Text 14245, 92 rader
Skriven 2010-04-24 17:28:31 av Johan Zwiekhorst (2:292/100)
  Kommentar till text 14234 av Maurice Kinal (1:261/38)
Ärende: lots of people talk and few of them know
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Hi Maurice!

In your message to me, dated <Thursday April 22 2010 18:53>, you wrote:

 >> The Netherlands are unilingual, so everyone speaks Dutch.

 >MK: But are they all Dutch?  I've been under the illusion (delusion?) that
 >MK: everyone living in the Netherlands is Dutch.  If that isn't true then
 >MK: exactly who are the Dutch?  I've run across people in Canada who speak
 >MK: English and claim to be of Dutch heritage so I assumed that Dutch is
 >MK: more than just a language.

The inhabitants of the Netherlands are called the Dutch. The inhabitants of
Belgium are Belgians. The Dutch-speaking Belgians are called Flemish, while the
French-speaking Belgians in the South are called Walloons. The French-speaking
Belgians in the Brussels region are not called Walloons but simply
francophones.

 >MK: I am still confused as to who these Dutch you refer
 >MK: to actually are.

I hope the above clarifies that.

 >> So the Dutch-speaking Flemish are Belgians, not Dutch.

 >MK: I am an English speaking Canadian who is not English.  Also I am not
 >MK: French, Dutch, Flemish, or German.  Did I miss anything?  :-)

In Dutch you would be called a 'Canadees'.

 >> Most Flemish people can speak very good French.

 >MK: They have me beat then.

 >> The current political issues in Belgium all have to do with
 >> language.

 >MK: Somewhat the same situation here in Canada.

Yes, but the number of francophones is much smaller in Canada and they have
never been the ruling class. That makes all the difference in Belgium and
explains the unbelievable arrogance of the francophones.

 >> That has historical reasons. In the past, the Flemish aristocracy
 >> spoke French, not Dutch.

 >MK: That sounds like what happened in Russia.  The language of the Tsarist
 >MK: court became French somewhere along the line despite them never being
 >MK: French.  I think only one of them was German (Catherine) and all the
 >MK: rest were Russians.  No French that I am aware of.

In fact, the entire European aristocracy spoke French. Even at the English
court. I don't know if it's still the case, but previous kings and queens of
Britain plus Queen Elisabeth II signed every law with "la Reine le veut" (it is
the will of the Queen) and her signature.

In Belgium, French was chosen as the official language right after the
independance from the Netherlands - especially since that involved an armed
conflict and Dutch was a hated language because of that. So you really had a
complete French-speaking society in Belgium except for the lowest classes in
the North of the country: they spoke Dutch. It has been a very long road
(although without bloodshed) to get the Dutch language 'emancipated' in
Belgium. That's why the Dutch-speakers in Belgium behave and are treated as a
language-minority, although they are perversely the majority in numbers. Hence
all of the current problems.

 >> I haven't tried Slackware yet,

 >MK: For the P1 I would conclude it is the only modern distribution that
 >MK: has a hope of installing.  Also your AMD64 system could successfully
 >MK: compile for it as long as you follow the same optimizations (i486) for
 >MK: 32 bit. That way you could add whatever 'office' software is if it
 >MK: already isn't in there.

I'll download the latest version and I'll have a look. Did you know Zenwalk?

 >MK: XFCE has gotten far too gnome.  Started out okay.  Personally I prefer
 >MK: WindowMaker over everything else but given I don't currently have a
 >MK: GUI at all then it really doesn't matter what I think.  :-)

No GUI at all? Isn't that a bit cumbersome for wordprocessing or surfing the
web?

Kind regards,

 ._|~/_

e-mail: johan@zwiekhorst.be_NOSPAM
web:    http://www.zwiekhorst.be_NOBOTS

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