Flûte

Flûte (from the cognate French for flute) can refer to :

En flûte

En flûte (French: "as a fluyt") is a French naval expression of the Age of Sail to designate a warship used as a transport, with a reduced armament.

Some warships, ships of the line or frigates, were occasionally used with more of less limited artillery, by reducing the number and calibre of their guns. Since ships have a limited amount of cargo space, they may be armed en flûte to make room for other cargo, such as troops and ammunition. This reduces the ship's ability to defend herself if attacked.

The term emerged from the French name for a type of ship – the cargo-carrying flûte used extensively as a mercantile ship or as a naval auxiliary vessel. In turn this derived from the Dutch name fluyt, probably the most common type of cargo-carrier during the seventeenth century – when in English usage it was commonly rendered as a flyboat.

This tactic was most relevant in the Age of Sail, when gun decks took up most of the space on a warship above the waterline. Reducing the artillery of a ship of the line or a frigate entailed a dramatic saving in space, since the removal of certain guns meant that their gunners (and their equipment and provisions) were not needed. The size of the crew of a sailing warship was determined primarily by the number of guns on the ship, sometimes over a hundred, as each gun needed a crew of several men, and it might be necessary to have all the guns in action simultaneously. The number of men required to fight on board the ship was far higher than the number needed simply to sail it. A typical ship of the line armed en flûte would have her armament cut down to a quarter of her maximum, and could accommodate over 1000 troops.

German language

German (Deutsch [ˈdɔʏtʃ]) is a West Germanic language that derives most of its vocabulary from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. A portion of German words are derived from Latin and Greek, and fewer are borrowed from French and English. Languages which are most similar to German include Afrikaans, Dutch, English, the Frisian languages, the continental Scandinavian languages and Luxembourgish. A Germanophone is a speaker of the German language either natively or by preference.

German is the most widely spoken (and official) language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Italian province of South Tyrol (Italian: Alto Adige) and Liechtenstein; it is also an official, but not majority language of Belgium and Luxembourg. With slightly different standardized variants (German, Austrian, and Swiss Standard German), German is a pluricentric language. German is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects, with many unique varieties existing in Europe and also other parts of the world. Due to the limited intelligibility between certain varieties and Standard German, as well as the lack of an undisputed, scientific difference between a "dialect" and a "language", some German varieties or dialect groups (e.g. Low German/Plautdietsch) are alternatively referred to as "languages" and "dialects".