Live data from Hacker News

Why is Chile so long?

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

381–390 of 468 posts

Re: Why is Chile so long?

#381
post #66

On the difference of Chilean Spanish to other "dialects": > It’s the farthest region from Spain, so the least communicated to the rest of the empire, and hence the one that drifted the most from the homeland. Er... if you look at the table ( https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_... ), Chile has quite a lot of red, but actually its Spanish is closer to the Spanish from Spain than that of other S…

Please note that there is no "standard" Spanish. In the Spain there are multitude of dialects and different variants. Even in the same region (e.g. Andalusia) you can find a ton of different variants. All of them are valid, as the RAE and the AAL make it clear.

Spanish can use four or five dialects, plus Vasque that is a totally different isolated language. But they all talk also bare metal Spanish.

Andalusians will change naturally to a more standard and fully intelligible Spanish when talking with somebody from Zaragoza (or even with Andalusian people that use a different accent). And any educated person can write fully understandable standard Spanish.

Re: Why is Chile so long?

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my book, 1M people is when a city starts to become a “proper” city. It’ll host major events, invest in public transit (beyond bus), have extensive infrastructure, have extremely thorough airport service, likely have many walkable neighborhoods, and generally feel like a city. Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs.

Edinburgh, where I have lived/worked for 40 years and has a population of just over 500K has all of those and more: major arts festivals, good train and growing tram networks, good airport links, very walkable and certainly "feels" more like a city than a lot of much larger cities. “This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.”

the "City of Edinburgh" may be 500k people, but the metropolitan area is bigger - once you include the outlying towns which people commute from there's more like 800-900k people.

https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/agglo/S20000463A__edinbu...

The festivals also completely skew things. Edinburgh in February is a vastly different city than Edinburgh in August.

Re: Why is Chile so long?

#383
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not like English. There is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Spanish . It is maintained by the: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy . In practice, I'm not sure what the impact is. I'm not a native Spanish speaker. But Spanish is not like English in regard to prescriptive norms.

Spanish native here, confirming that RSA is the institution that sets the language standard. But, people always deviate from it, though in my experience in word meanings and pronunciation, never in grammar to a degree that it become intelligible to another Spanish speaker. The toughest film to listen to for me was "The rose seller"[1] (1998), took me like 10m to get my ear accustomed to their pronunciation. [1] https…

To my non-roman ear it sounds a little like Italian.

Re: Why is Chile so long?

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edinburgh, where I have lived/worked for 40 years and has a population of just over 500K has all of those and more: major arts festivals, good train and growing tram networks, good airport links, very walkable and certainly "feels" more like a city than a lot of much larger cities. “This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.”

the "City of Edinburgh" may be 500k people, but the metropolitan area is bigger - once you include the outlying towns which people commute from there's more like 800-900k people. https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/agglo/S20000463A__edinbu... The festivals also completely skew things. Edinburgh in February is a vastly different city than Edinburgh in August.

That's right - in February it's full of students ;-)

Re: Why is Chile so long?

#385

When I went to Chile I was about to undertake a cross-country move across the US. Everybody I spoke to in Santiago couldn't imagine a country where you can drive a massive distance like that and move from one major metropolis to another. At the time, I thought they were just reflecting on the fact that Chile is a country where 40% of all people live in one metro area, so there isn't another huge metro area to move to…

City size is all definitional.

My first ever look at the states was out the window of a plane flying to NYC from the Bahamas at night. Straight up the east coast. Mind blowing. To my eyes it was one enormous city without any meaningful separation all the way. I was expecting to be surprised by the scale of the usa and yet it was way beyond what i could imagine.

Others won’t share that definition.

Re: Why is Chile so long?

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I learned everything except the question in the title. I still don't know why it's long, just a lot of facts about how long it is.

Did you miss this early in the article? Or did you just not find it convincing? > Chile is so long because of the Andes. Here's a map of elevation in South America. > You can't easily pass these mountains, and the tiny sliver of land to their west is Chile.

Ok but why a single country ? Why hasn't it split?

Re: Why is Chile so long?

#387
post #385

When I went to Chile I was about to undertake a cross-country move across the US. Everybody I spoke to in Santiago couldn't imagine a country where you can drive a massive distance like that and move from one major metropolis to another. At the time, I thought they were just reflecting on the fact that Chile is a country where 40% of all people live in one metro area, so there isn't another huge metro area to move to…

City size is all definitional. My first ever look at the states was out the window of a plane flying to NYC from the Bahamas at night. Straight up the east coast. Mind blowing. To my eyes it was one enormous city without any meaningful separation all the way. I was expecting to be surprised by the scale of the usa and yet it was way beyond what i could imagine. Others won’t share that definition.

beautiful image!

Re: Why is Chile so long?

#388
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 6M is included in the 9. They're not separate counts. That CSA also includes Baltimore so not a vary fair example. Absolutely not the same metro.

Having lived in Baltimore, it's juuust far enough from DC to not be a twin city.

Just out of curiosity, how far is far enough? As a thought experiment, would a shinkansen running every six minutes change this?

Re: Why is Chile so long?

#390

My key takeaway from this article is that the best place to go see the Milky Way is deep in the Amazon rainforest… where the tree cover is nearly 100% and there isn’t a single road for a hundred miles. That’s a neat collection of graphics. I’m curious how bespoke the creation process is for each graphic or if this is something everyone just does in ArcGis or similar. That last graphic about the Western US being the o…

Just come to NZ, go to the Dark Sky Reserve centered around Lake Tekapo and enjoy the Milky Way in all its glory.

We have zero snakes and very few dangerous spiders and you'd have to try very hard to find them, they're rather shy.

Also, we make great coffee and beer.

Post reply on HN