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Laaca

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Czech republic,
30.08.2018, 23:25
 

Interresting DOS forum in german (Announce)

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Just accidentaly I found an interresting and quite active DOS forum. http://dosforum.de
But a disadvantage for many people is the fact that this forum is in german language. I speak german only on the very basic level so it is difficult for me to read more deeply the posts for I believe that among us are many people who speak german fluently.
(But probably these people already know this forum :-| )

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rr

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Berlin, Germany,
03.09.2018, 20:01

@ Laaca
 

Interresting DOS forum in german

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> Just accidentaly I found an interresting and quite active DOS forum.
> http://dosforum.de
> But a disadvantage for many people is the fact that this forum is in german
> language. I speak german only on the very basic level so it is difficult
> for me to read more deeply the posts for I believe that among us are many
> people who speak german fluently.
> (But probably these people already know this forum :-| )
I was a member once, but the admins/moderators didn't agree to my posting style, so the banned me.

There's also a spin-off: https://dosreloaded.de/forum/

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Rugxulo

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Usono,
11.09.2018, 01:08

@ Laaca
 

Interresting DOS forum in german

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Sorry for this off-topic rant, but I find it vaguely interesting!

The German language is supposedly harder (for a native [American] English speaker like me) to learn than others (see Language Difficulty Ranking here). So it's like an entire level above the more obvious choices. This is despite English being Germanic itself (but a lot has changed since Beowulf, the whole Norman French invasion and all). Supposedly J.R.R. Tolkien (a German name) was an expert in Old English. Of course let's not forget the Battenbergs/Mountbattens! The Swedes and Dutch are apparently fairly close, too (among others).

Apparently there was at least one very famous Czech (Austria/Bohemia?) immigrant to the U.S. who spoke German natively (among other languages). But that was a fairly long time ago, and I don't live near that part, so it's a bit obscure for me. Still intriguing!

Sorry, I just try to pretend to understand and connect the dots. It's a big world, it's a small world, whatever. I was never well-traveled, so my curiosity is a bit worthless.
marcov

11.09.2018, 16:48

@ Rugxulo
 

Interresting DOS forum in german

Post reply

> Sorry for this off-topic rant, but I find it vaguely interesting!
>
> The German language is supposedly harder (for a native [American] English
> speaker like me) to learn than others (see Language Difficulty Ranking
> here).
True, but that is mostly based on speaking/writing, not understanding.

> So it's like an entire level above the more obvious choices. This is
> despite English being Germanic itself (but a lot has changed since
> Beowulf, the whole Norman French
> invasion and all). Supposedly J.R.R. Tolkien (a German name) was an expert
> in Old English. Of course let's not forget the Battenbergs/Mountbattens!
> The Swedes and Dutch are apparently fairly close, too (among others).
Frisian is closest. Dutch and German should be closer than Swedish, since both West Germanic languages, while Swedish is North-Germanic.

(fun fact: name 6 West Germanic languages with some form of official state recognition)

The roots you quote are often quoted for this difference (e.g. Wikipedia), but somehow totally bypasses the fact that Shakespearian Era English is far more Germanic than current. I think a mostly bilingual nobility in the 18th and 19th century is as much to "blame" as the influences you name.

The Battenberg bit is just one side of the interconnection of nobility and royalty. The strange bit is always that the major royalty in WW-I were closely related (Russian Tsar and the German Emperor were both first cousins of the English King), which makes WW I the biggest family row ever!

> Apparently there was at least one very famous Czech (Austria/Bohemia?)
> immigrant to the U.S. who spoke German natively (among other languages).
> But that was a fairly long time ago, and I don't live near that part, so
> it's a bit obscure for me. Still intriguing!
German was the major language of science before WWII, and central Europe indeed spoke a lot of German due to the Austrian Empire. Still, there are more first language German speakers in Europe than English speakers.

Note that it I've had to decrypt 1900-1910 chemical articles, and while my German is somewhat decent, that is a whole different ballpark. The (Gothic-like) fonts alone are a horror.

> Sorry, I just try to pretend to understand and connect the dots. It's a big
> world, it's a small world, whatever. I was never well-traveled, so my
> curiosity is a bit worthless.
Language comparison is fun, but it works best if you have at least a working knowledge of a few. Sometimes that goes faster than you would expect. One of the more flabbergasting things I found out was when a Frenchman from the northern parts (Lille) learned to understand and speak Dutch in about 6 weeks.

Very impressive, specially because the languages are in different families. I never got to ask however if he had Dutch speaking relatives though.
Rugxulo

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Usono,
12.09.2018, 02:06

@ marcov
 

Interresting DOS forum in german

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> > The German language is supposedly harder (for a native [American]
> > English speaker like me) to learn than others
>
> True, but that is mostly based on speaking/writing, not understanding.

To be honest, 600 hours isn't much less than 750 (apparently 20%).

But the U.S. is overwhelmingly monolingual (although I heard once
that only 24% of the world is similarly limited). I mean, I get it,
there's less urgency or need over here, but it's still a bit
short-sighted. So I'm sympathetic but mostly for philosophical reasons.

> > So it's like an entire level above the more obvious choices. This is
> > despite English being Germanic itself (but a lot has changed since
> > Beowulf, the whole Norman French
> > invasion and all). Supposedly J.R.R. Tolkien (a German name) was an
> > expert in Old English. Of course let's not forget the
> > Battenbergs/Mountbattens! The Swedes and Dutch are apparently
> > fairly close, too (among others).
>
> Frisian is closest. Dutch and German should be closer than Swedish, since
> both West Germanic languages, while Swedish is North-Germanic.
Frisian is very obscure to me. But so is Yiddish.

I heard Dutch is closer and thus easier, certainly easier than German.
One teenager on one of the FreeDOS mailing lists (Maarten) said they
learn English, German, and Dutch in school. (Not sure if that's a fairly
recent development or not. The Van Halen brothers immigrated as pre-teens
and didn't speak English at all, AFAIK.)

Some famous Swedes (e.g. Pewdiepie, Linus Torvalds) are fluent too, so
I think they also learn in school. Similarly the Danes, from what little
I can tell. Not sure about others (or maybe even this much, barely).

Of course, Linus works and lives here and is (dual?) citizen nowadays.
Two of his daughters were born here. Not saying it was guaranteed, but
even I predicted he'd gain (dual) citizenship due to that, years ago.
(Yes, I know he's from Finland, but he's still Swedish, apparently
the minority. Finnish is not Germanic, supposedly related to Estonian
and Hungarian.)

> (fun fact: name 6 West Germanic languages with some form of official state
> recognition)
>
> The roots you quote are often quoted for this difference (e.g. Wikipedia),
> but somehow totally bypasses the fact that Shakespearian Era English is far
> more Germanic than current. I think a mostly bilingual nobility in the
> 18th and 19th century is as much to "blame" as the influences you name.
Old English is 100% indecipherable to modern English. I challenge anyone
to pretend otherwise. At least Shakespeare is mostly comprehensible.
BTW, British slang is extremely bizarre, and I'll never get used to it.

> The Battenberg bit is just one side of the interconnection of nobility and
> royalty. The strange bit is always that the major royalty in WW-I were
> closely related (Russian Tsar and the German Emperor were both first
> cousins of the English King), which makes WW I the biggest family row
> ever!
Yes, they were cousins with Tsar Nicholas II or whatever. As you probably
know, they're also related to Willem-Alexander, Felipe VI, and "half of
Europe". Probably due to intermarriage between monarchs. The whole name
change was political circa WW1 anyways. (Prince Philip is from Greece,
with Danish and even English heritage, so he's Elizabeth's fourth cousin,
I believe. His sisters all married Germans, and his Greek cousin Sophia
is the mother of Felipe. Wasn't the grandfather of the Swedish king a Brit?
Hey, even Charles and Camilla are like ninth cousins once removed!)

I don't really care about politics or history or genealogy at all, but
I do like trivia and trying to connect the dots. (Princess Diana's
grandfather was an American, so was Churchill's mother, among others.)

> > Apparently there was at least one very famous Czech (Austria/Bohemia?)
> > immigrant to the U.S. who spoke German natively (among other languages).
> > But that was a fairly long time ago, and I don't live near that part, so
> > it's a bit obscure for me. Still intriguing!
>
> German was the major language of science before WWII, and central Europe
> indeed spoke a lot of German due to the Austrian Empire. Still, there are
> more first language German speakers in Europe than English speakers.
Yes, German is a very popular language. One singer (Danish) married a
Hungarian/American lady but asked her father's permission in German.

BTW, I've heard that Germans can't understand Swiss German without
subtitles! But luckily the Swiss focus more on "standard" German
most of the time.

> Note that it I've had to decrypt 1900-1910 chemical articles, and while my
> German is somewhat decent, that is a whole different ballpark. The
> (Gothic-like) fonts alone are a horror.
I dare you to pretend to read Old English (Beowulf) natively.

> Language comparison is fun, but it works best if you have at least a
> working knowledge of a few. Sometimes that goes faster than you would
> expect.
I took Latin in school, which is of course both dead and complicated grammatically. I learned Esperanto for fun, read many interesting translations (Shakespeare, parts of the Bible) and periodicals. I know that's not quite as good as learning a Slavic language (Czech, Polish, Russian, Croatian) or similar, but it's better than nothing. Dr. Zamenhof was a Polish Jew of Lithuanian descent who spoke Russian (and Yiddish??) natively.

> One of the more flabbergasting things I found out was when a
> Frenchman from the northern parts (Lille) learned to understand
> and speak Dutch in about 6 weeks.
I wonder if he already knew English (or maybe Latin). Modern English
is roughly 60% Latin-based.

> Very impressive, specially because the languages are in different families.
> I never got to ask however if he had Dutch speaking relatives though.
Well, you know, conversational fluency doesn't mean literary or especially
writing. Even in E-o, where there is "official" vocabulary and strict
grammar rules, many many people overuse neologisms and "borrow"
quasi-universal foreign words when they shouldn't or don't need to.
It's still a burden trying to memorize vocabulary, so I suspect that
most just "make up" a word (esperantize?) when they don't have a
dictionary readily available. So even there it's messy, but it's
not really a well-taught language, most are users self-taught.
Also, being auxiliary (second language only, by design) makes things
less urgent.

P.S. I've been listening to a lot of Sleeze Beez on internet radio
recently. They're a Dutch band (disbanded in 1996 but had a one-off
reunion in 2010 or such). Well, their first album had one singer
(Belgian) but the rest had another guy (English). Maybe you've heard
of them?? I mean, we're roughly the same age, but I'd never heard
any of their stuff (outside of one song several times on House of Hair,
so I never even remembered the band's name).
marcov

12.09.2018, 12:17

@ Rugxulo
 

Interresting DOS forum in german

Post reply

> > > The German language is supposedly harder (for a native [American]
> > > English speaker like me) to learn than others
> >
> > True, but that is mostly based on speaking/writing, not understanding.
>
> To be honest, 600 hours isn't much less than 750 (apparently 20%).
I meant that the universal perception of "difficult" is more the active part. But since you had Latin, cases and declensions are not new to you, and they are (together with gender) the hardest part.

Word order and concatenating words is also considered a problem, but that is shared with Dutch, so not something that makes German harder than Dutch.

> But the U.S. is overwhelmingly monolingual (although I heard once
> that only 24% of the world is similarly limited).

Rule of thumb, the bigger the country the lesser the language skills. And China and India, while not entirely mono-lingual are mainly so, and that is 2.5/7 of the population.

Note that American as an ex colony is a grade worse, since it doesn't have dialects of the same magnitude like e.g. UK English has. Dialects also help with language skills.

> I mean, I get it,
> there's less urgency or need over here, but it's still a bit
> short-sighted. So I'm sympathetic but mostly for philosophical reasons.
The needs are also different. Spanish is much more important in the Americas than in Europe (where it is still a big economy with the second largest tourist sector (after France)).

> > Frisian is closest. Dutch and German should be closer than Swedish,
> since
> > both West Germanic languages, while Swedish is North-Germanic.
>
> Frisian is very obscure to me. But so is Yiddish.
Frisian is Ingvaeonic, like English. Some however also include old Saxon in this subgroup (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Germanic)

Dutch and, roughly, the German Rhineland are Istvaenonic, rest of Germany is Irmvionic. The standard-Germanification of the Rhineland however reduced this a bit.

Keep in mind btw that the Saxons are from roughly Northern Germany. There is a direct link between Northern Germany dialects (Saxon platt) and English too.

> I heard Dutch is closer and thus easier, certainly easier than German.
If it is closer, I'd say it is not that much. English barely distinguished Dutch and German before the 1500s. (hence "Dutch" which is based on the same root as the German autonym "Deutsch"). Only the founding of the Dutch Republic
and language centralization due to bible translations made the difference pronounced.

I'd say the difference is not distance but practical details, like Dutch shedding many of its declensions, case and most of the word gender in the early 20th century (after they were already disused for a while) and the German sound shifts that make the words somewhat unfamiliar, both in writing and pronunciation, even if they have the same root. Those are somewhat predictable though, so that is more an initial problem.

Dutch and German are closer to each other, indeed due to the Latin/French vocabulary in English. Which can be confusing for English people learning Dutch, since many French derived words in Dutch remain pretty French in pronunciation too. At least much more than in English.

> One teenager on one of the FreeDOS mailing lists (Maarten) said they
> learn English, German, and Dutch in school. (Not sure if that's a fairly
> recent development or not. The Van Halen brothers immigrated as pre-teens
> and didn't speak English at all, AFAIK.)
In the NL that is standard. English starting from primary school even. German usually from the second class secondary school.
The upper 60% of the students also gets French starting with the first year of primary school. But the minimum (depending on group 2 or 4 years) is not enough to really be fluent.

In Belgium they start much younger with French, with way, way better results. Most university students (iow that had the highest and usually longest form of secondary education) seem fluent to at least being able to manage every day events.

The share of the Dutch population that can speak some English is pretty high. German is less and still declining. I blame cable television (before the cable era, people in border areas watched German television, just to get more choice, myself included)

Afaik van Halen were of Indo heritage (former Dutch colonial citizens in Indonesia)? Maybe they speak some Malay. Or maybe that is a generation to late already.

(Linus T and Scandinavian English level)

Smaller countries, better skills. And while further away (core simple words are a little more different), the distance of English to North Germanic is still much, much closer that other languages. (

> (Yes, I know he's from Finland, but he's still Swedish, apparently
> the minority. Finnish is not Germanic, supposedly related to Estonian
> and Hungarian.)
Yup. Quite different.


> Old English is 100% indecipherable to modern English. I challenge anyone
> to pretend otherwise. At least Shakespeare is mostly comprehensible.
Really old texts (like 1000 A.D.) often are. 1500-1600 era usually is better, specially if you are educated a bit about the differences.

> BTW, British slang is extremely bizarre, and I'll never get used to it.
Slang and dialects are hard because there often is no formal education for them. The only way to learn is exposure.

> Wasn't the grandfather of the Swedish king a
> Brit?
> Hey, even Charles and Camilla are like ninth cousins once removed!)
Yeah, our king decidedly went in a different direction (Argentinian :-)

All former Dutch monarchal spouses were German afaik (Claus,Bernard,Hendrik,Emma,Sophia). We need to go back to 1840 for Anna Pavlovna of Russia to break that trend.

> I don't really care about politics or history or genealogy at all, but
> I do like trivia and trying to connect the dots. (Princess Diana's
> grandfather was an American, so was Churchill's mother, among others.)
Same, though with a bit more continental focus, for obvious reasons. But the area of interest is more the local tribal past (and languages relate somewhat to that).

> BTW, I've heard that Germans can't understand Swiss German without
> subtitles! But luckily the Swiss focus more on "standard" German
> most of the time.
Schwizerdütsch is something else indeed. Though the trouble already starts in Bavaria, and even Nuernberg dialects are complex.

I can understand dialects from both Ruhr and Rur areas (which are somewhat related to my own Limburgish dialect), and can understand Cologne dialects (which are a different branch) after some time to get used to it.

> I dare you to pretend to read Old English (Beowulf) natively.
I know. I had to in English class. With the translation, you recognize some worths, but that's it. Pronunciation is alien.

