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00:17
@Mitch I'd bet they had troubles of their own.
00:48
Connections
Puzzle #607
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01:12
Strands #341
“A flair for fashion”
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Wordle 1,329 4/6

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@Xanne Oh, is today's difficult?
@tchrist Have you read this: nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/…
It is written a little bit from the perspective of someone in journalism/advertising. But still.
> I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it.
What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.
01:38
Trump is firing all officials who might act as checks on his authority because he wants to use that unchecked authority for...something.
Presumably something bad.
He just illegally fired (or tried to fire?) the head of the Federal Election Commission.
Likewise, he's currently withholding federal funds to push organizations to accept his positions on, say, trans issues. He could use that same power to push them to do pretty much anything; as I recall, the legal limits of this are unclear but he can certainly do a lot more than he has already.
@alphabet Ya think?
Likewise, Trump can just keep declaring national emergencies to fund whatever he wants, and impoundment to stop whatever he doesn't. The courts might be able to stop that second part. But he doesn't really need Congress for most of his plans.
@Robusto If the inspectors general are all replaced by adorable kittens with names like "Mr. Sparkles" in matching collars, would that change your mind?
01:55
@alphabet Hmmmm ... that would be a game-changer, most likely.
The courts may intervene on some things. But a country that only remains a republic because of constant interventions by the courts is not a particularly stable one.
Dec 1, 2024 at 6:32, by alphabet
The year is 2030. After threatening the CEO of Disney with execution on charges of "woke sedition," the Trump administration has forced them to make a children's movie about how Princess Ivanka's idyllic upbringing has made her the perfect replacement for the entire Supreme Court.
This joke was a bit funnier at the time I made it.
@Robusto Whistleblower: Hands report to inspector general / Inspector general: Sits on report, meows
Now it just looks prophetic.
@Robusto Aw, this regime hasn't lived up to your high expectations?
I wish they would stop trying to live up to all my expectations.
02:35
@Cerberus I have not. Yet. Been supremely busy, and not with the most pleasant of matters: just work and ugly moderation issues.
@tchrist Moderation of this site?
02:53
@Cerberus Unfortunately.
So I can imagine.
One of the belligerents start belligerating again?
@Vikas You know, I'm actually kinda happy to be reminded that there are places much more dystopian than the US right now
03:18
@Vikas Hilarious.
I saw a Dutch site where they had a video of how they asked Deep Seek about the Uyghurs. It listed all of the known facts about their oppression, the camps, everything. Then, one second after its finished answer was displayed...it all disappeared and was replaced by, "I can't comment on that" or similar.
Part of the answer is in Dutch. But the Dutch contains only a more detailed version of what you see in the English part of the answer, listing all the misdeeds of the Chinese government. And then...poof.
 
2 hours later…
05:12
This from Ms. Eats-salad-with-a-hair-comb:
> What is the difference between Greenland and Donald Trump? Greenland is not for sale. *boo*
> Ok. For any Republican Trump Administration person who wants to throw eggs at me because of that joke: you can’t, because they’re too expensive.
06:49
@M.A.R. Ah-HAH!
We knew it!
I doubt whether it was ever an "Apple" font for me, but then it must have been something else, before the change.
 
1 hour later…
08:57
Biological term of the day: anoikis - disconnection of a cell from the extracellular matrix, often leading to death of the cell
Anoikis is a form of programmed cell death that occurs in anchorage-dependent cells when they detach from the surrounding extracellular matrix (ECM). Usually cells stay close to the tissue to which they belong since the communication between proximal cells as well as between cells and ECM provide essential signals for growth or survival. When cells are detached from the ECM, there is a loss of normal cell–matrix interactions, and they may undergo anoikis. However, metastatic tumor cells may escape from anoikis and invade other organs. == Etymology == The word "anoikis" was coined by Frisch and...
09:31
Insulin eyedrops for treating corneal defects: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11124528
Amazing.
Another groups of scientists published a similar study in Nature: nature.com/articles/s41598-024-63091-y
I wonder if this might help people with keratoconus.
Maybe I should try it out.
 
