I cannot resist… I have to tell… when they did it, they had non-stop media coverage, as much as could possibly be done.
An hour or two after traffic switched, TV broadcast from Svinesund, the biggest of the road crossings to Norway, and a major route for road haulage, and a reporter said something like "here we have the driver of a Norwegian 18-wheeler, <name>. Well, <name>, what do think of the big reform?" Norwegian, looking a little dense and speaking slowly: "Uh, what reform?" There was big signage everywhere. The reporter tried dropping a hint, the Norwegian truck driver refused to have noticed any change in the driving rules. Camera showed the very big 18-wheeler. The reporter dropped increasingly clearer hints and looked discomfited, the Norwegian still said "no, what reform, is anything new?" and eventually they cut the interview and switched back to the studio.
This almost sounds like a sketch since Sweden has “Norway jokes” where the punchline is consistently how dumb Norwegians are — a structure that I’m sure is mirrored in Norway and similarly in other countries (england/scotland, france/belgium maybe?)
In Norway we have the exact same jokes about the Swedes.
One quip which did the rounds in the papers prior to the Swedes starting to drive on the right was that they would perform the switch in several phases - first heavy traffic, then cars a month later...
> In Norway we have the exact same jokes about the Swedes
This is a fairly recent development. When I moved to Sweden in the 1970s, it was so bad I learned Swedish at accelerated rate in order to avoid the kneejerk compulsion of many (if not most) Swedes to tell their favorite jokes about how dumb Norwegians seemed to be. No doubt a consequence of century-old rivalry and the fact that Sweden during the early part of the last century was the larger, richer, most industrialized and organized society in comparison. And they believed much of it to be actually true, in the way that derogatory humor always evokes some degree of "no smoke without fire." To this day, I meet swedes who are surprised at hearing that bananas are not actually called "gulebøj" in Norway (bended yellow) - a reference to how Norwegian is not as anglicized as Swedish, as there has been a pushback against this trend in Norway historically. As Norway has become progressively richer these jokes in Sweden about Norwgians have more or less disappeared however.
The notion that Norwegians nowadays have the same jokes about Swedes is something I hear repeated, but it saddens me nonetheless because it doesn't rhyme with the spirit I remember from my childhood. If true, then it means that a fair number of my present (Swedish) countrymen are being denigrated, perhaps because Norway can now pride themselves on being the richest (real) country in the world per capita, so rich that a lot of swedes migrate here to take the worst paid jobs in restaurants and in hospitals. They are popular as employees because they understand the language and are hard working. And probably because they can take denigrating jokes, maybe because well, they used to do it too. But it's not all that funny, really.
Well, not everybody's idea of good fun I guess, friendly nations or not.
But what do I know, I only visit Norway once in a blue moon nowadays. I have actually yet to hear a good "swede joke" at all actually; maybe they are just a myth?
> I have actually yet to hear a good "swede joke" at all actually; maybe they are just a myth?
Perhaps most of the good Swede jokes moved to Minnesota?
(seriously, a bunch of the intra-scandinavian humor seems to be of Scandahoovian-American origin. Like the "10,000 Swedes chased through the weeds / by one Norwegian" thing.)
Similar jokes were made when the outlook for a Swedish NATO ascension was bad. The much more cool-headed and diplomatically grounded Finns were set to join NATO without trouble. So the solution was obvious: Sweden should join Finland instead of NATO.
Relevant context is that Norway was the junior partner of a personal union with Sweden for most of the nineteenth century and until 1905. Also Sweden and Finland was one and the same realm for six centuries or so until 1809.
As a Norwegian I have bonded with Swedes on several occasions over having the same jokes about each other. Not that the jokes are always geniously funny or anything, but that would be both an unrealistic expectation and completely unnecessary. Some unserious rivalry is fantastic to have among friends.
I'm Norwegian, born in '75 and we visited Sweden on holiday regularly, and exactly the same jokes were common when I was a child, with the nationalities swapped.
the only Norge jokes I heard (in California) were about the cowardice of Swedes in battle.. nothing about being dumb.. that was well before the year 2000, admit
I have no idea if the Scots think or joke that the English are stupid, but can say that the English have a joke pattern of "An Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman…" and it's always and only the Irish who are picked on.