Old Frankish is even worse, since even earlier, you often don't even recognize anything as familar:

"Maltho thi afrio lito"
(I say, I free you, half-free.)

With the translation, thi might guessed as "you/du/jij/thou", and that is about it. Some common simple French words come from it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankish_language#Influence_on_Old_French_and_Middle_Latin )

> I took Latin in school, which is of course both dead and complicated
> grammatically.

I tried Latin and old Greek for about two months, then decided that was enough, and I was more technically inclined :_)

> was a Polish Jew of Lithuanian descent who spoke Russian (and Yiddish??)
> natively.
Dutch(native),German(4y),English(6y). A bit of French(4y), usually enough to manage receptions of hotels, restaurants etc, if they are willing to listen.

I wouldn't classify my German as entirely fluent, but I have done German tradeshows and spoke German on the floor. I'll probably would need to spend some months in Germany to really get a level further.

(French guy learning Dutch)
> I wonder if he already knew English (or maybe Latin). Modern English
> is roughly 60% Latin-based.
There are pockets of Dutch dialects in Northern France, but they haved waned in the 20th century. Lille even has a native Dutch name, Rijssel.

I learned English and French at the same time, and while there is some shared vocabulary, it is not the same. English is still much and much faster, and you use your Germanic language skills much more.

I sometimes wish I could revisit that first year of English lessons, since I have much, much more context to connect it with.

> It's still a burden trying to memorize vocabulary, so I suspect that
> most just "make up" a word (esperantize?) when they don't have a
> dictionary readily available. So even there it's messy, but it's
> not really a well-taught language, most are users self-taught.
> Also, being auxiliary (second language only, by design) makes things
> less urgent.
(I'm really glad there are no recordings of the above tradeshows in Germany for exactly those reasons).

> P.S. I've been listening to a lot of Sleeze Beez on internet radio
No, but it seems there heyday were the eighties. Slightly too old for me, I was a young teenager then, and didn't really go to popconcerts yet, and they seem to have only one song that touched the Dutch TOP 40 rankings.
Rugxulo

Homepage

Usono,
13.09.2018, 06:00

@ marcov
 

Interresting DOS forum in german

Post reply

> I meant that the universal perception of "difficult" is more the active
> part. But since you had Latin, cases and declensions are not new to you,
> and they are (together with gender) the hardest part.
>
> Word order and concatenating words is also considered a problem, but that
> is shared with Dutch, so not something that makes German harder than Dutch.
I have no direct urge to learn any further languages (yet), no huge need. It might be fun, though.

What was it I was reading about months ago? Some spaghetti western dudes (long ago) whom somebody made a video game about. (quick Googling) Bud Spencer and Terence Hill: Slaps and Beans. I haven't played it, only saw YouTubers playing it, but apparently they were huge in Europe for their movies. One has passed away by now, but the other is still active on tv (and his mother was German, so he's also fluent in that). IIRC, they were also famous for the ("hilarious" German ??) dubs of their movies. Of course, they weren't nearly as famous over here, which apparently shocks a lot of Europeans when an American says they've never heard of them.

(Sorry for the off-tangent, but it's little trivia like that which piques my interest.)

> Rule of thumb, the bigger the country the lesser the language skills. And
> China and India, while not entirely mono-lingual are mainly so
India is supposedly very multilingual, at least in some major parts (Tamil Nadu?). But I guess you can always find exceptions.

There are of course "English only" advocates here, which I don't necessarily agree with. I agree that we don't really need more fragmentation, for its own sake, but a little courtesy (interoperability?) sometimes helps.

> Note that American as an ex colony is a grade worse, since it doesn't have
> dialects of the same magnitude like e.g. UK English has. Dialects also help
> with language skills.
We have slang, but I swear it gets worse over the Internet, which amplifies (or even reinvents) everything. What you read online or see in movies is an exaggerated (or faux/new/trendy) version.

> The needs are also different. Spanish is much more important in the
> Americas than in Europe
There are certainly many native Spanish speakers, but most of them are in Texas, California, etc. Other parts certainly have many immigrants from various places, but it doesn't make enough of a dent to inspire any direct behavior change or acknowledgement.

> Frisian is Ingvaeonic,
Ah yes, Malmsteen, famous Swedish (now American?) guitarist. :-P j/k

(All of that kind of classification is over my head, sadly.)

> > I heard Dutch is closer and thus easier, certainly easier than German.
>
> If it is closer, I'd say it is not that much. English barely distinguished
> Dutch and German before the 1500s. Only the founding of the Dutch
> Republic and language centralization due to bible translations made the
> difference pronounced.
You mean Luther's translation or others? Apparently he also had a big influence on Sweden (et al).

> > One teenager on one of the FreeDOS mailing lists (Maarten) said they
> > learn English, German, and Dutch in school. (The Van Halen brothers
> > immigrated as pre-teens and didn't speak English at all.)
>
> In the NL that is standard. English starting from primary school even.
> German usually from the second class secondary school.
>
> The share of the Dutch population that can speak some English is pretty
> high. German is less and still declining. I blame cable television (before
> the cable era, people in border areas watched German television
But has the widespread Internet helped or hurt? It probably helped more with English (which many prefer). I'm not denying that the U.S. is fairly populous (big audience) and also influential (movies, music, etc). I guess I have to be a bit cautious not to overhype it (since it's not exactly an absolute authority on anything, even if they think they are, but even they often can't agree amongst themselves).

> Afaik van Halen were of Indo heritage (former Dutch colonial citizens in
> Indonesia)? Maybe they speak some Malay. Or maybe that is a generation to
> late already.
AFAIK, only their mother (Eugenia) was from Indonesia, and she died in 2005. I've never seen much acknowledgement about her (or even the father, Jan, who died in 1986). I'm almost surprised I even know that much, but I'm a nerd, heheh, I like trivia. (I'd be good on Jeopardy.)

> (Linus T and Scandinavian English level)
>
> Smaller countries, better skills. And while further away (core simple words
> are a little more different), the distance of English to North Germanic is
> still much, much closer that other languages.
Given enough years, anybody can become "native" to any place. Of course that's fairly obvious since it happens all the time. Linus is hardly the first Swede to emigrate here.

> > BTW, British slang is extremely bizarre, and I'll never get used to it.
>
> Slang and dialects are hard because there often is no formal education for
> them. The only way to learn is exposure.
We'd have to ignore all the useless insults (which are too common), of course, and only focus on practical words. I'm sure there's phrasebooks or videos on it, if looking hard enough.

It just boggles my mind, even after having watched a ton of Britcoms and whatnot, it's still noticeably different in many many ways. It's a true culture shock, and it certainly wouldn't be easy for me to adjust to such a place. (Not impossible but certainly confusing.) There is little in common due to such a vast distance and divergence of history. The pattern of thinking is entirely different.

> Yeah, our king decidedly went in a different direction (Argentinian :-)
Not to get too controversial (let's not), but due to his (rare, potential) Anglican succession, they had to change a few laws because of her. Somewhat strange, but it shouldn't be all that surprising.

> All former Dutch monarchal spouses were German afaik
> (Claus,Bernard,Hendrik,Emma,Sophia). We need to go back to 1840 for Anna
> Pavlovna of Russia to break that trend.
Wasn't the Danish queen half Swedish? Well, who cares, it's all the same (furious uproar ensues!). It's hardly shocking. I'd be more shocked if there wasn't a lot of cross-pollination (or whatever) in Europe.

(BTW, I was somewhat disappointed to hear that Australia has gone a bit crazy with citizenship requirements for its politicians, even contra those with dual British citizenship. It's already impractical that U.S. demands birther rights, but are others really so petty to demand such fake righteousness too?? Bah, politics, always complaining but never truly helping anybody.)

(Xenophobia is dumb, but the only thing worse is when such a buzzword becomes so common as to label most people that unfairly, for fake political purposes, which then defeats the point and waters it all down. The modern outrage culture sucks, always looking for someone to harass.)

> Old Frankish is even worse, since even earlier, you often don't even
> recognize anything as familar:
> Some common simple French words come from it
Does "France" come from "Franks"? Or only loosely? I know it was (part of?) Gaul (Gallic?). Well, after thousands of years, everything is half this and half that anyways, so the answer is probably "yes and no".

BTW, a while back I read a biography of one famous 19th century Frenchwoman from Normandy. The guy said people there look different, which I thought was a bit crass. But wasn't "Norman" similar to "Norseman"? IIRC, William the Conqueror was of so-called "viking" descent. Of course, what little was left 900 years later, if any?? (For instance, Iceland is Germanic, but they are loosely related to Norwegians and Scottish, according to Wikipedia.)

> Dutch(native),German(4y),English(6y). A bit of French(4y), usually enough
> to manage receptions of hotels, restaurants etc, if they are willing to
> listen.
So you've been to France and/or Belgium a lot? (I had a teacher who often vacationed in Belgium in the summers, for no obvious reason. BTW, my first Latin teacher was from France.)

> I wouldn't classify my German as entirely fluent, but I have done German
> tradeshows and spoke German on the floor. I'll probably would need to
> spend some months in Germany to really get a level further.
Immersion would probably help, yes, but nowadays you could probably learn online (or Rosetta Stone, Berlitz, or whatever, maybe even YouTube videos).

> > P.S. I've been listening to a lot of Sleeze Beez on internet radio
>
> No, but it seems there heyday were the eighties. Slightly too old for me, I
> was a young teenager then, and didn't really go to popconcerts yet, and
> they seem to have only one song that touched the Dutch TOP 40 rankings.
"Too old"? I mean, you're only six years older than I am (according to ancient FPC authors page, I already remembered but double-checked anyways).

I got my first VH CD in '93, and Sammy "left" in '96. So I was very young then too. If I had to learn from the radio, I'd have never become a fan. '90s radio never ever played anything from the '80s. That whole era was basically discarded entirely, for no good reason (maybe they burned out on it from overplaying it?). So certainly I understand if you never heard it on the radio. There are bands that are exceptions to that rule that were still played a lot (e.g. Led Zeppelin), but they were very few.

My point is that, even if uncommon, it's possible to become a fan of a band that isn't (mostly) active anymore. Certainly '87 (for a '73-born dude) is extremely young, but '96 (disbanded) ain't too far-fetched. But hey, even a "small" country like .nl can be "too big" to know every "local" band. I just stumbled upon them by accident on internet radio (which is nowhere near as shallow as local radio, you can halfway pick your own stuff).
Rugxulo

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Usono,
18.09.2018, 20:20

@ Rugxulo
 

random trivia (sorry for off-topic)

Post reply

> > The needs are also different. Spanish is much more important in the
> > Americas than in Europe
>
> There are certainly many native Spanish speakers, but most of them are in
> Texas, California, etc.
I forgot about the territories (Puerto Rico, Guam). Not exactly sure, but I suspect our friend Guti here is from the latter (notice that his blog post about Mr. Colligan is in Spanish). I'm mostly closer geographically to the former but have never visited. I guess those are similar in nature to Aruba, Saint Eustatius, etc? (Doesn't even the Netherlands have some ancient history with the kingdom of Spain?)

> > > BTW, British slang is extremely bizarre, and I'll never get used to it.
> >
> > Slang and dialects are hard because there often is no formal education
> > for them. The only way to learn is exposure.
 >
> We'd have to ignore all the useless insults (which are too common), of
> course, and only focus on practical words. I'm sure there's phrasebooks or
> videos on it, if looking hard enough.
I meant that dirty/curse words are overused and somewhat useless. How many different ways can you call someone a "wasteman"? "Jammy bloke", "barmy git", "bloody tosspot, you know, the usual nonsense. Very bizarre.

> > > P.S. I've been listening to a lot of Sleeze Beez on internet radio
> >
> > No, but it seems there heyday were the eighties. Slightly too old for me,
> I was a young teenager then, and didn't really go to popconcerts yet, and
> > they seem to have only one song that touched the Dutch TOP 40 rankings.
>
> "Too old"? I mean, you're only six years older than I am (according to
> ancient FPC authors page, I already remembered but double-checked
> anyways).
Like I said, they had one singer for their first album (Tigo Fawsi/Belgian) but another for the rest (Andrew Elt/British). One of the guitarists has a YouTube page with some videos, but mostly I'm only listening via Slacker Radio online.

Top 40? I assume you're referring to "Stranger than Paradise". But the big one I was barely familiar with was "Screwed, Blued, and Tattooed." However, they had a lot of other good songs. "Heroes Die Young", "Rock in the Western World", "Scream" are also good. The big one with the original singer, IMO, is "Dyin' to Live" (now that's a perfect song!).

But maybe you don't even like that style of music, who knows.
marcov

19.09.2018, 17:26

@ Rugxulo
 

random trivia (sorry for off-topic)

Post reply

> I guess those are similar in nature to
> Aruba, Saint Eustatius, etc?

I've never been there. But afaik on most Dutch island, the "other" language is more likely to be English, not Spanish. Papiamento (a creole language with afaik a lot of Portuguese influences) is afaik spoken a lot on the larger islands, Aruba and Curacao.

On some of the Dutch islands (like Dutch part of Saint Martin) hardly any Dutch is spoken at all.

> (Doesn't even the Netherlands have some
> ancient history with the kingdom of Spain?)
Didn't have the colonies have some spat with the British over tea? :-D

Strictly speaking only the problem was Phillips II, so the King, not Spain itself. Who had a bunch of fiefs besides being the King of Spain including most of what is now Belgium and the NL(some of which was still submerged in that period)

But he ruled from Spain with much less feeling for local sensitivities than his father Charles V(who grew up in Ghent). So it happened that the Habsburg treasury was empty, and he raised extra taxes in the richest part of his realm (Flanders). At the same time he also stepped up Protestant prosecutions and one thing led to another. Some things were said, some people were executed, and you have a revolt on your hands.

> I meant that dirty/curse words are overused and somewhat useless. How many
> different ways can you call someone a "wasteman"? "Jammy bloke", "barmy
> git", "bloody tosspot, you know, the usual nonsense. Very bizarre.
Yup.

> But maybe you don't even like that style of music, who knows.
Hard rock was more in decline in 1990 here, though with a few exceptions (like GnR). Alternative was moving up, and the rave movement ran full tilt.

More so than in the US(at least, judging by MTV US VMA that I watched in that time).

Maybe they simply only got specialist venues, and since i didn't live in a major city at the time....
Rugxulo

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Usono,
21.09.2018, 13:27

@ marcov
 

random trivia (sorry for off-topic)

Post reply

> > I guess those are similar in nature to
> > Aruba, Saint Eustatius, etc?
>
> I've never been there. But afaik on most Dutch island, the "other" language
> is more likely to be English, not Spanish. Papiamento (a creole language
> with afaik a lot of Portuguese influences) is afaik spoken a lot on the
> larger islands, Aruba and Curacao.
I meant they're separate territories, not that they speak Spanish.

> On some of the Dutch islands (like Dutch part of Saint Martin) hardly any
> Dutch is spoken at all.
Huh, apparently only 300 km (190 mi) away from Puerto Rico. Wait, France owns half? Sounds like the whole Cuba debacle (and U.S. naval base). What could go wrong?? :-P Yup, apparently named after the same Saint Martin that Luther was named after.

> > (Doesn't even the Netherlands have some
> > ancient history with the kingdom of Spain?)
>
> Didn't have the colonies have some spat with the British over tea? :-D

A four-year president over here makes everyone lose their minds. I don't know how the British are so sane after having one monarch for 60 years. Honestly, it shouldn't be that PTSD-inducing, but people just can't help (even 1+1/2 years later) constantly going crazy over it, ugh. (The media never shuts up and corrupts every corner, it's extremely aggravating.) So yeah, I pity the inevitable uproar in transition to King Charles. The British press is considered even more hostile than U.S. (which I find doubtful). I don't understand the gossip obsession with the royals. I like trivia but only innocent stuff, all the other nonsense is boring.