2 hours later…
11:19
Sand of the day: fech-fech (or fesh-fesh?)
Fech fech (Arabic: فش فش) is a very fine powder caused by the erosion of clay-limestone terrain and it is most commonly found in deserts. It consists of a surface horizon of pulverized soil with low particle cohesion protected under a thin crust. Fech fech is derived from ancient lake muds or on certain argillaceous rocks and is one of the desert surfaces that produces dust. It is not determinable from the surface and can therefore pose a significant transportation hazard acting as a surprise "trap" as the ground collapses beneath a vehicle, miring it in a quicksand-like substance. Fech-fech...
 
2 hours later…
13:10
> This study showed that statin use is associated with higher white matter hyperintensity volumes and lower total and peripheral cortical grey matter volumes 9 years later academic.oup.com/braincomms/article/6/6/fcae417/…
This is your brain on statins
13:36
> New research finds whale vocal sequences follow both Menzerath’s law (longer phrases use shorter sounds) and Zipf’s law (frequent sounds are shorter) - patterns seen in human language. science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads6014
#WhenTaken #346 (07.02.2025)

I scored 823/1000🏅

1️⃣📍266 km - 🗓️4 yrs - 🥇187/200
2️⃣📍3.5K km - 🗓️4 yrs - 🥈131/200
3️⃣📍577 km - 🗓️4 yrs - 🥇179/200
4️⃣📍688 km - 🗓️16 yrs - 🥈146/200
5️⃣📍192 km - 🗓️9 yrs - 🥇180/200