It is/was the same pattern in Norway and Sweden, and to some extent Denmark, with those three. I suspect a whole lot of these were recycled by publishers of cheap joke books and magazines.
Supposed to be real. And it's not typical of the Norwegian/Swede genre — in that the direction is clear, while here it might be either a dumb Norwegian driver or a Swedish journalist having his leg pulled.
Having a non-binding referendum and moving against the 85% vote takes balls. And we're forever greatful that they did. Presumably people thought it would be inconvenient and voted no, while politicians realized the cost of doing it later would be much larger than just ripping the band aid off. At the time, the number of massive motorway crossings and similar was probably nearly zero. Today the cost would be unimaginable. We would have caved in the 70s at the latest, and at a cost many times larger.
My optimistic take on this is that the politicians of the time had the actual peoples' best interests at heart and realized that even though the change was unpopular, it was the right thing to do and that people would eventually realize that. I'm sure very few of those 83% held their opinion a few years after the change.
Also 83% is really a lot... While seemingly obviously correct now, the vast majority didn't see it that way then. I can only assume that If I was there I would be against it too.
Nowadays with mass media and powerful almost immediate public reaction to government, such "you'll thank me later" moves seem less likely, and arguably, we are worse off for it.
> Nowadays with mass media and powerful almost immediate public reaction to government, such "you'll thank me later" moves seem less likely, and arguably, we are worse off for it.
The problem isn't mass media, the problem is that they did use this card many times over the past decades to promote neoliberal policies, and in retrospect it's clear that nobody is thanking them.
The main lesson is that you can indeed force things on people, and when you do so for good reasons you'll be thanked later, but you must do it wisely and be sure that people will thank you, otherwise you're just destroying public's confidence in politicians (which doesn't matter to the neoliberals anyway, since they don't think State is a valuable institustion in the first place…)
It's funny. It took cowardice to declare the referendum, and then they were forced into having even bigger balls than if they had done the right thing in the first place.
Re-frame the question "I have to re-learn something" vs "I can just keep on doing what I am doing today", and I think you're pretty close to the answer.
I think a large part were just ”no” to anything. Few I imagine were against right hand traffic but many simply resisted change.
Only just half of voters voted, however.
I didn't expect Swedes to be so contrarian for the sake of it. Surely nobody likes to put the whole car in the oncoming lane every time to check if you can even start overtaking...
Interesting how changing up the side of the road drivers use elevated their attention, resulting in less accidents, until the activity became second nature again.
The relatively smooth changeover saw a temporary reduction in the number of accidents... These initial improvements did not last, however. The number of motor insurance claims returned to "normal" over the next six weeks
Traffic accident rates briefly dropped as drivers overcompensated for the increased risk from driving on the unfamiliar side of the road, before returning to the level following the trend prior to the changeover.
Yes, it's a thing that makes it hard for city planners and transport engineers when they test out new things. Any change often improves status quo in the start, so need to run it for long enough to actually gather valid data.
When I first visited Kuala Lumpur in Indonesia I was dumbfounded how there wasn't endless car accidents. The taxi from the airport was one of the scariest things in my life. Roads marked with 3 lanes had cars 5 abreast with scooters and motorbikes still finding just enough space to lane split.
It really seemed like chaos to me. Didn't see a single bingle.
In early 2001, my wife and I visited the beautiful country of New Zealand. The travel books told us to be aware that traffic flows opposite from the US. When we collected our rental car in Invercargill, there was a sticker near the steering wheel that read: "To stay alive, drive on the left!".
We had a good laugh and drove away from the airport. We soon discovered that the raised middle finger was international. :)
You probably also saw the arrows on the road itself as a reminder of the correct direction of travel. Those are always near any places tourists are likely to stop, since after a break it's common to forget which side to be on.
Yes, and they were a much needed reminder. After a couple of days we had the direction figured out, although I still got confused entering a parking lot sometimes.
There is a joke, that in order to facilitate such a change, it should be done in more manageable steps. So on day 1, only the motorcycles switch over to the other side of driving, on day 2 the motor vehicles, and on day 3 the trucks and busses switches over...
One surprising (after we got a ticket..) thing about parking laws in Sweden is that you're also only allowed to park on the right side of the road / with the car in the direction of the traffic. This has the benefit of that when you're leaving the street parking, you are sitting close to the lane and can look behind you for coming cars and only cross one lane. Compared to parking on the "wrong" side, where you're sitting on the opposite side of the lane in your car, having your view of the opposing lane blocked by the parked car in front of you.
