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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 (Zeeuws)
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   L O W L A N D S - L * 20 November 2005 * Volume 01
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.11.17 (03) [E]

> From: jonny <jonny.meibohm at arcor.de>
> Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.11.15 (01) [E]
>
> Dear Sandy,
>
> you wrote:
>
>> Note that "en" will mean "it" when applied to masculine nouns: there is
>> a gender system in West Country dialect involving masculine, feminine
>> and neuter. I still hear this in at least the older people in my own
>> village, eg the clock is always referred to as "he", the cat as "she"
>> (even if it's male) and so on.
>
> Interesting. 'cat' in Standard German is feminine, too.
> LS sometimes also differs in gender from German: LS 'de Grund' is
> feminine,
> in G 'der (masc.) Grund', both meaning 'ground'.
>
Ah, but there's no relationship between these historical Germanic gender
systems and the one use in the South West of England!

In the South West the system is quite predictable:

1. Uncountable nouns are neuter, eg sand, salt, sugar, water, rain, snow;

2. Countable nouns are masculine if they're stationary (unless moved by
an outside force), eg houses, clocks, wheelbarrows;

3. Countable nouns are feminine if they can move under their own
propulsion, eg cars, ships, clouds, rainstorms.

4. Animals are masculine or feminine according to their sex.

Rule 4 seems to vary in different areas, as if all animals can be
feminine under rule 3. It's often remarked that a tomcat is feminine,
though.

I should say that this system is on its way out now, and I don't know if
there are any speakers who use it consistently. As I said, though, I do
still hear at least vestiges of it in the older population of this village.

There is sometimes some semantic significance to the gender system,
however. For example, a snowstorm is "she" and falling snow is "it". I'm
not sure if a snowfield would be "he", but it seems so to me. So certain
things can be distinguished by the pronoun alone.

Another interesting grammatical rule in the West Country is that for
transitive and intransitive verbs. The prefix -y is added to form an
intransitive verb. For example:

"Uch am gwain out to garden to dig the rosebed."

"Uch am gwain out to garden to diggy."

This also occurs as a back-formation:

"Uch am gwain to library to study."

"Uch am gwain to library to stud English."

("Uch am gwain" = "I am going").

>> Fuoks just wer tonning oot ther ky--
>
> Please help me: "Folks just were turning(?) out their (???cows,
> keys???)--"
> "And twae or three eggs." 'twae' spoken twa-e, with
> one and a half or even two syllables?

The poet is writing in the Cleveland dialect (just to the north of
Yorkshire, on the east coast).

"kye"  /ka:i/  is Scots for "cattle" and apparently Cleveland dialect too.

"twae": I don't know how this is pronounced in Cleveland but in my East
Lothian dialect of Scots it's written "twae" and pronounced /twe:/ (like
Dutch "twee" but with the English "w"). In other dialects of Scots it's
"twa" /twQ/.

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cochlear_my_eye/

----------

From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.11.19 (02) [E]

From: Ingmar Roerdinkholder
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.11.19 (01) [E/Papiamentu]

I think Papiamento "warda" is from Pt/Sp "guardar", Dutch has "wachten" =
to wait, there is no Dutch equivalent *waarden or so for German "warten",
which could have given Pap. "w! arda". But the resemblance in sound may have
influenced the meaning of this verb.
And Pap. "ènvelop" will be from Dutch envelop(pe) rather than from English.
Another interesting English loan, because it is such a common word, is Pap.
"bèk" from back.
The language name ending in -o is the Arubian, and also the Dutch form.
People from Curaçao and Bonaire say Papiamentu, with the Portuguese
pronunciation. In Dutch it is also called Papiaments, especially by people
from the Dutch Antilles themselves.
What I found paticularly fascinating in Papiamento when I first "met" it,
was to see how much Portuguese stock is still hidden under the Spanish
front, and also how African, how non-Romance, non-European, the grammar is.
The latter is even more so the case in English/Dutch based Sranan Tongo,
but the ressemblance between those two Creoles in grammar, and even in
base vocabulary from Portuguese, is really striking. And that has little
to nothing! to do with the facts they were both Dutch Colonies, there were
not so much close contacts between the two linguistically, and the
distance between them is more than a thousand kilometres -over the ocean.

Ingmar

----------

From: R. F. Hahn
Subject: Language varieties

Thanks for the tweaking, Ingchi, and for the added info.

