4 ms·
The UK is a European country. Not in the EU anymore, but you folks didn't move continents ;-)
by fredoliveira 5y ago
The UK is a European country. Not in the EU anymore, but you folks didn't move continents ;-)
- namdnay 5y agoTo be pedantic, they never were on the continent :) Apart from Gibraltar I guess
- detritus 5y ago*stares at continental shelf depth map around the UK described on old European map on wall
- IshKebab 5y agoHa yes well... "the continent" refers to the European land mass. C.f. "continental breakfast". But the UK is part of the European continent in the continental shelf sense. The word "continent" is not really well defined. Here's a nice video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrsxRJdwfM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrsxRJdwfM0
- rootusrootus 5y agoIt does seem poorly defined. If it were the land mass, I would expect that Europe extended all the way to the other end of Russia.
- DrBazza 5y agoNever you say? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
- avianlyric 5y agoCulturally we generally consider Europe to mean continental Europe i.e. Europe without the islands. Thus the U.K. being an island nation isn’t part of Europe. But the definition of Europe will change depending on who you’re talking to and what your talking about.
- nicoburns 5y agoIn my experience, the UK is culturally very similar to the rest of Europe (much more similar then we are to the US, although there is some influence there). This fact is just obscured by the language barrier.
- avgcorrection 5y agoWhat language barrier? English is a Germanic language with a lot of French vocabulary. Close to Dutch. It isn’t like Basque or Hungarian.
- nicoburns 5y agoMostly British people's poor education in languages. It's not that other European languages would be hard for us to learn, it's that most people in the UK de facto don't learn another language to a useful level (presumably because English is so widely spoken that we can get away without doing so). Which makes it very difficult for most of us to engage with European culture, media, etc even though it's often quite similar to our own and I suspect would otherwise interest us.
- avgcorrection 5y agoCulturally we Icelanders consider Europe to mean continental Europe i.e. Europe minus the volcanic islands.
- chrisseaton 5y agoIn the UK, 'Europe' in this kind of context has almost always meant 'the continental mainland'. That's not a Brexit thing - that's the terminology for as long as I've been alive.
- fredoliveira 5y agoI see. Makes perfect sense — I appreciate the cultural context.
- tasuki 5y agoWhen an English person says "Europe", they mean the continental part.