All countries are different, tell me a fact about your country.

lost_in_c said:
Is there a case to be made for Dutch being closer to English than to German?
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More the other way around. English is an amalgamation of Saxon (Germanic, old Frisian, Northern European origin), French (it was the "official" language for a while; Norman conquest around 1066) and a bit of (old) Greek.

English is sometimes referred to as being three languages wearing a trench coat pretending to be one language.
 
Yeah ok but I'm not talking about the historiography of it. I mean like, if you're Dutch, say, what languiage (written or spoken) feels more familiar to you? German? English?
 
lost_in_c said:
if you're Dutch, say, what languiage (written or spoken) feels more familiar to you? German?
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Probably more German. There's a lot more commonality as they both derived from a similar Germanic origin. Germany is also right next door, so there's a lot of overlap with local dialects in the border region. Great Britain is also right next door, but the North Sea is somewhat in the way.
 
lost_in_c said:
Whenever I hear Dutch, it sounds like some kind of blunted German. But whenever I read Dutch (or, ok, see Dutch words), it looks like a snazzy English. Like English with spunk. Am I super off? Is there a case to be made for Dutch being closer to English than to German?
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Interesting video close to your question
‘The Frisian Perspective on "Talking to a Frisian farmer in Friesland with Old English"’
[media]
]View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brTMWgE-m6w[/media]
 
Cool.

The stuff about inheritance, though, I have to tell you that I am exceedingly skeptical of current academic thinking on this. Any historiographical study that holds Russian, for example, to be part of a different tree than German, Dutch and English is just hopelesly off.

vmisev said:
Interesting video close to your question
‘The Frisian Perspective on "Talking to a Frisian farmer in Friesland with Old English"’
[media]
]View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brTMWgE-m6w[/media]
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See?? I knew it.

Although I sterted reading Beowulf once, which is in "Old English," and just basically seems to be a slight offshoot of German.
 
Charming fact, in the world of Beowulf, the sea is known as the whale road.

I mean. That must have been one seriously charmed chapter in history.
 
lost_in_c said:
The stuff about inheritance, though, I have to tell you that I am exceedingly skeptical of current academic thinking on this. Any historiographical study that holds Russian, for example, to be part of a different tree than German, Dutch and English is just hopelesly off.
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AFAIK current thinking is that all Indo-European languages have common ancestor in Proto-Indo-European. For example, there are many similar and almost same words in Serbian (Slavic) and Sanskrit (Old Indo-Aryan).
 
That's exactly the kind of problem I have. They are perfectly comfortable zooming way back and inventing a whole theoretical language without a shred of proof, but to contemplate that there is a concrete language group that springs from what we may call maybe Old Norse and includes Slav as much as English and German is blasphemy.

It all just seems like the field lacks a little rigour.
 
lost_in_c said:
Octopus are mad smart. Probably smarter than dogs. But in terms of lineage, they are of the same family (don't think family is the right technical term here but whatever) as spiders and scorpions. A A mad smart spider. Doesn't that kind of make it terrifying?

I bought octopus too to try it, but octopus is very tough meat and really only good as part of a wider seafood platter, lika a Spanish paella.

But I did know how smart they are before I ate it, and I did feel a little guilty. They are probably as smart as young children.

On the other hand, it's weird, because I think I would try dog with no remorse, whereas I don't think I could ever knowingly eat a horse. Maybe one has affinity for certain animals.

Also, if the Germans here can confirm, the Germans have only one word for both octopus and squid.

C'mon Germany.
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https://mmmediterranean.com/what-difference-between-octopus-squid-cuttlefish/

If I do not eat something don't bother me if someone other love it. I didn't try a dog but my friend eat in Vietnam and he said that was very good.
 
lost_in_c said:
That's exactly the kind of problem I have. They are perfectly comfortable zooming way back and inventing a whole theoretical language without a shred of proof, but to contemplate that there is a concrete language group that springs from what we may call maybe Old Norse and includes Slav as much as English and German is blasphemy.

