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Scottish Café

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Re: Scottish Café

#41

Post by sidpatil »

neiman wrote: post #28
Tade0 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this is now history. Nowadays people go hiking in the mountains instead and argue about math there. My algebra professor from college does a biannual kayaking trip. Not a mathematician, but I spent a few years during high school hiking with math students, talking mostly about math. We even went on a sort of pilgrimage to Lviv to see the grave of Stefan Banach and of course the Scottish Café. I still rem…

Lol. Discussing math while hiking is great, but regular meetings in cafes are a whole different animal. There's something about the repetitivity, the short meetings, the "mundane" atmosphere etc, which is good for me for math discussions. Hiking trips are too "special" to bring the same experience.

Not to mention the easily-available caffeine, which is conducive to discussion.

Re: Scottish Café

#42

Post by Symbiote »

wirrbel wrote: post #23
jl6 wrote: post #18

I could find no explanation of why it was called the Scottish café or what the link to Scotland might have been. Any ideas?

I don't know about that particular history, but naming things is hard and naming cafes and hotels based on foreign places was kind of customary. "Cafe Wien" (obviously nod to Viennas Coffee house culture), etc. In Germany at least the Country + Hof combination is still fairly common for established hotels ("Englischer Hof", literally "English Yard/court"). So I could very well imagine that someone founding a Cafe loo…

I had Hof as a cognate to "hall", but that's not correct, it primary cognate is "hovel".

But there's a modern meaning of "pub" — via Korean!

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...

Re: Scottish Café

#43

Post by wirrbel »

marton78 wrote: post #40
wirrbel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boils down to economics and custom. A few years ago, travelling in the US we, a group of European exchange students) I remember well how we were after lunch or dinner almost thrown out of restaurants by servers (i.e. brought the bill without having asked for it, etc.). I remember it so well because it really felt rude to me (we were not really hanging around unduly and might at times have ordered a round of desert…

There's many things that seen to have been economically viable a hundred years ago, which would seem crazy today. For example, houses with 4m high roofs, thick, stable walls and stucco. Or maybe it was economically just as little viable as it is today, but people just didn't think that much about economical viability back in the old days?

My grandmother grew up in a hut, every weekend it would be swept out with fresh sand, because it had a stomped mud floor. This was in Germany. Pretty sure the local gentry had these stucco ceilings, but not everyone.

Pretty sure a lot of what was done wasn't done with as tight calculations as it is done today. On the other hand, the markets weren't as unforgiven as today so it might have been easier to turn an investment into a profit.

It would be interesting to see the bookwork (if it even existed in the first place) of the Scottish Café, with supplemental informations by economists / historians putting it into perspective

Re: Scottish Café

#44

Post by wirrbel »

Symbiote wrote: post #42
wirrbel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about that particular history, but naming things is hard and naming cafes and hotels based on foreign places was kind of customary. "Cafe Wien" (obviously nod to Viennas Coffee house culture), etc. In Germany at least the Country + Hof combination is still fairly common for established hotels ("Englischer Hof", literally "English Yard/court"). So I could very well imagine that someone founding a Cafe loo…

I had Hof as a cognate to "hall", but that's not correct, it primary cognate is "hovel". But there's a modern meaning of "pub" — via Korean ! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...

hall is cognate to Halle I think. The proper standard German translation for hall might be Gutshof. But primarily, Hof refers to a yard, and then derived from that, are related meanings. It can refer to a farm (in many German regions a farm consists of several houses /stables arranged in a way that the buildings form the enclosure of a yard, "der Hof", see also David Hasselhof: Hassel-Hof, the Farm of Hassel).

A rural hotel/Restaurant is sometimes referred to as a Gasthof (Gast=Guest).

court of justice = Gerichtshof

royal court = Königshof

atrium = Vorhof

The Korean word your referencing seems to stem from Hofbräu, which refers to the royal court, Hofbräu is the Bräu (= brew) with the royal warrant (from the Königs-Hof).

Re: Scottish Café

#45

Post by Turing_Machine »

wirrbel wrote: post #23
jl6 wrote: post #18

I could find no explanation of why it was called the Scottish café or what the link to Scotland might have been. Any ideas?

I don't know about that particular history, but naming things is hard and naming cafes and hotels based on foreign places was kind of customary. "Cafe Wien" (obviously nod to Viennas Coffee house culture), etc. In Germany at least the Country + Hof combination is still fairly common for established hotels ("Englischer Hof", literally "English Yard/court"). So I could very well imagine that someone founding a Cafe loo…

In one of his books, Richard Feynman told of staying in the "Hotel City" (in Switzerland, I believe), observing that in America they would have called it the "Hotel Cité", because using a foreign name makes it sound fancier.

Re: Scottish Café

#46

Post by Turing_Machine »

Symbiote wrote: post #42
wirrbel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about that particular history, but naming things is hard and naming cafes and hotels based on foreign places was kind of customary. "Cafe Wien" (obviously nod to Viennas Coffee house culture), etc. In Germany at least the Country + Hof combination is still fairly common for established hotels ("Englischer Hof", literally "English Yard/court"). So I could very well imagine that someone founding a Cafe loo…

I had Hof as a cognate to "hall", but that's not correct, it primary cognate is "hovel". But there's a modern meaning of "pub" — via Korean ! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...

Think "Pizza Hut", "Radio Shack", etc.

Re: Scottish Café

#48

Post by armSixtyFour »

miles wrote: post #6
armSixtyFour wrote: post #2

It's unfortunate that it's so hard to find a pdf of the "The Scottish book", it looks as though any copy of it is over 150 USD.

There are a number of PDF versions (and much more) linked from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Book : English version of Scottish book http://kielich.amu.edu.pl/Stefan_Banach/pdf/ks-szkocka/ks-sz... Manuscript of Scottish book https://web.archive.org/web/20180428090844/http://kielich.am... The New Scottish Book PDFs https://web.archive.org/web/20170703172619/http://www.wmi.un...

Thank you!
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