Text 14262, 103 rader
Skriven 2010-04-26 09:53:14 av Johan Zwiekhorst (2:292/100)
  Kommentar till text 14254 av Maurice Kinal (1:261/38)
Ärende: you must whip it
========================
Hi Maurice!

In your message to me, dated <Saturday April 24 2010 15:24>, you wrote:

 >> In Dutch you would be called a 'Canadees'.

 >MK: Good to know.  There is much mutual respect between the Dutch and
 >MK: Canadians that stems from WWII.

The word is pronounced like 'canadace', by the way. The Flemish and the Dutch
are the best of friends also. Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg were at
the very heart of the European Union with the very first economic union called
BeNeLux (that still exists today although it is absorbed by the European
Union).

 >> Yes, but the number of francophones is much smaller in Canada
 >> and they have never been the ruling class.

 >MK: That is debatable.  At present the Bloc, which is a purely Quebec
 >MK: based federal political party, could bring down the current minority
 >MK: government along with the two other opposition parties.  Also in
 >MK: Quebec itself provincial politics has always been francophone centric.

Is that localized in Quebec or at the Canadian national parlement? If the
latter, such a small number of francophones would have WAY too much influence
on a national level.

 >> explains the unbelievable arrogance of the francophones.

 >MK: I am not going to touch that one.  ;-)

Hehe. ;-) As usual, the big problems are created by francophone polititians,
not by francophone citizens. When you talk to the francophone common people,
they're nice and friendly. They just don't see the need to learn any other
language than French. Especially not Dutch with regards to the Flemish: why
would they, as almost every Flemish they meet speaks fluent French?

 >MK: I believe it became the language of diplomacy somewhere along the
 >MK: line.

Yes. Nowadays, it being replaced by English more and more. In Europe, most of
the diplomats and aristocrats still speak French.

 >MK: quote me on that.  Seems to me the English language has French leakage
 >MK: into it probably for the same reason.

Probably. There are a lot of words in the English language that are clearly
derived from French and/or Latin. 'Chair' is an interesting one, as the current
French word is 'chaise'. In mideval French, the word was 'chaire', and that is
where the English word comes from. Interestingly, the French still has the word
'la chaire', but it now means an elevated chair or tribune of some sorts.

 >> Dutch was a hated language because of that.

 >MK: War is a nasty business.

Yep. Throughout the history of Europe, the Big Three (England, Germany and
France) have always and regularly been at war with each other. Mix in Spain and
Austria, and you got war all the time. Guess which patch of land was right in
the middle of all that commotion and was taken by invading forces all the time?
Right: Belgium. Especially Flanders was ruled over its history by almost every
neighbouring country in Europe and by Austria and Spain. It explains why
Flemish people speak so many languages: we had to in our history. We've been
ruled by the French, the German, the Spanish, the Austrians and the Dutch.
Sometimes more than once. Only the English have never ruled us. And the Dutch
only did it for 15 years before they were defeated in an independance war.
Did you know that Belgium was independant only once before? From January to
December 1790 Belgium declared itself independant and became "the United States
of Belgium". ;-) It lasted not even a year before we were reclaimed by Habsburg
rule (Austria-Hungary). And overrun and added to France by Napoleon. Yep, we
know our languages. ;-)

 >MK: Not at the moment.  Still picking away at the stuff that really
 >MK: matters as far as computers are concerned although quite a bit of it
 >MK: is user orientated but only as it pertains to a terminal based
 >MK: console. Once that is settled then we'll see but I have doubts simply
 >MK: because I've never really had a use for GUI interfaces.

I have always worked with text interfaces in the past, but only up until the
early nineties, when I was exposed to OS/2.

 >MK: What wordprocessing would that be?  At the moment I can read
 >MK: postscript and pdf files via a shell wrapper to ghostscript on console
 >MK: framebuffers. As for editting I don't bother as I tend to keep all my
 >MK: editting in regular text which could be reformatted to whatever format
 >MK: someone else may think is required although for the life of me I
 >MK: cannot understand why. It can be done though.  What do you think about
 >MK: Tetex?  It can handle a number of formats.
 >MK: I use text browsers.  Always have.  They work great and are less buggy
 >MK: and vastly more compact.  Doesn't everybody?  ;-)

I know it can all be done using a text interface, but it's cumbersome and why
would you want to? For the challenge of it? ;-)

Kind regards,

 ._|~/_

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

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