Quote Originally Posted by rockzmom
devochka. Thanks, you taught me something today! I had never heard of Fries or Friesland!
Your thoughts about the name of the apple cake are a good possibility. I also found this on Wiki and maybe it might help explain as well. Also remember we are talking about pre 1900 here as Nana was born in 1903.

High German
Main article: High German languages
High German is divided into Central German and Upper German. Central German dialects include Ripuarian, Moselle Franconian, Rhine Franconian, Central Hessian, East Hessian, Lower Hessian, Thuringian, Silesian, High Franconian, Lorraine Franconian, Mittelalemannisch, North Upper Saxon, High Prussian, South Markish and Upper Saxon. It is spoken in the southeastern Netherlands, eastern Belgium, Luxembourg, parts of France, and in Germany approximately between the River Main and the southern edge of the Lowlands. Modern Standard German is mostly based on Central German, but it should be noted that the common (but not linguistically correct) German term for modern Standard German is Hochdeutsch, that is, High German
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language



Quote Originally Posted by devochka
What are scratch and sniff photos?
Ah.. it was sort of a joke since it won't work here on the internet... but a scratch and sniff photo is one that has the smell of whatever it is that you are looking at. They use it a lot here with say, air fresheners so you will know the fragrance of it before you buy it. They do it with other things as well. You use your fingernail to scratch a little patch on the container and then you can sniff it to smell the fragrance. So I was teasing you about sending a photo that we could smell your wonderful waffles!
The Netherlands in its current state (with its current borders) exists since 1830, when Belgium became independant (there were some issues with the provinces of Limburg and Luxemburg so it actually took until about 1866 but I won't bore you with those details). Even before that, the Netherlands were a proud state were Dutch was spoken.
But you have to take in consideration that Dutch and German are part of the same language family. And indeed, there are Dutch dialects that resemble German a lot. Also, the Netherlands and Germany share a border, so it is only natural that there are Germans who moved to the Netherlands while keeping their native language.
So in conclusion: there are people speaking a dialect very similar to German and there are (of course) people who actually speak German but as far as I know it hasn't been an official language in the past 200 years. Before that I'm a bit iffy on what the official languages were.

I hope I didn't bore you to death with this post. If so, sorry and I hope someone in your vicinity knows CPR...


Wouldn't it be grand if we could send those pictures over the internet? I've always imagined commercials on tv with smell .

Mieke