h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

the duke did die childless but he also left behind him a legacy picturesque and it is coniderably a brain child and now it can also be an earning member

Excuse my limited German, but insofar as I can tell, Bavarians tend to use the word "schloss" for their castles (rhyming with "candy-floss") and this feels like the ideal word for a castle which is meant to be lived in and designed to look pretty rather than functional. Thinking of places like Ringsberg and that other fairy-tale job in Bavaria.

It's telling that Prussians lean towards the word "festung" for THEIR castles. This word does not suggest a candy-floss edifice with romantic pointy towers.

This word has a hint of deep, dank, evil-smelling festering dungeons, tall thick functional walls, grim solid towers, and he sort of edifice where the form takes not even second place to the function. (Thinking of Konigsberg Castle, as was, which was the capital of German East Prussia and base for crusading colonising expeditiuons into the East for nearly nine hundred years. The last and most calamitous of these crusades "drang nach Osten" was in 1941, and blew back so badly on the Germans that in 1945, the Russians and the Poles got together to blast Konigsberg Castle into rubble, as a symbolic eradication of the German urge to find "lebensraum" in the East)

Ah, how different the 20th century might have been if Bavaria and not Prussia had become the dominant force in a unified Germany...

That Prussia vs Bavaria thing is a bit different, IMO. Both use the following words with the same meaning:

Schloss - Fairy-tale and Baroque-upwards-style Castle. The purpose of a 'Schloss' is to be representative and beautiful.

Burg - Is the medieval type castle. With grey walls, dungeons and stuff.

Festung - Is a fortress. A military thing.

Bye,

HELL