"Similar" languages

Leasnam   Tue Feb 02, 2010 10:25 pm GMT
Baldewin, what is the meaning of 'tutoyate'?


<<Who are the most Romanized Germanic people, the English or the Flemish?. >>

Neither, I would ween to say. Romanisation is an eld-old process no longer productive today. English are definitely Nordicised and Normanised, but not really "Romanised" per se. Their contact with Romandom is through sheer bookliness. Pas réel.

Flemish might have a contact that more intimately affects the culture and the leed on a practical, every-day level, but I do not know for sure. I have never been to Flanders (yet :).
PARISIEN   Tue Feb 02, 2010 11:44 pm GMT
<< Baldewin, what is the meaning of 'tutoyate'? >>

-- I think our friend Baldewin wanted to coin an English cognate to French "tutoyer" (= German "duzen"), i.e. using the familiar pronoun "tu" instead of the formal "vous").

Until recently Flanders was an exception in North-Western Europe because of their strong community lifestyle, conservative family values and staunch Roman Catholic faith. It was a sort of Bavaria-by-the-Sea (many Flemish claim a selective affinity to Bavaria BTW), hugely different from both French and Dutch individualism. But this is rapidly changing.
encore   Wed Feb 03, 2010 10:25 am GMT
<<Germanophobia in the Netherlands kind of pisses me off. Especially those who haven't been through WWII have no reason in hating Germans>>
What does have Germany Federal Minister of Health Philipp Rösler or talented soul singer Xavier Naidoo etc.(their native language is German) in common with Second World War or "German soldiers marching their streets"? "Germanophobia" and other "phobias" is serious illness of stupid people.
James   Wed Feb 03, 2010 12:39 pm GMT
Germanphobia is long pass it's sell by date. FFS, especially the Dutch that go on about those evil Germans. Get over it guys, the war is so long ago, and by the way the Dutch weren't saints themselves in their colonial Indonesia.

Germanphobia is just plain stupid today.
Mustafa   Wed Feb 03, 2010 3:57 pm GMT
German and Turkish are similar. Both have almost the same vowels, both agglutinates very long words and the syllables usually end in consonants.
The Turkish blood is strong in Germany so it is likely the two languages will be even more similar in the future.
Franco   Wed Feb 03, 2010 7:59 pm GMT
Also both the Germans and the Turks have Asian genes . The Hunes invaded Germany in the Middle Ages.
Leasnam   Wed Feb 03, 2010 9:01 pm GMT
<<-- I think our friend Baldewin wanted to coin an English cognate to French "tutoyer" (= German "duzen"), i.e. using the familiar pronoun "tu" instead of the formal "vous"). >>

Ahh, I had a feeling that it might mean this, but I wasn't wis.

We have a term like this already in English: it the verb 'thou'--t.i. "to thou someone".
PARISIEN   Thu Feb 04, 2010 11:23 am GMT
Thou shalt not you me.