{"id":1215,"date":"2009-04-05T22:05:09","date_gmt":"2009-04-05T22:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/2009\/04\/05\/1215\/"},"modified":"2009-04-05T22:05:09","modified_gmt":"2009-04-05T22:05:09","slug":"rasmussen-again-and-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/rasmussen-again-and-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Rasmussen again and again"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nCopenhagen Cityscape<\/a>
\nOriginally uploaded by torkristensen<\/a>
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FT.com wrote<\/a> that “Mr Rasmussen resigned on Saturday and his successor, finance minister Lars Lokke [sic!] Rasmussen \u2013 the third consecutive premier with that surname \u2013 now has a tough act to follow, particularly with the economy and the minority government\u2019s popularity hitting new lows.”<\/p>\n

As a native speaker of Danish, I hadn’t even noticed that this is the case.<\/p>\n

Of course I know their names – Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Lars L\u00f8kke Rasmussen – but as everybody else in Denmark I think of them as Poul Nyrup, Anders Fogh and Lars L\u00f8kke, and I find it utterly bizarre and confusing when they in English-language media are all referred to as Mr. Rasmussen<\/i>.<\/p>\n

What’s happening is that surnames ending in -sen<\/i> are so common that most people who have a less common middle name use that for most purposes, especially if their first name is common (such as Poul, Anders or Lars).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Copenhagen Cityscape Originally uploaded by torkristensen FT.com wrote that “Mr Rasmussen resigned on Saturday and his successor, finance minister Lars Lokke [sic!] Rasmussen \u2013 the third consecutive premier with that surname \u2013 now has a tough act to follow, particularly with the economy and the minority government\u2019s popularity hitting new lows.” As a native speaker of Danish, I hadn’t even noticed that this is the case. Of course I know their names – Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Lars L\u00f8kke Rasmussen – but as everybody […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,99,159,130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-denmark","category-economics","category-en","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}