Excuse me, but Burg is a castle build for defence. People of the area could get behind their walls in a case of attack, so many settled in close proximity for safety. The resulting town was often called Burg in the middle ages, but thats not true for today.

In todays language Burg does not mean town anymore. It is only used for a kind of castle. You can’t ask “In welcher Burg wohnst du?”

Unless you still live in the middle ages of course.

Additionally, in German the hamburger or burger is written with a simple u, not ü, Hamburger or Burger.

obviously it’s also a friendly smiley face

As someone with an ø in my real name, I have had to explain it so many times 😮‍💨

Once, back when I was still on fb, some troll reported me for using a “fake” name based on it and I had to send fb a picture of my passport to reactivate my account 🤬

It is if it’s in a rock band’s name though

No, it’s a metal U. Diacritics are vowels run through a distortion filter.

I don’t believe you.

It is a funny U in English, which is the only language that matters.

Yes, i’m American. How could you tell?

I’d argue that they still exist, unless we’re just ignoring prison labour.

I’ve never heard of this so did a little digging. I’m not sure this fits the bill of state sanctioned since the “owners” were pretty much immediately prosecuted via joint efforts of the local sheriff and the FBI then convicted of violating federal law.

While looking through this, I learned of peonage where Mae Louise Miller was released escaped from slavery in 1961. I don’t see any legal repercussions for her “owners”.

I wouldn’t say state sanctioned in her case either. Maybe state turning a blind eye.

Nonetheless, whether or not state sanctioned applies in either situation, it doesn’t diminish the horrible reality that people were being kept as chattel well into the twentieth century.

Thanks for informing me of this. I really had no idea it existed.

Today, possibly? Until the next one’s prison sentence ends tomorrow.

Close enough

Burg in modern German means castle, but as part of city names I think your etymology sounds about right. Bürger, on the other hand, means citizen. So the Bürgermeister is chief citizen, and Bürgerkrieg literally is citizen war. A civil war.

Kreig ≠ Krieg

The order of letetrs matters

the duality of the bürger

Imagine the letter H and G would look similar. Now imagine there was a language that didn’t have the letter H. People who spoke that language would post: “Hot Dog” and then go like “aaaahahaha imagine God Dog, like a god thats a dog”.

Now add the fact that germans know and use the word burger regularly and do posess knowledge of the existence of different languages and that “burger” is an english word, thus pronunciation differs.

So I’d say no, not funny.

Then again I have laughed about and made jokes that made use of the similarity of burger and Bürger. But I guess the “rofl different languages”-element needs to be combined with smth more to qualify as a joke.

Yours, german giving german answers

Not really, the words are pronounced differently

Although I’ve seen the email address burger@[domain] and wondered why anyone would have an address named after a food - until realising the sender was a Mr. Burger (pronounced like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/De-Burg.ogg + er).

Also, the food burger is pronounced almost like the Americans do because we took the English pronunciation and modified it slightly to fit existing German sounds.

The “ü” in Bürger however is pronounced like the “ue” in the French word rue, which is a sound that doesn’t exist in English.