As a cyclist I wish we had the same rule where I live. Far too often a car parked on the street will not see me when they try to exit their spot, as it's only when half the front of the car is in the cycle lane they actually can see past the other car.
As a Swede it amazes me that some countries allow parking "in the wrong direction". I've never even thought about it, and I don't know if it's a written rule (I'm sure it is, just it;s been a long time since I got my license).
In finland this has been allowed since a few years ago. It is quite useful on narrow sidestreets in residential areas where it helps hunting for parking spaces.
The biggest problem seems to be that now many misinterpret the law that one must leave 5 meters empty space before pedestrian crossings as being measured from the front of the car, ie not applying when parking on the ”wrong” side
Also it seems less understood or followed rule is that it is also technically 5 meters from any crossing lane. And then sometimes whole intersection is very nebulous. As pedestrian crossing can be faraway from intersection and still be part of intersection...
You don't have to go further than Norway to be allowed to park on both sides of the street (unless indicated otherwise by signs) as well as park in both directions.
I believe many Norwegians have received parking tickets when visiting Sweden because if this difference. I wasn't aware of this myself until recently.
Where do you live?! You couldn't park facing the wrong way in any big city in America, either. Maybe on small residential streets it's not always enforced.
Norway. It might be more common than I anticipate, just weird that we've been parking in Sweden for decades not knowing this and never having received a ticket. I guess it has helped that it until a few years ago was quite hard to enforce tickets on foreign cars, so maybe they just skipped us and thus we never learned our lesson.
Seattle is noteworthy for being going against the norm in this case. As a midwesterner, it definitely surprised me to see so many "contra-parked" cars the first time I visited Seattle. It was one of those things that was just so deeply ingrained that it never occurred to me to park against traffic like that.
Ah yeah. I live in Portland and this is pretty uncommon here now, but I have seen it in Seattle more often on steep hills, which makes some sense. At least in the old days with a manual transmission, parking facing uphill was safer (wheels toward the street, too). The Seattle area is also weird in that it used to be the only place in America where 4-way intersections had no stop signs at all. No one knew if you should stop. No one party had the right of way. This went for most residential streets around there in the '90s... not sure how it is now.
Something interesting is that roads don’t have the same properties if you just drive them the other direction.
It’s not something you will immediately notice by just looking at the road, you have to think of the full picture.
Imagine a fork vs a merge. You have buffer zones for off-ramps. Tight merges. Psychology of drivers. Reaction to signage.
All this alters the flow of traffic and create undesired bottlenecks.
In the bigger cities you can still find a few examples of such originally left roads around, with less ideal flow. Usually around tunnels where rework is difficult.
The somewhat hidden (non financial) cost seems to have been giving up on some of the existing public transport services - like trams. The Wikipedia article mentions that briefly towards the end.
The trams were already on the way out in the 1950's, they were seen as a thing of the past that were inhibiting the development of the new car-centric urban areas. Several systems closed well before H-day, in the 50's and early 60's. The ones that closed on or around H-day were mainly in Stockholm and in Helsingborg.
In Stockholm, plans had been made as early as the 1940's to gradually replace the tram network with the metro, and that did in fact happen. Today's green and red metro lines do in fact use old tram line alignments to a pretty significant extent (the younger blue line was all new and mostly blasted out of the bedrock deep underground). In 1957 the city council formally decided that the tram networks should be gone by the mid-1970's, at which time most of the infrastructure and rolling stock would have been considered end-of-life. All H-day did was accelerate this by a couple of years. Two suburban lines were kept though and they survive to this day, but at least up until the 1990's their future was kind of uncertain. Things finally changed in the mid-90's, and new light rail alignments started to get built again.
It was not done throughout, but cities with trams with doors on only one side posed a problem. So it is my understanding that when such retrofits would have been to costly, the trams were decommissioned instead.
It's barely noticeable except when I come back from abroad and expect train doors to open on the wrong side, it happens maybe a couple of times until I get used to it again.
For trains the door side is hardly ever standard, even if the train always uses a certain track out of 2 directional ones. Some stations have center platforms, others have side platforms. Maybe there is some network in the world with only one type, but in most cases they come in a mix.
