Transcription. A four-panel meme.

Person A: “I’m an expert in French history.”

Person B: “Oh yeah? Name 15 kings.”

Person A: “Louis.”

Person B: “That’s on me, I set the bar too low.”

  • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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    1 year ago

    Does anyone know what started the obsession with Louis?

    Charles, obviously, okay sure, but Louis I was basically a placeholder whose kids fought over the inheritance.

    • thomas@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Louis is the “same name” as Clovis. I mean by that it is how the name evolved as the dynasties changed their language from Frankish to Latin to then French.

      Clovis was the first king unifying all Franks, so many Frank kings are named Clovis … and later ones are named Louis.

      • IWantToFuckSpez@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Clovis is also the modern French rendition of that name. In Old Frankish it was something like Chlodowig. Hence why king Louis is called Lodewijk in Dutch and Ludwig in German.

    • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      basically a placeholder

      • New Child 1, New Child 2, New Child 3 … don’t you think this is kinda generic?
      • Agreed. We need more imaginative names for our children. What about Louis?!
      • Great idea! Louis 1, Louis 2, Louis 3 …
    • Sjmarf@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 year ago

      Not sure; I’ve wondered that before too. If I had to guess I’d say people just keep naming future kings after previously liked kings - the first few king Louis weren’t all that popular, but later on there were some popular ones (Louis IX was named a saint, for instance, which may have boosted it).

      16 is certainly a lot of kings to have the same name. I believe there’s 20-something Pope Johns, if I recall correctly

      • InputZero@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I’m just waiting on pope John Paul George, then we just gotta tack on Ringo somehow and we’ve got The Beatles back!

    • wafflez@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      From my understanding, people in need of accessibility. Mostly for people who are visually impaired and use screen readers

      • wizzor@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        That’s my understanding too, and at least back in the day there was a volunteer group doing this.

        Helps with search engine indexing too.

    • Sjmarf@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 year ago

      Some people rely on ‘screen readers’ (software that reads text on the screen out loud when you move your finger over it) to browse content on Lemmy. Some screen readers can read text on images (I know Apple’s does, not sure about Android), but obviously it can make mistakes and there’s missing context a lot of the time. Hence the transcriptions.

      There was a group of people on Reddit who added image transcriptions in the comments of posts but it was rarely seen in the post itself. I quite like that it’s been more popular on Lemmy. For inline images you can add hidden transcriptions using markdown, but for image posts it has to go in the body of the post.

      There are also a couple of other benefits. The post is more likely to appear in search results if someone searches for text included in the transcription. And if the image fails to load for whatever reason, or the image host deletes it, you can get the gist from the transcription.