Quote:
Originally Posted by bartveld
Just to make sure no one is offended: Leuven is in Belgium. 
Thanks for your hard work, GtrsRGr8! |
I don't want to offend anyone, either. Thank you, very much, for the correction!
My
faux pas was an
assumption, based upon the fact that the books were available in English and/or
Dutch, and that the language of the non-English books just "looked Dutch." My knowledge of the Lowlands (I think that they are called) is weak, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I remember, now, that one of the languages widely spoken in
Belgium is, indeed, Dutch (Flemish).
Curious, I did a quick check on the Internet, and found that German, French, Luxembourgish, and other languages are also spoken in Belgium; Dutch, German, and French are official languages. And, my error, indeed, could have been offensive to someone--according to one (seemingly reliable) website that I checked, Belgians
can be offended if someone speaks to them in one of the languages other than their own.
Does anyone know where else that Dutch (Flemish) might be an official language, or at least widely spoken? Knowing the answer might help me or someone else keep from making the same mistake in a post.
I've learned a lot from being on MobileRead, and not all of them have to do with ebooks.
BTW--I forgot to mention something in my initial post. People can find Open Access ebooks in subjects, that they're interested in, by using search engines dedicated to Open Access books.
Oapen is the best known, if not the best, such search engine. So why post a relatively very, very small
collection of Open Access ebooks, as I did in my initial post (and occasionally do in other instances, too)? Two reasons: 1) I am not sure that foreign (to the U.S.) books are searched using search engines that are available to us, and 2) some people like to just
browse collections--yours truly being one of them.