> Strictly speaking only the problem was Phillips II, so the King, not Spain
> itself.
>
> But he ruled from Spain with much less feeling for local sensitivities than
> his father Charles V(who grew up in Ghent). So it happened that the
> Habsburg treasury was empty, and he raised extra taxes in the richest part
> of his realm (Flanders). At the same time he also stepped up Protestant
> prosecutions and one thing led to another. Some things were said, some
> people were executed, and you have a revolt on your hands.
Very little dispute is religious in nature these days. Religion has little power, at least in the States. Mostly it's secular powers warring against each other (or at least progressives trying to upend the patriarchy/status quo, often equated to liberals/Democrats versus conservatives/Republicans). But yes, many people actively hate religion, and they are dangerous when given power.

Nowadays everyone has a persecution complex. It's very stressful trying to avoid such topics (and people) when it invades every corner of public life. Some people can't take a hint! I'm basically apolitical, but there are many people who have serious anger issues and an axe to grind. It's a very dangerous world, and those who fight against their so-called "enemies" are often worse! Honestly, I'm not joking, this proves (to me) that the U.S. needs much better access to mental health care coverage!

> > But maybe you don't even like that style of music, who knows.
>
> Hard rock was more in decline in 1990 here, though with a few exceptions
> (like GnR). Alternative was moving up, and the rave movement ran full tilt.
>
> More so than in the US(at least, judging by MTV US VMA that I watched in
> that time).
Yes, grunge and alternative mostly displaced classic rock or metal. It's somewhat annoying that so much good music was discarded entirely with no outlet for it.

But MTV isn't an indication of much. Even in the '90s, their showing of videos was declining. Tastes changed, so a lot of artists got pushed aside. Even later, "MTV" literally stopped representing "Music Television" (they explicitly changed it to just be a meaningless acronym). And channels like MTV2, once considered an outlet for music proper, quickly changed their tune, too. Even websites like MTV Hive (or whatever) stopped having videos (but probably for licensing reasons). Even YouTube (and Vevo?) originally wanted to host all music videos but didn't due to copyright (Viacom dispute??). Granted, I don't care for videos anyways and consider them a waste of effort.

(As an aside, the '90s sucked. I'd hear incomplete/chopped songs on the radio, e.g. VH's "Humans Being", as well as way too many greatest hits compilations from all labels for all artists, often with chopped songs. Even videos like VH's "Don't Tell Me" were chopped. The whole climate of consumerism or whatever was very rude to artistic integrity. You can have decent mixes/edits sometimes, but overall it's considered "bad". So yeah, that always bugged me.)

> Maybe they simply only got specialist venues, and since i didn't live in a
> major city at the time....
They probably didn't have proper management or tour support or record label support or whatever. I don't know the details. They probably burned out or maybe had other priorities. I'm just glad some of it was preserved for posterity. They had a lot of good songs, so it's a shame they weren't better recognized. But I never cared for concerts anyways, always preferred live CDs or whatnot. They did make one live album, but so far I'm only listening to internet radio.
marcov

21.09.2018, 16:49

@ Rugxulo
 

random trivia (sorry for off-topic)

Post reply

> I meant they're separate territories, not that they speak Spanish.
The leeward islands (St. Martin,Saba and Eustacius) are closer to Puerto Rico, the other ones (Leeward Islands or ABC island; Aruba/Bonaire/Curacao) are closer to Venezuela

The larger ones are separate countries under the Dutch Crown, the smaller are municipalities. There are some islanders in the NL, but they are mostly from the larger (Aruba and Curacao). I don't know much about the others.

A bit more about Saint Martin, since, obviously, it was heavily in the news last year due to being leveled by hurricane Irma. I do know Saint Martin has some cruise ships.

Saint Martin was just upgraded from municipality to separate country (2015?) before this happened.

> > On some of the Dutch islands (like Dutch part of Saint Martin) hardly
> any
> > Dutch is spoken at all.
>
> Huh, apparently only 300 km (190 mi) away from Puerto Rico. Wait, France
> owns half? Sounds like the whole Cuba debacle (and U.S. naval base). What
> could go wrong?? :-P Yup, apparently named after the same Saint Martin
> that Luther was named after.
The one with the cape and Halloween?

> A four-year president over here makes everyone lose their minds. I don't
> know how the British are so sane after having one monarch for 60 years.
Well, limit their power to ribbon cutting :-)

> I pity the inevitable uproar in transition to King Charles. The
> British press is considered even more hostile than U.S. (which I find
> doubtful).
The British tabloids are horrible. And mostly a waste of time.

> I don't understand the gossip obsession with the royals. I like
> trivia but only innocent stuff, all the other nonsense is boring.
Well, all the Stormy Daniels stuff doesn't really belong in the relevant news either.

> Very little dispute is religious in nature these days. Religion has little
> power, at least in the States. Mostly it's secular powers warring against
> each other

Mwha. Just yell abortion and run for cover ! :-)

> Nowadays everyone has a persecution complex. It's very stressful trying to
> avoid such topics (and people) when it invades every corner of public life.
> Some people can't take a hint! I'm basically apolitical, but there are many
> people who have serious anger issues and an axe to grind.

That's the problem with all populist bits. Politics should not be driven by emotion.

> But MTV isn't an indication of much. Even in the '90s, their showing of
> videos was declining.

I do know that, and many of those bands were old.

> Even later, "MTV" literally stopped representing "Music Television" (they
> explicitly changed it to just be a meaningless acronym). And channels like
> MTV2, once considered an outlet for music proper, quickly changed their
> tune, too.

Here MTV turned into a soap/reallifetv channel gradually (mid nineties - late nineties) The problem is that the other channel with actual music wasn't available on basic cable, neither were others. The competitor dutch channel (TMF- The Music Factory) held out a bit longer but was bought by MTV and ended up the same.

> Granted, I don't care for videos anyways and consider them a
> waste of effort.
I liked having MTV on when doing some low-key coding in the evening. Both music and a bit of distraction from time to time.

> (As an aside, the '90s sucked. I'd hear incomplete/chopped songs on the
> radio, e.g. VH's "Humans Being", as well as way too many greatest hits
> compilations from all labels for all artists, often with chopped songs.
Here radios always clipped longer songs, specially during prime time (rush hours), also in the nineties. But it was fairly rare, and mostly only for longer songs. And you risked a DJ blabbing through parts of it.

> But I never cared for concerts anyways, always preferred
> live CDs or whatnot.

I like a concert now and then, but my main live music was festivals.
Did GnR and Interpol last year, and in november the Human League (80s) comes to a venue that is 3km away. I can't really skip that :-)
Rugxulo

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Usono,
24.09.2018, 04:58

@ marcov
 

random trivia (sorry for off-topic)

Post reply

> > > On some of the Dutch islands (like Dutch part of Saint Martin) hardly
> > > any Dutch is spoken at all.
> >
> > Huh, apparently only 300 km (190 mi) away from Puerto Rico. Wait, France
> > owns half? Sounds like the whole Cuba debacle (and U.S. naval base).
> > What could go wrong?? :-P Yup, apparently named after the same Saint
> > Martin that Luther was named after.
>
> The one with the cape and Halloween?
We do have Halloween but not St. Martin's Day. Of course, Halloween (All Hallows' Eve) is "mostly" a secular holiday. The only religious part is obviously All Saint's Day. (A much smaller, "mostly" secular, region-based celebration is Mardi Gras, loosely centered around Lent and Fat Tuesday/Ash Wednesday.)

> > A four-year president over here makes everyone lose their minds. I don't
> > know how the British are so sane after having one monarch for 60 years.
>
> Well, limit their power to ribbon cutting :-)
The monarchy still has lots of power, I presume, but I don't know the details. Obviously some of that has been divested in recent decades.

> > I pity the inevitable uproar in transition to King Charles. The
> > British press is considered even more hostile than U.S. (which I find
> > doubtful).
>
> The British tabloids are horrible. And mostly a waste of time.
Hollywood entertainment rags aren't much better. What passes for "news" or journalism these days is either gossip or flat out slander (libel?). It's quite toxic, and I'm surprised they get away with it. (And of course the Internet makes everything amplified.)

N.B. The IMDb forums had to be shut down because of so many horrendous problems. (But those people will just go elsewhere. Bah, social media can be such a burden, so I avoid most of it.)

> > I don't understand the gossip obsession with the royals. I like
> > trivia but only innocent stuff, all the other nonsense is boring.
>
> Well, all the Stormy Daniels stuff doesn't really belong in the relevant
> news either.
I'm apolitical, and I don't normally get involved. But it's pushed so heavily, and then some, 24/7, that you can't avoid it entirely, even by choice! It's very angry, obsessive, and it's quite destructive. (EDIT: I have to mention that Slacker [internet] Radio always tries to give me ABC News/political ads, among more benign others. Luckily, I can "skip" it, ugh.)

Having said that, even if I'm no explicit supporter of any political parties, it's hard not to see that they were against Trump from well before he was even nominated. For many reasons (mostly fake), they hated him. There have been so many ("mostly" fabricated) "scandals" that I can't take them seriously anymore. And yes, they are trying very hard to remove him from office by throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. They really hate him, but they hated him before he was even elected. It's hard not to be cynical when they're so biased. So yeah, even to someone who doesn't actively care about "the important issues", it's still very annoying.

N.B. They actively hate all conservatives and Republicans (often directly by name), so it's not truly just a Trump hatred. Don't be naive and think it's only about him.

EDIT: Nobody I know of uses accents in English, so I guess we misspell "naïve" because we don't use "i umlaut" (or whatever). Apparently there's a (not superficial but functional?) difference between dieresis and umlaut??? Sheesh.

> > Very little dispute is religious in nature these days. Religion has
> little
> > power, at least in the States. Mostly it's secular powers warring
> against
> > each other
>
> Mwha. Just yell abortion and run for cover ! :-)
Do you really think religious affiliation matters in politics? Okay, random trivia: Condi Rice is Presbyterian but didn't vote for Trump (also Presbyterian, his mother came from Scotland, apparently it's popular there). Hillary's V.P. (Kaine) is Catholic, so is Trump's wife (Melania). Heck, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Rick Santorum ... they're all "Catholic" (more or less), but they don't agree on anything. Yes, Catholics are against abortion (with some confused people not understanding the difference, ahem, Melinda Gates). Speaking of excommunication ....

Yes, it's a contentious issue, and yes, many people lose their minds or mislead people unfairly. No, it's not "important" because I don't think anybody actively cares enough to change anything. I don't think the status quo is going anywhere. And I don't see any concrete signs that anything is under attack or will change anytime soon. So I don't know why some people still lose their minds (or tempers). It's a joke, honestly, and I hate it. Such a waste.

The entire Woman's March (2017) was only a day after Trump's inauguration. Yes, they tried mostly to pretend it was about various issues, but really it was just them blowing their own horn. It was kinda ridiculous. How do you get pissed off at a guy who hasn't even (barely) been elected and hasn't done or changed (broken??) anything yet? How do you get mad at a pro-life guy when you still have the "right" to do whatever you want (since, what, 45 years)? Are you that afraid of his "power"? It's ridiculous. Am I just overly cynical, skeptical? Am I the only one who isn't afraid? Why do people lose their freakin' minds over this, over something that hasn't even happened, and probably won't?

So it's just fake outrage, more insanity (virtue signaling?), total waste of time. I'm honestly tired of hearing about it. I shouldn't even be thinking about it. I'm out of the loop, I have no power, and yet I hate this constant need to war against literally all existing ideologies as if everybody that came before us is 100% wrong and must "change", it's psychotic.

> Here radios always clipped longer songs, specially during prime time (rush
> hours), also in the nineties. But it was fairly rare, and mostly only for
> longer songs. And you risked a DJ blabbing through parts of it.
They haven't trimmed many songs in recent memory, but I don't really listen much anymore (except via internet, better selection). My point was that the industry was, and still is, very weird.

Internet is probably better for most artists these days (but worse for record labels??). You can buy Sleeze Beez music on various sites. BTW, even their live album was recorded in Japan, which (allegedly?) was more friendly to "hair metal" (or whatever) even once it became outmoded in the West. Strange to think the '90s were mostly grunge/alternative because many things have gotten worse, musically, but there's still good modern music (even if different). BTW, apparently one song ("We Do Rock 'N Roll") was missing on their second album (U.S. release only), go figure. Apparently the record label hated it? Yet I've heard it on internet radio without problem. So yeah, that's weird/annoying, even iTunes and Google Play lack that song.

> > But I never cared for concerts anyways, always preferred
> > live CDs or whatnot.
>
> I like a concert now and then, but my main live music was festivals.
> Did GnR and Interpol last year, and in november the Human League (80s)
> comes to a venue that is 3km away. I can't really skip that :-)
Speaking of disbanding in '96 (well, Slash left). Yeah, their reunion was insanely successful and long awaited. (Though I guess you know Axl is more or less also in AC/DC these days, already did one mini-tour with them.) BTW, did you know Slash is British (went to school there) and (AAVE) American? Yep, useless trivia. :-P
Rugxulo

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Usono,
26.09.2018, 16:49

@ Rugxulo
 

random trivia (sorry for off-topic)

Post reply

Sorry for the off-topic, I wasn't trying to bring up controversial topics or antagonize anyone. But sometimes it's hard to avoid, even for "neutral" things like boring trivia! I just like the irrelevant stuff.

For instance, did you know there was (only) one English pope (Adrian IV)? Also (only) one Dutch pope (Adrian VI). But no Americans, no surprise, it's a very young country. And who cares about that omission anyways? Not me.

Speaking of that, another famous Dutch band that I forgot to mention is Vandenberg. IIRC, they had three successful albums in the '80s, but the only big hit was "Burning Heart" (which I've heard many times on House of Hair radio). To be fair, I heard tons more good songs of theirs via internet radio. After they disbanded, I think the main guitarist joined Whitesnake ("Here I Go Again", "Is This Love?", etc), another '80s band that had many hits (more popular? I assume you've at least heard of them).

According to Wikipedia, the Netherlands isn't that small a country. My (U.S.) state is like a third of that size. So I shouldn't be that surprised, but truly it's thousands of miles away, so I know very little. The obvious people (Famke Jansen, Guido van Rossum) speak for themselves, I suppose.

Oh, I just found and bought a cheap (but good) digital game on my Wii U called Toki Tori. I'd barely heard of it before (Game Boy Color?) but never played it. The company behind it (Two Tribes) is apparently Dutch.

Am I trying too hard to connect the dots here? I know little things don't matter, but I'm still curious. Probably just my weak way of relating, dunno! (Hey, the U.S. isn't that isolated or nationalistic ... but close enough! Ugh.)
Rugxulo

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Usono,
02.10.2018, 04:29

@ Rugxulo
 

Sleeze Beez

Post reply

> Internet is probably better for most artists these days (but worse for
> record labels??). You can buy Sleeze Beez music on various sites. BTW, even
> their live album was recorded in Japan, which (allegedly?) was more
> friendly to "hair metal" (or whatever) even once it became outmoded in the
> West.
> ...
> BTW, apparently one song ("We Do Rock 'N Roll") was
> missing on their second album (U.S. release only), go figure. Apparently
> the record label hated it? Yet I've heard it on internet radio without
> problem. So yeah, that's weird/annoying, even iTunes and Google Play lack
> that song.
The Wikipedia article mentions two albums in 2010, which wasn't really a "comeback" but more of a belated "farewell" (AFAICT): Screwed Live!, and the Very Best of. I actually forgot that they had an official website! But it hasn't been updated in recent years, so I only browsed it like once or twice. It does mention there the omitted song (import only?) from their second album. You'd think it would've been on their live album (or greatest hits), but no. So apparently even they didn't care that much, perhaps??

Google Play doesn't even have (import only?) 2010's Screwed Live! nor The Very Best of. iTunes doesn't have those either. But both apparently added a different compilation ("The Best of") three days ago! (20 vs. 15 songs, I haven't checked closely, but they omit some stuff and add other obscure stuff that I'm not familiar with. Bah, we really need a new live album, but oh well.)

BTW, there was a 30-year anniversary interview done last year (2017) with one of the guitarists.
Rugxulo

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Usono,
02.10.2018, 04:48

@ Rugxulo
 

Sleeze Beez

Post reply

> BTW, there was a 30-year anniversary interview done last year (2017) with one of the guitarists.
Oops, almost forgot to mention that I found a recent interview (2017) with Andrew Elt about his new project (7 Miles to Pittsburgh), which has some good stuff.