https://whentaken.com

Wordle 1,329 4/6

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14:47
@CowperKettle It' pretty obvious, those whales are taking statins.
> Résultat: Vous venez probablement de Paris, 2e arrondissement.
snort That's exactly where one of my high school French teachers stayed for a week vacation.
Granted, most of my answers were "non, je ne l'emploie pas".
15:06
So... not totally inaccurate.
@jlliagre I find the color scheme annoying as no color is the background color which is 'no where near' but the 'very near' color is light orange which is closer to the background color than 'éloigné' which is dark. So somewhat confusing.
But that guy is suisse, what does he know?
@Mitch Yes, not only that one but I find most of the color schemes used on online maps to be senseless. Why can't these guys choose an intuitive color gradation?
15:28
@jlliagre I now exactly the reason. They're not trying (not thinking of what the reader will think). -They- know what the meaning is (what the highest and lowest are), so it's very hard for them to know what other people expect.
and they use the default colors given by the software, so they don't question.
In some sense the color scheme is esthetically pleasing and if reversed would make total sense.
@jlliagre But, not totally irrelevantly, in the late 1700's, when Napoleon was growing up, how French were things in Corsica? I mean the regular people spoke Genoese/Tuscan, but the upper class... Italian-accented French? Is the latter what he grew up speaking? Was it well known as emperor that he had a awful southern accent? (or hid he have a southern accent?)
@Mitch Yes, at first I wondered why they put me in Corsica while I answered with selecting what I would have used in Marseille.
@Mitch Mitch, I still can't copy to chat using send and upload. I copy the thing I want to copy but then it won't paste into this space. So...
@Lambie 1) screen save the image to a local file. 2) use the 'upload' button to upload the image.
(don't try to copy-paste)
@CowperKettle is there a similar word choice "where am I from?" quiz for Russian?
@Mitch Excuse me? I don't get it
15:45
@CowperKettle The French quiz I posted above that jliagre posted the map from. YOu answer some questions like "What do you call a bug that lives under a rock: a pill bug, a potato bug, a roly poly, etc" (possibilities that are particular to a given area), and then at the end it tells you where you grew up. Eg in American English 'soda for most of the US, 'pop' for areas osmef th midwest, and 'coke' for the south.
@Mitch In the late 1700's, Corsica was not yet really Frenchified. Regular people spoke Corsican, upper class spoke Corsican too. Only French troops were speaking French (or something else). Literate Corsicans were writing in Italian (Tuscan). French was a foreign language and spoken as such by the elite. Napoleon barely spoke French when he joined the Brienne school. Note that Corsican accent was/is substantially different from the southern accent (influenced by Occitan/Catalan or Basque).
Very interesting.
Someone should make the article for the École de Brienne!
16:00
L'École de Brienne est un ancien établissement d'enseignement militaire situé à Brienne-le-Château (Aube). == Histoire == À l’origine un couvent de Minimes destiné à l’éducation des enfants du pays de Brienne-le-Château, cet établissement fut converti en collège en 1730. En 1774, le zèle des moines, soutenu de la protection de l’archevêque de Toulouse, le ministre, et de celle de son frère, leur permit de donner plus d’étendue à l’enseignement. En 1776, le gouvernement fit choix de ce collège pour y établir une succursale de l’École militaire de Paris. L’école militaire de Brienne fut supprimée...
@jlliagre Yeah I sorta mistakenly lumped Provençal and Corsican together or at least the accent.
hmm...I always hd the impression that Provencal was closer to the varieties of Italian than to the varieties of (northern) French.
Of course I should have looked at French Wiki.
@Mitch Hmm I wouldn't have though that. But I don't know enough about the languages.
I had always wondered if Napoleon was more Italian than French (linguistically/culturally) but the (admittedly superficial) history I got barely mentions Corsica and that's the most I got.
@Cerberus well yeah because maps and national borders, it looks like langue d'oil and langue d'oc are just two slightly different versions of the same thing and little mention is made of things outside of those nationalist borders.
Like the weather...it only seems to start right at the border.
> Map of the different Occitano-Romance dialects
@Mitch This is true.
And that may be part of why I thought of the Langues d'Oc as closer to northern French.
16:26
@Cerberus I've heard that there is/used to be a dialect continuum from Sicily to Portugal...but not one that went over to French.
@Mitch Hmm it may be possible.
But I wonder why French wouldn't be included in the Q continuum.
@Cerberus maybe because the vulgar latin that led to modern French was influenced enough by the Franks (Alemanic? Bavarian?) to diverge away from the Mediterranean varieties?
@Mitch Possibly.
Then again, I'd like to see confirmation that French is excluded from the Borg continuum.
16:46
@Mitch That doesn't make sense. There was definitely a language continuum among all Romance countries (excluding Romania, obviously).
I can imagine that.
@Mitch Nobody was identifying as Italian in the late 1700's. People were identifying themselves to the island / state / region / village where they belong and Corsica was no exception. Anyway, culturally, Corsica was much closer to Italy. Corsican going to the University were doing it in Pisa until the mid 1800's.
Corsican (corsu, pronounced [ˈkorsu], or lingua corsa, pronounced [ˈliŋɡwa ˈɡorsa]) is a Romance language consisting of the continuum of the Tuscan Italo-Dalmatian dialects spoken on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, a territory of France, and in the northern regions of the island of Sardinia, an autonomous region of Italy. Corsica is situated approximately 123.9 km (77.0 miles; 66 nautical miles) off the western coast of Tuscany; and with historical connections, the Corsican language is considered a part of Tuscan varieties, from that part of the Italian peninsula, and thus is closely related...
