Montreal City Weblog

Kate 20:55 on 2020-09-18 Permalink Reply  

• Max 09:56 on 2020-09-19 Permalink

  With 900,000+ interments at NDN, it’s surprising that this doesn’t happen more often.

• Kate 10:23 on 2020-09-19 Permalink

  I would’ve expected them to have a minimum burial depth. People with excavators can easily dig deeper than animals, pretty much. Bury a coffin down the conventional six feet, and groundhogs shouldn’t be getting that far.

  You’ll notice that the same thing is not being reported of the adjoining Mount Royal cemetery. Unlike them, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges has temporary graves, which are plowed up from time to time. I’ve seen bones in charnel heaps up there, once saw a femur and a few vertebrae lying around. This was some time ago, but as far as I know the temporary grave thing is still being done. If NDN was a little more respectful of burial depth, I don’t think this would be a problem.

• dwgs 11:46 on 2020-09-19 Permalink

  Am I the only one admiring the gophers’ get up and go?

• Ian 14:33 on 2020-09-19 Permalink

  Not to be pedantic but gophers aren’t the same thing as groundhogs.

  I noticed NDN usually has more groundhogs than MR but I have no idea why that might be.

• Raymond Lutz 15:02 on 2020-09-19 Permalink

  I thought Gopher was a client/server protocol! One of its subsets was Archie, developed here by McGill and Concordia postgraduate students (for the Montreal angle).

• Michael Black 15:12 on 2020-09-19 Permalink

  The Peter Deutsch mentioned in that Archie entry is not the one in “Hackers” by Steven Levy. He was credited with bringing the Internet to McGill (which I think means “to Quebec”).

  McGill used Gopher for at least a classified ad system. I guess it’s been gone for a long time now, but it lasted well into the Web age. People would talk about Gopher in the past tense, and I’d mention McGill. I forget when it ended, but it was definitely still there in 2001, I bought a computer off one of the ads.

  But yes, groundhogs are big, gophers are small.

• Kate 15:45 on 2020-09-19 Permalink

  I looked it up, and while our animal is marmotte in French, the official translation seems to be woodchuck.

• Ian 16:46 on 2020-09-19 Permalink

  Groundhog and woodchuck are synonymous, at least according to WIkipedia…

  “The groundhog, also known as a woodchuck, is a rodent of the family Sciuridae, belonging to the group of large ground squirrels known as marmots. It was first scientifically described by Carl Linnaeus in 1758”

  …which also explains where “marmotte” comes from. In English, “marmot” includes all the large ground squirrels.

  I guess this is another one of those things where in French species are sometimes fairly generic, like how “faucon” includes falcons, hawks, ospreys etc. or “pingouin” includes both Arctic and Antarctic species.

• Ian 16:48 on 2020-09-19 Permalink

  …bt now I just remembered the French word “siffleur” and frankly I think in English we should start calling them whistlepigs because that is a WAY better name.

• dwgs 17:49 on 2020-09-19 Permalink

  There are arctic penguins??!

• Ian 20:54 on 2020-09-19 Permalink

  Puffins, auks and penguins are known in French as “pinguoin”.

• Ian 19:29 on 2020-09-20 Permalink

  Related linguistic nerding out: https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-french-gained-lost-and-then-regained-the-word-for-1595024185

  tl;dr: in France “pingouin” only refers to Arctic birds, the penguin is a”manchot”. It’s only Quebec French that conflates the two.