Monday, October 03, 2005


Caffe te Nazi: this is just a cafe, nothing more; it's named after a person and the spelling of the Albanian personal name happens to be the same as that of the reprehensible political community.

I should have realised this as soon as I saw it and should have corrected the post long before now. As a friend, Sabina, told me:
"the same name i noticed several times..i also thought about meaning of nazi, again double meaning for us..but albanians just puts that name, cause its a name..nazi is a personal name..it cames from nazmie, the short way- nazi, its spelt- nozi..caffe te nozi..its mans name, nazi, but nazmie is also girls name..".
(I should have realised because Nazi is the Albanian equivalent of Naz, just as Sami is the Albanian equivalent of my own name, Sam.)

[Updated on the 22nd of November 2006; I've put the updated post above and the original below, so that if it's retrieved in searches, the (grossly) incorrect information (for which I can only apologise) won't be displayed on results pages.]

[Updated on the 14th of January 2007]

Poli, along with, once more, Bytycci has been kind enough to correct my mistake.

Bytycci noted that:
As I said above, Nazi is simply a nickname of names like Nazim or Nazmi. It doesn't have anything to do with Nazis. It is pronounced differently too. It means, At Nazi's.
There is no short form for "National" in Albanian. The translation is "Kombetar" ose "Nacional".
Poli commented:
Hi Sam! About that "Nazi"-thing: in albanian there's the name "Nazmi" and Nazi (the "z" sounds like an rough "s")is just the nickname of "Nazmi". It hasn't anything to do with nationalism or with Hitler-Nazis, so it happens that non-albanians misunderstand that...unfortunately!
I've tried to find alternative explanations, but I can't. "Kombetare" is "national", so "Nazi" can't be reduced to an abbreviation of "national"; I think this is Cafe Nazi.

I've deleted the relevant technorati tags.

Technorati tags:/; //.

2 comments:

  1. As I said above, Nazi is simply a nickname of names like Nazim or Nazmi. It doesn't have anything to do with Nazis. It is pronounced differently too. It means, At Nazi's.
    There is no short form for "National" in Albanian. The translation is "Kombetar" ose "Nacional".

    Cheers

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Sam! About that "Nazi"-thing: in albanian there's the name "Nazmi" and Nazi (the "z" sounds like an rough "s")is just the nickname of "Nazmi". It hasn't anything to do with nationalism or with Hitler-Nazis, so it happens that non-albanians misunderstand that...unfortunately!

    ReplyDelete