My 2nd child & I watched a random video in which some guy tried the figure out which country name was the most unique. He started with some criteria that sounded OK to use, but then diverted.
This has angered child 2, and so we will now write down all UN members names in their original language(s) and apply proper criteria.

We may not sleep.

#Parenting #NeuroDivergent

They are currently writing down all the country names in their original languages, on paper, with a pen, 32 per column.
My suggestion to just copy the page into an Excel sheet is greeted with barely masked disgust: "Papa! I won't do this on a _laptop_! I have _standards_!!!"

First criterium will be: the name contains common words ("The", "United", "El"), in the language it is in.

~~Second criterium: the name cannot contain any words that are also used in another name ("Sudan" + "South Sudan").~~ EDIT: I misunderstood, this is not criterium 2.

We'll apply these as soon as BK2 has finished writing all names down.

I suspect there will be some looking up of words in a bunch of languages...

Writing done, now we apply criteria.
After criterium 1

Criterium 2: compound words.

Example: "...land" eliminates "Deutschland", because "Land" in German is a word, like "land" in English.

...also eliminates a lot of "...stan"
Researching...
We're hitting our first not-clear-cut cases, such as "Belize", "Brasil", and "Brunei". We let them survive.
Does anybody have an opinion about "Burundi"?

We discovered a mistake! "Tschad" should have been eliminated in round 1.

Fixed.

We find things like "Comores Komori" comes from the Arabic for "Moon". BK2 is a little annoyed with themselves because they do speak Arabic but didn't notice.
Followers from @Finland: is "Suomi" a word?
This second round takes time!
We're now on a side quest, finding out which countries we missed. We had 176 only.
We just eliminated Switzerland. Feels low-key wrong.
We're down to 77

We both underestimated the effort we had to put in for round 2, lots of "Etymology" chapters on Wikipedia had to be read, and sometimes we had to go further.

We're now shattered, and we will stop here.

Tomorrow, criteria 3: duplicates. Any name or part of name that exists more than once will be eliminated ("Sudan" & "South Sudan" for example)

Sleep tight, and stay tuned for our heroic quest to find the country with the most unique name, done right[tm].

Day 2 of our heroic effort.

We're more awake now, and BK2 immediately found mistakes we made late yesterday:

- Eliminated Uruguay, Paraguay, Papua New Guinea, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Australia, because their names contain words.

Criterium 3 - similar names

We threw out 2:

- Niger & Nigeria

#NeuroDivergent #Parenting #TheMostUniqueCountryName

Now to think about what additional criteria to use.

BK2 is toying with "sound the same in their respective language", I'm not convinced.

First, though, we're watching TADC episode 8, so if you want us to consider a criterium, let us know!

Side note: the latest TADC episodes have been _insane_! For the last 3 episodes, we all went "WHAT???!!" when the "[upbeat jazzy music plays]" came up...
@jexner Maybe throw out countries that are named after a people because naming a country after the people who live there is a very β€žnot uniqueβ€œ concept. Like France is named after the Franks for example.
@bollino313 Not a bad idea! And maybe the same for a specific person, e.g. Colombia.
@jexner based on the last photo, I saw you had #France but not in #french. :)
@raphadue BK2 is not amused. "Tell them I speak French!" :-)
@jexner
Arguably any country ending with a vocal is going to be less unique than one ending in a consonant.
@raphadue We did use your suggestion. It was the final criterium that led to "Nepal" winning!
@jexner wow, you even respected our four official Swiss languages? including Rumantsch!? amazing ❀️
@mario_angst_sci of course! We're doing this bcs it has to be done right!
@jexner Burkina Faso!
@weezmgk I think we're missing countries. Turkey was also missing... adding them now
@jexner Hm...either itΒ΄s the laptop or excel. The latter would make sense.
@electricfusionQ Nope. It's pen and paper.
@jexner So a non-digital standard.
I´m ok w/ that. ✊