Cultural Cartography

A rose is a rose is a rose

Or is it? 

For obvious reasons (being 3 weeks away from giving birth) I have been thinking a lot about names recently. In particular about how names work and sound in different cultures. 

Our aim is to find a name for our baby that will not only exist in both English and German but that is also pronounced approximately the same. You would think that this is easy, but believe me it is not!! Because of course we both have to like what the name stands for as well. 

I have also realised that certain combinations just don't work in one language, when they work in the other. TH- being a rather obvious one in German. I also personally don't like starting a name without a strong syllable at the beginning. 

And of course there is all that talk about how a name can affect your personality - and if that wasn't bad enough, a friend told me yesterday that she was really interested to find out what we are going to call our baby. So am I!! 

Sometimes I wish we could just stick with our working title!! You won't find that on this list. 

More thoughts on this topic here 

Interesting Berlin 2010

 
 It is that time of year again - Well actually no. We are doing Interesting Berlin 2010 earlier this year than last. To be honest, mainly because I wanted to do it before my pregnancy turned into motherhood. 

It is going to be great this year. We have a cool new location which is much better suited for an evening of exciting and interesting presentations i.e. it has a stage and proper lighting and there are no holes in the roof so we don`t have to worry about it raining. We are at the Heimathafen, which is an old dance hall which has been reopened to do modern theatre for the people and of the people ("Volkstheater"). 

 

We are not letting talk more than 10 minutes, so there is even less danger of getting bored. And we have some great speakers. I can´t wait to find out what happens when it rains moon or what all the stupid questions that people ask when they get a tour of Berlin (Quote: So where is the wall then?) And much much more. 

We have sold lots of tickets but there are still some left. You can get them online or directly from the office at Heimathafen. 

Any other questions, just drop us a line: interestingberlin (at) gmx.de 

North of England

It has been a long time since I posted last but I have three good excuses: Pregnancy,  work and Interesting Berlin 2010. Another post to follow on that in particular. 

Maybe it is because we used to go there at the start of summer, but when I was surfing for something on the web, Stephen Smith´s website caught my eye so I decided to check it out. 

I couldn´t help smirking at the banner. 

Why? Because for so long coming from the North of England basically meant that you had a heart of gold but either had no money or you were very tight with it. (see wikipedia entry on Yorkshire - interesting I didn´t know that David Bowie´s father came from Tadcaster) It was a poor area which never really got going again after the End of the Industrial Revolution - outside of the city centres of Leeds and Manchester that is. But now all of a sudden the Internet allows you to make an asset of being "cheap"! I love it.