I was also doing random searches on eBay and found this (autographed second album but a bit too pricey for me!).

BTW, just curious, do you have to pay taxes on online purchases, even digital? That's something that has increased a lot for us in recent years (before Trump, so it's not his fault, just to be fair).
marcov

04.10.2018, 22:17

@ Rugxulo
 

Sleeze Beez

Post reply

> BTW, just curious, do you have to pay taxes on online purchases, even
> digital? That's something that has increased a lot for us in recent years
> (before Trump, so it's not his fault, just to be fair).
Everything for consumers, iow all prices in supermarkets or online have VAT inclusive here. Online or not. And other EU countries don't generally require extra taxes even if their VAT levels differ.

If you are a company, for local purchases you pass VAT number, and it is not calculated (and you submit a quarterly overview to the tax authority) or, for international purchases you apply to get the VAT back.

On the airport there is a place where you can submit bills and get your VAT back ( must be able to show fairly pristine items in a box), if you are not living in the NL/EU. Also for citizens living abroad(like my brother who lives in Kenya).
Rugxulo

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Usono,
03.10.2018, 04:14

@ Rugxulo
 

Sleeze Beez

Post reply

> Google Play doesn't even have (import only?) 2010's Screwed Live! nor The
> Very Best of. iTunes doesn't have those either. But both apparently added a
> different compilation ("The Best of") three days ago!
Amazon also has it for purchase (no huge surprise).

(Seriously, why do I forcibly have to pay taxes to the U.S. [state] government for digital-only goods that basically come from .nl? How do they deserve any cut? It makes no sense, they did no work. But they've strong-armed all these online retailers in recent years, ugh.)

> (20 vs. 15 songs, I haven't checked closely, but they omit some stuff
> and add other obscure stuff that I'm not familiar with. Bah, we really
> need a new live album, but oh well.)
Well, considering I can't directly purchase the former (although Slacker Radio is definitely using it, sometimes), it shouldn't matter. Still, even those 20 songs omitted some gems. So I dunno, I feel incomplete.

I did make a list of all the songs from the two live albums and two greatest hits compilations. The only songs that are available on all four albums are as follows: Heroes Die Young, House Is On Fire, Rock In The Western World, Screwed Blued 'N Tattooed, Stranger Than Paradise. So only five songs in common (all from second studio album!), seems nobody can agree what the best songs were. (In fairness, they apparently had a lot of other good songs, too, IMHO.)

Next, of other songs available on three of four albums, I've never heard two of them and maybe only once the other one (go figure). 12 songs are on two of four albums, I've heard seven of those fairly frequently, but the others not as much (or not at all for four of them).

If a new live album (with Andrew, obviously) ever happens, I hope they do Dyin to Live, We Do Rock 'N Roll, and probably anything else (I'm not that picky; again, they had a lot of good ones). There's already video of Andrew and the band's live version of "Hit and Run" on YouTube (another song from first album with other singer). Hmmm, they have some live stuff from 2010 on YouTube, I haven't looked too closely there (music is still good, but all music videos are boring to me). Apparently they also recorded a cover of Journey's "Faithfully" in 2011?, first "new" music since 1994.
Rugxulo

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Usono,
11.10.2018, 17:13

@ Rugxulo
 

random trivia (sorry for off-topic)

Post reply

> > Mwha. Just yell abortion and run for cover ! :-)
>
> The entire Woman's March (2017) was only a day after Trump's inauguration.
> Yes, they tried mostly to pretend it was about various issues, but really
> it was just them blowing their own horn. It was kinda ridiculous. How do
> you get pissed off at a guy who hasn't even (barely) been elected and
> hasn't done or changed (broken??) anything yet? How do you get mad at a
> pro-life guy when you still have the "right" to do whatever you want
> (since, what, 45 years)?
Just to pretend to understand and explain this to myself ....

Planned Parenthood officially endorsed a candidate (Hillary) for U.S. President for the first time ever. They spent like $30 million dollars (and hired extra employees, 300?) to try to help get her elected.

Now, keep in mind that (I think??) they already receive heavy funding from U.S. federal government, and most of their services in recent years have been exclusively related to abortion (which they call "healthcare" albeit extremely narrow in demographic).

Also, they did officially co-sponsor the Women's March, IIRC, so it's not quite an accident. But then again, you could chalk it all up to the typical Democrat vs. Republic rivalry or just trying to keep their funding (and/or services). And Trump does say he's pro-life, and he probably did somewhere promise to defund them or decrease it partially or whatever. (Still, protests are an overused waste of time. Just scream the loudest, and you'll always get what you want! Sigh.)

It's just so extremely exhausting having to constantly see in all media, even entertainment (especially!), political haranguing. Over a four-year job! Four years! And they act like the world is ending. They literally complain (and protest) about everything. Oh, BTW, the fourth year is almost always wasted on further campaigning. (And they waste like $200 million to run! But the job is only roughly $400k per year. Seriously, attack ads are a waste of money and aren't even true most of the time. All of that wasteful b.s. needs to go away permanently. But no one ever focuses on the actual livelihood of the people, it's always nonsense issues that will never change or get fixed. Or military, 'cause that's surely not a waste of billions of dollars, ugh.)

Sorry, but after like the tenth protest, and reading long lists of complaints (which have zero to do with any actual decisions or judgements, plus have zero chance of ever being solved by literally anyone), it's hard to care anymore. And coordinated attacks on various politicians make it a horrible (and unstable) world, yet the mainstream media is either chief instigator or else willingly cooperating with such destruction. (Truly, anyone in power or anyone rich or famous is always a target, especially conservatives.) They love a good crucifixion! Yes, they abhor some people that badly, and no, I don't think most of the targets deserve death or ostracism or bankruptcy or lifelong career unemployment. Seriously, some people actively want to punish or destroy so many others, usually based upon (almost) nothing (and sadly without a fair trial, empty accusations are too cheap to rely upon, public opinion is irrelevant). It's more than absurd, it's psychotic.

Hey, I'm very naive, can't you tell? I don't have any influence at all. It's just depressing. Everything is outrage culture these days, and every issue/topic is treated like "life or death". I mentioned the IMDb forums being shut down. Even there (forum for entertainment, tv/movies) it was extremely toxic, lots of anger/hatred, libel, even character assassination. I'd almost guarantee that the lawyers had to get involved, it truly was that bad. I joked that I was going to write a book: "Everybody's Crazy (and I Can Prove It!)" with that being one of the chapters. Everything is politicized these days, and it's just rotten. It's very easy for everything good to be burned to the ground by such psychos, but I guess good solutions are harder than they sound.
marcov

19.09.2018, 16:37

@ Rugxulo
 

Interresting DOS forum in german

Post reply

(sorry, I replied twice, but the post got lost due to problems with inlogging)

> Bud Spencer and Terence Hill:

They are indeed staple. Just like Louis de Funès movies and Don Camillo. (the original B/W with Fernandel, not the reimaging with Terence Hill)

These are like movie series that were rerun annually before cable, probably because the contracts between state broadcasters made it cheap.

The German dubbing is indeed sometimes funny. NL doesn't dub but subtitle except maybe a few things aimed at the very youngest (like Disney films).

The joke is always that dubbing countries are illiterate, but in reality it is just the size of the language area. Dubbing is simply more expensive.

> India is supposedly very multilingual, at least in some major parts (Tamil
> Nadu?). But I guess you can always find exceptions.
Afaik in India there is a very large monoligual Hindi segment of the populace, and likewise in China with Mandarin.

> There are of course "English only" advocates here, which I don't
> necessarily agree with. I agree that we don't really need more
> fragmentation, for its own sake, but a little courtesy (interoperability?)
> sometimes helps.
It depends. Specially it is hard on shared institutions (schools, healthcare, social workers and -security), which often can't reject people (but have to provide treatment etc)

> We have slang, but I swear it gets worse over the Internet, which amplifies
> (or even reinvents) everything. What you read online or see in movies is an
> exaggerated (or faux/new/trendy) version.
Slang is maybe a bit bigger in English, but happens in other languages too.

But a dialect (like mine, in the Limburg region) is nearly (wholly?) a separate language. There is a wikipedia division for it even.

> There are certainly many native Spanish speakers, but most of them are in
> Texas, California, etc.

Maybe a few in Miami too.:-D But point taken, it is no uniform distribution.

> > Frisian is Ingvaeonic,
>
> Ah yes, Malmsteen, famous Swedish (now American?) guitarist. :-P j/k

Ah, I assumed that known, since it includes English. Basically it is a subgroup of Western European that had similar soundshifts as English.

Similarly Southern German (and Swiss) dialects that are Allemanisch in nature are called Irminonic, and the less affected dialects, usually Franconian in origin are Istvaeonic,

Standard German is a mix of various dialects, Dutch developed from the Old Frankish language, but there are variants of that language in Germany too, that underwent the soundshifts and thus sound very differently.

Linked to that group is the other Franconian derived language recognized by a country, Luxembourgish

Note that these are all West Germanic languages, iow English' group. Norse (Daenish/Norwegian/Swedish) is a tad further away

> You mean Luther's translation or others? Apparently he also had a big
> influence on Sweden (et al).
Luther on German, Staten Bible on Dutch, King James on English. Before there were hardly books in the vernacular, mostly just Latin and/or French.

Which is why as first written (and widely read+distributed) work, they had enormous influence on the formation of standard languages.

> But has the widespread Internet helped or hurt?

TV and Internet makes it easier to keep skills current. I don't think it really helps much learning languages. Maybe a bit of pronunciation.

You still need education (or immersion) to really learn the language.

> I guess
> I have to be a bit cautious not to overhype it (since it's not exactly an
> absolute authority on anything, even if they think they are, but even they
> often can't agree amongst themselves).
It is less of a problem. International sites are only a fraction of the sites a person visits, and usually from big firms that translate the site anyway.

DVD/BD Movies sold here universally come with subtitling and or dub tracks for most major West European countries. TV stations are dubbed or subtitled.

It is different if you are in IT, but otherwise IMHO it shouldn't be overrated.

> AFAIK, only their mother (Eugenia) was from Indonesia, and she died in
> 2005. I've never seen much acknowledgement about her (or even the father,
> Jan, who died in 1986). I'm almost surprised I even know that much, but I'm
> a nerd, heheh, I like trivia. (I'd be good on Jeopardy.)
Yeah, but I assumed the parents met, married and lived there for a while. Seems to have been only quite short.

> It just boggles my mind, even after having watched a ton of Britcoms and
> whatnot, it's still noticeably different in many many ways. It's a true
> culture shock, and it certainly wouldn't be easy for me to adjust to such a
> place. (Not impossible but certainly confusing.) There is little in common
> due to such a vast distance and divergence of history. The pattern of
> thinking is entirely different.
Well, then brace for every Cockney, if you ever make it to London. Cabbies can seem to be unintelligible.

> (BTW, I was somewhat disappointed to hear that Australia has gone a bit
> crazy with citizenship requirements for its politicians, even contra those
> with dual British citizenship. It's already impractical that U.S. demands
> birther rights, but are others really so petty to demand such fake
> righteousness too?? Bah, politics, always complaining but never truly
> helping anybody.)
There are some constraints here too, and in the same period there was a bit of noise.

The bigger noise here was about Turks and Moroccans with dual passport returning to the other country but keeping social security based on their Dutch passport, often relating to those countries (and then specially Turkey) trying to influence their diaspora.

> (Xenophobia is dumb, but the only thing worse is when such a buzzword
> becomes so common as to label most people that unfairly, for fake political
> purposes, which then defeats the point and waters it all down. The modern
> outrage culture sucks, always looking for someone to harass.)
Yes. Definitely. Even the problems that there are (of which are dual passports are one per definition specially if such rights are inheritable since that promotes fundamental inequality) are usually totally glossed over with 18th century nationalistic sentiments.

> > Old Frankish is even worse, since even earlier, you often don't even
> > recognize anything as familar:
> > Some common simple French words come from it
>
> Does "France" come from "Franks"? Or only loosely?

Afaik from Francia, as in country ("realm") of the Franks after 800-900.
In that period the Frankish empire split, and in the end the south-western part kept the name and later became the core of France.

But it was much smaller than France now. (missing eastern third( Burgundy, Alsace-Lorraine, Provence ), as well as Narbonne. The English Plantagets also had claimes on Aquitaine.

France got only (roughly) its current borders under Louis XIV, 800 years later.

> I know it was (part of?) Gaul (Gallic?).

Gaul is basically Celtic France minus Provence plus large parts of Belgium as the Romans (JayCee!) saw it. Say around the time of Christ. (Gallic wars in the 50ties BC)

That was already pretty Romanized (as in Vulgar Latin speaking, proto-French) by the end of the Roman empire and the move of Franks south in 450 and seized control. But demographics prohibited their language getting dominance, so that's why France speeks French, which is not a Frankish language.

That's in a nutshell. Franks are divided in Ripuarian and Sallian too. The Sallian ones conquered France and were based in Metz and Bavay and later Paris. The Ripuarians had Cologne as main city.

> Well, after thousands of years, everything is half this and
> half that anyways, so the answer is probably "yes and no".
Roughly same territory, different period.

> a while back I read a biography of one famous 19th century Frenchwoman
> from Normandy. But wasn't "Norman" similar to "Norseman"? IIRC, William
> the Conqueror was of so-called "viking" descent.
Yes. Normandy was ceded as tribute to Viking/Daenish incursions in the 800 and 900 hundreds.

> Of course, what little was left 900 years later, if any??

Well, William the Conqueror was more 1066 so that is more like 200 years later, but afaik then they were already mostly frenchified.

>(For instance, Iceland is Germanic, but they
> are loosely related to Norwegians and Scottish, according to Wikipedia.)
Iceland afaik is 16th century Danish.

> So you've been to France and/or Belgium a lot?

My birth hometown (lookup city of "Roermond") is 5km from the German border, and say 15 from the Belgian border. We mostly made one day trips into Belgium, though I also stayed in Leuven, Brussels(Fosdem!) and Ghent a bit longer.

If you ever go there, I always like the Grand Place in Brussels. Very impressive.

In my teens we mostly went to France by car for our annual holiday. First handful years to the west coast, later years to Nice and surroundings, with Dordogne and ten days in Paris inbetween.

> (I had a teacher who often
> vacationed in Belgium in the summers, for no obvious reason.

I'm still planning a tour to Trappist Monasteries. Very educational.

> Immersion would probably help, yes, but nowadays you could probably learn
> online (or Rosetta Stone, Berlitz, or whatever, maybe even YouTube
> videos).
I'm beyond that level. I can understand and read anything.

(I'll move the Sleeze Bees bits to the reply of the other msg)
Rugxulo

Homepage

Usono,
21.09.2018, 12:55

@ marcov
 

Interresting DOS forum in german

Post reply

> > Bud Spencer and Terence Hill:
>
> They are indeed staple.
 >
> These are like movie series that were rerun annually before cable, probably
> because the contracts between state broadcasters made it cheap.

I used to watch a lot of tv but don't too much anymore. But no, I never saw any of their stuff. Cable has gotten even more expensive in recent years, and the whole digital takeover somewhat annoyed everyone. That, plus faster internet and streaming, makes the landscape a much different place than before.

> The German dubbing is indeed sometimes funny. NL doesn't dub but subtitle
> except maybe a few things aimed at the very youngest (like Disney films).
>
> The joke is always that dubbing countries are illiterate, but in reality it
> is just the size of the language area. Dubbing is simply more expensive.
It's fairly common to subtitle foreign films. Heck, CC (closed captions) are quite common, too. Though I never had working SAP (second audio program), e.g. Spanish (which I don't grok anyways), hence my point that it's more popular elsewhere. Dubbing is somewhat rarer, e.g. old kung fu movies.

BTW, just for weirdo trivia, did you know there is a religious tv station called TBN? Actually, I never watch it, but they had a spinoff channel called TBN Salsa meant for (American) Hispanics who don't speak Spanish. I don't want to be rude, but I seriously don't see the point of having two English-speaking channels for the same subject. But someone somewhere thought it a good idea! Isn't that weird??

