LL-L "Language varieties" 2003.06.08 (01) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

======================================================================
L O W L A N D S - L * 08.JUN.2003 (01) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
http://www.lowlands-l.net * sassisch at yahoo.com
Rules & Guidelines: http://www.lowlands-l.net/rules.htm
Posting Address: lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org
Server Manual: http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/1.8c/userindex.html
Archives: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/lowlands-l.html
=======================================================================
You have received this because you have been subscribed upon request.
To unsubscribe, please send the command "signoff lowlands-l" as message
text from the same account to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org or
sign off at http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html.
=======================================================================
A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West)Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
=======================================================================

From: "thomas byro" <thbyro at earthlink.net>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2003.06.07 (03) [E]

Ron

You know, I never thought ofpossible Indian influences on English here.
Here in  Central Pennsylvania, you encounter few   people with obvious
Indian features.  Yet my older son had friends in High School who were
proud of their Indian ancestry.  Some were blond haired and blue eyed. I
think in this area at least, many of the Indians merged into the
European population at an early date. It would  be surprising if they
did not exert some linguistic influence.

Tom Byro

/quote/
From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language varieties

Ian, Lowlanders,

I have a feeling there is a lot we don't understand and may never
understand about the occurrence of linguistic features.  So we talk --
in my opinion for good reason -- about "regional features," but in many
cases we can't really be sure why a given feature is found within a
certain region, often across language boundaries.  You can only theorize
in most cases, such as assuming that a feature spread is due to contacts
(including intermarriage), but what sometimes seems to defy logic is
that for instance a phonological feature is spread across a certain
group of dialects of more than one language, but little or nothing else
is spread in the same manner.  I am afraid that we can only guess and
leave open the question if unknown and unknowable ancient linguistic
substrates account for certain distributions.  We have no idea what
sorts of languages were used in Europe (or Eurasia) before the coming of
Indo-European, and we will probably never find out.  Cases of surviving
relics like Basque and Caucasian language isolate are few and far
between.

Likewise, it is often difficult or impossible to understand why a
linguistic feature seems to spring up in a certain group of varieties
while related varieties do not have it.  Can we always be sure if it is
a newly acquired or a preserved feature, if it is language-internal or
substratal?  Think about tonality in South Slavonic languages
(Slovenian, Croatian, etc.), unknown in other Slavonic languages.  Did
Proto-Slavonic have tones and lost them elsewhere?  Or is it the other
way around (such as in some Northern Bengali dialects that are tonal --
unheard of in Indo-Aryan -- clearly due to Tibeto-Burman "hill tribes"
having been converted to Bengali)?  Did Southern Slavonic *acquire*
tones, and if so, was this from a pre-Slavonic substrate or via a
language-internal development?  Some argue that Swiss Alemannic is
tonal.  If so, why?  The same applies to Norwegian and Swedish, strange
given that Icelandic is not tonal and there is no sign of tonality in
Old Norse.  We have heard about the _sleeptoon_ ('dragging tone') in
Limburgish which may be argued to be a sign of tonality, since there are
minimal pairs of words with and without this tone.  Is this merely a
farther development of the _sleyptoon_ in Lowlands Saxon, where a vowel
receives extra length due to -e deletion?

In some cases, substrates may seem clearcut.  New Zealand English may
have Maori influences (though I do not know that for a fact aside from
lexical influences).  In that case it would be simple, because there is
a single substrate language with little variety.  It is far more complex
with English and French of North America, and Spanish and Portuguese of
Latin America, because indigenous languages have contributed to their
development, but details of this are poorly known, because this was
insufficiently studied in the past, and many of the languages
disappeared along the way.  I have a feeling that American Indian
influences on North American English has been largely ignored, unlike
the "Old World" origins of the various dialects.  A fairly large
percentage of North Americans have some American Indian ancestry (though
not all of them know about it or care to admit it), and the ancestors of
many had close contacts with Native Americans.  Indigenous linguistic
and cultural heritage may well have been underestimated so far.  Why is
it that many of today's American Indians sound "special" but alike in
English even though their ancestral languages are different (though
tended to share cross-language-group areal features)?  And why is it
that American Indian English sounds rather "Canadian" to me
(phonologically, including intonationally), even south of Canada?  Is
this a case of north-to-south spread?  Is it that Canadian English has
stronger indigenous influence?

/quote/

----------

From: "Peter J. Wright" <peterjwright at earthlink.net>
Subject: Response to "Language Varieties"

Something I always wondered about is:

Are there geographically distinct Australian and New Zealand accents?
I.e.,
can someone from Sydney pick out someone from Perth, or can someone from
Auckland tell when someone else is from Wellington?

Peter Wright
New York, NY

----------

From: Críostóir Ó Ciardha <paada_please at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2003.06.07 (04) [E]

Ian and Ruud wrote (respectively):
"Going back a bit, I'm inclined to agree that the
English of NZ sounds at least as similar to that of
Southern Africa as it does to that of Australia."

"My impression is, but based on very little exposure to NZ English,
is that it is very similar to AU English, except that is has the
glottal stop for final t (maybe also k, p), like many accents in
Britain, but unlike Australia."

For me, there are similarities in the clipped vowel range in both South
African and NZ English, in some dipthongs, and in some consonants. NZ
English to me shares a kind of phonological abruptness with its South
African counterpart in stark contrast to Australian English which is
more
drawn out in its sounds. No offence in meant to any variety,
incidentally - they all sound wonderful.

It may be that NZ and SA English on one hand and NZ and Australian
English on the other shared similar regional English ancestors; it may
be
that both pairs shared the same linguistic superstrate in the colonial
period; it may be that indigenous influences on NZ and SA English were
similar in sound and function and subtly different in the case of
Australian English.

