Betty or Veronica?

[catalina_marina]

Originally Posted by mudshark

Quick! Where is San Marino located?

Eh, between France and Spain?

*checks*

Nope, that would be Andorra. See?

Oh, the one I remember was all nice and new... Back then. Germany was one country again, Tsjechoslowakije (you can translate that for yourself) was broken up, Yugoslavia had fallen apart, and Russia wasn't completely whole anymore either. But I learned (and so it said in the Atlas too) that the capital of Yugoslavia, or small-Yugoslavia, as my teacher liked to call it, was Belgrado. Now, apparantly, that country doesn't exist anymore either.

[Nate the Great]

Chandler Bing: Why do they call it a check? Why not a Slovakian?

[mudshark]

Originally Posted by catalina_marina

Oh, the one I remember was all nice and new... Back then. Germany was one country again, Tsjechoslowakije (you can translate that for yourself) was broken up, Yugoslavia had fallen apart, and Russia wasn't completely whole anymore either. But I learned (and so it said in the Atlas too) that the capital of Yugoslavia, or small-Yugoslavia, as my teacher liked to call it, was Belgrado. Now, apparantly, that country doesn't exist anymore either.

Okay, yeah -- there was a lot going on in a short stretch of time, there.

Still, that sort of thing is always going on, and Yugoslavia was a sort of artificial construct anyway, cobbled together by the Allies at the end of WWI to show the (soon-to-be out-of-business) Austro-Hungarian Empire who was in charge. Czechoslovakia, as a country, also dated from the same time. In fact, you only have to go back 50 years or so before that to see Germany and Italy being assembled out of what had previously only been separate smaller bits.

Borders are nice, as ideas; so are country names; they look kinda cool on maps and all that, but historically, they tend not to have much in the way of permanence. Just in my lifetime, the maps of places like Africa and Southeast Asia have been overhauled pretty dramatically, and the Middle East and South Asia only a few years before that.

Originally Posted by PointyHairedJedi

I wondered that my own self. I suspect though that it's so she has a good idea where to send her armies first...

Okay, that would work. Should have thought of it myself.

[catalina_marina]

Just in your lifetime, hm? :P

The name Germany doesn't make much sense anyway. Historically speaking, we're all Germans. People who think up those words should start looking at what countries call themselves, sometime, and only mangle it just a bit to make it fit in their own language. :P

Useless information: In our local dialect, we call them Prusen.

[Nate the Great]

How are we all Germans? "German" is a cultural label, one that is not shared by most of us.

[mudshark]

Originally Posted by catalina_marina

Just in your lifetime, hm? :P

Yes, yes -- cue the "antiquity" jokes. I can take it.

The name Germany doesn't make much sense anyway. Historically speaking, we're all Germans. People who think up those words should start looking at what countries call themselves, sometime, and only mangle it just a bit to make it fit in their own language. :P

I suppose Deutschland really isn't much better, is it?

Useless information: In our local dialect, we call them Prusen.

How, then, do you keep the Prussians sorted out from the Bayerischers? (Actually, the Bavarians probably tended to stay home with their beer and cheese, while the Prussians were the ones who came to your town uninvited, so yeah... )

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

How are we all Germans? "German" is a cultural label, one that is not shared by most of us.

Oh? And what is your background, then -- Basque? Samoyed? Greek? Native American? Sino-Tibetan?

Most of Europe that isn't south of the Alps is, at the very least, culturally informed by one or more German branches and the language in which you speak and write is a Germanic language. The Lutheran religion which pervades your neighborhood originated in a city midway between Berlin and Leipzig, and just who did you suppose the Angles and the Saxons were? Unless you're a Martian or a Gray alien or something nearly as exotic, you're most likely up to your eyebrows in German, whether you knew it or not.

Edit: Come to think of it, Germans did a fair bit of mucking about in the rest of Europe, too, so if your family came from pretty much anywhere west of the Urals, there's a German influence in there somewhere or other.

[Chancellor Valium]

Originally Posted by mudshark

Yes, yes -- cue the "antiquity" jokes. I can take it.

So...what was Clodius Pulcher like at parites?

[catalina_marina]

Originally Posted by mudshark

I suppose Deutschland really isn't much better, is it?

Well that is what I was referring to. We call it Duitsland, hence the mangling.

How, then, do you keep the Prussians sorted out from the Bayerischers? (Actually, the Bavarians probably tended to stay home with their beer and cheese, while the Prussians were the ones who came to your town uninvited, so yeah... )

I give up. What are Bayerischers? People from some other German state or something?

Edit: Come to think of it, Germans did a fair bit of mucking about in the rest of Europe, too, so if your family came from pretty much anywhere west of the Urals, there's a German influence in there somewhere or other.

I suppose I was mostly referring to the language, since Americans tend to come from pretty much all of Europe anyway... I wouldn't call the French Germanic, really. But if you're German, Dutch, British... Than yeah, all German.

[mudshark]

Originally Posted by Chancellor Valium

So...what was Clodius Pulcher like at parites?

Bit tedious, actually.

Originally Posted by catalina_marina

I give up. What are Bayerischers? People from some other German state or something?

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.)

I suppose I was mostly referring to the language, since Americans tend to come from pretty much all of Europe anyway... I wouldn't call the French Germanic, really. But if you're German, Dutch, British... Than yeah, all German.

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.