Doesn't need to be related to left-handed past. Just imagine those lanes were the other way around, then if you and me were going on Valhallavägen opposite directions and wanted to U turn over there at the same time then we can easily be in the way of each other.
When you have two multi lane one way roads going opposite ways and want add a two-way connection between them then you often want to put lanes the opposite of normal way. Another example is all roads connecting Chiang Mai's old city outer and inner circle road. The country is left-handed but those connecting roads are right handed, the opposite of Stockholm intersection
I haven't seen any historical maps of the road so I no longer have any reason to believe it stems from that. I was just going based on that (flawed) logic.
The "see also" section links to a similar changeover in Okinawa which mentions that a country having more than one traffic direction is in violation of the Geneva convention (on road traffic) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Convention_on_Road_Tr...
If this is a violation, the United States needs to fix its own problem. Left driving is the rule in the US Virgin Islands, and it's especially dangerous because (like Sweden before 1967) most cars there have left-hand steering and the roads are narrow.
“American territories are under American sovereignty and, consequently, may be treated as part of the United States proper in some ways and not others (i.e., territories belong to, but are not considered to be a part of, the United States). Unincorporated territories in particular are not considered to be integral parts of the United States, and the Constitution of the United States applies only partially in those territories.”
(This kind of stuff can be very convolutrd. There are parts of France that aren’t in the EU, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_France: “Overseas France (French: France d'outre-mer, also France ultramarine)[note 3] consists of 13 French territories outside Europe, mostly the remains of the French colonial empire that remained a part of the French state under various statuses after decolonization. Most, but not all, are part of the European Union”)
> changing to driving on the right reduced accidents while overtaking, as people already drove left-hand drive vehicles, thereby having a better view of the road ahead
They already used left-hand drive vehicles but rode on the left?? That's just ridiculous and obvious why they switched...
It should go beyond that, a second official language, so that all signs, documents and government interactions should be just as valid in both languages.
I think that if it were to become a official second language that would be a natural second step, if nothing else just for efficiency in regions that currently have multiple languages.
I am fluent in one language and speak three others passably, and have order-a-beer/ask-for-a-toilet/get-directions ability in a few others. It does not matter to me which language I use to communicate. Why should it? The one I am fluent in is not the language of any of my ancestors if I go back just a couple of generations. So what?
My children are natively fluent in two languages. Neither of their languages is a second language.
Which language should I tell them is their primary language?
Are you trying to make a point or..? It's a bit unclear. People can have multiple languages they're native in, that doesn't mean we should try to replace every language with English.
> that doesn't mean we should try to replace every language with English
Where did I say that everyone should speak only English? I do not care what language people speak.
> Are you trying to make a point or..?
Why are you being unkind? Or hostile, or whatever this is?
I was asking a question. I understand that people think they will lose something if they speak a different language. My native language is not the same as any of my ancestors from just a few generations ago, and I want to know what difference it makes?
Speaking a different language than your great great great grandfather ("a few generations ago") is not always very impactful, though even this means you can no longer read letters or poetry or novels that they may have written or just loved. You can no longer understand laws that they might have obeyed, understand speeches that influenced them, and so many other things that keep a culture going beyond generations.
However, that pales in comparison to what the transition means, not speaking the same language as your grandparents. You get a huge gulf of distance from relatives who, for the majority of humanity, are some of their most beloved and close relationships.
Language and culture go hand in hand. I don't understand how you've learnt 1 fluently and 3 passably and are deemingly completely missing this aspect to it. So to standardize language is to attempt to standardize culture which I would imagine we don't wanna do, right?
And it doesn't matter what your ancestors spoke, of course. But it does matter what those around you speak, now. Neither the person you originally responded to or me have mentioned ancestors.
Usually people have one primary language which is usually the one predominantly used in the home they grew up in (or maybe the one used for their primary education).
If you have multiple, that's fine, but your disregarding the reality for 90%+ of people if you don't think most people have a language that is their "primary".
> It does not matter to me which language I use to communicate. Why should it?
For most people language is tied to their culture and history. I'm just saying that we should not mandate that people use a certain language as their "primary". It would be nice if we had a global way to passably communicate though.
