>>First? A noun on it's own right.
>>A German loan word. First translates to roof top, ridge, top of a mine tunnel (how complicated to say Stollen)
>>;)
>I speak enough German to embarrass myself over there but I never came across that word. Can't imagine how it is pronounced. I never grasped the relation of F to V in German.
>My late wife would have had the answer. Her first language was German.
>Her stollen took hours to make but it was worth it.
>So rare to find good stollen here -I 've forgotten the last one.

Hi Bill,
While not out of use, that word is not in the top 1000 words, and I guess a lot of Germans will fail. In special with the mining one. And that's not all, there is a kind of snowy surface named First and one or two I'm to lazy to describe.
Sorry to here about your wife.
In general like the English first but a German i (this is a lot of i here) and r.
F you do like in English, that's the straight one. V is the one with many faces that can change between F and W, and there is no rule, just knowledge. One can assume that a V in front of an latin-derived word is a W (because the w is two v clued together like y is ij. You know, double-u, because v was tricky in Latin. Could be an u). But no.
Stollen is one of those two faces as well. The first is the horizontal mining tunnel. And derived from that those kind of bread / cake. It's best if done in large quantities (private qty was a laundry basket full of Stollen a job done on private ingredients by the bakery), and in Germany it's a local speciality, and then one can fight about the right way to do it. Self made Stollen is more like a loaf of bread with yeast and stuff. I would ship you one, but we know the protection problems around the border.