> The latter is even more so the case in English/Dutch based Sranan Tongo,
> but the ressemblance between those two Creoles in grammar, and even in
> base vocabulary from Portuguese, is really striking. And that has little
> to nothing to do with the facts they were both Dutch Colonies, there were
> not so much close contacts between the two linguistically, and the
> distance between them is more than a thousand kilometres -over the ocean.

Well. I've pondered this sort of phenomenon for quite some time now, have
been waffling with my opinion. Lately I've ! come to suspect that distance 
is
no serious obstacle to spread as long is there is *some* connection. You
may suspect two main agents:

(1) slaves (or their descendants) or other contact variety speakers
that relocated to other colonies (which in most cases are colonies
held by the same power)

(2) slaver traders, slave owners or colonists that relocate or, in the
case of slaver traders or slave wardens, serve more than one colony.

I am now tending to suspect that in the case of the genesis of pidgins and
creoles too much of the focus has been on the people that ultimately adopted
and developed them. In other words, I believe we mustn't underestimate the
roles of the (usually European) power elites and their agents in the genesis
of such language varieties. The "seeds," namely the basic vocabulary and
grammatical structure, of such varieties are quite likely to have been
carried from colony to colony by Europeans (or peopl! e of European descent)
with or without the aid of relocated slaves or relocated non-Europeans that
were conversant in another contact variety.

A compelling case is that of the striking lexical and structural
similarities between Oceanian pidgins and creoles, Australian pidgins and
China Coast Pidgin, where you would not expect such similarities to exist
between China Coast Pidgin and the others, at the very least. We certainly
ought not totally disregard a possible role played by Chinese laborers and
tradesmen that tended to follow European colonists or were actually
transported there by them. However, I believe that the Europeans involved
had a definite role in spreading the seeds for such types of varieties.

As one of my undergraduate research projects in my Southeast Asian minor
degree I compared certain historical developments that led up to the
creation of the Sino-Indigenous ethnicities of British-held Malaya,
D! utch-held Indonesia and the Spanish-held Philippines: the Baba (Chinese),
the Peranakan and the Mestizos respectively. For this purpose I had to go
through stacks and stacks of relevant 18th- and 19th-century books, letters
and other types of documents in English, Dutch and Spanish, as well as
through mostly 20th-century Asian documents. (I also had an eye on German
colonization of Papua.) Of particular interest to me (coming from the
language side of things) were diary-type portions and anything else that
contained direct speech quotes. It became clear to me that in the "good"
old days of European supremacy (real and imagined) colonists and their
helpers, most of whom had little or no education and little or no incentive
to regard indigenous people as being real human beings (in part to protect
themselves from compassion), either believed that all "Kanakas" anywhere in
the world had one type of "primitive" language, or they believed th! at
"primitive," "childish" linguae francae were all they deserved or could be
expected to learn. Lots and lots of descriptions of ethnic "mentalities"
and "characters" (ranging between patronizing and disparaging) lead me to
this conclusion. In other words, I am suspecting that Europeans taught each
other general types of pidgins and, directly or indirectly, took these from
colony to colony. Once established, the "native" population developed their
varieties on those fundations and, with the loss of their ancestral
languages adopted them as native languages (thus creating creoles).

I wonder what your and my other Lowlands friends' thoughts on this are.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

The spread of tok Pisin from its East New Britain heartland to all parts of 
the former German New Guinea was certainly a deliberate policy of the German 
administration.  Likewise, the British on the Papuan side spread Hiri Motu! 
far beyond its original trade sphere of the south Papuan coast.

Once the Australians took over control of both territories, their patrol 
officers or "kiaps" used either Motu or Pidjin (depending which territory) 
as their main means of communication with local people.  After self 
government and ultimately independence, the Papua/New Guinea division has 
waned, and Tok Pisin has now spread "organically" outside its traditional 
area.  But without colonial impetus, neither language would have gone far.

Paul

----------

From: heather rendall <HeatherRendall at compuserve.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.11.19 (02) [E]

Message text written by INTERNET:lowlands-l at LOWLANDS-L.NET
>(2) slaver traders, slave owners or colonists that relocate or, in the
     case of slaver traders or slave wardens, serve more than one colony.<

Or  just the sailors who sailed the ships.

Wasn't Portugese the basis of the language ( whose name I forget) that
became the lingua franca in the Mediterranean of sailors/ships and trade?

