LL-L: "Low Saxon" LOWLANDS-L, 24.NOV.1999 (01) [E]

Wed Nov 24 15:44:26 UTC 1999

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From: Roger P. G. Thijs [roger.thijs at village.uunet.be]
Subject:  LL-L: "Low Saxon" LOWLANDS-L, 23.NOV.1999 (03) [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
> Subject:  Low Saxon
> > Obviously I am wrong. Could you tell me what and where are the Low
> Franconian
> > varieties in Germany?
> Georg, I don't have the exact information here at my fingertips, and I am
> hoping that another subscriber has more ready access to it.  All I can
tell
> you for now is that there is an area about halfway between Mönster/Münster
and
> Cologne where a fairly small Low Franconian wedge juts out from the
> Netherlands into Germany between Westphalian Low Saxon in the north and
> Ripuarian in the south.  This group is usually, if not always, included
under
> "Low German."

1. When looking for books in dialect in the area between Kleve and Krefeld,
these books are often classified as "Niederrheinisch" in bookshops. Quite
often they share the shelves "Niederrhein" with books about local history
and with books with pictures of the region.

2. For the variants West of the River Rhine, I think the bilingual
"Dialekte und Dialektliteratur in de Euregio Rhein-Maas-Nord /
Dialecten en dialectliteratuur in de Euregio Rijn-Maas-Noord",
published by the "Kreis Neuss" and the "Landschaftsverband Rheinland",
with contributions by "Veldeke Limburg", has some authority..

Their classification (from North to South):

A. North (Starting at the river Rhine, where it bends into the Netherlands):

--- Kleverländish ---
with at the Dutch side: "Noordlimburgs" (Venray, Horst, Venlo)
with at the German side "Niederrheinisch" (Kleve, Kevelaer, Geldern, the
North of Kempen)

(To my personal judgement this dialect group is rather North-East
Brabantish, e.g. Kleve uses the Brabantish "gij" for the Dutch /
West-Flemish "jij" and the German "du")

B. isogloss--- Uerdinger Linie ik/ich

C. Middle:

--- Südniederfränkisch--
with at the Dutch side "Middellimburgs"   (Weert, Roermond)
with at the German side "Südostniederfränkisch" (Kempen-South, Krefeld,
München-Gladbach, Neuss)

D. South (West of Aachen)
 "Zuidlimburgs" (in the Netherlands/Belgium only)

E. Isogloss--- Benrather Linie --- maken/machen
(South of Neuss, in the West bending to the South along the Dutch-German
border, leaving though the Dutch towns of Kerkrade and Vaals at the East)

F. Ripuarisch (Kerkrade - Aachen - Köln - Bonn)

3. On the maps the dialect area's are split-up between the Dutch and the
German sides of the border. I think this is correct, since,while the grammar
is pretty much alike, a significant part of the vocabulary is Dutch in the
West and German in the East.
Also the orthography is Dutch in the West and German in the East (e.g. oe/u
in Limburgian for u/ü in Niederreheinisch)

A national border line gets it's influence after 200 years of stability:
For Belgian Limburg a lot of French vocabulary penetrated in the dialects
(e.g. for car parts: guidõ (guidon), ãbreijaasj (embrayage), bwatvitèss
(boîte-vitesse), boegeej (bougie) in my version of the municipality of
Vliermaal), so one also sees a bit of a dividing line between Limburgian
vocabulary from Belgium and vocabulary from the Dutch side.
Maastricht at the Dutch side is a special case, with a bit of French
vocabulary (with some differences though, e.g.: they do not use "bougie" for
the motor part, but for a candle, we call "kaos" in the West), since this
town allways tried to keep tight links with the Liège area.

The dialect of the municipality of Selfkant (with Tüddern) in the Kreis
Heinsberg, Germany, (attached to the Netherlands in the period 1945-1955) is
virtually South-East Limburgian, to my judgement.

Regards,

Roger

----------

From: Eldo Neufeld [greneuf at interchange.ubc.ca]
Subject:   Plautdietsch

Dear Ron, Reuben, and anyone,

My original question to the INS was: "What does the Institut fur
niederdeutsche Sprache consider my mother-tongue, Plautdietsch, to be?  (We
consider it to be a low-Saxon dialect of Niederdeutsch."

To that came the answer: "Etwa das von Ihnen angesprochene Nedersaksische
ist dem Niederdeutschen sehr ähnlich, allein ist es eine niederländische
Sprache."
Does this refer to Plautdietsch or to Low-Saxon, or to something else?

Ron asked: "Why is it a Netherlandic language?"

Reuben stated:  "I find it difficult to believe that someone at the
'Institut' would refer to Plautdietsch as "Niederländische Sprache"!"  In
my opinion it is a West Prussian dialect of Low Saxon (Low German),
containing a few netherlandic elements."

Ron responded: "I quite agree, but I have the sneaking suspicion that that
is not what they had meant, that they had somehow gotten tangled up in
Eldo's use of the name "Low-Saxon" in reference to the entire language.  I
would be even more surprised, nay dismayed, to know that they really
considered the Mennonite Low-Saxon/Low German dialect group (Plautdietsch)
a Netherlandic language.  I assume that they had referred to the varieties
on the Netherlands side of the border.  Perhaps Eldo can clarify this."

I wish I could! I'll try.  I'm not sure now to what they were referring.
(All of the above quotes are taken out of context, but I don't believe that
is a problem in this case.  All the succeeding questions and anwers, in my
opinion, were direct and self-explanatory.)  It may be that my use of the
name "Low-Saxon" in my original question was not specifically accurate (see
above), and that that threw them off.  If this was my fault, I apologize
for starting the whole thing.

Eldo Neufeld
4040 Blenheim St.
Vancouver, BC   V6L 2Y9
Tel: (604) 738-4378
e-mail: greneuf at interchange.ubc.ca

----------

From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject:  Low Saxon

Roger wrote:

> 3. On the maps the dialect area's are split-up between the Dutch and the
> German sides of the border. I think this is correct, since,while the grammar

> is pretty much alike, a significant part of the vocabulary is Dutch in the
> West and German in the East.
> Also the orthography is Dutch in the West and German in the East (e.g. oe/u
> in Limburgian for u/ü in Niederreheinisch)

Roger, do you really think it is appropriate to use lexical influences and
orthography as factors in classification?  What would that make English and
Scots with significant portions of their vocabulary being Scandinavian- and
French-derived?  What would that make the Scandinavian varieties with an
extremely high proportion of their vocabulary being Saxon-derived?  And, could
a government then not just officially introduce a different orthography (such
as one based on the orthography of the majority language) and on this basis
simply declare that the dialects of a given (minority/regional) language that
happen to be used on their side of the border do not belong to the language to
which the dialects on the other side of the border belong?  If it were this
were the case, the language map of Eurasia would look quite different from the
way it looks now.  Yes, political borders and influences due to education and
communication centralization to play significant roles in the development of
languages, but in my estimation it would take a very long time to affect
classification where political borders separate speakers of the original same
language.

Best regards,

Reinhard/Ron

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