I think something changed culturally as well. When my parents grew up any moderately educated person was expected to speak different several different languages.
Very few in my generation speak three languages, even in my rather international field. Yet my older colleagues speak french, German and Spanish like it is nothing. And my international colleagues often speak 4+ languages.
I am fine with English being a de facto Lingua Franca, but I can't help feeling something has been lost.
Speaking and using professionally is not the same. One of my friends speaks 6-7 languages, but can't use most of those for work, it's better to know 2 sufficiently well than imagining yourself being a polyglot.
Yeah, I get what you are saying. I would never want to mandate any language. I think it is dumb when countries have official languages as opposed to e.g. operating languages.
I just think that people are more worried about the homogenization of language than they need to be. In fact, with how quickly culture is homogenizing around the world, I think that it is even possible that language differences outlast cultural differences over the medium term. Teenagers in a lot of the world I have been to in the past years dress/behave/express themselves ... not very differently.
Everywhere I go in the world, old shit is different, but modern shit is depressingly the same, or really similar anyway.
> Everywhere I go in the world, old shit is different, but modern shit is depressingly the same, or really similar anyway.
That seems like a very reductive take. Of course trends and culture is more global since we now communicate globally, but there are definitely regional cultures and values and those are expressed many different ways.
If I travel from my small european city to a city in the american midwest or a city in nigeria that are going to be massive differences regardless if the teens are doing the same tiktok dance or whatever metric of homogenization you pick. But in all of those places I almost everyone I will meet can speak english.
I imagine having offical languages dictates that all the state functions have to operate in said official languages. If you have a government office for example, your website, pamphlets, administered tests etc for example have to be printed in the official language. Would be a mess if that was not enforced
Having worked in an international organization where most people communicated in English and most people were ESL, going back to a company where my native language was the norm was a huge benefit in clarity of communications.
Languages certainly form how we think, a universal language undoubtedly leads to worse communication and worse ideas.
Sure, but how would I teach my children English as a first language, when my English is only ESL. And even if I could, I would never do that, as a diversity in languages directly leads to a diversity in thought.
I agree about diversity in languages being a good thing. I also see minor languages gradually dying out.
First languages do change with time so it does happen, and it can be induced to happen. My grandparents all spoke English as a first language, but if you go back a few more generations only one of my great (or possibly great great) grandparents ancestors would have done.
Diversity in thought is great, but I don't think that distinct native languages are a prerequisite for that. Throughout history, the societies that were able to achieve the greatest accomplishments, according to most any measure, are those with the most people using the same language.
I (native dane) work in robotics. Our company has a disproportionate amount of non-danes employed, who also are not native english speakers. I've been reading and writing english since I was very young, but having almost never spoken it makes face-to-face communication challenging. And not only that, but I encounter colleagues conversing in Hindi, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Greek etc. Any of those conversations is one I'm locked out of, and unable to contribute to. It's really a Tower Of Babel type of situation here. Effective communication is a frustrating chore, especially since we're talking about highly technical subjects. Upper management thinks our diversity is a strength, but I'm just not seeing it from where I'm sitting.
In my next job, this is a situation I will seek to avoid.
> I encounter colleagues conversing in Hindi, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Greek etc. Any of those conversations is one I'm locked out of, and unable to contribute to.
This is really rude of them, and it's something management should work very hard to fix. Because as you say, in addition to being rude it's terribly inefficient for the company. If they employ people from all over the world, they should probably mandate English as the only allowed language in just about any situation.
If you have speakers of different languages in a conversation or group, it's just common sense to use a language everyone can understand and use.
Yes, it's easier for Danes to speak Danish when four out of five in the group understand it, but standing around there being the fifth person who can't understand a word of what's being said is not a nice experience.
>And not only that, but I encounter colleagues conversing in Hindi, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Greek etc. Any of those conversations is one I'm locked out of, and unable to contribute to.
I had that happen on occasion, every time it felt pretty exclusionary and somewhat rude, so I tried to always speak in english if that was the only common language among people tangentially involved in a conversation.
But even that is certainly not ideal, it has been pretty clear to me that, even though I have absolutely no problem speaking and understanding English, talking to a native speaker in my native language leads to much quicker and clearer communication.