If we rely on the 'regional English' model as a cause of divergence,
explaining the relative uniformity of Australian English becomes
difficult. If
you look at Australia, each state had a different settlement pattern
from different parts of Britain and Ireland and Europe (even though,
roughly
speaking, the 'national' composition of each state was roughly 25%
Irish, 15% Scottish, 1.5% Welsh and 45% English, with large numbers of
Cornish in S Australia and 'Germans' (undifferentiated) in S Australia
and QLD) - placenames often give this away. Tasmania has Derwent
(Derbyshire), Tamar (Cornwall/Devon), Devonport, Launceston (Cornwall),
Ulverstone (Cumbria) and so on, whereas Western Australia has
Perth (north central Scotland), York, Stirling (central Scotland), and
so on. Surely Tasmania should have a mixture of Derbyshire, Cornish.
Devonian and Cumbrian influences and WA a more Scots-based form?

There are two possibilities as far as I can see: either the original
settlers blended their accents over time to a British standard that
sounded much
like modern Australian and NZ English (the period in question would be
c.1800-1850), based obviously on Southern English and every
subsequent wave of migrants saw their children adopt this standard, or
else one Southern English-based phonological region came to dominate
all others in the new colonies of both Australia and NZ (and, to a
lesser extent, South Africa). That could explain why - consonants aside
- their
is so little Irish influence on Antipodean Englishes, despite the Irish
component being a quarter of Australia and perhaps 15% of NZ. (It must
be
remembered that up to 1870 most of the Irish transportees to Australia
spoke Irish and a little English, although their children would have
spoken English perhaps exclusively.)

A colonial elite who spoke an overpowering Southern English-based
variety which was then adopted by all children of the colony regardless
of
status or regional background, which may have been a descendant of
modern British RP, can be the only explanation as to why NZ and
Australian English (and to a lesser extent SA English) are so similar to
each other, despite such hugely phonologically disparate settler
populations. (A good test of this might be to compare and contrast the
phonology of the Englishes of places like Tristan da Cunha, Pitcairn, St
Helena, Gibraltar (1715), the Falklands and Norfolk Island which were
settled at roughly the same time by the same colonial authorities.)

Which begs the afterthought: if Canada had not been settled by loyalist
refugees from the United States speaking an Atlantic variant which
soon became dominant in 'British North America', would Canadians have
adopted this same 'colonial elite 1800-1850' accent and sound so very
different today?

Food for thought, eh?

Criostóir.

----------

From: Ruud Harmsen <rh at rudhar.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2003.06.07 (04) [E]

Ron Hahn:
>Also, there is always the possibility of a feature being more archaic
>and being preserved in pockets or enclaves.  This could very well
be the
>case with consistent [x] for /x/ <ch> (versus [x] ~ [C] for [x] <ch> as
>in most German and Lowlands Saxon varieties).  In other words, Swiss
>(and I hesitate to add "German," because I would not stand in the
way of
>it claiming separate language status), Dutch, Flemish, [...]

To make things more complicated, in "Flemish" (see below), written
ch and g _are_ influenced by the front- of backness of adjacent
vowels to some extent, but they usually don't go as far as really
having an ich-laut.

By "Flemish" in this context I'd mean many different thing, who
happen to share the above feature:
- Flemish dialects in Belgium, Brabantish and Limburgian dialects in
Belgium and the Netherlands
- Standard Dutch as spoken with an accent from regions where those
dialects are also spoken (not necessarily also by those speakers of
the standard language).

The Limburgian dialects tend to go rather far along the "High
German" way, in having ich-laut-like sounds.

--
Ruud Harmsen  http://rudhar.com/index/whatsnew.htm  6 June 2003

-----------

From: Ian James Parsley <parsleyij at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language Varieties

Ruud and Ron,

Well, NZ and Southern African English also have other
similarities not shared with Australian - e.g. the
pronuncation of 'fish and chips'.

Clearly in the case of Swiss German and Dutch we're
into a dialect continuum, within which both are in the
west and also on the fringes (therefore the
'Wellentheorie' comes into play). Of course this
doesn't mean they're mutually intelligible, but it
does mean there are similarities between them which
*can* be explained through linguistic theory. This
means, as Ron more or less says, that archaic usage in
both 'dialects' accounts for the similarity.

Ron's point about the substrates is also no doubt a
good one. With SA English we may even *overstate* the
influence of Dutch/Afrikaans and pay little heed to
influences from other African languages. There are a
few PhDs to be done there!

Best,
Ian.
-------------------
Ian James Parsley
Co Down, Northern Ireland

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language varieties

Folks,

We ought to bear in mind that relationsships between European immigrants
and the native populations of North America were not always hostile,
that particularly in the early days, and even later, Europeans lived
near or within indigenous communities, intermarried with them, and
learned from them, as did many descendants of African Slaves.

Another thing we need to bear in mind is that among the participants in
the early development of Afrikaans there were speakers of Malay,
Javanese, Sundanese and other Malayo-Polynesian languages of what is now
Indonesia, oftentimes house servants and nannies, not to mention
numerous persons of various Khoisan ancestry ("Coloureds"), who still
make up a large percentage of the Afrikaans-speaking population,
especially in the West Cape area.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

================================END===================================
* Please submit postings to lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org.
* Postings will be displayed unedited in digest form.
* Please display only the relevant parts of quotes in your replies.
* Commands for automated functions (including "signoff lowlands-l") are
  to be sent to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org or at
  http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html.
======================================================================