> Afaik in India there is a very large monoligual Hindi segment of the
> populace, and likewise in China with Mandarin.
I can directly name people who are exceptions to that, but of course that means little when the majority doesn't need to care. (BTW, Mandarin is spoken elsewhere too, e.g. Singapore.)

> Slang is maybe a bit bigger in English, but happens in other languages too.
Shakespeare had an enormous vocabulary. And I think this proves that English, as a whole, has many loanwords and influences. I may be wrong, but the dictionary can easily have over a million words (whereas a "normal" language only needs a fraction of that). Tons of synonyms, tons of archaic words, lots of bizarre slang (but I'm used to a lot of it ... except not British slang, which is even more bizarre).

> But a dialect (like mine, in the Limburg region) is nearly (wholly?) a
> separate language. There is a wikipedia division for it even.
Like Pascal (or Forth), there are (too) many variations.

Well, there are often debates about what constitutes a dialect or not. I read someone say Galician was practically a dialect of Portuguese, but who knows.

> > There are certainly many native Spanish speakers, but most of them are
> > in Texas, California, etc.
>
> Maybe a few in Miami too.:-D But point taken, it is no uniform
> distribution.
Right, Cuba, forgot about them.

> > You mean Luther's translation or others? Apparently he also had a big
> > influence on Sweden (et al).
>
> Luther on German, Staten Bible on Dutch, King James on English. Before
> there were hardly books in the vernacular, mostly just Latin and/or
> French.
Obviously you know that the Latin Vulgate was Catholic, but the Anglicans didn't want to keep communion with them, hence the schism, separate (incompatible) translation, etc. Similar problem with Luther.

Not entirely sure what the Dutch history is. Used to be a big Protestant stronghold but that seemingly evaporated in recent years (massive secularism but with strong Catholic minority). It's weird when reading about random people like Job Cohen (whom Wikipedia described as a "Jewish atheist").

Yeah, I don't want to pretend to get into politics or religious wars, just find it all odd.

> Which is why as first written (and widely read+distributed) work, they had
> enormous influence on the formation of standard languages.
Of course it was more about government control and different interpretations (to say the least).

> DVD/BD Movies sold here universally come with subtitling and or dub tracks
> for most major West European countries. TV stations are dubbed or
> subtitled.
Blu-Ray (and variants, XL? I never kept up personally) can hold a lot more space, so yes, I've definitely seen those have much much more regarding dubbing and subtitles than plain (smaller) DVDs. I mostly think the world has semi-standardized on Blu-Ray after all these years (remember PS3? early 2006 vs. XBox360 with optional, third-party HD-DVD), but last I checked, Dell didn't include it by default in any laptops, only optionally.

> > AFAIK, only their mother (Eugenia) was from Indonesia, and she died in
> > 2005. I've never seen much acknowledgement about her (or even the
> > father, Jan, who died in 1986).
>
> Yeah, but I assumed the parents met, married and lived there for a while.
> Seems to have been only quite short.

Here's an article that talks about the trip (with picture taken from the boat ride). I'd seen the picture before (Inside magazine).

Though I swear that trip was supposed to be (quasi) temporary, roughly ten years, something about reuniting or visiting distant cousins. Maybe I'm misunderstanding because I don't honestly know the details.

> That was already pretty Romanized (as in Vulgar Latin speaking,
> proto-French) by the end of the Roman empire and the move of Franks south
> in 450 and seized control. But demographics prohibited their language
> getting dominance, so that's why France speeks French, which is not a
> Frankish language.
(Western?) Rome ended in, what, 453? But the Byzantine decline (1453?) was the true end (IIRC). And I assume you're superficially aware of the Vulgate Bible (speaking of Vulgar Latin).

> > Of course, what little was left 900 years later, if any??
>
> Well, William the Conqueror was more 1066 so that is more like 200 years
> later, but afaik then they were already mostly frenchified.
I meant 1066 vs. 19th century Frenchwoman from Normandy. How much was left? I mean, I *really* don't want to be too glib or rude here, but look at France's recent world cup victory. Those Vikings sure are talented. :-P
marcov

21.09.2018, 15:56

@ Rugxulo
 

Interresting DOS forum in german

Post reply

> I used to watch a lot of tv but don't too much anymore. But no, I never saw
> any of their stuff.
Definitely check out Louis de Funès, he is hilarious

> Cable has gotten even more expensive in recent years,
> and the whole digital takeover somewhat annoyed everyone. That, plus faster
> internet and streaming, makes the landscape a much different place than
> before.
Here they recently are upping the commercial break frequency, after American model. Annoying.

> It's fairly common to subtitle foreign films. Heck, CC (closed captions)
> are quite common, too. Though I never had working SAP (second audio
> program), e.g. Spanish (which I don't grok anyways), hence my point that
> it's more popular elsewhere. Dubbing is somewhat rarer, e.g. old kung fu
> movies.
That's probably because Mexico and Spanish Americans in general is a different DVD regioncode from US. So there was no real financial incentive to make them multilingual. Here selling the same disc but with a nationalized sleeve seems a way to efficiently cater to smaller language areas.

>(TBN hispanic english) thought it a good idea! Isn't that weird??

Very weird. If not language it must be cultural.

> > But a dialect (like mine, in the Limburg region) is nearly (wholly?) a
> > separate language. There is a wikipedia division for it even.
>
> Like Pascal (or Forth), there are (too) many variations.
(Ouch, the religious topics are further down! NO need to begin here!)

... Or K&R, or C++ or D, or whatever spin offs considered them the next generation of C.

Anyway, a language is a dialect with some rubber stamp of approval, usually fairly arbitrary.

> Well, there are often debates about what constitutes a dialect or not. I
> read someone say Galician was practically a dialect of Portuguese, but who
> knows.
Worse, there is something called dialect continuum. Which means that dialects don't have nice borders but gradually change the further you go. German is extra complicated because Northern German platt is such enormous area. Probably larger than Dutch.

> > Luther on German, Staten Bible on Dutch, King James on English. Before
> > there were hardly books in the vernacular, mostly just Latin and/or
> > French.
>
> Obviously you know that the Latin Vulgate was Catholic
Latin. The Latin Church is a subdivision of the Catholic Church. Some Easter Mediterranean and Middle Eastern churches are Catholic but not Latin. This was clarified by Pius-I-Forgot-his-number-but-during-WII.

> but the Anglicans
> didn't want to keep communion with them, hence the schism, separate
> (incompatible) translation, etc. Similar problem with Luther.
No. Luther originally wanted to reform the church, not create a schism. One of his critiques is that nearly all churchgoers couldn't understand the Latin services and had no direct access to religion's sources, except through priests. This is why he translated the bible while he was banned. (what is the correct English for this? I meant a formal Church Ban here)

> Not entirely sure what the Dutch history is.

In a nutshell:

Part Lutherian, larger part Calvinist (Presbyterians are Anglo Saxon Calvinists), which was also state religion of the Republic. Contra reformation by Spain (combined with a vast military offensive) re-catholisized the southern provinces and Belgium. The Dutch-Belgium borderline is chiefly based on the final frontline in that conflict.

There also was small Jewish population (both Sephardic, Spanish connection, as Ashkenazi), chiefly in larger cities (and then specially in Amsterdam) which was hit very hard in WWII.

Since the sixties large influx of immigrant labour, mostly from Morocco and Turkey. So there is also a 5% Islam nowadays.

> Used to be a big Protestant
> stronghold but that seemingly evaporated in recent years (massive
> secularism but with strong Catholic minority).

Protestant majority, but fragmented over Lutheran and Calvinist, so largest single religion is Catholic (40%). Secularism biggest in Lutheran and Catholic circles, less in Calvinist. That 40% is by origin, not practising.

If you go to a church here on a Sunday service, it will mostly be elderly people. And a lot REALLY elderly (like 80+, the baby boom generation is already heavily secularized)

> It's weird when reading about random people like Job Cohen (whom Wikipedia > described as a "Jewish atheist").
Well, I'm a catholic one :-)

> Yeah, I don't want to pretend to get into politics or religious wars, just
> find it all odd.
I'm not religious at all, but religion is a major factor in historic events, as which is why we got here, the influence of 1500-1600s bible translations on the formation of their respective standard languages.

> Of course it was more about government control and different
> interpretations (to say the least).
Some might actually have believed this or the other interpretation to be the ONE, but I think there was also a lot of pragmatism.

On the government side probably a main factor was to stop people fighting in the streets. The unrest prompted states (in this case: the various states of the fragmented German Empire) to declare preferred religion in the hope that would quiet things down.

Not that it helped, Europe was in for a century of religiously motivated warfare.

> > DVD/BD Movies sold here universally come with subtitling and or dub
> tracks
> > for most major West European countries. TV stations are dubbed or
> > subtitled.
>
> Blu-Ray (and variants, XL? I never kept up personally) can hold a lot more
> space, so yes, I've definitely seen those have much much more regarding
> dubbing and subtitles than plain (smaller) DVDs.

Afaik audio tracks are not that large, and even commonly found on DVDs.

> I mostly think the world
> has semi-standardized on Blu-Ray after all these years (remember PS3? early
> 2006 vs. XBox360 with optional, third-party HD-DVD), but last I checked,
> Dell didn't include it by default in any laptops, only optionally.
I have a BD writer in my Sony laptop :-) But I rarely toast CD/DVD/BDs these days. Even the last main reason, making CDs for use in cars has been made irrelevant since most cars have some form of mp3 sound now)

> Though I swear that trip was supposed to be (quasi) temporary, roughly ten
> years, something about reuniting or visiting distant cousins. Maybe I'm
> misunderstanding because I don't honestly know the details.
In that period a lot of people went to East Indies (now: Indonesia) simply to work in the colonial build-up. My mother's family went too, my grandfather was working in the maintaining of printing presses at the time, but came back because there was too much unrest. One uncle was born in Jakarta.

> > in 450 and seized control. But demographics prohibited their language
> > getting dominance, so that's why France speeks French, which is not a
> > Frankish language.
>
> (Western?) Rome ended in, what, 453?
Yes, but a lot of their power was already gone before, including control of Gaul/France. The guy the Franks overran had no backup from Rome. Basically a Roman officer (Magister millitium) who founded his own little kingdom.

> But the Byzantine decline (1453?) was
> the true end (IIRC). And I assume you're superficially aware of the Vulgate
> Bible (speaking of Vulgar Latin).
It is said that Vulgar Latin was a dialect continuum at that time, but later it broke up in multiple languages.

> > > Of course, what little was left 900 years later, if any??
> >
> > Well, William the Conqueror was more 1066 so that is more like 200 years
> > later, but afaik then they were already mostly frenchified.
>
> I meant 1066 vs. 19th century Frenchwoman from Normandy. How much was left?
Ah ok. That paragraph. I can't really imagine that much left there. There were not that many Danes to begin with, and as nobility they mostly would have gone to England.

> I mean, I *really* don't want to be too glib or rude here, but look at
> France's recent world cup victory. Those Vikings sure are talented. :-P
You do realize that Normandy is a terribly small piece of France? I wouldn't be surprised that the Norman invasion was like 200 people or so.

And then I'm not even counting football teams high percentage of people with non European roots. (Nothing wrong with that, but they probably don't trace back to 11th century Normandy)
Rugxulo

Homepage

Usono,
24.09.2018, 04:10

@ marcov
 

random linguistic, cultural, and religious trivia

Post reply

> Here they recently are upping the commercial break frequency, after
> American model. Annoying.
Strange to me that people use AdBlock while watching YouTube when over-the-air tv has always been way worse! Yeah, I just mute (sound) tv commercials because they're so nonsensical.

> >(TBN hispanic english) thought it a good idea! Isn't that weird??
>
> Very weird. If not language it must be cultural.
It's the same exact gospel, so how do you infuse extra cultural stuff into that? Same language, too. Seriously, sometimes people go too far with pointless divisions. Sometimes, divisions are imaginary.

(The main dude on OSNews website is Dutch, and he's in love with AAVE. IMO, that's just slang, not a separate dialect, but even that heavily varies based upon region.)

> Anyway, a language is a dialect with some rubber stamp of approval, usually
> fairly arbitrary.
Yes, everything is seemingly arbitrary, especially standards. Too rigorous is bad, but too weak is useless. Of course, most people always ignore interoperability unless forced.

Speaking of programming, apparently D and Modula-2 are still trying to get integrated into GCC proper eventually.

> > Obviously you know that the Latin Vulgate was Catholic
>
> Latin. The Latin Church is a subdivision of the Catholic Church. Some
> Easter Mediterranean and Middle Eastern churches are Catholic but not
> Latin.
Yes, so I've heard, but I've had little interaction with them because I'm in the "West". Anyways, Latin is more or less obsolete, everything is vernacular here (e.g. English). But the Vulgate is still the "official" Bible though most people just use an approved (imprimatur?) English translation or whatever (often directly from Hebrew/Greek, not from Latin).

> This was clarified by Pius-I-Forgot-his-number-but-during-WII.
Pius XII, presumably. A bit before both of our times, obviously.

Or were you referring to Divino afflante Spiritu? I've heard of it, barely, but I'm not directly familiar with it. I think they just went back to the original languages once the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.

> No. Luther originally wanted to reform the church, not create a schism.
No, he definitely wanted reform and changed many things for no good reason. I'm surprised he thought he could get away with it. Excluding books from the Bible, diminishing the number of sacraments, ignoring celibacy, and calling the Pope the Anti-Christ? No, that's definitely schism, not minor fixes.

I don't want to vilify anyone, but he was not a good example of the faith.
Nor was Henry VIII (nor Swedish king, I forget his name).

> One of his critiques is that nearly all churchgoers couldn't understand
> the Latin services and had no direct access to religion's sources, except
> through priests.
Even if they couldn't literally read the Bible, translating it to German (whatever dialect) doesn't help the rest of the "Catholic" world. The Anglicans also translated the Bible to English but with so-called "corrections" ("obey your elders" instead of "presbyters"). They too deprecated some of the books, aka Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical, which were eventually removed.

Latin was dying, and even Catholics had vernacular translations in English (e.g. Douay-Rheims). Latin was at least mostly universal. It's hard work verifying every potential translation error or misuse. The reason for authority/tradition (bishops and priests) is to stay consistent. Having everyone make their own private interpretations is ridiculous. There's only one truth, and you can't change it. Otherwise you don't believe in truth at all, just ambiguity (moral relativism?), and that doesn't work.

> (what is the correct English for this? I meant a formal Church Ban here)
Excommunication.

> > Not entirely sure what the Dutch history is.
>
> In a nutshell:
>
> Part Lutherian, larger part Calvinist (Presbyterians are Anglo Saxon
> Calvinists), which was also state religion of the Republic. Contra
> reformation by Spain (combined with a vast military offensive)
I assume you mean Counter-Reformation (mostly by Jesuits)? The Council of Trent did indeed fix, or at least clarify, many points of contention.

> Since the sixties large influx of immigrant labour, mostly from Morocco and
> Turkey. So there is also a 5% Islam nowadays.
Loreen ("Euphoria") from Sweden is a child of Moroccan Berber Muslims. (St. Augustine's mother, St. Monica, was Berber. He called himself Punic. Of course, here in America, I've heard him called "black"! Who the hell knows, maybe it's all true, none of it, who knows. "A rose by any other name ....")

> If you go to a church here on a Sunday service, it will mostly be elderly
> people. And a lot REALLY elderly (like 80+, the baby boom generation is
> already heavily secularized)
Parochial schools would disagree, but obviously not all children know what they're doing (nor care). Yes, it's a secular world overall, but there are still many faithful.

> > It's weird when reading about random people like Job Cohen (whom
> Wikipedia > described as a "Jewish atheist").
>
> Well, I'm a catholic one :-)
"Catholic atheist"? Sorry if I just lump you in with Job Cohen. (Agnosticism isn't much better, even Darwin was lapsed Anglican/agnostic. Funny/sad that people treat him as some kind of solitary prophet. And his wife was Unitarian, ugh. Messy world.)