Driving on the left
Speaking creole
The metric system
The 09/06/2024 date format
The Kelvin scale
The french decimal time system
The AuthaGraph projection
Would you please stop posting low-value comments that break the site guidelines? They explicitly ask you not to (a) go on about downvotes or (b) sneer at the rest of the community.
I can agree on all of the points except "Speaking English". The way things are going it's going to be either that or mandarin regardless, but there's so much culture in language that IMO it'd be a shame to hurry it up.
English is more likely than Mandarin, because lots of people (including the mainland Chinese working in sectors that interface with the outside world) can speak some English, but very few people outside China speak any Mandarin.
I don't know enough about Mandarin to have an opinion on it.
The language has more characters than what fits on a keyboard, right? I wonder how typing on a keyboard feels. I guess only people who have experience in writing Mandarin and English can compare the feeling.
Writing Mandarin with pinyin is way easier, you just type the first letter of each sound in a sentence. “I like to eat ice cream” is 我喜歡吃冰淇淋, written entirely by the letter sequence wxhcbql.
Not worth discussing until some serious improvements to the spelling system. Currently learning it requires learning two obnoxiously independent systems, the written and the spoken.
On a serious note: compared to the other inconsistencies, this seems like a very minor one. If we wanted to standardize time, we should agree on ONE timezone across the world. But of course that seems almost impossible: Having to convince 8 billion people on a change that has little benefit in their everyday life.
How would one timezone work? The sun sets at 8:00 in one place and sets at 20:00 on the other side of the world?
In terms of working or traveling between time zones, it seem like it would be much harder to remember the fact that, for instance, people in New York stop work when the clock says 17:00 and people in LA work until 20:00, than to remember that they are three time zones apart.
IIRC the more serious proposals for a global time scheme deliberately abandon the old 24:60:60 so that daylight expectations, locally as they would be, would have to be re-learned anyways. Up to that point that doesn't sound that bad to me. But where i don't see any chance is durations, how many seconds/minutes/hours. I suspect that a change to duration units would be even harder to adapt to than metrification of lengths.
I propose infinite timezones, you simply calculate the true noon from your latitude. Smartphones can do that for us.
The time at your workplace would be some minutes off the time at your home. And when your phone is off, you are screwed.
It's like in the old days before railroads when every town had it's own time, but even worse.
That’s the opposite of what we should do. If a plant monoculture is susceptible to diseases, then a language monoculture is susceptible to mind-viruses. What would the world look like now if every country spoke German in 1933?
That was already sort of the case though, at least among the intellectuals.
Up until WWII, a huge part of the scientific discourse was held in German. The language's relevance had waned a bit by 1933, but it was still a widely spoken and understood language in Europe, much more so than today.
Mostly the same as today, if that was the only difference?
Same language is a result of cultural similarity much more so than a cause for it. If there is no political or cultural pressure to speak the same language, they relatively quickly diverge.
What I was implying is, language barriers are a firewall against charismatic, manipulative psychopaths trying to brainwash you into doing unspeakable things.
They do so by turning "he has a point" into "who is this funny little moustache guy and why does he sound so angry?"
But having one gives a platform for those narratives to spread and potentially become dominant.
To be clear, I'm not saying freedom of press between countries should be eliminated (quite the contrary!), only that diversity of languages should be preserved. In my opinion, this does two things:
1. Allows more diverse ideas to come into being, as language directly affects on one's way of thinking.
2. Slows the spread of dangerous ideas, due to some of their appeal (or the charisma of their advocates) being lost in translation.
While I fully agree with you that the diversity of languages should be cherished, not squashed, I don't think those are good arguments. We've gone over argument 2 and why I don't think it works in the other thread.
For argument 1, that is known as the Sappir-Whorf hypothesis, is mostly discredited, at least in its stronger versions. By and large, people speaking the same language have a huge variety of differences of ideas, but you can also find areas with remarkable cultural similarity between people speaking different languages.
For an example of why this is not true in practice, look at Canada. The French speaking parts of Canada have far more in common with the rest of Canada and with the USA then they do with France, and even more so compared to Guinea or French Guiana.
The reason why language diversity should be preserved instead is that it gives access to a trove of cultural history that would be lost and forgotten, at least outside of scholarly circles, if it people could no longer understand it. This is by far the most problematic for oral cultural history, but even for written culture it is highly relevant.
