General / Off-Topic Why The British Flag? Covas Menu

Burke

B
Cause when they found america they were looking for india... possibly the fabled north west passage. A quick trade link to india for (possibly) the british empire and the spice trade that would cut out the eastern routs and citys like constantinopal or whatever it was called then.

He thought he found india when he got there, hense west indies
 
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Burke

B
I might have been off with the northwest passage thing cause thats an arctic rout but i saw this tv thing where columbus landed with his little band and there was like a couple meters of sandy beach and then thick jungle. So off they went, brave explorers into the jungle. Plenty of water but the food soon ran out. So by this time they are close to death by starvation, so they look off their leather belts and boots and they boiled teh leather till it was soft and ate it. This is where "eat my boots" comes from. They sustained themselfs just long enough to stumble out of the jungle and into the inca empire. The history of the world turned on them eating boot leather.

Edit : google says maya empire :)
 
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ethelred

ethelred
Just a slight correction on an earlier post.

English has very, very few words from Brythonic (roughly pre-Roman) languages (in modern times these are Welsh/Cornish/Breton). Notoable words are Hog = pig and tumulus = small hill.

Most legal and military words in English come from Norman French (which had Latin as it’s root) because of the installation of a new elite post conquest.

Very little came direct from Latin (except some ecclesiastical terms and these days scientific terms too).

300 years ago saw the start of the codification of English and this standardisation means that you can read documents from then with only some words having gone out of fashion. Spoken English would be much harder to understand due to colloquial words and accents.
 

SpocksOddSocks

SpocksOddSocks
Speedcuffs said:
Hmm. What flag should it be for Covas that communicates in binary code?
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How about

1200px-Logo_Borg.svg.png
 

Koen

Koen
Burke said:
A quick trade link to india for (possibly) the british empire and the spice trade that would cut out the eastern routs and citys like constantinopal or whatever it was called then. He thought he found india when he got there, hense west indies
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There was no Suez Canal around that time, ships to India had to go around Africa - so Constantinople was not on the sea route from the British islands to India.

And Columbus was not looking for a route to India for the Brits, but for Spain.
 
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Burke

B
Koen said:
There was no Suez Canal around that time, ships to India had to go around Africa - so Constantinople was not on the sea route from the British islands to India.

And Columbus was not looking for a route to India for the Brits, but for Spain.
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Istambul was famous for spice trade once upon a time. But you are right of course.
 
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insanephoton

insanephoton
Columbus wa s a bit of a chancer, who has had good PR through the centuries. There have been suggestions that he had a map form someone else (plenty of claims of earlier voyages to the Americas before him, though little definitive proof). Then we get the rubbish about most peole not backing him because they were dumb flat earthers, when in fact most educated people of the time believed that the Earth was a globe. The reason they were sceptical was the distance. The ancient Greeks had made a reasonably accurate estimate of the size of the Earth . Since there was no particular reason to believe that there was any significant land mass between Asia and Europe most people thought that the expedition would fail due to running out of supplies mid ocean.
 

ibmalone

I
insanephoton said:
Columbus wa s a bit of a chancer, who has had good PR through the centuries. There have been suggestions that he had a map form someone else (plenty of claims of earlier voyages to the Americas before him, though little definitive proof). Then we get the rubbish about most peole not backing him because they were dumb flat earthers, when in fact most educated people of the time believed that the Earth was a globe. The reason they were sceptical was the distance. The ancient Greeks had made a reasonably accurate estimate of the size of the Earth . Since there was no particular reason to believe that there was any significant land mass between Asia and Europe most people thought that the expedition would fail due to running out of supplies mid ocean.
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Indeed, my understanding is Columbus was actually wrong about the size of the Earth, and "got lucky", although the belief the rest would just be ocean wasn't entirely rational either.

It seems quite likely the Vikings did get there, they definitely got to Greenland (and called it that in another PR coup), and apparently just off the coast of Newfoundland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Anse_aux_Meadows but they weren't big into maps. So there was evidence that there might be more landmasses. Very cold and inhospitable ones. Whether that knowledge made it into the Mediterranean with the Vikings who went to Constantinople (these guys got *everywhere*) I'm not sure, but almost certainly some medieval scholar has followed up that angle.

The legends of St Brendan suggest he may have got there too, but you read those early lives of Irish Saints with more than your recommended daily allowance of salt.
 
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