this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
1240 points (98.8% liked)
memes
16192 readers
3022 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- [email protected] : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- [email protected] : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- [email protected] : Linux themed memes
- [email protected] : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I mean, this is my public username. It takes a very quick Google search to dox me. Most of my name is in my username already.
I can't think of what Norwegian name it's supposed to be a Danish pronunciation of, tbh. Severin?
My family is originally from Sauda in Norway. Norwegian tradition used to be that your family name was the name of your home. If you moved to a new farm, you adopted the name of that farm as your new family name. They don't do this anymore, as it got really hard to track genealogical records with families changing names all the time.
When my ancestors immigrated to America, Norway was under Danish rule, as Denmark had conquered Norway at the time and was forcing Danish pronunciation on the Norwegian language. So my family name's pronunciation of "saw-duh" became "sov-dae."
When my ancestors got to America, no one could pronounce my family name correctly, so they changed the spelling to be more phonetic in the English language. And that's how I got my current family name!
Right, yes that was common, being named after the farm. Interesting family story 🙂
Though, being Danish, I have a national duty to say that Denmark didn't conquer Norway, it was inherited by a king around 1400 and then developed into a full union in 15-something when the Swedes left the Kalmar Union. It was a dual monarchy, effectively one country, ruled from Copenhagen and standard Danish was no more forced on the Norwegians than it was forced on other Danes speaking a dialect of Danish.
The union was dissolved in 1814 when Napoleon (who was allied to Denmark), lost his wars and Norway was given to Sweden. After 100 years under Swedish rule, Norway was finally independent.
It's been something of a national need in Norway to emphasize all the bad things under the dual monarchy, but in truth Norwegians and Danes were completely equal. Look up any major historical or cultural figure from the era and there's a good chance he came from what is now Norway, most of the navy was Norwegian and so on. I understand the need to find someone to other so that the national identity grows stronger, but it's a pity it's become a narrative of Danish exploitation when that's completely false.
I say equal, that goes for the political class and nobility, the peasants in both countries were of course almost completely powerless 😉
That's very interesting. I learned the history of my name through living descendants of my ancestors in Norway. (Two brothers immigrated to America, while a third brother stayed behind in Norway) They were the ones who told me Norway was conquered and ruled by Denmark for a while.
Perhaps it was a mistranslation between us; I had wondered how Norway was able to preserve their country's heritage and language while being ruled by their neighbor.