I've Come to the Conclusion -

- (other than the obvious one that I don't post enough anymore and I really miss everyone here) - that it doesn't really matter what you're researching on the Internet, eventually you end up at Eddie Izzard.

The other day, I got to wondering, not for the first time, if there exists a blend of Spanish and Portuguese. (Yes - it's mostly prevalent in border areas of Brazil and is called Portunol or Portunhol, and there should be a tilde over that "n" in Portunol.) From there, I began reading about mutually intelligible languages and started wondering why there aren't any mutually intelligible languages with English (well, there's Scots - that's that only one - and there's division on whether it's a language or a dialect. I'll come down on the side of language), which led to Frisian, since it's the mostly closely-related language there is to English today. I remember years ago reading that hearing Frisian is kind of like hearing English but not being able to understand that words. At that time, I rented a movie in Frisian with English subtitles and, while that description might be a little exaggerated, it's not entirely. There's some of the same - cadence, I guess - and I picked up a flat "a" (like in lamb or cat) that I don't recall hearing in other Germanic languages. This time, I wanted to find something on YouTube where I could hear someone saying in both English and Frisian "Bread, butter, and green cheese is good English and good Fries," since the sentence is supposed to be pretty much the same in both languages but I didn't find anything. Maybe I'll look harder another day. What I did find was Eddie Izzard buying a brown cow from a Friesian farmer. Eddie spoke Old English and the Friesian farmer spoke Friesian and they managed - for the most part! - to understand each other.

From Portunol to Eddie Izzard. It seems kind of inevitable.