From: lars@beagle-ears.com   
      
   On 2025-12-28, rbowman  wrote:   
   LP>> And yes, the girl speaks Dutch, and FWIW, there are subtitles on the ad   
   LP>> at Youtube.   
      
   > I'm not proficient but I do better with written rather than spoken Dutch.   
   > Back when listservs were a thing I was on the lowlands-l list. It seems to   
   > have survived.   
      
   I find written Dutch 80+% readable, but the spoken is totally   
   unintelligible. Dutch and Danish are very similar mixtures of German,   
   English and French, but have completely different sets of phonemes. Each   
   of them accuses the other language of "it's not really a language, it's a   
   throat disease".   
      
   > Going the other way my people emigrated from what is now the Baden-   
   > Württemberg area where there are the Upper German dialects that differ   
   > from standard German.   
      
   In my vocabulary, Hochdeutsch is the standard ("educated") German.   
   In the North, there is Plattdytsch and in the South theere is   
   Schwäbisch. In the Southern dialects, they "swallow" the grammatical   
   endings, so I learned to just say "dö" instead of der/die/da/den/dem.   
   Nobody would take me for a native, but they understood me just fine, and   
   it relieved me of the worry of getting the wrong ending.   
      
   My first wife (back in Denmark) had German grendparents, so we would go   
   visit cousins in Offenburg and Munich several summers.   
      
   > fwiw, the Bitterroot flows north so there's the same situation that   
   > confuses some people. Do you go up the Bitterrot or down the Bitterroot?   
   > It's just as well Upper Saxony didn't survive as a state.   
   --   
   Lars Poulsen - an old geek in Santa Barbara, California   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)