Quoting John Cowan <cowan@...>:
> Jan van Steenbergen scripsit:
>
> > Andreas, I see that you master the List's official language to a
> very
> > acceptable degree. I doubt whether I would have done equally well with
> a text
> > in Swedish.
>
> That's because Dutch is simple, easy, and obvious (until you get kicked
> in
> the head by some lexeme like "opstanding", the meaning of which nobody
> would
> ever guess), whereas Swedish is the province of Inscrutable Nordics
> who
> decided to make themselves even more inscrutable than before. Face
> it,
> North Germanic is *weird*.
Says the speaker of a West Germanic language that's trying very hard to look
like a Romance one. English is essentially Language's equivalent to a
transvestite.
Andreas