the region is shared mostly by Slovakia and partly by Poland but the territories have been governed by the old Hungarian kingdom for quite some time. However, in Hungarian, it was called ?rva v?rmegye (which is why the Finnish squirrel is probably unrelated). The word v?rmegye is essentially “county” in Hungarian (more precisely “comitatus”).

I suppose that this Hungarian name is closer to the original name and the Slovak name is derived. It turns out that in Hungarian, ?rva is an orphan (hear the similarity?) or widow. You can actually see this fact on the same page that confirms that Orava is squirrel in Finnish.

http://www.nonequilibrium.net/...../#comments

Lumo is charm in Finnish, by the way.

I enjoy your writing about physics and others – and even in the cases when the answers seem a bit naive, it is an excellent formulation of the problems and myths.

I wonder if the name of the region is of Hungarian origin Probably not, since the region is near Poland, not Hungary. The word “orava” means “squirrel” in Finnish.

I’ve read your recent on BH loss of information, that was very clear, thanks. And sure – on the other hand, my post on the subject was breathtakingly stupid

Cheers

These teleconferencings worked fine for us e.g. when Suvrat Raju was defending his PhD and Shiraz Minwalla was in India.