You forget heir Frank, Biggi is a woman, There will be a test!

Print Biggi's posts and keep them with you!

Biggi!  Tell us about the crossbow eagle shoot you went to this summer.  Did you take pictures?  

I'm currently teasing Mike Otterberg with the possibility of a wooden eagle match at Glasgow. Could do it on a tall pole. Told him it could also be a (maypole). Is that possible? 


        Joe.  

Froggie, you are right. 

I should write something about the constitution and development of Schützengilden and Schützengesellschaften. I have a bit knowledge about that for German regions, but I have to read it up for the Austro-Hungarian empire. 

But this is also a longer story, I'll gonna write this later. Its already 1:45 AM here in Bavaria and I am a bit tired...

         Biggi.   

Ok, Joe. I copied and pasted the whole class. Bought a file cabinet and barely got it all in. I hope it won't be a closed book test  or i'm in trouble 

Biggi, one thing that stuck me as you were redrawing all those borders is, the languages must have been a challenge to keep up with. Can you tell us something about that? Where some lost and combined?

Frank

And this Sorbian language has a lot of dialects. But the language still survived, all over the centuries. There were a lot of sovereigns all over Europe, who gave the order its forbidden to use the origin language. But this was nearly not possible to steal the people their linguistic identity. 

In Tyrol (Austria) and South Tyrol (Italy), a lot of people speak both languages: Austrian German and Italian. But they still have an own language in South Tyrol, called Ladinian. And this language is completely different to Italian or German. They have also different dialects in the Ladinian language. This language is teached at school, that it might not get lost. Makes a lot of identification to their homeland.

Look at Switzerland: Three official languages German, French and Italian. But also "Rätherromanisch", an old language which is the fourth official language used in Switzerland. Or Belgium: they have their Belgian language, Dutch and French and also Flemish language. Its a kind of mixture between Belgian and Dutch - but an official language.

But also in Yugoslavia, they created an official language for authority stuff and each part of the country kept the own language like Slovenian, Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian, and so on. People didn't lost their identity keeping their language. During the cold war, in the east European countries every student had to learn Russian, because Soviet Union was the big brother. But normally they hated it, to learn the language of the occupying country...

We Europeans are used to a lot of languages...   

Oh, maybe its a little bit like in America, where the immigrants brought their language with them and still nowadays they can speak a funny kind of German or other languages, which were used 200 years ago in the country they came from. Language can survive!

         Biggi.   

I was fortunate to be in Tallinn, Estonia, right after the failure of the USSR and the re-established independence of Estonia. On one day I hired a young man--early 20's--who spoke excellent English, to show me around the city and tell me about its history. I asked him how many languages he spoke. He said he was most fluent in his native Estonian (a language the Russians tried to discourage) and Finnish because they are almost identical except for a few words. He spoke Swedish because many Estonians did as a result of having been overrun by the Swedes when they had an empire in the Baltic. Hard to think of the Swedes today as having that in their history. His English was excellent, having studied it in university for reasons of business and international trade. Languages he spoke less fluently he said were Polish, Latvian, German, and French. When I noted that he had neglected to include Russian, he dismissed that with, "Oh, well, of course. We were forced to study that in school."

C'est la vérité!

BP wrote on Sep 30^th, 2012 at 3:32am:


Proscha? Never heard about it, cannot find anything in maps or on the web. 
Where is it located?

               Biggi.

Aaahhh, I see. Now I know where it is located. It is in the far east of former Germany Territories. 

The regions of Ostpreußen (East Prussia), which were lost after WWI. But this region had always Polish roots. The German inhabitants were chased out of the region in the 1920s and the properties were given to Polish farmers. Since the treaty of Versailles and the speech "Fourteen Points" of Woodrow Wilson, the region was given to the new Polish state.

         Biggi.