Sapir-Whorf states that language affects the way you perceive reality. I only stated that it affects your way of thinking, i.e. the set of ideas you are capable of having. It is ironic that the existence of this very concept in the English language, "Sapir-Whorf", has a gravitational effect that makes one associate similar ideas with it and automatically label them as wrong. This is a tool very often used in politics, and it only works if the idea you want to discredit has a sufficiently close relative in your language with a succinct name and a negative connotation.
For example, Westerners often label Japan as "xenophobic" (as did Biden recently), while the Japanese themselves do not see themselves as such. I theorize this is at least partly because the Japanese counterpart of "xenophobia" literally translates back as "foreigner hatred", which is a much stronger expression than "foreign-fear". This makes any argument using that expression sound ridiculous. "I'm not refusing to rent my house out to you because I hate you; I just don't know where you're coming from, what your lifestyle is like, and whether you pose a flight risk." This is within the gravity well of "xenophobia"; it is not within the gravity well of "外国人嫌悪". It is much harder to make the same argument when the language itself is working against you.
As to your other comment, a populist tells people what they want to hear. Any actual "cause" is only a means to an end for them. And Hitler was so good at being a populist that people wept at his speeches and became wholly subservient to his agenda. I think this was mostly due to his mastery of the language. It was the advertising slogans, not whatever he was selling. Had he had a larger audience to speak to, he would have changed the narrative accordingly.
The Sappir-Whorf hypothesis is precisely related to cognition, ideas, and not perception of reality. In fact, the only aspect of linguistic relativism that was somewhat confirmed was the part related to color perception, so you seem to have this reversed.
One of the more infamous notions of purely cognitive S-W that dorm peddle that is entirely discredited is the idea that people who speak gendered languages tend to associate "feminine qualities" with feminine nouns describing even inanimate objects, and "masculine qualities" with the reverse. This has been measured in various ways and is simply false.
I would bet that your example of "foreigner hatred" vs "xenophobia" would also turn out to be wrong if studied. The much, much more likely reason Japanese people don't consider themselves xenophobic is that people don't typically think of themselves as holding bad views. I would bet lots of English-speaking white nationalists also don't consider themselves xenophobic for the same reason.
Finally, I think your outlook on the level to which Hitler manipulated the German people is highly optimistic about human nature. I think it's unfortunately quite clear that people didn't need a lot of sophisticated convincing to do what they did in WWII, they wanted to do most of that and all they needed was someone who would allow and organize them. And to be clear, I'm not only speaking of the German people here - atrocities against Jewish people and other minorities were committed in many European countries where people didn't speak an ounce of German, they just needed to be let loose. Including, shamefully, my own country (Romania), to be clear that I'm not just pointing fingers at others.
Sapir-Whorf, in its original form, claims language influences your perception of reality. Its "stronger" form, linguistic determinism, claims language determines your thoughts. I claim neither of those things. I claim that, since language, as a highly intellectual cognitive function, obviously has some sort of effect on your thoughts (but not to the point of determining them), having more of them makes us, as a collective, capable of having ideas we might not have had otherwise, some of which might be effective vaccines against mind-viruses (or mind-viruses themselves, in which case it's lucky we're not a monoculture).
That language affects thinking isn't the extraordinary claim, its contrary is. It is hard to believe that your method and efficiency of solving a problem is invariant to the format in which you represent that problem, especially when that format can be so varied.
> I think it's unfortunately quite clear that people didn't need a lot of sophisticated convincing to do what they did in WWII
They needed a decade of sophisticated propaganda and indoctrination, and even a change in the language itself, with words like "Übermensch" and "Lebensraum" being added to the dictionary. It didn't happen overnight.
I also don't know where you're getting the claim from that the countries where the Holocaust took place "didn't speak an ounce of German", given that a large part of it took place on former Austria-Hungary territory where German was presumably the most prevalent second language. But even supposing they didn't, how would that disprove my point? I'm not saying language barriers make you immune to mind-viruses, I'm saying they can slow down their spread. The effects of this one were devastating, but they could have been much more devastating without any language barrier whatsoever. Because one country I can realistically believe not to have spoken an ounce of German is the UK. And they had no shortage of like-minded individuals either, but the local moustache man, Mosley, while said to be a good orator, was no Hitler. I think the public having the ability to understand what Hitler was saying would have been demoralizing at best and galvanizing at worst. It definitely wouldn't have helped Churchill's cabinet, which at one point already had half the mind to strike a deal with him.