> I'm not religious at all, but religion is a major factor in historic
> events, as which is why we got here,
Religion is frowned upon in political circles. Even though America has a reputation for its fundamentalists and conservatives, it plays very little role (overall). Religion has very little power in the U.S., and people expect it to sit on the sidelines and get out of the way (and get mad at any hint otherwise). Unfortunately, religious freedom isn't so great. Freedom is maybe a delusion anyways.

But worse is constant "change", i.e. rebellion on any- and everything that exists, which is psychotic. It's hard to believe (almost) that some people don't know their own weaknesses! They rally so hard against the system but constantly change their mind, constantly find a new battle, make new people enemies, can never rest, are never happy!

> the influence of 1500-1600s bible translations on the formation of
> their respective standard languages.
Bishop Challoner (himself a convert) cleaned up a lot of the archaic language in Douay Rheims translation. Even KJV has had several revisions (and even so-called Catholic editions, with corrections of course).

> Not that it helped, Europe was in for a century of religiously motivated
> warfare.
American secularism is much worse. It's changing ideology knows no bounds, and it vilifies everyone unfairly. "Rules for Radicals" is psychotic.

> > I mean, I *really* don't want to be too glib or rude here, but look at
> > France's recent world cup victory. Those Vikings sure are talented. :-P
>
> You do realize that Normandy is a terribly small piece of France? I
> wouldn't be surprised that the Norman invasion was like 200 people or so.

Well, that one autobiography implied it was a noticeable difference. But the world (before airplanes) was a smaller place.

> And then I'm not even counting football teams high percentage of people
> with non European roots. (Nothing wrong with that, but they probably don't
> trace back to 11th century Normandy)
Well, it's the least surprising thing in the world. People move around a lot these days. It's stranger (almost) to be nationalistic, but maybe that's easier to avoid for Europeans (and/or Catholics).
marcov

04.10.2018, 23:09

@ Rugxulo
 

random linguistic, cultural, and religious trivia

Post reply

> > Here they recently are upping the commercial break frequency, after
> > American model. Annoying.
>
> Strange to me that people use AdBlock while watching YouTube when
> over-the-air tv has always been way worse! Yeah, I just mute (sound)
> tv commercials because they're so nonsensical.
I think radio is more often passive than TV.

> > >(TBN hispanic english) thought it a good idea! Isn't that weird??
> >
> > Very weird. If not language it must be cultural.
>
> It's the same exact gospel, so how do you infuse extra cultural stuff into
> that?

It's how you present it. Culture does matter, not just language. Otherwise you might as well be a Brit.

> (The main dude on OSNews website is Dutch, and he's in love with
> AAVE.
> IMO, that's just slang, not a separate dialect, but even that heavily
> varies based upon region.)
I looked at that article, and seemed to lump Caribbean (read: Barbados, and I assume other islands too) with mainland US slang (and assume it is constant throughout the US too).

I'm no expert on American slang, but I find that hard to believe it is that uniform.

> Speaking of programming, apparently D and Modula-2 are still trying to get
> integrated into GCC proper eventually.
Still no life in GPC. Lessons from the past :-)

> > > Obviously you know that the Latin Vulgate was Catholic
> >
> > Latin. The Latin Church is a subdivision of the Catholic Church. Some
> > Easter Mediterranean and Middle Eastern churches are Catholic but not
> > Latin.
>
> Yes, so I've heard, but I've had little interaction with them because I'm
> in the "West".

Quite some Syrian refugees lately, as well as Ethiopian Christians, I live in a city center, and quite some minor churches now serve such foreign congregations.

> Anyways, Latin is more or less obsolete,

Amen to that.

> But the Vulgate is still the "official"
> Bible though most people just use an approved (imprimatur?) English
> translation or whatever (often directly from Hebrew/Greek, not from
> Latin).
Is there an approved Catholic English translation at all? King James is Anglican.

Afaik there was never a definitive decision that puts Vulgate bibles over the original (Hebrew/Greek/Arameic) bibles.

> > This was clarified by Pius-I-Forgot-his-number-but-during-WII.
>
> Pius XII, presumably. A bit before both of our times, obviously.
>
> Or were you referring to
> Divino afflante
> Spiritu? I've heard of it, barely, but I'm not directly familiar with
> it. I think they just went back to the original languages once the Dead Sea
> Scrolls were discovered.
Afaik those were differing aspects of the same encyclical publication. Elsewhere he confirms that the original translations are no less that the vulgate one.

> > No. Luther originally wanted to reform the church, not create a schism.
>
> No, he definitely wanted reform and changed many things for no good reason.
> I'm surprised he thought he could get away with it. Excluding books from
> the Bible, diminishing the number of sacraments, ignoring celibacy, and
> calling the Pope the Anti-Christ? No, that's definitely schism, not minor
> fixes.
Keep in mind that he translated the bible after he put up his position on the church in Wittenberg, and was banned for it by Charles V.

You can't really support Catholic institutions then, when they have been ordered to kill you on sight.

> Even if they couldn't literally read the Bible, translating it to German
> (whatever dialect) doesn't help the rest of the "Catholic" world.
You got to start somewhere. Best it be something you know.

> The
> Anglicans also translated the Bible to English but with so-called
> "corrections" ("obey your elders" instead of "presbyters"). They too
> deprecated some of the books, aka Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical, which were
> eventually removed.
The Anglicans were less about reform, and more about cutting loose from Rome, so that Henry VIII could have his divorce.

> Latin was dying, and even Catholics had vernacular translations in English
> (e.g. Douay-Rheims). Latin was at least mostly universal. It's hard work
> verifying every potential translation error or misuse. The reason for
> authority/tradition (bishops and priests) is to stay consistent. Having
> everyone make their own private interpretations is ridiculous. There's only
> one truth, and you can't change it. Otherwise you don't believe in truth at
> all, just ambiguity (moral relativism?), and that doesn't work.
If all priests are good natured bible scholars, sure. Reality is and was different. Bishoprics were commonly bought as occupation for second sons.

(and of course the best religious persons are Trappist monks, but that is a different story).

> > (what is the correct English for this? I meant a formal Church Ban here)
>
> Excommunication.
No. A Papal ban (back then) was afaik a bit more, more or less a moral obligation of everybody of good faith to kill the heretic. Luther had to go into hiding because of it.

> > Part Lutherian, larger part Calvinist (Presbyterians are Anglo Saxon
> > Calvinists), which was also state religion of the Republic. Contra
> > reformation by Spain (combined with a vast military offensive)
>
> I assume you mean Counter-Reformation (mostly by Jesuits)? The Council of
> Trent did indeed fix, or at least clarify, many points of contention.
Yes and no. That was a paper reaction of the Church. This was a large (20000 headcount. Quite significant for the time) army led by the Duke of Alva/Alba that traveled from Spain through Italy, Austria and Germany to the Low Countries(primarily Belgium BTW). The detour because those were Habsburg lands. (IOW avoid France)

He instituted a martial law council (called the blood-council, for good reason) to judge heretics, and, like all inquisition, a lot of Jesuits were involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Troubles

> Augustine's mother, St. Monica, was Berber. He called himself Punic. Of
Well, if you know Latin, you know the term "Punic" :-)

> course, here in America, I've heard him called "black"! Who the hell knows,
> maybe it's all true, none of it, who knows. "A rose by any other name
> ....")
Well. You could call him "Canaanite", which is the biblical term for Eastern Punics.

> > If you go to a church here on a Sunday service, it will mostly be
> elderly
> > people. And a lot REALLY elderly (like 80+, the baby boom generation is
> > already heavily secularized)
>
> Parochial schools would disagree, but obviously not all children know what
> they're doing (nor care). Yes, it's a secular world overall, but there are
> still many faithful.
Parochial schools generally admit non Christians here, and have only a single hour of religion education a week. (I went to one myself, and my secondary school was a "Bishopric college"). The exact law about such schools differ from country to country.

> > > It's weird when reading about random people like Job Cohen (whom
> > Wikipedia > described as a "Jewish atheist").
> >
> > Well, I'm a catholic one :-)
>
> "Catholic atheist"? Sorry if I just lump you in with Job Cohen.
Please don't. It is a religious thing. He favors Ajax, I favor PSV, naturally.

> (Agnosticism isn't much better, even Darwin was lapsed Anglican/agnostic.
> Funny/sad that people treat him as some kind of solitary prophet. And his
> wife was Unitarian, ugh. Messy world.)
And his cousin on the Wedgwood side. But indeed Darwin was quite religious afaik.

> But worse is constant "change", i.e. rebellion on any- and everything that
> exists, which is psychotic. It's hard to believe (almost) that some people
> don't know their own weaknesses! They rally so hard against the system but
> constantly change their mind, constantly find a new battle, make new people
> enemies, can never rest, are never happy!
Or is that just a spin? The current debate about sexual misconduct of a Supreme Court judge does have some echoes in the past. (Clarence Thomas?)

Except for some over eager press, it might not be constant change, that is just a perception. It is more a lid on a cesspit that people tried to keep on so long that is finally overflowing.

> > You do realize that Normandy is a terribly small piece of France? I
> > wouldn't be surprised that the Norman invasion was like 200 people or so.
> Well, that one autobiography implied it was a noticeable difference. But
> the world (before airplanes) was a smaller place.
History is quite strange there. Some major battles of the past had impressive numbers of troops, some were overrated skirmishes. Rule of thumb is that army sizes in the Dark ages (400-1500) are generally smaller, despite big numbers in the few records.

I looked it up and estimates range from 7000 to 12000. Not clear if that are combatants only or not. Estimated size of French population: 9-11 million (France had the largest population in medieval times, at least among Western countries. Maybe Poland-Lithuania was larger though)

> > And then I'm not even counting football teams high percentage of people
> > with non European roots. (Nothing wrong with that, but they probably
> don't
> > trace back to 11th century Normandy)
>
> Well, it's the least surprising thing in the world. People move around a
> lot these days. It's stranger (almost) to be nationalistic, but maybe
> that's easier to avoid for Europeans (and/or Catholics).
Certainly here with Belgium 20km away, and Germany 5km. But that traditional weariness of polarization is diminishing, with extreme right wing on the move, and previously thought principles that were core to democracy violated.
Rugxulo

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Usono,
05.10.2018, 05:54

@ marcov
 

random linguistic, cultural, and religious trivia

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> I think radio is more often passive than TV.
Both radio and tv can be quite painful re: advertisements. So YouTube is tons more pleasant (for now!). I think a lot of big tv companies have paid their way into YouTube (begrudgingly, resentfully) in recent years. I do think that some influential people want more power, control, money, and resent YouTube and its creators for success they have outside of them.

> > (The main dude on OSNews website is Dutch, and he's in love with AAVE
>
> I'm no expert on American slang, but I find that hard to believe it is that
> uniform.
I don't fully know. Maybe I'm naive, but I assumed everyone locally talks (roughly) the same, plus some slang. Maybe some speak differently to others? I don't. (I do live in a big city, but I'm not gregarious.) Whatever, it's not worth even accidentally going near psychological b.s., so I'll avoid that. (I don't know what "code switching" is and don't care.)

My whole point of mentioning Thom wasn't to denigrate anyone or make generalizations about the Dutch. But he was too sensitive to one other guy's snide comments, taking offense to something that was weak at best. I just thought him odd for treating it like a separate, protected species rather than accidental slang (not universal). Whatever, he overreacted, IMO.

Some divisions are imaginary (or trivial), and it's not worth dividing people up (splitting hairs).

> Quite some Syrian refugees lately, as well as Ethiopian Christians, I live
> in a city center, and quite some minor churches now serve such foreign
> congregations.
Half of Syria was basically displaced due to fighting (since 2011?), but IIRC, most Christians come from Lebanon (which has its own problems, I guess). Also, there have been many Ethiopian Jews moving to Israel in recent years.

> > Latin is obsolete
>
> Amen to that.
"De gustibus non est disputandum." (Common saying.)

> Is there an approved Catholic English translation at all?
Yes, many over the years, esp. with such schisms being so problematic (and omitting several books).

I already mentioned Douay-Rheims.

My own brother (not a scholar, nor am I) recently got a New Revised Standard Version: Catholic Youth Bible.

NABRE (2011?) is one such, but it's basically a continuation of older versions. Although, technically, that's not 100% what is used in Mass here, for whatever reason.

The British use (or used to use?) Jerusalem Bible (but not the "new" one, inclusive language?, bah I have no idea, it gets complicated fast). One famous semi-local nun around here preferred that original one, too.

> Afaik there was never a definitive decision that puts Vulgate bibles over
> the original (Hebrew/Greek/Arameic) bibles.
AFAIK, the Vulgate (in various minor revisions) trumps everything else because of its historical accuracy. But others (translated from original languages) have been approved, too. Both are often acceptable (assuming good faith).

> You can't really support Catholic institutions then, when they have been
> ordered to kill you on sight.
He was given the chance to recant, but his stubbornness led him to put his personal "conscience" and private interpretation well above those with whom he worked, the hierarchy, etc. I don't know the full history, of course (Diet of Worms), but I'm not sympathetic to him.

> You got to start somewhere. Best it be something you know.
They already knew Latin.

> The Anglicans were less about reform, and more about cutting loose from
> Rome, so that Henry VIII could have his divorce.
He already had special permission just to marry his first wife. "Be careful what you wish for!"

> If all priests are good natured bible scholars, sure. Reality is and was
> different. Bishoprics were commonly bought as occupation for second sons.
Martin Luther was a priest himself! Why did he go through such arduous training if he was just going to forsake it anyways? I swear, half the reason people listen to him is because of that (minimal) authority. But he wouldn't even have it without his predecessors. For freak's sake, he said "there are no saints" (certainly he wasn't!), but he was named after one! If there are no saints, why listen to this guy? What did he ever do that was so miraculous? Why do people rebel against their own parents? Only a fool thinks he's smarter than everyone who came before him, and that everyone else is always wrong. "Pride comes before a fall." The Wikipedia page for Luther Bible is very strange indeed.

Sorry, clearly I am "biased" against some things. We can't believe in literally everything and be sympathetic to all contradictory ideas. Just some people really go off the deep end. How is that "normal" or "good"?

> > Excommunication.
>
> No. A Papal ban (back then) was afaik a bit more, more or less a moral
> obligation of everybody of good faith to kill the heretic. Luther had to go
> into hiding because of it.
I have no idea, I'm out of the loop (at least regarding ecclesiastical judgments). Maybe you mean something weird like interdict? No idea, ignorance is bliss!

> > Augustine's mother, St. Monica, was Berber. He called himself Punic.
>
> Well, if you know Latin, you know the term "Punic" :-)
Loosely. "Phoenician" is pretty vague, ambiguous, useless these days. (So is "black" or "white" or similar tripe, "Caucasian" or whatever. Useless in almost any context, but some still hold onto such divisions as a pseudo-political tactic. But the U.S. is generally too stir-crazy from its own isolation. We do honestly probably need more immigrants just to cleanse our palate!)

> > course, here in America, I've heard him called "black"! Who the hell
> knows, maybe it's all true, none of it, who knows. "A rose by any other
> name ....")
>
> Well. You could call him "Canaanite", which is the biblical term for
> Eastern Punics.

It was so long ago that I could call it anything and still not know the difference. (Ten fingers, ten toes, what a weirdo!) Of course, it's trivial anyways, so who cares. "I yam what I yam." -- Popeye

> Parochial schools generally admit non Christians here, and have only a
> single hour of religion education a week.
Yes, you can attend even if non-Catholic. And even Catholics aren't forced to attend (but are forced to go to CCD instead). But "normally" it's only Catholics who go to Catholic school (and it's more expensive, plus they still have to cater to secular standards).

> > "Catholic atheist"? Sorry if I just lump you in with Job Cohen.
>
> Please don't. It is a religious thing. He favors Ajax, I favor PSV,
> naturally.
Obscure "football" reference? Well, they do here locally say (American) football is the state religion! (But I dislike most sports except very rarely watching baseball.)

