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