical plants. Rice needs flood plains, which you arn’t going to find in the savanna. You will find no savanna regions with a tuber based diet because tubers don’t grow there and even if the country includes tropical regions, the transportation system is too broken to make moving goods around the country affordable.
I’m sure it’s the nostalgia for the past rather than how they actually sound. Think about it- all those names conjure up the same images. It’s not the sounds that are romantic- it’s the images we associate with them. Chances are if the names stuck we wouldn’t even have those romantic “lost era” images associated with them and they’d be no more pretty than “Bolivia.”
The source is actually in Guinea, then flows into Senegal, then into The Gambia.