> > (Agnosticism isn't much better, even Darwin was lapsed Anglican/agnostic.
> > And his wife was Unitarian, ugh. Messy world.)
>
> And his cousin on the Wedgwood side. But indeed Darwin was quite religious
> afaik.
Yeah, he was unduly worried his children would be sickly since he married his first cousin! Not a popular custom anymore, and I'll bet his more fervent supporters would be embarrassed by that fact. (That kind of thing is an oft-touted insult, mostly by immature people on the Internet.) Of course, even Albert Einstein was purveyor of that, too. (What a world!)

> Or is that just a spin? The current debate about sexual misconduct of a
> Supreme Court judge does have some echoes in the past.
It's totally a tactic to stop any pro-life judges. His opponents truly don't care, they've had worse scandals. (Sorry, but any feminist that had issues with Trump also had issues with Slick Willie. Either way, one of them was going [back] into the White House.)

> Except for some over eager press, it might not be constant change, that is
> just a perception. It is more a lid on a cesspit that people tried to keep
> on so long that is finally overflowing.
No, most of it is lies or exaggerated for sensationalism, hit pieces/character assassination, and just plain dirty underhanded manipulation of emotions for keeping or gaining power. It's very toxic.

Radicalism is very destructive, psychotic even. People who shout "Revolution!" or "To the streets!" are not what I'd call upstanding citizens. They think it's their duty to rebel, but rebellion never comes from a good place. (MLK is one rare example of peace and goodness, but even he nowadays is entirely watered down into a secular hero only for political purposes, ugh.)

> Certainly here with Belgium 20km away, and Germany 5km. But that
> traditional weariness of polarization is diminishing, with extreme right
> wing on the move, and previously thought principles that were core to
> democracy violated.
There are radicals who hate almost everything (long lists), they want to destroy certain people they deem "deplorable". They will use any tactic they can to do it. It's a bit psychotic. Some people respect no rules except their own passions and hatred.

I'm not really interested in politics (pointless and destructive only), but the U.S. is pathetic. Too many divisions over useless things. You know, "united we stand, divided we fall", "a house divided cannot stand". Ugh.
Rugxulo

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Usono,
06.10.2018, 04:04

@ marcov
 

more irrelevant trivia

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According to Wikipedia, today is German-American Day (never heard of it). If we do have a sizeable population of German immigrants or German descendants around here locally, I've never met them. (Maybe one lady, but I'm not sure.) I'm out of the loop, but I don't speak German anyways. "It's all Greek to me" (common saying). Of course, all Catholics were/are sympathetic to Pope (Emeritus) Benedict XVI.

There are some famous Americans who have/had such parents: Lou Gehrig (baseball), Charles Schulz (Peanuts), Bruce Willis (actor), Kirsten Dunst (actress), and I don't even remember who else (Michael Fassbender?). I'm sure there are many others I'm forgetting. Ah yes, Heidi Klum (AGT judge). Okay, I'm a bit confused here, but indeed some have dual citizenship.

Obviously many famous musicians, too: Accept, Scorpions, MSG, Doro Pesch, Lenny Wolf/Kingdom Come, who else? Beethoven, Handel. Meh, I'm more into hair metal than classical. (Robert "Mutt" Lange is South African, IIRC, but his mother was German.) I know I'm forgetting others.

Germany is huge, though, roughly five times the size of the Netherlands, right? But the U.S. is four times even that size. (Speaking of irrelevant ....) So it shouldn't be that obscure, but I guess it's truly far enough away (5000 mi or 8000 km).
marcov

06.10.2018, 16:26

@ Rugxulo
 

more irrelevant trivia

Post reply

> According to Wikipedia, today is
> German-American
> Day (never heard of it). If we do have a sizeable population of
> German immigrants or German descendants around here locally, I've never met
> them. (Maybe one lady, but I'm not sure.) I'm out of the loop, but I don't
> speak German anyways. "It's all Greek to me" (common saying). Of course,
> all Catholics were/are sympathetic to Pope (Emeritus) Benedict XVI.
The tradional story is that German immigrants mainly went to the midwest. More recent NL immigration afaik mostly went to Michigan (there is a reason there is a place called "Holland" there) and dairy states in general. Though my guess would be after WWII more Dutchies went to Canada than to the US. And again mostly to get larger dairy farms, iow farmers.

> There are some famous Americans who have/had such parents: Lou Gehrig
> (baseball), Charles Schulz (Peanuts), Bruce Willis (actor), Kirsten Dunst
> (actress), and I don't even remember who else (Michael Fassbender?). I'm
> sure there are many others I'm forgetting. Ah yes, Heidi Klum (AGT judge).
> Okay, I'm a bit confused here, but indeed some have dual citizenship.
Recent arrivals surely do. There are also some strange cases where people are American but grew up in Germany (because their parents were stationed on one of the huge American bases in Germany). Same with UK.

A major base is 20-30km south of my hometown (NATO base Geilenkirchen). In my parent's youth (60s, 70s), the American and English bases were very important, because they attracted artists to my hometown. (they had sponsored tours to the bases, and picked up some extra gigs in nearby towns).

Some of them were major staging areas for troops enroute to Vietnam.

In my time that was mostly gone, though there were about 1000 British from some RAF base (I believe Wildenrath) though.

> Germany is huge, though, roughly five times the size of the Netherlands,
> right?

More like 9 times. More if you don't count the 18% water that make up the inner former Southern Sea (Zuiderzee), which is now diked off and called the Ijsselmeer. (Ysel Lake).

Germany has only 4.5 times the population of NL though, it is relatively sparsely populated. :-D

If I look up for comparisons Germany is between Montana and New Mexico in size, but with twice the population of California (80m).

NL is three quarters of New York state in surface (maybe closer to 80% since it has a slightly larger water surface area), but with 85% of the population. So comparable, but the NY state population is more unevenly distributed.

> But the U.S. is four times even that size. (Speaking of irrelevant
> ....) So it shouldn't be that obscure, but I guess it's truly far enough
> away (5000 mi or 8000 km).
U.S/Ger = Twenty times larger, That makes US 237 times larger than NL(40K sqkm2) in surface with with only 19 times of the population. IOW your backyard is probably ten times mine :-P

I don't know how the US figure is corrected for lakes and such though.

U.S/EU area = +/- 2 (9.8M vs 4.5M sqkm) U.S/EU population = 0.65 (325M vs 500<), iow about 3 times denser. But that is going to change in a few months.
Rugxulo

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Usono,
09.10.2018, 06:49

@ marcov
 

more irrelevant trivia

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> The tradional story is that German immigrants mainly went to the midwest.
We still have many immigrants here but maybe not as many as in the old days. (I swear there was an Ehlert family at church, but I never spoke to them. It's a fairly big parish/school.)

> More recent NL immigration afaik mostly went to Michigan (there is a reason
> there is a place called "Holland" there) and dairy states in general.
> Though my guess would be after WWII more Dutchies went to Canada than to
> the US. And again mostly to get larger dairy farms, iow farmers.
Wasn't modern New York (state) partially founded by the Dutch? (Kirk Douglas was born in Amsterdam, NY ... although not Dutch but Belarusian descent ... though allegedly speaking Yiddish, which is Germanic!) Double-checking on Wikipedia, former President Martin Van Buren was born in New York and spoke Dutch originally. My aunt is a postal carrier locally, and she used to have some Dutch on her route, but I never met them. (They were elderly, so I don't know when or why they moved here. Not a lot of dairy farms in the big city, but I could be wrong!)

> > Okay, I'm a bit confused here, but indeed some have dual citizenship.
>
> Recent arrivals surely do. There are also some strange cases where people
> are American but grew up in Germany (because their parents were stationed
> on one of the huge American bases in Germany). Same with UK.

Right, the military "brats" get around a lot, often marry foreigners, have children born on military bases (U.S. soil) and are raised dually sometimes. It's fairly common (even if my own family isn't too militaristic).

> A major base is 20-30km south of my hometown (NATO base Geilenkirchen). In
> my parent's youth (60s, 70s), the American and English bases were very
> important, because they attracted artists to my hometown. (they had
> sponsored tours to the bases, and picked up some extra gigs in nearby
> towns).
>
> Some of them were major staging areas for troops enroute to Vietnam.
Back when the draft was mandatory, my uncle was stationed in Germany for a few scant years. Though I've never heard the details, never asked him (yet?), it obviously wasn't that important so many decades later. (Given enough decades and changes, is anything left? West vs. East Germany, obviously, that distinction is mostly irrelevant nowadays.)

I assume that was during the war in Vietnam (aka, French Indochina? lots of Catholics there, but speaking French there has fallen into disuse in recent generations, probably for obvious reasons). We did and still do have various Vietnamese Catholic immigrants, among others.

Even Angela Merkel is part Polish, so her maiden name was Germanized (sp?) from Kazmierczak to Kasner. Also her grandfather converted from Catholic to Lutheran (go figure).

> In my time that was mostly gone, though there were about 1000 British from
> some RAF base (I believe Wildenrath) though.
The late Andrew Sachs (Manuel from Faulty Towers) wasn't Spanish nor British but in fact German originally (probably dual citizen later). Famous for its quote, "Don't mention the war!" Years ago, PBS (tv) used to show a lot of Brit-coms here.

> > Germany is huge, though, roughly five times the size of the Netherlands,
> > right?
 >
> Germany has only 4.5 times the population of NL though, it is relatively
> sparsely populated. :-D

Yes, I mainly meant population. 80 million people where a few dozen move to the U.S. isn't very shocking. It's not that far away, but far enough I suppose.

> If I look up for comparisons Germany is between Montana and New Mexico in
> size, but with twice the population of California (80m).

Never been to those states. The U.S. is geographically huge, and travel isn't that common (outside of obvious reasons: work, family, vacation). Too many regulations as well certainly make things less convenient.

Highly-populated states (like CA) tend to have quite an ego and believe they are superior to others based upon their size. Or maybe I'm just naive to be shocked at such hubris, but I guess it's the same old story. Probably just a few bad apples making the larger group look bad. There's no talking to some people, they want to push others around. I hate to be cynical and quasi-political, but some people never give it a rest! Very arrogant.

> NL is three quarters of New York state in surface (maybe closer to 80%
> since it has a slightly larger water surface area), but with 85% of the
> population. So comparable, but the NY state population is more unevenly
> distributed.
For lack of a better word (and I hate buzzwords), NY is very diverse and highly-populated as well. Then again, .nl (and .de and .se) all apparently have more than their share of immigrants. Hey, I like immigrants, I just don't like complete chaos. I don't blame immigrants for anything (how can I? they don't change/break anything, they have little power, same as me), but I swear America is its own religion nowadays, ugh. But even Europe isn't a "utopia", most likely, has its own problems (or worse in some ways), ugh.

> > But the U.S. is four times even that size. (Speaking of irrelevant
> > ....) So it shouldn't be that obscure, but I guess it's truly far enough
> > away (5000 mi or 8000 km).
>
> U.S/Ger = Twenty times larger, That makes US 237 times larger than NL(40K
> sqkm2) in surface with with only 19 times of the population. IOW your
> backyard is probably ten times mine :-P

Population only, land area doesn't matter. I moreso meant personal influence. Not to trivialize smaller countries, esp. since (like I said) the U.S. is very divided and not something I worship absolutely. "Your backyard" doesn't really apply to me, it's not mine, I don't own or control it. I don't even halfway like it (although it hates itself and everyone else, mostly, so that's hard to stomach, very toxic attitudes, and sadly I don't think EU is totally immune either).

> I don't know how the US figure is corrected for lakes and such though.
>
> U.S/EU area = +/- 2 (9.8M vs 4.5M sqkm) U.S/EU population = 0.65 (325M vs
> 500<), iow about 3 times denser. But that is going to change in a few
> months.
Why, because of Brexit? Clearly you have a different view than I do. I guess Europe is (mostly?) more chaotic than U.S.? So maybe you don't (or can't) care because you've (generally speaking) lived through so much. It's just weird to me how destructive the world is. Cheesy quote: "Some men just want to watch the world burn". (And no, I don't mean Trump. It's a cliche that he's to blame for everything. I'm too naive for such an evil world.)
Rugxulo

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Usono,
10.10.2018, 04:04

@ Rugxulo
 

more irrelevant trivia

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> Wasn't modern New York (state) partially founded by the Dutch?
> former President Martin Van Buren was born in New York and spoke Dutch
I forgot that the Roosevelts were of Dutch descent, too. (Honestly, I'm more interested in nationality/citizenship and language than bloodlines or ethnicity. Or politics, obviously, too ephemeral.) Wikipedia says Teddy's grandfather was born in NYC but also "the last full-blooded Dutch Roosevelt of his line." (Hey, did you know Yul Brynner was 1/32 Mongolian? Yep, super important, lol.)

Pat Nixon, Richard's wife, her own mother was a German immigrant. I also remember hearing that Lou Bega ("Mambo #5") is from Germany. (When artists sing in English, it's often hard to tell.) Even Bruce Lee's mother was half German. (Though, boring trivia, since he was born here [San Francisco, CA], he was technically American. Though he didn't come back to U.S. until adulthood, went to college here [Seattle, WA], married here, etc).

I don't fully understand Belgium. Half Dutch, half French (Flemish and Walloon)?? The only Belgians I can think of are the obvious ones: Django Reinhardt (and his brother Joseph), St. Damian of Molokai (famous for missionary work in Hawaii, not yet a U.S. state), Fr. Georges LeMaitre, and of course Jean-Claude Van Varenberg. Huh, Belgium also has German as an official language (for the crucial 1%). Wikipedia also says there is (or was?) a sizeable Yiddish population in Antwerp.

BTW, yesterday was Columbus Day (observed). In recent years (since '70s?) some people (apparently six states and various cities since 1992) have taken to (even officially) rename it to Indigenous People's Day. I can't say I personally care, but it sure is pointlessly annoying when people get offended over a dead guy. (It's always something, some people seriously love to complain. Some people like negative attention or whatever.)
marcov

10.10.2018, 12:46

@ Rugxulo
 

more irrelevant trivia

Post reply

> > The tradional story is that German immigrants mainly went to the
> midwest.
>
> We still have many immigrants here but maybe not as many as in the old
> days. (I swear there was an Ehlert family at church, but I never spoke to
> them. It's a fairly big parish/school.)
It usually depends on how far you go back. The most recent large waves of Europeans are already 70 years ago (forties, fifties). People that are old enough to remember the homeland are 80+ probably.

> Wasn't modern New York (state) partially founded by the Dutch?
Yes, NYC too, was the hub, but it was traded to the English in the 1600s for Suriname (Dutch Guyana). The position was considered not very defendable, and the plantation system of Suriname were considered more profitable.

> Kirk
> Douglas was born in Amsterdam, NY ... although not Dutch but Belarusian
> descent ... though allegedly speaking Yiddish, which is Germanic!)
Yes, but the German language era stretched till Belarus before WWII.

> Double-checking on Wikipedia, former President Martin Van Buren was born in
> New York and spoke Dutch originally. My aunt is a postal carrier locally,
> and she used to have some Dutch on her route, but I never met them. (They
> were elderly, so I don't know when or why they moved here. Not a lot of
> dairy farms in the big city, but I could be wrong!)
I meant that most people that emigrated after say the forties, mostly went as farmers, usually dairy or mixed. These were typically not refugees and brought money and expertise with them. Simply because land is very expensive in the NL, and also because of (overproduction) regulations. Actually in the nineties a colleague of my father in a chemical plant changed careers and went to Canada to dairy farm. (had farmer parents and in-laws though)

> Right, the military "brats" get around a lot, often marry foreigners, have
> children born on military bases (U.S. soil) and are raised dually
> sometimes. It's fairly common (even if my own family isn't too
> militaristic).
And WWII GI's children.

> > Some of them were major staging areas for troops enroute to Vietnam.
>
> Back when the draft was mandatory, my uncle was stationed in Germany for a
> few scant years. Though I've never heard the details, never asked him
> (yet?), it obviously wasn't that important so many decades later. (Given
> enough decades and changes, is anything left? West vs. East Germany,
> obviously, that distinction is mostly irrelevant nowadays.)
Short term stationing usually stick to the base facilities more. Longer stationed ones usually integrate more.

