Text 14232, 81 rader
Skriven 2010-04-22 21:45:42 av Johan Zwiekhorst (2:292/100)
  Kommentar till text 14212 av Maurice Kinal (1:261/38)
Ärende: `scuse me while i kiss the sky
======================================
Hi Maurice!

In your message to me, dated <Wednesday April 21 2010 15:04>, you wrote:

 >MK: (...) but I'd have to ask which country contains the
 >MK: greatest amount of Dutch people?

The Netherlands are unilingual, so everyone speaks Dutch. That's 16.6 million
people.
In Belgium, only the Flemish speak Dutch. That's 6.6 million people, so a lot
less than in the Netherlands.

 >MK: But are they Dutch?  If so then is 60% of Belgians a greater number
 >MK: then the percentage of Dutch in the Netherlands which I mistook
 >MK: 'n<E2>erlandais' to mean?  <- sorry about the fonts which will change
 >MK: even more after I post this.

The language is the same, but the Flemish *are* not Dutch (only the Dutch are
Dutch!). The Netherlands is a kingdom and so is Belgium. So the Dutch-speaking
Flemish are Belgians, not Dutch.

 >MK: The few Belgians I've met in real life spoke French.

Most Flemish people can speak very good French. Most Walloons (the
French-speaking part of Belgium) can't speak Dutch at all or very, very bad. So
even Flemish people will speak French or English when outside Belgium or the
Netherlands.

The current political issues in Belgium all have to do with language. Most of
the French-speaking Belgians have no respect at all for the Dutch language:
they refuse to learn and/or to use it. That has historical reasons. In the
past, the Flemish aristocracy spoke French, not Dutch. Dutch was only spoken by
peasants. Things change, however, and the Dutch-speaking North of Belgium is
much more prosperous than the French-speaking South. They also outnumber the
French-speaking Belgians (there a roughly 4.3 million of them versus 6.6
million Dutch-speaking Belgians and approximately 150,000 German-speaking
Belgians). Most of the current problems (and today the government resigned over
it) have to do with French-speaking citizens moving to Flanders in numbers
while refusing to learn or to speak Dutch (as would be required when residing
in Flanders). Instead, they claim the right to speak French wherever they want
and as long as they want. In reverse, Flemish people who move to the South
adapt and speak French. So you get a growing number of unilingual
French-speaking people in the Flemish rim around bilingual Brussels (the
French-speakers move there because real-estate is a lot cheaper in Flanders).
That situation breeds conflict and that happens every few years, usually with
the fall of the federal Belgian government as a result. The French-speakers
have 50% of the votes (instead of the 39% they should have according to their
numbers) and so are able to block almost any attempt to stop the invasion of
French in Flanders.

 >MK: Then I have been Gentoo before there was actually a Gentoo.  ;-)

Perhaps you should have a peek at it, then.

 >> However, I'm currently looking for a decent distribution for
 >> Pentium-1 class computers with 64 to 128 MiB RAM that will work
 >> snappy and yet allow modern browsing and office tools.

 >MK: Slackware should work great on that.  However I'd choose a different
 >MK: window manager than kde for those machines given that kde - and gnome
 >MK: while we're at it - is too much of a hog.  The nice thing about
 >MK: Slackware is they stuck with i486 optimizations for most of the good
 >MK: stuff so a Pentium-1 class machine shouldn't experience too many
 >MK: problems.  If a Pentium-1 class laptop I'd go with Slackware-11.0 as
 >MK: the pcmcia stuff works right out of the box.  Also APM with the right
 >MK: 2.4 kernel.

I haven't tried Slackware yet, but I did try Zenwalk which is based on
Slackware. It worked OK, but not as snappy as I would have liked. Plus it
couldn't handle Dutch/Flemish language and regional settings. I also tried
Xubuntu with an XFCE desktop, but that was way too slow.

Kind regards,

 ._|~/_

e-mail: johan@zwiekhorst.be_NOSPAM
web:    http://www.zwiekhorst.be_NOBOTS

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