Identify [no object] as is really ugly language, sorry!
Nobody considered himself Italian, nobody called himself Italian.
People referred to themselves by the island/state/region/village they lived in.
@Cerberus That's the way you say it though.
It is a very recent Americanism, only used by a certain subgroup.
> The Shepherds' Crusade of 1320 was a popular crusade in Normandy in June 1320. It originally began when a large group of common-folk banded together to preach a crusade after a teenage shepherd said he was visited by the Holy Spirit. Initially aiming to help the Reconquista of Iberia, it failed to gain support from the church or nobility and instead murdered hundreds of Jews in France and Aragon.
Of course.
17:06
@jlliagre If you're counting Romanian in a dialect continuum with other Romance languages, then that's a different idea of continuum than I'm thinking of.
@Mitch You read me wrong.
excluding
I usually think of dialect continuum as a long geographic connection (does not have to be linear) where nearby languages are mutually intelligible even though distant ones along the continuum may not be. eg sicilian <-> neapolitan <-> lazio <-> tuscan <-> ... <-> genoese <-> provencal <-> catalan <-> spanish (i'm not sure if portuguese is included.
@jlliagre Oh. Oops. right.
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be. This is a typical occurrence with widely spread languages and language families around the world, when these languages did not spread recently. Some prominent examples include the Indo-Aryan languages across large parts of India, varieties of Arabic across north Africa and southwest Asia, the Turkic languages, the varieties of Chinese, and...
They include French (and Portuguese) in the Western Romance continuum.
In terms of vague distance by language features and vocab, French seems to me further from Spanish and Italian than either are to each other.
@Cerberus Wikipedia includes them so maybe I was just thinking differently.
@Mitch Don't apply continuum rules to modern isolated languages.
Almost nobody was speaking French when dialects were a thing in France.
Very few people speak "standard Italian" in Italy even these days.
@jlliagre No, I know, just using those as vague geographical areas instrad of listing out every single one individually.
@Cerberus It might be recent, but is easily standard, used in formal writing.
17:28
@Cerberus The fact that you find it ugly is not a reason for others to avoid it, unless they're trying to appeal to your personal taste.
Not to start another of these pointless debates or anything.
@Mitch This may be true.
@Mitch Yes, I guess I used that expression because I already read something like Do you identify as black. It wasn't a calque from French anyway because it wouldn't work.
@Mitch What I said is that it is very ugly.
@alphabet Most people find it ugly.
@alphabet Then what are you doing?
@jlliagre Ugly!
Sorry, I'll drop it after having expressed my frustration now.
Ha ha :-)
This map is good, but also bad.
It might be good printed as an A1 poster.
17:58
@Cerberus So you identify as someone who does not identify as saying 'identify as'.
I identify with that.
Wahh I'm dead!
Just use normal language to say what you mean.
My work is done here.
Hyped-up language is never a good sign.
Now I'm back!
@Cerberus It looks mostly good about the extent of the languages (if one can ever say that there is only ever a single language at a location)
@Mitch Oh, noes!
18:03
I couldn't say anything about the colors.
But the scale and the font sizes?
But the -lack- of color in of Iran middle is strange...sure it is thinly populated desert... but so is lots of the border between Iran and Pakistan... it doesn't seem consistent about leaving out color where there are few speakers.
@Cerberus I have to look again...
(I do find it very interesting how Ossetian has a yellow (only) cousin all the way in Tajikistan.)
@Mitch I did think about that too: only a few of the various thinly populated areas are coloured grey.
@Cerberus oh wow...tiny. my eyes hurt. I think they had this data, of which there are so many categories, that the only way to fit it was with such a tiny font.
But I suppose one can zoom in on anything these days.
@Mitch They could have put the legend all on the left of the map, and made the map itself a lot coarser, with all the fonts much larger (or the map as a whole much smaller).
This map is a bit on the other side of the spectrum.
But the letters are a big improvement.
18:16
@Cerberus I've just been playing with zooming in and that makes everything look great. So yeah A1 if printed. But on a screen you can zoom in however you like and it's very readable.
@Mitch But then you see only a tiny part of the map, and no legend.
And you can read no number or letters without zooming in, so you don't even know where to zoom in.
@Cerberus trur, but easy enough to scan back and forth.
Do you find that easy?
@Cerberus moving back and forth between the legend the inscrutable numbers is annoying.
You need to zoom and drag around many times until you have found both Ossetian and its only cousin and their names and the name of their branch.
@Mitch Exactly.
18:18
yes. annoying..
Even dragging from the name of the language to the name of the branch takes a while zoomed in.
you could learn one of those languages in the time it takes to scroll back and forth.
True.
Or maybe more, e.g. you could learn Ossetian together with the other one whose name it takes too much time to look up so I don't remember.
looking that up
Please, don't.
You'll just tire yourself and give up.
18:21
Yaghnobi.
I also learned Swahili at the same time.
In another window.
That's what took so long.
It has your map right at the beginning.
Ilovelanguages: Iranian languages comparison Persian, Dari, Tadjik, Kurdish, Pashto, Baluchi, Tat, Ossetian
I love 'I love languages'
Umm.
@Cerberus it looks like a lot of people in the Sahara and Kalahari.
Secret cities.
Buried under the sand.
Fremen.
Millions will erupt when the appointed hour strikes.
18:41
@Cerberus Now I'm all anxious. Please let us get this over with.
They may take a liking to you.
 
