20090525

Elephant on Hauptstrasse


You just never know what you might find when you peek over hedges (not that I'm suggesting you do this, mind you!)

20090525

15 comments:

Ineke said...

Good catch!

Janet said...

Interesting find!

Hilda said...

Hee hee! But it's always tempting to look over someone else's house! ;)

Cute.

AB said...

Nice shot! And that is "Hauptstraße"! I guess Villingen must be small.

Baron's Life said...

visually pleasant

A Lady's Life said...

What a nice statue.
I would love to have something like that in my front yard but I am sure it would not stay long before it's either stolen and/or broken.

claude said...

It is the junge in Switzerland !!!
Not far away from here they are a big one and a small one in front of the entry of a second hand store.
May be a day I will show them

Z said...

Ineke and RR: I'm always on the look-out for photo opportunities. It's amazing how many there are in this small village.

Hilda: Shhh...

AB: VilliNgen (with the N) is in Germany, in the Schwarzwald region. Villigen (without an N in the middle) is in Switzerland, and actually not very far from Villingen. I've seen many instances of the two getting mixed up! :-) And yup, it's a small village of less than 2000 people.

Something I would like to point out to some of my readers who may not know this about German in Switzerland: the 'double s' Eszett character ß is not used in Switzerland (and Liechtenstein). So, it's Strasse rather than Straße. A comment about this can be found at the bottom of this page here.

Baron and Lady: Thanks! But really, do you have to worry about vanadalism so much where you live? I'm sorry to hear it.

Claude: I look forward to seeing the French elephants! :-)

Halcyon said...

At least it was only an elephant. Imagine the embarassment if you had found a neighbor sunbathing in the nude! :)

AB said...

Oops - my misspelling of Villigen was unintentional. I did know I was using as non-Swiss Esszet. I guess that was a bit remiss of me, as it is Swiss street. The link from the link on Esszet is fascinating - Warum die Schweizer weiterhin kein Eszett schreiben.

Chuckeroon said...

Now I know why there is no wheat on show.....all trampled.

Z said...

Halcyon: Yikes!

AB: How about distilling the gist of the article for me if you have the time? My German is not so good and reading something like that takes ages!

Oh Chuck: I just need new subjects to photograph for the blog. The crops I keep for my private collection.

AB said...

How about distilling the gist of the article for me if you have the time?

The usual reason given for no esszet in Switzerland is the lack of space on a multilingual typewriter. However, the gist the article is that another main reason is that the Swiss have a different system of pronunciation, in particular they have soft (lentis) and hard (fortis) forms of several consonants such as s, b, and f and use this distinction to break words into different syllables. The hard forms belong to both the proceeding and following syllables and are written with a double consonant that may be split in hyphenation. The esszet would break this double consonant rule.

Z said...

AB: Interesting! I don't think I have much hope of ever hearing these differences. Thanks for getting back to me with the information.

S-V-H said...

it's only a little one...LOL... wait until he is bigger :)

Great idea for a post!
Susanne

Sue's Daily Photography