Betty or Veronica?

[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.