It all just seems like the field lacks a little rigour.
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Indo-European split into many branches, Germanic is just one of many, Balto-Slavic is another. Germanic then split into Old Norse, East and West branches, from West branch sprung Anglo-Frisian and Old English from that. Mix that with other influences that SirDice mentioned in #226 and you have modern English.
Balto-Slavic split into Baltic and Slavic groups, Slavic split into West, East and South, South group split again into Western (Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian) and Eastern (Church Slavonic, Bulgarian and Macedonian). East split into Old East Slavic from which Russian originates, and Ruthenian which gave us Belorussian, Rusyn and Ukrainian.
It’s simple, right? 😉
 
astyle said:
Yeah, that stuff clearly confuses beer and kvas. They are made using a very similar process, using largely the same ingredients... and kvas was in fact quite high in ABV back before 10th century AD... But this article is very clearly written by someone who can't even spell 'Russia', and is writing for a 4th-rate American content farm. Any Russian or Ukrainian would tell you that. Proper kvas takes about 24-48 hours on a hot summer day to get all nice and fizzy.

The stuff in the picture is very clearly kvas. What was sold in stalls and tents around the clock was kvas. I'd know, I have memories of kvas barrels on every corner of the city in 1980s and 1990s. Occasionally, there'd be a vending machine that dispensed VERY foamy kvas into a glass for you:
View attachment 23447
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Miss those tings and also it used to be some Kvas in some sort of small cistern.
Also talking about alcohol content - kefir got some too ... :)))
 
vmisev said:
Indo-European split into many branches, Germanic is just one of many, Balto-Slavic is another. Germanic then split into Old Norse, East and West branches, from West branch sprung Anglo-Frisian and Old English from that. Mix that with other influences that SirDice mentioned in #226 and you have modern English.
Balto-Slavic split into Baltic and Slavic groups, Slavic split into West, East and South, South group split again into Western (Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian) and Eastern (Church Slavonic, Bulgarian and Macedonian). East split into Old East Slavic from which Russian originates, and Ruthenian which gave us Belorussian, Rusyn and Ukrainian.
It’s simple, right? 😉
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I buy basically none of it. This mythological "Germanic." It just doesn't exist, and there is no evidence for it.

On the other hand, evidence for a Scandinavian culture that colonized south to modern day Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, France, and west to modern England, Iceland, even at times Greenland and Newfoundland over the whale road, and then simply walked east through Finland into what is today refered to as Russia, there is overwhelming evidence for.

In other words, I think it's prepostrous to suggest that Norse comes from "Germanic." It's clearly the other way around.
 
GlitchyDot said:
Also talking about alcohol content - kefir got some too ... :)))
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Very true, although in my case, that was kind of difficult to get - mostly because it took traveling long distances away from a major city to get to a place where THAT is sold.

Alcohol in kefir materialized due to the rather inevitable fermentation of milk products in areas like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, that part of the Eurasian continent. In Soviet times, Minsk was a known refrigerator brand name...
 
SirDice said:
Early hominids didn't invent the tape recorder before fire unfortunately. No written records either.
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And maybe the Flying Spaghetti Monster just teleports out of sight whenever people look to where it was just spreading its noodly appendage.

In the field of science, of academic research, you at least make some attempt to back your propositions up with solid evidence. Specially when there are alternative theories that dispute it which do have solid evidence to support them.

Making tribes up out of thin air because they can't theoretically be disputed smacks of a serious lack of professionalism.
 
astyle said:
Having cultural knowledge like that is helpful when learning about the backstory behind the weird names in the world of computers. For example, why was Beowulf Cluster named like that? (oh, and did any get built with FreeBSD? ;) )
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Hold me back before I rabbit hole.

What you usually hear is that if the hardware is too disparate, the price you pay in overhead negates the benefits of added capacity. Who knows if it's true.
 
By the way I just want to add that I found battle sweat hilarious. Man those people were tough. "Ah no it's just a little battle sweat."
 
Maturin said:
Sure. By 'many sheep' maybe like most I think of Australia and NZ, while Australia is also associated with cattle farms, and NZ is associated with sheep, only, which of course ain't true.
Kind of more harmless ones, but prejudices of the ignorant.:cool: If one had said 'more cows than people' I'd guessed Argentina, or Brasil.
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Getting warmer. Another factoid that'll eliminate Australia and NZ (and Botswana). We've won the World Cup twice, though the last one was a long time ago.
 
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