Re: CHAT: American vs European educational standards

Quoting Stephen Mulraney <ataltanie@...>:

> On Tue, 24 Sep 2002 12:05:08 -0500
> "Davis, Iain E." <feaelin@...> wrote:
>
> > When it comes to the European nations, I'm not sure I could successfully
> > (from memory, without a map) list off all the european nations, much
> > less their capitols.  With a map, I could probably figure it out...and
> > oddly, I bet the map would have the capitols on it.
>
> Curiously, "Capitol" refers only to (US?) American legislatures. Well,
> perhaps it can be extended to the city that's seat of the legislature,
> I don't know. But there ain't any Capitols in Europe: The cities are
> "capitals" and the buildings housing the legislatures don't have a
> common term to refer to them.
The prescriptive rule is not that a <capitol> is the legislature itself;
that spelling refers to the building that houses the legislature and
can refer to the legislature only by metonymy.  And, although many such
capitol buildings are built on hills (Texas's is), AFAICT, only that
capitol building in Washington, D.C., is actually called "Capitol Hill".
Things have come full circle, it seems.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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