1 hour later…
19:58
@alphabet to be fair, it has this robotic customer support vibe to it. "Greetings Earthling, I identify as a humanoid body snatcher and my designation is antifa staff seargent." Cerb's point might be that pretty language would win this cultural war of identities, not wordy inventions that give it a false aura of being concise
@Mitch Portuguese is much, much, much closer to Spanish than Catalan is.
Jul 22, 2024 at 18:09, by Robusto
Also, I think I can read Portuguese better than Catalan:
@Mitch One line along the north runs through Portuguese and Galician and Asturian and Aragonese and Catalan and Gascon and Aranese. And Asturian has a line to Castilian. How you paste together the oc and oïl langues I leave to you.
It's not so much a straight line as a spreading 2D thing.
Eventually you will get to the farthest reaches of Italy. But there are many, many, many, many more Latin-derived languages than you have begun to list here.
@M.A.R. That is nicely put.
Western Romance does not form a continuum with Eastern Romance.
20:10
It is interesting how Latin survives there but nowhere near it.
Romania is quite far from the nearest other Romance language, in Italy.
Yes. And there is a bit of a group there, too. Romanian (or Daco-Romanian), Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian.
I saw it.
But they're scattered weirdly. Balkanization at its finest. :)
So this puts Occitan close to Spanish?
Far closer to Spanish than to French or Ligurian?
I was questioning the same thing. I'm not sure what the distance means.
I think they have constraints based on attempting to use area to represent the number of speakers.
20:33
Corsican location in that tree is questionable. Corsican is not Tuscan (or Italian as they name it in the tree) but is far much closer to it than to Sardinian.
True.
20:52
@tchrist 👍🏽. It sure reads that way. To me, on paper, Portuguese looks like Spanish with a couple of weird spellings; pronounced, Portuguese sounds like Russian with a couple of Spanish words thrown in.
Connections
Puzzle #607
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Strands #341
“A flair for fashion”
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Connections was opaque to me today.
@tchrist I've always wondered about the 'reconquista' explanation of Northern Spanish dialects following the armies southward. It seems very plausible, but it's not like the entire north colonized southwards step by step by longitude - it's just the military moving south. Or maybe that's how it worked?
@tchrist That gives the impression that French is much more on a continuum with Occitan than I had thought. A dialect continuum doesn't have to be linear, it could branch off.
21:10
Yeah, religion. Lovely.
The Book of Exodus (from Ancient Greek: Ἔξοδος, romanized: Éxodos; Biblical Hebrew: שְׁמוֹת Šəmōṯ, 'Names'; Latin: Liber Exodus) is the second book of the Bible. It is a narrative of the Exodus, the origin myth of the Israelites leaving slavery in Biblical Egypt through the strength of their deity named Yahweh, who according to the story chose them as his people. The Israelites then journey with the legendary prophet Moses to Mount Sinai, where Yahweh gives the Ten Commandments and they enter into a covenant with Yahweh, who promises to make them a "holy nation, and a kingdom of priests" on condition...
I tried reading the Bible as a kid, but got tired, it was complicated
@Robusto Yeahh I have purple now, in three tries. I have nothing else.
@Cerberus Blue was entirely occulted from me.
And after seeing it?
OK I have yellow.
OK now I have green.
21:19
@Cerberus When I saw it I thought, "Meh, cheap-o."
Staring at blue now...
Ohh I get it.
Yeah.
I must say SPOILER did make me think of that.
I never would have guessed.
Much earlier.
Connections
Puzzle #607
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🟨🟦🟪🟪
🟪🟪🟪🟪
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21:21
You did better than I did today.
"Maybe it's the time of year or the time of day."
About blue: SPOILER
@Robusto Well, my results also look weird.
I NEVER get purple first.
I'm satisfied with any order. I don't have time for perfection. I mean, what's the point? I'm exercising my brain enough as it is.
And for purple SPOILER
@Robusto Same.
I didn't try for purple first. It was just the only one I half-saw.
Purple Rain, Purple Rain.
I really think her puzzles would be better if she cut out all the references to commercial mass entertainment and brands and colloquial language inspired by those.
21:25
@Cerberus Yeah.
Making them a little bit more erudite would be nice, too.
Then again, we can do that.
What should the source be, then?
@Cerberus Yeah, but it is nice having someone else do that. ;=)
Shakespeare, perhaps.
If you want erudite :-)
