Governor of Amazonas wants to charge Amazon royalties for use of the brand • Hacker News Board

Re: Governor of Amazonas wants to charge Amazon royalties for use of the brand

#71

Post by aurizon » Wed, Dec 06, 2023, 12:31 PM UTC

otikik wrote: post #6

aurizon wrote: post #2

This has some merit, as Bezos might decide he can do a good work for Amazon as well as for The Amazon with a small selectable field where customers can donate a small fee, that in the aggregate, might be large enough to make a difference if it is wisely and properly directed to the indigenes that have been screwed over by the diseases and 'bad manglement' delivered by the conquistadores, heirs/occupiers and their wid…

Why would he do that, precisely now? He has had plenty of opportunities to help in other quite worthy causes before.

He has reached a point where functional as well as factual acts of redemption are needed. We have seen how their system has created huge volumes of worthless 'garbage in motion' - by this I mean goods of such low value, coupled with low quality that neither buyer nor seller wants it. It is also low in density, so Amazon has burdened the ship-return ecology with unmanageable volumes of GIM that some Chinese online sellers are having ¬¬80% or more cancellations and returned good - that they lack the funds to credit the buyer with a refund at all = large numbers have folded their tents and fled. This Christmas season will see a shipper/seller/buyer crash = collapse. Honest shipper/seller supply chains will be burdened with tens of thousands of freight cars filled with melanges of all this stuff - all low value, not worth moving/sorting/delivering. Wait and see how Dec/Jan/Feb unfold.

Re: Governor of Amazonas wants to charge Amazon royalties for use of the brand

#72

Post by gerdesj » Thu, Dec 07, 2023, 1:06 AM UTC

VTimofeenko wrote: post #67

gerdesj wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes but it cuts both ways. "Greece" (Ελλάδα - Hellada) is not a "Greek" (Ελληνικά - Hellonika) word. Sorry if I've screwed up the transliteration, its all Greek to me! Whenever a Έλληνας (Hellonas - I think) uses the term Greek or other Anglicised word then we (whoever we are) could sue right back! Modern Greek is just as close to old or classical Greek (and that's a PHD discussion) as modern English to German o…

> Ichthyophthirius Anecdata, but for a native Russian speaker this is not a tongue twister at all. We borrowed quite a few letters for Cyrillic alphabet and have dedicated sounds for them. This word becomes a shorter "ихтиофтириус", which has a much nicer visual balance of vowels and consonants

I'm not an expert in linguistics but I do know how my mouth and tongue works! I apologise that I can't give examples in Cyrillic.

This word is roughly pronounced "ick", "thee", "oh", "fuh", "thirius". The surprising thing in English is the ph-th bit - we only see that in Greek words and perhaps some Russian or other Cyrillic based borrow words.

When I look at it, we English use two letters for each of these phonemes: ph (fuh) and th (thuh). In Cyrillic I think you have a single letter: phi and theta (Greek) - I don't know the actual Russian names but it will be similar.

We can say fuh/thuh in a word as consecutive phonemes but it is rare.

Re: Governor of Amazonas wants to charge Amazon royalties for use of the brand

#73

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Dec 07, 2023, 1:17 AM UTC

gerdesj wrote: post #72

VTimofeenko wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ichthyophthirius Anecdata, but for a native Russian speaker this is not a tongue twister at all. We borrowed quite a few letters for Cyrillic alphabet and have dedicated sounds for them. This word becomes a shorter "ихтиофтириус", which has a much nicer visual balance of vowels and consonants

I'm not an expert in linguistics but I do know how my mouth and tongue works! I apologise that I can't give examples in Cyrillic. This word is roughly pronounced "ick", "thee", "oh", "fuh", "thirius". The surprising thing in English is the ph-th bit - we only see that in Greek words and perhaps some Russian or other Cyrillic based borrow words. When I look at it, we English use two letters for each of these phonemes:…

> This word is roughly pronounced "ick", "thee", "oh", "fuh", "thirius".

Nah, closer to "ick-thee-off-thirius": https://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/ichthyophthirius

> the surprising thing in English is the ph-th bit

Right, especially not having a vowel between them, because "f" -> "th" without an intervening vowel is very unusual in English.

Re: Governor of Amazonas wants to charge Amazon royalties for use of the brand

#74

Post by VTimofeenko » Thu, Dec 07, 2023, 4:20 PM UTC

gerdesj wrote: post #72

VTimofeenko wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ichthyophthirius Anecdata, but for a native Russian speaker this is not a tongue twister at all. We borrowed quite a few letters for Cyrillic alphabet and have dedicated sounds for them. This word becomes a shorter "ихтиофтириус", which has a much nicer visual balance of vowels and consonants

I'm not an expert in linguistics but I do know how my mouth and tongue works! I apologise that I can't give examples in Cyrillic. This word is roughly pronounced "ick", "thee", "oh", "fuh", "thirius". The surprising thing in English is the ph-th bit - we only see that in Greek words and perhaps some Russian or other Cyrillic based borrow words. When I look at it, we English use two letters for each of these phonemes:…

> This word is roughly pronounced "ick", "thee", "oh", "fuh", "thirius". That's very close in Russian (and other Slavic languages FWITW); if I were to transliterate Russian pronunciation it would be "ikh-tio-fte-rius".

> The surprising thing in English is the ph-th bit

Interesting! I thought it would be the "ch-thy" part since "ch" usually sounds "t-sh"-ish in English, like "child".

I wonder if in English this phoneme uses the "k" sound only for words like "chrysanthemum" or "chrysalis" borrowed from Greek-ish languages.

> I don't know the actual Russian names but it will be similar.

Actually "ф" is just "ph" as in Philadelphia and "т" is "t", very close to how it sounds in the word "term". I think the key difference is that the "th" (sounds like in "the", "they", etc.) phoneme is a separate letter so it's decoupled from "t".

Re: Governor of Amazonas wants to charge Amazon royalties for use of the brand

#75

Post by merry_flame » Sat, Dec 09, 2023, 12:39 PM UTC

It would be nice if Amazon did something about the forest itself on the hand. I am personally saddened that the company is now top of mind for that name for probably most of humanity, despite the Amazon rainforest being the world's largest, is worth many billions and doesn't even support a massive rainforest-oriented conservation program. Same thought about brands benefiting from the aura of other non-persons including Red Bull (from the CITES-vulnerable krating/gaur, which has fewer than 1,000 individuals left in Thailand), Puma, Jaguar…

Re: Governor of Amazonas wants to charge Amazon royalties for use of the brand

#76

Post by merry_flame » Sat, Dec 09, 2023, 12:49 PM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #5

This is like when city of Batman in Turkey requested royalties from Warner Bros for using the name Batman. Also, it's like when the country Iceland suing Iceland supermarkets chain, which is an ongoing dispute.

From the Wikipedia, 'The dispute arose once more when the supermarket tried to stop the trademark "Inspired by Iceland" from being branded on Icelandic groceries in 2015.' That seems cheeky, to put it mildly…

Fortunately, it seems the country essentially won their case in December 2022 and the EU trademark has been cancelled. (“The monopolisation of a country name cannot lead to the inequitable situation in which traders with real and genuine connection to a certain geographic location are forced to constantly ‘look over their shoulder’ when referring to the real geographical origin of goods and service,” the summary documents say.)