Arglebargle III posted:

Lake Superior has some pretty interesting geography because the lake basin was excavated over some really ancient granite. Isle Royale and the Porcupine Mountains in northern Wisconsin are remnants of some truly ancient mountain ranges. The porkies are barely hills at this point, but migration patterns of butterflies still go the long way around ancient peaks that haven't been an obstacle for millions of years.

Starks posted:

I’m surprised no German cities made the list.

System Metternich posted:

It’s still a widely-used word for the French-speaking part of Switzerland ("Welschschweiz") and the Italian-speaking parts of Tyrol, ie today’s Trentino ("Welschtirol"). Oh, and the Walloons of course.

Count Roland posted:

I gotta say that butterfly part sounds coincidental to me.

Unless we have evidence of butterfly migration patters from centuries and millennia in the past.

Mano posted:

Well, it's complicated.

We have 4 official languages (DE, FR, IT, Rumantsch) and then the unofficial English. This is complicated by the fact that it's not "Deutsch" as in the Hochsprache but Schweizerdeutsch (in a zillion dialects, mostly mutually comprehensible) when it comes to talking.
The languages are split roughly 70/20/10/0.3 %.

Theoretically everyone learns at least 2 languages passably (plus English). But the quality isn't necessarily that high, and combined with some other stuff it leads to many conversations being in English, since it's much easier for technical stuff (where DE <>FR and FR <>EN and DE <>EN).
The moniker "Français fédérale" is certainly well known (Swissgerman politicians talking in horrible french with grausame accents) and the Röstigraben is also a fact for many things.
There is some resentment from the Romands (the Welsche, see prior post) because ... most Swissgermans only speak "High German" when forced to and rapidly drop back into Swissgerman. But in the Schools you only learn the Hochsprache. Which means you don't understand the Swissgermans EVEN THOUGH YOU LEARNED THEIR LANGUAGE.
The Ticinesi (Italian speakers) ... are on the other side of the Gotthard and afraid they'll be forgotten or just lumped in with Italy.
Th Rumantsch speakers are about 30thousand or so, and spread across some dialects which actually are not necessarily mutually comprehensible. They are forgotten about mostly.
The Dütschschweizer don't like speaking French cause as largest group you don't need to speak it often and till then you forget it. Also most would rather speak English since it's the world language and much easier than that weird French stuff like passé imparfait, snails and frogs legs (we'll take some pate though). (This infuriates the Romands cause as they rightly point out FRENCH IS A NATIONAL LANGUAGE (and it was the world language for much before this upstart English)).

Orange Devil posted:

https://www.euratlas.net/history/europe/1600/entity_1122.html

That was around the peak of Spain's might, yes.

elbkaida posted:

Prague was by far the biggest "German" city at the time, with Cologne a distant second. Then during the 17th century the German cities got reduced even further:

Squalid posted:

Do we think most people in Prague spoke German at the start of the 17th century? Or was it always mostly Czech?

Mano posted:

In case anyone is interested, I can give a general guide to surviving as a German in Switzerland when it comes to speaking.

Carbon dioxide posted:

Swiss German is very weird to me.

I'm Dutch and I can understand Hochdeutsch reasonably well.

I can't make much sense of Swiss German - but here's the thing, the combination of vocals, the accent and actual mouth movements sound a lot like Dutch.

As a Dutch person, listening to Swiss German is probably what it would be like to listen to my native language after I've had a stroke.

a pipe smoking dog posted:

Spain's rule over Milan was fairly tenuous I think but that looks fairly accurate. 1600 was also during the Iberian union so arguably you could also show Lisbon as Spanish.

Mano posted:

System Metternich posted:

From the 16th Century on all the way to the mid-19th century Prague was majority (or at least plurality) German-speaking, as far as I can see. As early as the 15th century, Jan Hus was famously complaining that the Czech spoken in Prague got more and more germanised due to the large presence of German-speaking craftsmen, merchants and especially university students there, and when Emperor Rudolf moved his court to Prague a century later, German speakers from all over the Empire followed him too. Prague‘s rapid growth after ~1850 finally led to a large number of Czech speakers from the surrounding areas moving into the city. In 1847, German-speakers outnumbered Czech ones 2:1, but ten years later it had already changed to a 59% Czech vs 41% German split

Dommolus Magnus posted:

Wasn't the germanization largely a result of Czech speakers being expelled in the wake of the Thirty Years War?

Dommolus Magnus posted:

Wasn't the germanization largely a result of Czech speakers being expelled in the wake of the Thirty Years War?

System Metternich posted:

I woaß jetz o it wiaso dass moansch dass i automatisch noch da Schrift reen muaß bloss wei i vo Deitschland kimm

visits to Basel (why is everything so expensive over there? )

Mano posted:

Basel is cheap

I understand nearly all of that except for "Schrift reen"?

System Metternich posted:

„reen“ was my sorry attempt to write how I would pronounce „reden“

CommonShore posted:

Not as a reply to any one specific person but in my experience English speakers have don't have any clue about the extent of Hapsburg power under Charles V of Spain:





By the 1560s the Spanish were in the Philippines too. It was a staggeringly large empire at its peak:




Italy meanwhile was one of the Thunderdomes for Europe's great powers until the late 19th century, with different parts being flipped between French, Spanish, and Austrian rule at different times.

Craptacular posted:

So someone compare the differences between German and Swiss-German in a way that I as a non-German speaker can understand. Is it more like the difference between American English and Scots, or more like the difference between American English and Tok Pisin?

