Slashdot Mirror
How Old Is the Average Country?
Daniel_Stuckey writes with a snippet from his piece at Vice: "I did some calculations in Excel, using independence dates provided on About.com, and found the average age of a country is about 158.78 years old. Now, before anyone throws a tizzy about what makes a country a country, about nations, tribes, civilizations, ethnic categories, or about my makeshift methodology, keep in mind, I simply assessed 195 countries based on their political sovereignty. That is the occasion we're celebrating today, right?"
Excel and About.com
The G
"England" may be 1000+ years old but 1) it's far from certain that it's the same "England" as today, and 2) it was a subsidiary of Normandy, Inc. for quite some time, pardon my Middle French.
Ezekiel 23:20
A count, I presume? (Although nowadays, from what people are telling me, it more like someone called a "countant" rules the land, or how this horrible notion is spelled.)
Ezekiel 23:20
...or the fact that France was occupied by the Germans during WWII. The three year occupation of Sweden by the Danes during a war in the 1520:s, on the other hand, is apparently enough to cut Sweden's age down to 490 years.
Something which by the way wouldn't bother a Swede if it wasn't for the fact that the blasted Danes are listed at 1048 years. ;-)
Here's what you don't get:
He's not talking about existence as a culture, he's talking about being recognized as an independent nation-state.
Germany, for example, did not actually exist as a nation-state prior to the Prussian defeat of the Hapsburgs in the Austro-Prussian War, and the defeat of Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War a few years after that. What existed were hundreds of feuding statelets that all spoke German.
The Greeks existed as a culture, but the last independent Greek state had been conquered by the Ottomans in the 15th century.
The Italians were in exactly the same boat as the Germans. There were the Kings of the Two Sicilies and Piedmont, the Pope, a Grand Duke of Tuscony, Hapsburgs in Venice, and several smaller states that were absorbed by Piedmont prior to unification.
Poland was divided between three Empires at the end of the 18th. Officially the Czar was Polish Head of State, but he didn't give the Poles any autonomy, and ran his bit of Poland as if it was merely another Oblast of Russia, so the Poles don;t count that as independence.
Please explain to me why the UK is as old as the Act of Union while you did not measure the age of your country starting with the annexation of Texas or some other quaint date like that.
Mentioning Texas is hitting below the belt.
On the other hand, this site lists Austria as 1037 years old, Hungary as 1012. Please remind me, what country did that guy named Franz Joseph rule?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
A thousand years ago England was French so ooh la la rosbif.
Actually it was Norman, which isn't quite the same thing. The Normans spoke French but were Norsemen who'd settled in Normandy only a century or two before the Norman Conquest. Even the name "Norman" derives from "Norse".
You consider it the same country even after the Normans trounced you, completely changed the government and aristocracy, and even started to change the language almost beyond recognition. Yeah, right.
Technically, yes, historians do consider it to be the same country. William, Duke of Normandy was persuing a claim to the English throne as a relative of Edward the Confessor.
Adolescence is actually an excellent metaphor for the US. A mix of overconfidence and insecurity, for the wrong reasons in both cases.
Aren't they forgetting the Anschluss in 1938? Do we the independence date for France to 1944, when the Germans were kicked out and they got control of their coutnry back? When do you set a date for Italy? Unification in 1870, or with the establishment of the Roman Empire 2000 years earlier? How old is China? Was it established in 1949, 1919, 216BC or 2100 BC? How old is Egypt? 3 days, two years or 5000 years?