Advanced Linguistics

Just got back into Eisenstadt today. Ah, home sweet home. I'm really glad I went away for a bit, because returning to my bucolic Austrian surroundings gives me a new appreciation for the place. France was wonderful, of course. I was in the best of company and really managed to improve my French. I can't really hold deep conversations in the language, I lack the vocabulary for this, but I have a good basic command which allows me to do the basic stuff like make people laugh out loud at my irreverant personality (and maybe even order un sandwich). More on irreverance later when I work up the energy to download my photos that will accompany my wine-tasting story. Coming back to the Vienna International Airport resulted in something of a linguistic world-war three in my head. Stefan was kind enough to meet me at the airport, and he was in a mood to speak English, explaining that he had just watched the Lord of the Rings with the original soundtrack. Fine by me, but after very little sleep and catching a 6:30 AM train to Paris and then a delayed flight to Vienna had taken its mental toll. My utterances were more of a jumbled up mixture of all 3 of my tongues. I respond to questions with an instinctive "Oui!! ich meine... ja.... yes!!!" Stefan's English is really good, but he kept making errors distinguishing between "all" and "everything", which produced quite a conundrum in my head. What IS the differenct between "all" and "everything"??? He would say things like "I memorized all" or "I ate all". Now, these errors could be corrected in two ways: I memorized all of it/I memorized everything. I ate everything/I ate all of it/them. The distinction between it and them when coupled with "all" is easy- "it" is for non-count nouns, and "them" for countable nouns. The secret to all vs. everthing eludes me. It's the same word in German, why are there two in English? There must be some purpose or rule to the madness that I can use to explain it in a helpful manner. My brain hurts. I need to go to sleep. Pictures and more stories of froggy-land later- including my ill-fated snail friend Pierre, who's house I kept as a souvenir!