Heather

----------

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

Hi, Heather!

> Or  just the sailors who sailed the ships.

Sure.  I would imagine that it contributed some, but it would have been less 
as far as the various settled populations are concerned.  In fact, it would 
be interesting to find out about linguae francae among sailors in the olden 
days, given that many crews were multilingual, also given that many Low 
Saxon sea shanties contain English bits, not just words but whole phrases, 
sentences and choruses.*

The kinds of sailors that must have influenced the linguistic scenes of some 
Caribbean islands, though, must have been pirates, some groups of which 
dominated certain populations.

> Wasn't Portugese the basis of the language ( whose name I forget) that
> became the lingua franca in the Mediterranean of sailors/ships and trade?

No, mostly Spanish, Occitan, Italian and Sicilian, perhaps also 
Catalan-Valencian-Balearic and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), with a hefty dose of 
Arabic, especially Judeo-Arabic, thown in.

Here's a nice introduction to it (mentioning also that the only spoken trace 
of it is found in counting rhymes of children in Jerusalem!):
http://www.uwm.edu/~corre/franca/edition2/lingua.2.html
http://www.uwm.edu/~corre/franca/go.html

Have a nice week!

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

***

*Example:

   Ick hew mol en Hamborger Veermaster sehn,
   to my hoodah, to my hoodah!
   De Masten so scheef as den Schipper sien Been,
   to my hoodah, hoodah ho!
   Refrain:
      Blow boys blow, for Californio.
      There is plenty of gold so I am told
      on the banks of Sacramento.
      Blow boys blow, for Californio.
      There is plenty of gold so I am told
      on the banks of Sacramento.

   Dat Deck weer von Isen, vull Schiet un vull Smeer,
   to my hoodah, to my hoodah!
   Dat weer de Schietgäng ehr schönstes Pläseer,
   to my hoodah, hoodah ho!
   Refrain

   Dat Logis weer vull Wanzen, de Kombüs weer vull Dreck,
   to my hoodah, to my hoodah!
   de Beschüten, de löpen von sülben all weg.
   to my hoodah, hoodah ho!
   Refrain

   Dat Soltfleesch weer grön, un de Speck weer vull Moden.
   to my hoodah, to my hoodah!
   Köm gev dat bloß an Wiehnachtsobend.
   to my hoodah, hoodah ho!
   Refrain

   Un wulln wi mol seiln, ick segg dat jo nur,
   to my hoodah, to my hoodah!
   denn leupt he dree vorut und veer wedder retur,
   to my hoodah, hoodah ho!
   Refrain

   As dat Schipp weur, so weur ok de Kaptein,
   to my hoodah, to my hoodah!
   de Lüd för dat Schipp weurn ok bloß schangheit.
   to my hoodah, hoodah ho!
   Refrain

***
AS spelling:

   Ik hev maal 'n Hamborger Veyrmaster seyn,
   to my hoodah, to my hoodah!
   Dey masten so scheyv as den schipper syn beyn,
   to my hoodah, hoodah ho!
   Refrain:
      Blow boys blow, for Californio.
      There is plenty of gold so I am told
      on the banks of Sacramento.
      Blow boys blow, for Californio.
      There is plenty of gold so I am told
      on the banks of Sacramento.

   Dat dek weyr von ysen, vul schyt un vul smeyr,
   to my hoodah, to my hoodah!
   Dat weyr de schytgeng er schoynstes pleseyr,
   to my hoodah, hoodah ho!
   Refrain

   Dat looschy weyr vul wanztsen, de kombuys weyr vul drek,
   to my hoodah, to my hoodah!
   de beschuyten, dey loypen von sülben al weg.
   to my hoodah, hoodah ho!
   Refrain

   Dat soltvleysch weyr gröoyn, un de spek weyr vul maden.
   to my hoodah, to my hoodah!
   Koem geyv' dat bloos an 'n Wynachts-Abend.
   to my hoodah, hoodah ho!
   Refrain

   Un wul'n wy maal sayl'n -- ik seg dat ja nuur,
   to my hoodah, to my hoodah!
   den loypt hey drey voruut und veyr wedder retuur,
   to my hoodah, hoodah ho!
   Refrain

   As dat schip woyr, so woyr ook de kaptayn,
   to my hoodah, to my hoodah!
   de luyd' vör dat schip woyr'n ook bloos schanghayd.
   to my hoodah, hoodah ho!
   Refrain 

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