Re: [tied] Inguaeonum [was Celtic Jutland]

>This is just personal experience from a few days in the
>Netherlands, vs. a few days in Germany. Once you figure
>out Dutch has an extra article or two

Only 1 extra article: "de" (masc. + fem.) & "het" (neuter) instead of
English "the".

>, it almost (but never quite) makes sense as bizarrely-spelled
>English, while German remains absolutely a different language
>no matter how long you look at it. I'm talking about newspaper
>headlines, shop signs, and the such. The sensation I felt is
>probably what a monolingual Italian gets when puzzling out
>Spanish, or vice versa. Mark Odegard

Well, Dutch (standard Dutch: Holland) is about halfway English & German. The
dialects of W-Flanders are perhaps a bit closer to English, but those of
Brabant (Brussels) & certainly Limburg (Maastricht) are closer to German.
Intrinsically, English & German about equally difficult for Dutch-speaking
people. German is probably easier to understand because of the resembling
word order, and easier to pronounce (and certainly to spell), but it has of
course a difficult declension. I guess the differences between German/Dutch
& Dutch/English are a bit larger than Spanish/Italian.

Marc Verhaegen