I'm aware that this is just a form of security through obscurity, but practice shows that security through obscurity often works. Might not be the strongest argument for preserving languages, but in my mind, a language monoculture is just like any other monoculture, with all its drawbacks.
They had Europe's most accomplished public speaker and its best propagandist at their disposal, both of whom had a better understanding, or at least a more insidious approach, to crowd psychology than perhaps anyone at the time.
This is a cute ideea and one I'm sure many have believed over the years, and one that Charlie Chaplin perhaps made most famous with his gibberish-spewing dictator character.
However, in my opinion, the truth is that Hitler's ideas and the way they fit German culture at the time were far more powerful than his speech-giving skills. His speeches and style did not resonate with American or British or French audiences (to the extent that they didn't - he was in fact a pretty popular politician all over Europe before he began attacking them) not because they didn't understand German, but because they weren't Germans.
His speeches preyed on German bitterness after losing World War I, they preyed on German poverty because of the reparations, they preyed on German conceptions of national pride, and, of course, they preyed on German antisemitism and xenophobia more generally.
Many of those elements were not present in, say, France (who had defeated Germany in the recent war), so even if the French had spoken German, they certainly wouldn't have been swayed with arguments about how they had humiliated Germany, or about how Germany needs more "living space". The Spanish or the Polish would not have been swayed by Hitler's notion that blond blue-eyed Germans are the chosen people who rightfully rule the world. And the Japanese would have barely even understood what he was talking about, even if they had all been native German speakers.
And conversely, Hitler had no shortage of allies before and during WWII, not because Mussolini or Hirohito or Stalin were such fine speakers of German that they were mesmerized by his carefully crafted speeches, but because they liked his actual ideas and plans for conquest, regardless of language.
Look at what date it is today, and then try to guess which one of these format is the one they are referring to.
Also: one of these is an ISO standard format. The other one is a format that no one would use. (DD/MM YYYY is in use, but no one would write YYYY-DD-MM.)
Nobody ever should write YYYY-DD-MM, its the worst of both worlds with the structure being both in a non-logical order AND not conforming to how dates are pronounced.
Just in case it isn't clear, the usual European date format (DD-MM-YYYY though the separators vary) reflects the usual pronunciation — even in Britain and Ireland, where today is the ninth of June.
Just use uppercase numbers for the month and lowercase for the day. That way you will always know which is more significant without any prior knowledge of how the order of the digits in decimal numbers work.
I'm curious about examples. I know many languages do not have word::word translations, but a concept that cannot be translated -- even if it needs a full sentence, is a very different thing.
There are words/concepts that require you to have lived in that culture for some amount of time to understand the cultural baggage connected to the word, and how the word actually describes a part of the culture. As a Swede, one such word for me is `lagom`, which is often translated as `just right`, but this is a cop-out that doesn't do it justice.
To understand it you must know, on a deeper level why a Swede values things being lagom, and this is surprisingly hard to put into words because it involves history, language, value systems, social patterns and even concepts like gratitude towards simple things. This word encapsulates a really big aspect of Swedish culture, making it impossible to translate accurately.
It's like how the Inuit have 35 words for "snow", or the Swedish have 51 words for "tax evasion". Some cultures have a need for nuances that necessarily gets reflected into the local language, nuances which will be lost when bluntly translating into the one category-level word in English.
The Inuit example is a common misconstrual [0]. The ancestor language has three root words that they might modify with a suffix in the way we might use a phrase 'snow on the ground'.
An hour or two after traffic switched, TV broadcast from Svinesund, the biggest of the road crossings to Norway, and a major route for road haulage, and a reporter said something like "here we have the driver of a Norwegian 18-wheeler, <name>. Well, <name>, what do think of the big reform?" Norwegian, looking a little dense and speaking slowly: "Uh, what reform?" There was big signage everywhere. The reporter tried dropping a hint, the Norwegian truck driver refused to have noticed any change in the driving rules. Camera showed the very big 18-wheeler. The reporter dropped increasingly clearer hints and looked discomfited, the Norwegian still said "no, what reform, is anything new?" and eventually they cut the interview and switched back to the studio.