> Trump megadonor Steve Wynn has filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to overturn the landmark 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, which protects the media's ability to aggressively cover public officials.
21:29
::yawn::
@skullpatrol Basically anything else. Already 70% of her categories are not the things I mentioned. She could make that 100%.
@Robusto That it is.
Post some pooteen with those greasy fries 🍟 @CowperKettle
Thnx
@Cerberus did you read about Sweden cutting back on use of computers in the classrooms of early elementary schools due to falling grades.
@skullpatrol Oh, that sounds like a good idea.
Schools here are also cutting back on using tablets in class.
And phones are now mostly forbidden inside the entire school building.
21:40
Yeah, they need time to mature first.
22:02
@Mitch In Brasil it works otherwise.
@Cerberus Amen. I bet the kids think they've been forced to take a vow of silence at some monastery suspended only at suppertime.
We don't need no education
@tchrist A little bit.
But some see the merit in it.
@skullpatrol It's hardly the captive lab rats' fault that their wetware is so hotwired to pick the cocaine drip instead of the glucose one every single time so that they invariably starve themselves to death while "having a good time". It's your fault for giving them that opportunity to kill themselves.
Do we have enough time to reverse the damaged generation.
Brain rot because of doom scrolling.
It will definitely be a test of character.
@tchrist temptation is a part of life.
In the big picture, of course :-)
22:58
@jlliagre Bollezeele!
@Cerberus Can you understand it?
@jlliagre It's just a very funny sounding name.
I don't know why.
Very southern, as in, below the rivers.
Listen to the story in Flemish. There is a discontinuum there though.
What story?
> Bollezeele :De Noordsche wind en de zunne kwaemen in kwiste, iedereën verzeekerde dat ze de sterkste ging zyn, an ze een reizer ezien hen die toekwaem, toe-edraeien in ze mantel. Ze zyn oovereën ekommen omdat de eerste dien bekwaem ging zyn om van den reizer zyn mantel af te doen trekken ging bekeeken zyn als de sterkste. Ton, de Noordsche wind, mee ael nheur macht, het begunnen blaezen maer hoe meer als ze blaesde, hoe meer dat den reizer nhem spande in ze mantel, en op 't ende, de Noordsche wind het nheur ooveregeeven van nhem hen te doen aftrekken. Maekt, de zunne het begunnen schingen
23:02
Yeah I would imagine there is no continuum between Dutch and French.
@Cerberus Just click on the town.
@jlliagre Hilarious!
I can understand that.
It's not easy, but knowing the story helps.
Here is some kind of transitional language between French and Dutch (Brabantian).
Brusselian (also known as Brusseleer, Brusselair, Brusseleir, Marols or Marollien) is a Dutch dialect native to Brussels, Belgium. It is essentially a heavily-Francisized Brabantian Dutch dialect that incorporates a sprinkle of Spanish loanwords dating back to the rule of the Low Countries by the Habsburgs (1519–1713). Brusselian was widely spoken in the Marolles/Marollen neighbourhood of the City of Brussels until the 20th century. It still survives among a small minority of inhabitants called Brusseleers (or Brusseleirs), many of them quite bi- and multilingual in French and Dutch. The Royal...
Oh, I see now that you linked to a website.
Yeah, in sound it is harder to follow.
She has a French accent, doesn't she ?
23:07
@jlliagre Hmm so that seems to be a Dutch dialect, a bit of a creole?
French Flanders.
@jlliagre I suppose to us the Belgian accents typically sound a bit French?
@jlliagre No, I meant the Brusselian dialect you linked to.
You tell me, I have no idea.
I am telling you with a question mark.
@Cerberus Oh, yes, Brusseleer is kind of a creole. I was asking about the Bollezeele woman who had, to my ears, an accent that sounds more French than the accent from the Belgian native Dutch speakers. If I understand correctly, for you Dutch speaking Belgians have a "more French" accent than Nederlands' Dutch. I don't understand the question mark though.
23:19
@jlliagre Yes, exactly.
The question mark signifies that I am not certain.
Does Flemish in general sound French to me?
Or not?
Does Flemish from the most southern region sound (even) more French to me than other Flemish accents? Maybe?
Got it.
So it would be most logical if there were a continuum beginning at the rivers all the way to the French regions, each accent being slightly more French sounding that the one north of it.
@M.A.R. I'd say the culture war issue is mostly around the importance of self-identification, nor the language used for it.
2 days ago, by alphabet
First men wear Wonder Woman costumes, next your kid's identifying as a dog and looking to get prosthetic paw implants /s
This is beyond weird. The period from 20 January to 20 February is usually the coldest here, with temperatures ranging from minus 10 C to minus 20 C and lower.

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