"Lauwersoog" - an easter egg?

[Chieftess]

Here's something I just thought of. If you look at the Dutch city name of "Lauwersoog" (which is actually a Ferry Terminal), it looks like (depending on your pronounciation of the word), "Lawyer(s) sue".

"Lauw" "er" "soo" ...

I've noticed some games make fun of lawyers this way (play on words).

 

[Tomoyo]

I've always pronounced it "Law-wer-sue(g)", and I think it's just a random city they put in.

 

[Rik Meleet]

Nonsense !

It is pronounced Lau - ers - oog. The G is very loud, BTW.

 

[Longasc]

I think the city names that were chosen for many civs are not really understandable or eastereggs. Maybe it is an easteregg, but I think it is just a bad choice. They left out Nijmegen e.g., and German city names are not quite abundant, correct or that of major cities.

The city names of other civs have issues, too.

 

[Tomoyo]

Nonsense !

It is pronounced Lau - ers - oog. The G is very loud, BTW.

I put the "g" in parentheses because I wanted to show that I mentally pronounced the "oo" more like a German [insert u with two dots]...

 

[a space oddity]

In Dutch the double o is an elongated sound, I guess you'd write it 'oh'. I sounds like the o at the end of Tokyo. The 'au' sounds like 'ow' in owl. So it's more like 'low-urse-ohg'.

BTW it is a very very small place, insignificant in history too AFAIK, a strange choice by any standard.

 

[Tomoyo]

Thanks... I like learning about this stuff briefly. Then, after a while, my attention fails.

 

[DBear]

Lauwersoog isn't even listed in my atlas.

 

[Totibbs]

http://members.home.nl/thomasvanofferen/lauwersoog.wav

Im from Haarlem, the only city in the Netherlands where they have no dialect, so I know how to say "lauwersoog".
But I tried to speak a little sentence with a Brabants dialect. Just for fun, because Lauwersoog is in the north of the Netherlands while Brabant is a province in the south

 

[RegentMan]

Also, does The Netherlands really have that many major cities?

 

[Shabbaman]

Define "major city". Did the iroquis have major cities? The zulu?

The dutch city list is truely bizarre. My guess is that Firaxis thought that ports must be of historical value for a seafaring country. Obviously, they are correct with that assumption. Unfortunately, they took a atlas and looked at present day ports: and the ports they took (Lauwersoog, Holwerd, Harlingen (though the last actually has some minor historical significance)) are nothing more than ferry stations where (mostly german) tourists are ferried to an island pretty close to the coast. Another pattern is the location of military schools, in Roosendaal and Breda.

It'd have made sense if they had included cities from the hanseatic league (Zwolle, Kampen) for example. Or the capitals or each province (state), which are almost all of them on the list except three. Or cities that were founded by the romans, like Nijmegen. I wouldn't even mind if there were some flemish cities in.

 

[Doc Tsiolkovski]

Seriously, I don't think there was a clear strategy behind picking the names. They just choose some, and then it would have been the job of the Dutch C3C beta testers (yes, there were some) to intervene.
Since they obviously slept, Netherlands ends with a mediocre list (still, way better than most of the vanilla ones) - while the other 5 new Civs seem fine.

 

[Frollo]

I never played the Dutch long enough to see Lauwersoog appear, but I did notice Holwerd. And yes, I did wonder why on earth they'd chosen that backwater dump, which I couldn't point out on the map even if my life depended on it, over historically important cities such as Nijmegen.

That's why I'm glad I found this thread -- Shabbaman is probably right in his analysis.

So I don't think it's an easter egg, just a poor and ill-informed choice for a city name.

 

[Chieftess]

I guess I'm the only one who sees the "lawyer sue" from "lauwersoog"...

 

[Tatran]

Seriously, I don't think there was a clear strategy behind picking the names. They just choose some, and then it would have been the job of the Dutch C3C beta testers (yes, there were some) to intervene.
Since they obviously slept, Netherlands ends with a mediocre list (still, way better than most of the vanilla ones) - while the other 5 new Civs seem fine.

Well the German beta testers must have been sleeping for more
than 10 years.Since civ1 the German city list contains a city
called Salzburg,while this is clearly a city in Austria.

 

[CuthaLion]

Have germany owned Salzburg in history?
Also Ottomans have Thessaloniki which is in Greece now, But Ottomans ruled her for near 500 years.

 

[Doc Tsiolkovski]

The lists (including the MGLs) for the original Civs are a different issue ...unfortunately, that NDA prevents me from going into the details.

But Salzburg is about the least problem on the German list. That city is Austrian for not even 200 years, and was Bavarian for a much longer time. In fact, it was the Archbishopry for Bavaria, and became an independant clerical state later (part of the HRE).
Btw, that of course also means Mozart was no Austrian . His family origins in Augsburg, and his father only moved to Salzburg.

What's much worse is that the last only holds 16 names, and the order doesn't make sense at all. Plus Königsberg is really not suitable for Germany (was German for exactly 74 years, and far from being among the 16 biggest).

 

[Frollo]

What's an NDA?

 

[Doc Tsiolkovski]

Non disclosure agreement. What you have to sign when joining a beta-testing process.

 

[DBear]

It makes you wonder if the designers even had an atlas between them. It is EASY to come up with 50 good German cities. And yes, 50 Dutch cities can be found, also.