Betty or Veronica?

[Nate the Great]

I consider my cultural background to be Minnesotan, but if you want names of European countries, that's a job for a PM or e-mail. It's a bit complicated.

[mudshark]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

I consider my cultural background to be Minnesotan...

Okay, so... Jell-O salads, lutefisk, hotdish, Ole and Lena jokes and the Kensington Runestone, then. Not so much, eh?

[Nate the Great]

Erm, not exactly. Yes, I've indoctrinated myself into those aspects of my culture, but remember that I live in the Twin Cities. I hate hotdish, and in fact any casserole. Cream of anything soup is revolting to me. Never touched a drop of lutefisk in my life, but I know enough lutefisk jokes to nauseate anyone. Ole and Lena...oh goodness yes. As for the Kenzington Runestone, I knew about that secondhand, but not the exact circumstances. And we don't add "eh" to the end of our sentences. Although Howard Mohr's bestselling tape/CD/book/musical How to Talk Minnesotan takes a few liberties, it is accurate in a few places.

[catalina_marina]

Originally Posted by mudshark

Bayern is what the Germans call the State of Bavaria, so the Bayerischers are the people who live there. (Also BMW stands for Bayerische Motoren Werke.)

Oh Beieren! Why didn't you say so?

If you go back to Charlemagne and before, many of the tribes in what is now France were Germans -- Burgundians, Franks (hence the name "France"), Merovingians and all of those, not to mention the odd hordes of Visigoths, Vandals and the like passing through -- and the rest were Celts who had been to a greater or lesser degree Romanized pre-4th century. It's only from Charlemagne onward that you begin to get a distinctly French national character, and even then you had Vikings (North Germanic) all over the place for a few hundred years adding to the mix.

Okay, you might have a point there. But since I'm not that historically concious, I was still talking about the language.

[Nate the Great]

A test: find a thread in this forum that has strayed further from the original point than this one.

[PointyHairedJedi]

The only one that I know of that ever did stay on topic for any length of time was, ironically, Topic Title.

[Nate the Great]

Well, and all of those one word at a time stories. In those cases, there is no point, but that IS the point.

[mudshark]

Originally Posted by catalina_marina

Oh Beieren! Why didn't you say so?

Well, it's like this: an alarmingly large number of years ago, I studied German in school for two or three years -- not enough to where I could pretend I was actually fluent in the language, but I could get around in it a bit. After that, I never used it very much, but bits of it continued to stick.

Then, after a certain favorite musician/composer of mine died in 1993, I was using Lexis/Nexis to find all the articles printed about him that I could. Somewhat surprisingly (to me, anyway), many of the articles I found were in Dutch, and I discovered that, as long as they didn't get too complicated, I could more or less follow what was being written. In short, I can recognize bits when I see them and be able to understand what enough of them mean to get the gist of the article, but it's a very long way from actually knowing the right words or place-names for things.

Okay, you might have a point there. But since I'm not that historically concious, I was still talking about the language.

Fair enough. It's just that the longer you look at the history part, the more the language part tends to get inextricably tangled up in it. Bit of a mess, really.

[Nate the Great]

Lexis/Nexus?

[mudshark]

No, Lexis/Nexis.