> I assume that was during the war in Vietnam (aka, French Indochina?

Yes, late sixties, early seventies.

> The late Andrew Sachs (Manuel from Faulty Towers) wasn't Spanish nor
> British but in fact German originally (probably dual citizen later). Famous
> for its quote, "Don't mention the war!" Years ago, PBS (tv) used to show a
> lot of Brit-coms here.
Do you know the series Allo Allo? If you want English with German (or French) accents and WWII quotes, that is the one to see :_)

> Yes, I mainly meant population. 80 million people where a few dozen move to
> the U.S. isn't very shocking. It's not that far away, but far enough I
> suppose.
For the crowd immediately leaving after post WII (and before), it was pretty permanent. They often went by boat (because airplane was not affordable).

> Highly-populated states (like CA) tend to have quite an ego and believe
> they are superior to others based upon their size. Or maybe I'm just naive
> to be shocked at such hubris, but I guess it's the same old story.

Yup very recognizable and pretty much the same with the heavily populated areas in the West of the NL, and the rest.

> > NL is three quarters of New York state in surface (maybe closer to 80%
> > since it has a slightly larger water surface area), but with 85% of the
> > population. So comparable, but the NY state population is more unevenly
> > distributed.
>
> For lack of a better word (and I hate buzzwords), NY is very diverse and
> highly-populated as well. Then again, .nl (and .de and .se) all apparently
> have more than their share of immigrants.
10% or so. Sixties/seventies migrant workers from Turkey and Morocco (there were also Yugoslavians, Spanish and Italians, but they mostly fully integrated, so are no longer so easily identifiable as such), and refugees after.

Then there is a contingent "other Dutch". Former Indonesians (very aging since came over in forties, mostly ex-government workers or colonial army), people from Suriname (big wave during independence in 1975) and from the Caribbean islands.

I like to hear the first two categories speak, specially the older generations. They often have had a formal education in Dutch, so they speak grammatically flawless, albeit a bit old-fashioned and formal Dutch, but with a clearly foreign accent. This combination is intuitively a bit conflicting (speaking very correct, and deftly, but with accent), and fun to hear.

Same with Surinamers, the not so old generations. Mostly correct Dutch, since educated in it, but with thick, typical accents.

As somebody who likes dialectal varieties that is a fun bit about new dialects emerging.

> Hey, I like immigrants, I just
> don't like complete chaos. I don't blame immigrants for anything (how can
> I? they don't change/break anything, they have little power, same as me),
> but I swear America is its own religion nowadays, ugh. But even Europe
> isn't a "utopia", most likely, has its own problems (or worse in some
> ways), ugh.
From what I hear the pressure to integrate is less in Europe due to social security benefits and a longer (post-colonial) tradition of political correctness. OTOH migrants that do want to integrate complain that society is more socially closed to them, and that it is harder to integrate that way.

Newer generations seem to mix more freely (helped by the fact that more people with a migration background go to higher education, making that a bit less lily white, and a more natural way of mixing)

> IOW your backyard is probably ten times mine :-P
>
> Population only, land area doesn't matter. I moreso meant personal
> influence. Not to trivialize smaller countries, esp. since (like I said)
> the U.S. is very divided and not something I worship absolutely. "Your
> backyard" doesn't really apply to me, it's not mine, I don't own or control
> it. I don't even halfway like it (although it hates itself and everyone
> else, mostly, so that's hard to stomach, very toxic attitudes, and sadly I
> don't think EU is totally immune either).
I meant literally "your backyard". Just some fun based on people/km2 statistic.

> > I don't know how the US figure is corrected for lakes and such though.
> >
> > U.S/EU area = +/- 2 (9.8M vs 4.5M sqkm) U.S/EU population = 0.65 (325M
> vs
> > 500<), iow about 3 times denser. But that is going to change in a few
> > months.
>
> Why, because of Brexit?

Yup. EU population decrease by 10%.

> Clearly you have a different view than I do.

Well, it was more a statistic than a view, but I have a canned brexit opinion:

Brexit is IMHO a democratic failure. Yes it was a vote, but the question was too abstract. Which can be seen very clearly in UK politics, the brexit vote (which is basically a simplistic yes/no polluted by an awful xenophobic campaigning) is used a mandate for just about anything relating to foreign politics and/or the economic future of the UK.

In the beginning I hoped it would be turned around, but nowadays I think a full break (with some arrangements to structure that) is better. Too much closed doors in-transparent wrangling and weak compromises otherwise.

It is a pity that politics wasted two years that could be spend on that structuring though.

> I guess Europe is (mostly?) more chaotic than U.S.?

Strange, here the sentiment is generally the other way around. But no, I don't think Western Europe is that different.

Some Mediterranean countries are still reeling from the economic crisis though (high unemployment, specially for youth). Eastern Europe is different though, socio-economically it is still recovering, and the crisis didn't help.
Rugxulo

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Usono,
11.10.2018, 16:05

@ marcov
 

more irrelevant trivia

Post reply

> It usually depends on how far you go back. The most recent large waves of
> Europeans are already 70 years ago (forties, fifties). People that are old
> enough to remember the homeland are 80+ probably.
Well, we've definitely had more than a few immigrants (locally) in recent decades. So it's not only old-timers from world wars.

> Do you know the series Allo Allo? If you want English with German (or
> French) accents and WWII quotes, that is the one to see :_)
I'm mostly only familiar with things like Red Dwarf, Are You Being Served?, Chef, Monty Python, and Keeping Up Appearances. (But even that's been more than a few years ago.)

> Then there is a contingent "other Dutch". Former Indonesians (very aging
> since came over in forties, mostly ex-government workers or colonial army),
> people from Suriname (big wave during independence in 1975) and from the
> Caribbean islands.
Two more famous "examples":

Sarah Chalke (from tv show Scrubs) is Canadian (now American?), but her mother is from Germany.

Mark-Paul Gosselaar (Zach Morris from tv show Saved by the Bell), his parents are actual Dutch (okay, with a tiny bit of Indonesian and German).
Rugxulo

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Usono,
11.10.2018, 17:28

@ Rugxulo
 

more irrelevant trivia

Post reply

> Sarah Chalke (from tv show Scrubs) is Canadian (now American?), but her
> mother is from Germany.
She was also in Roseanne, even the recent reboot. I guess you heard (maybe not) that they canceled that reboot (despite popularity and success) because the main star made an "offensive" tweet [Twitter] (about some obscure political person I'd never heard of, some lady from [dead/irrelevant] previous Obama administration). Of course, they've recently decided to retool it to "The Connors" and bring it back (yet again) with the main character being declared dead. I guess at least that way they're not punishing the rest of the cast (and themselves, the tv network) with loss of income over one person's alleged sin.

I barely watched that show (decades ago), never saw the reboot, but it feels like unnecessary drama. And I'm sure you're aware of other punishments having been doled out in recent years to various people (one Hollywood director, one radio host, and many more). It seems this is the new norm, self-described radicals organize to try to get fired those with whom they disagree. Oh, and publicly demonize their reputation in the process.

I'm not directly familiar with Rules for Radicals nor Hillary's senior thesis. It might be unfair to say she agrees with these tactics. But, generally speaking, they are used quite a bit when people are a bit impatient or angry over the status quo. And I don't think the ends justify the means, obviously. It's not necessarily totally psychotic, but in such a messy world it feels like no one cares about diplomacy or truth or patience. Some people really are out for blood.
Rugxulo

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Usono,
11.10.2018, 16:46

@ marcov
 

more irrelevant trivia

Post reply

> > Highly-populated states (like CA) tend to have quite an ego and believe
> > they are superior to others based upon their size. Or maybe I'm just
> > naive to be shocked at such hubris, but I guess it's the same old story.
>
> Yup very recognizable and pretty much the same with the heavily populated
> areas in the West of the NL, and the rest.
I hate to get political, but in reality you only have to win minimum 11 crucial states to get enough electoral votes to become U.S. President. So the other 39 can be ignored (in theory). It's just one of those weird statistics that shows how fragile everything really is.

(I don't seek this kind of trivia out, but it just seeps in because no one shuts up. It's a very toxic climate.)

> > Clearly you have a different view than I do.
>
> Well, it was more a statistic than a view, but I have a canned brexit
> opinion:
>
> Brexit is IMHO a democratic failure. Yes it was a vote, but the question
> was too abstract. Which can be seen very clearly in UK politics, the brexit
> vote (which is basically a simplistic yes/no polluted by an awful
> xenophobic campaigning) is used a mandate for just about anything relating
> to foreign politics and/or the economic future of the UK.
I know almost nothing about Brexit, sorry to imply otherwise. Somebody (maybe?) mentioned something about it detrimental to Ireland and beef/meat sales. Dunno!

Xenophobia seems strange because Britain (like U.S.) is extremely diverse, but maybe that's the cause? Maybe some few resent immigrants? (I find it hard to believe, and the media exaggerates and lies about everything. Some people cry wolf too much, but I guess it's sometimes true.)

Craig Charles (Lister from tv show Red Dwarf) is from Liverpool ("Scouse"?), England, but his mom was Irish, and his dad was from Guyana (South America, English-speaking). You mentioned Suriname, but honestly I don't know anything about either place. Oh, but he did say things were a bit "grim" growing up in Liverpool ('60s? '70s? much different era), and certainly the world isn't perfect! (But seriously, it's very wearisome to hear activists complain about non-issues. I don't mean related to him, only generally speaking. Some people can make a mountain out of a molehill. Opportunists, you know, sharks who smell blood. It's hard not to be cynical when the media is overwhelmingly rubbish!)

Hey, Trump's mom came from Scotland. His father's parents were German immigrants, I think, and sometimes they lied and said they were Swedish to not piss off potential tenants. (Irrational.)

I guess Britain has other issues with its upcoming new monarch (after 60+ years or so). Maybe that will resolve itself peacefully, who knows.

> Some Mediterranean countries are still reeling from the economic crisis
> though (high unemployment, specially for youth). Eastern Europe is
> different though, socio-economically it is still recovering, and the crisis
> didn't help.
Greece and Iceland had issues, no? I thought Germany bailed one (or both?) out. Also, Germany took in a lot of refugees (1+ million?), certainly more than most other countries (including U.S.). Oh, and let me mention the horrible fact that Obama's administration was spying on Merkel, hacked her phone or whatever. Not to mention the Snowden b.s. I don't know what the hell the U.S. thinks it's doing spying on allies. That's just asking for trouble, and certainly the Germans were pissed. I doubt Trump will (or can) fix such a mess, though, who knows. Some people in U.S. government themselves are very stubborn and xenophobic (you know, too many laws, too many restrictions, insane legalism, literally insane).

Immigration is yet another buzzword, yet another complaint on the endless "list" that radicals make for themselves. I honestly don't know anything about it. I'm just an observer. It's just a waste of time listening to a bunch of crackpot lawyers (or worse, armchair) argue about something that they weren't going to do anyways. The b.s. bureaucracy (media, elections, lawsuits, new laws) are all fluff, just for show, don't really help anybody, don't last, don't even try to get along or solve any actual problems. Seriously, it seems totally pointless, and it's very annoying. It's a waste of time and money, but that nonsense is what feeds certain agitators. I'm just too damn naive for my own good.
Rugxulo

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Usono,
03.11.2018, 15:42

@ marcov
 

Catholic Bibles

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Hey, I just wanted to be sympathetic, somewhat international, talk about languages, and enjoy some rock music! I didn't really want to get controversial or political. Honestly, I didn't even want to bring up religion since so many people online are secular and irreligious these days. I do want to keep the peace, but it's very hard sometimes.

(For the record I think secularism becomes its own religion, and politics is always the focus of secular power. It's very antagonistic by nature, so I'm not sympathetic. What, did you really want me to be the stereotypical patriotic American who shuns everyone else? America is not God! I doubt anybody on this forum thinks so either, but it's seriously annoying being constantly surrounded by such belligerence. Sigh, I guess it's easier to be humble when you're small and overlooked.)

> Is there an approved Catholic English translation at all?
A random (semi-related) search did find "Bible Versions and Commentaries" which explains some stuff fairly well. (I'm not a scholar, so a lot of that is over my head.)

Some other guy on FASM's forum (in Heap, aka off-topic subforum) mentioned Christ recently. I did search a bit for him, just for variety, and link to several online Bibles.

As much as I only want to need a single Bible translation, I think that's naive. Some translations just fall flat or don't convey what I remember. I remember some good quotes that just aren't nearly as effective in some translations. Some translations feel more watered down than others. Like Psalm 16:2, it varies noticeably. I guess that's how language works, some things are more obvious and relatable than others.

My Latin is too rusty (and was too weak anyways, they didn't press hard for such a dead language), so I don't read the Vulgate much (except for a lark) since it's fairly obscured. I only loosely know, being familiar with the English translation, what "Dixi Domino: 'Dominus meus es tu, bonum mihi non est sine te'" means.

I have an Esperanto Bible (La Sankta Biblio) that I bought, out of completeness, a few years ago. Since I had stopped regularly reading periodicals, I bought the book as a way to support the E-USA club. But I never read much from it. Honestly, it's an updated version with the Deutero-canonical books, so that's the only reason I bought it. I believe some of those were translated by Gerrit Berveling (Dutch dude). So, while probably not "official" status (imprimatur or whatever), I would prefer reading that over an obscured Latin translation (for fun, I mean, assuming faithfulness, gotta flex those language muscles).

James 5:16 (E-o): "Petego de justulo multe efikas per sia energio." (NABRE: "The fervent prayer of a righteous person is very powerful." Jen mian tradukachon: "La fervora pregho de obeanto havas grandan potencon.")

(Bah, I should quote Sirach, but Bible Gateway lacks those books, go figure.)

(BTW, I stopped being a member of ELNA/E-USA several years ago, mostly because I was burned out, less interested. I was never very active at all anyways, just mildly curious. UEA is located in .nl, too, but I was never a member there, nor IKUE, nor anything else. Like I said, I stopped subscribing and reading many periodicals, too. I still have a ton lying around, but "ne gravas!")

Okay, my copy is actually titled "_Biblio_". Editoris [redaktis?? ne el UV!] IKUE kaj KELI, eldonis KAVA-PECH (Chehhujo, .cz), presita sur papero (Germanujo, tiel nomata .de), kun la Duakanonaj Libroj tradukitaj de Gerrit Berveling, la unua eldono 2006 (sed mi achetis gin je 2012 au 2013 p.K., alproksimume).

Psalmo 16:2 : "Mi diris al la Eternulo: Vi estas mia Sinjoro; Mi ne havas alian bonon krom Vi."

Sirahhido 8:5 : "Ne hontigu iun, kiu sin forturnis de la peko: pripensu, ke ni chiuj estas punindaj." (NABRE: "Do not reproach one who turns away from sin; remember, we all are guilty." Jen mian tradukachon: "Ne mallaudu personon, kiu ekforlasas pekecon; memoru, ke ni chiuj ofte havas kulpecon.")
Rugxulo

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Usono,
03.11.2018, 16:23

@ Rugxulo
 

Patro Nia

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I keep forgetting to mention this, too:

Martin Schleyer was a Catholic priest from Germany. He invented the constructed language (conlang) "Volapük" (1879). But I'm not sure how much, if any, direct influence this had on Esperanto (1887), which is certainly more popular, but such ideas were common in those days, in an attempt to tame the chaos. Personally, I never learned it, only E-o, but I'm sympathetic.

Another interesting thing is the Church of the Pater Noster (in Jerusalem but "land ... formally belongs to France", huh? well, they did supposedly have a presence around the Levant in the old days). Well, more specifically, this website (archived), which claims to have "[t]he Lord's Prayer in 1697 languages and dialects". I found that fascinating and (many years ago, 2002) printed out the E-o pregho photograph of the translation on the physical wall and hung that printout up on my own room's wall.
Rugxulo

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Usono,
03.11.2018, 17:02

@ Rugxulo
 

E-o on Project Gutenberg

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And just FYI, Project Gutenberg has a good amount of E-o stuff to read. You may not directly care, but it's still interesting and useful. (I already own several works that are up there but in "dead tree" form, heh.)
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