Craptacular posted:

So someone compare the differences between German and Swiss-German in a way that I as a non-German speaker can understand. Is it more like the difference between American English and Scots, or more like the difference between American English and Tok Pisin?

PittTheElder posted:

As an aside that second map is real weird; Spain owns nearly all of South America but not Mexico?

e: Also all of Hungary and the complete HRE. Oh boy.

PittTheElder posted:

I agree with you, but on the other hand most of those weren't Spanish possessions, they were Hapsburg possessions, and the distinction is really important. Charles wasn't an all powerful monarch directing the activity of all these places, he was massively overworked and overcommitted, ironically because far too much authority was concentrated in him as a person. He spent most of his reign rushing from region to region putting out fires. He also made a brief attempt to put his son on all of his thrones, including the German ones, which of course was never going to be workable given his dependence on his brother Ferdinand there.

As an aside that second map is real weird; Spain owns nearly all of South America but not Mexico?

e: Also all of Hungary and the complete HRE. Oh boy.

Reveilled posted:

It'll be someone's EU4 game, not an actual attempt at real history. It has the same projection compromises as the game's map.

Phlegmish posted:

It's been very interesting reading about Swiss German. It seems there is a historical tendency for dialects in the Germanic area to proliferate and diverge regardless of geography; in a small area such as the Low Countries there have always been a ton of wildly different ones as well.

I think Flanders broadly relates to the Netherlands the way German-speaking Switzerland (or perhaps even more so Austria) does to Germany. The difference is that pressure from 19th- and early 20th-century French, at the height of its prestige, centralizing tendencies, and rate of expansion, has led to more of a convergence towards Standard Dutch. Young Flemish people (with one province as the notorious exception) don't really use dialects anymore. In terms of vocabulary and grammar, their speech is much closer to Standard Dutch than what people even just 50 years earlier would have spoken.

On the other hand, the Hollanders' accents and general pronunciation just sound off to us, and we stubbornly refuse to conform to them in that regard. The result is that most people speak something that clearly isn't a proper dialect, but not quite Standard Dutch either. Basically, the standard language with a sometimes very pronounced local accent, something in-between.

Still, it would practically never happen that a Fleming and Dutchman (perhaps given some time to adjust) are unable to understand each other, unless they are both complete idiots or communicating in bad faith. That's why I've always found it strange that there's a tendency among foreigners (and even some Flemings) to refer to 'Flemish' as a separate language when they would never do that for, say, Austrian or American. Flemish speech patterns are certainly much less divergent from the standard variety than Swiss German appears to be from Standard German. I wonder if that is due to the influence of French. From a francophone perspective, it has always made sense to isolate linguistic minorities (which the Flemish dialects were sociologically and seen within the wider 'French-speaking world' that Belgium as a whole was a part of) as much as possible, making them easier to assimilate. The same way that it's always alsacien, never allemand.

Reveilled posted:

It'll be someone's EU4 game, not an actual attempt at real history. It has the same projection compromises as the game's map.

Blut posted:

How does Afrikaans fit in? I've heard casually that its a lot closer to historical Dutch, from the approximate era when most of the emigrants would have left for South Africa? Is it also mutually intelligible?

And directly related to that, is there much of a culture of Afrikaners moving back to Dutch speaking Europe? London in particular, but the UK in general also, has had a lot of English speaking South Africans move there since the 1990s for....reasons.

CommonShore posted:

Blut posted:

And directly related to that, is there much of a culture of Afrikaners moving back to Dutch speaking Europe? London in particular, but the UK in general also, has had a lot of English speaking South Africans move there since the 1990s for....reasons.

CommonShore posted:

The second map is Hapsburg possessions at the end of the reign of Charles V. I guess they hadn't begun to colonize Mexico properly at that time.

luxury handset posted:

on the contrary, mexico had been spun off into a viceroyalty. but so had most of south america, so it's a bit weird of a map in terms of personal holdings of charles V. there was a brief time at the beginning of his reign (1515?) where mexico had not yet been conquered (1521), but then again, neither had peru (like three decades between 1540-1570) so i'm not sure what the hell that map is trying to portray

Reveilled posted:

It'll be someone's EU4 game, not an actual attempt at real history. It has the same projection compromises as the game's map.

Blut posted:

How does Afrikaans fit in? I've heard casually that its a lot closer to historical Dutch, from the approximate era when most of the emigrants would have left for South Africa? Is it also mutually intelligible?

And directly related to that, is there much of a culture of Afrikaners moving back to Dutch speaking Europe? London in particular, but the UK in general also, has had a lot of English speaking South Africans move there since the 1990s for....reasons.

Count Roland posted:

I visited SA for work a couple years ago, and spoke to a number of fairly young people that had good jobs there. All of them were looking to emigrate. Australia was the most popular destination, but Canada, NZ and the UK came up as well. The Netherlands or continental Europe never came up. Oddly, I don't think the US did either. This is totally anecdotal of course.

PittTheElder posted:

I agree with you, but on the other hand most of those weren't Spanish possessions, they were Hapsburg possessions, and the distinction is really important. Charles wasn't an all powerful monarch directing the activity of all these places, he was massively overworked and overcommitted, ironically because far too much authority was concentrated in him as a person. He spent most of his reign rushing from region to region putting out fires. He also made a brief attempt to put his son on all of his thrones, including the German ones, which of course was never going to be workable given his dependence on his brother Ferdinand there.