LL-L "Language varieties" 2006.03.10 (01) [E]

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10 March 2006 * Volume 01
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From: Ben J. Bloomgren <Ben.Bloomgren at asu.edu>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2006.03.09 (05) [E]

Karl wrote:

I would
suppose it is akin to the Norwegian/Swedish level of seperation or perhaps
more like Danish/Norwegian (you must select from several flavors of Norsk:
Nynorsk, Bergen Norsk, Riksmal. Lansmal, hytegesprochet (???spelling
approximate).

Karl,
I am on a list on Yahoogroups about the Norwegian language. Riksmål and
Landsmål are older terms for Bokmål and Nynorsk before the 60's when
someone, whose name escapes me, created the term Nynorsk that he wanted to
combine with Bokmål to be used as a "pure" Norwegian language that was free
of centuries of Danish influence. According to what I have learned on that
list, Danish was the language of the educated in Norway until Norway gained
independence from Denmark and then Sweden. The common man spoke his local
dialect, and if he wrote at all, he wrote a kind of
Dano-Norwego-Danoswedish. It was a big stew pot of things because nobody
bothered to look into the local dialects as a written language. The
Norwegian people who moved to the US emigrated because of near third-world
conditions. Kids barely had to even go to school, and it was mostly about
the attitudes regarding Norwegian dialects as a written language.
Ben

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From: Karl Schulte <kschulte01 at alamosapcs.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2006.03.09 (12) [E]

It is strange you say that, as I have same feeling with German (which I
understand somewhat) and related tongues; it is as though if were only
to listen a bit harder, I'd understand all (but don't).
Karl Schulte

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

Paul Finlow-Bates:

> I can't explain why, but the effect of Jutish on me is the same as 
> Danish -
> whenever I hear it I feel like I should understand it, but don't quite.
> Sort of like overhearing a Geordie conversation with too much background
> noise to make out the words.
>
> I like to imagine it's some sort of call from my ancient roots, but then I
> wake up.

Paul, I experience that, and I assume all of us have it to varying degrees 
when we hear language varieties that have a similar sound to those of 
languages we know, especially where you recognize a word here and there.

I have it particularly with South Jutish dialects, especially when spoken by 
older people who still have the old-time sound down, in which case the sound 
is rather close to that of Low Saxon  (while younger people have a more 
Danicized sound, much like younger Low Saxon speakers in Germany and the 
Netherlands have more German- and Dutch-influenced sounds).  Also, I 
understand Danish (spoken at a "reasonable" speed), and this makes it appear 
to me as though I should understand Southern Jutish far better than I do.  I 
can only understand about 75-85% of written SJ texts, and I'm quite lost 
when people speak at normal speed.  I suppose this means that I would learn 
it quickly if I were exposed to it on an everyday basis.

On the other hand, when I occasionally hear people speak Upper and Uppermost 
Allemannic (which is on a continuum with "mainstream" German) at normal or 
fast speed, I have a hard time and tend to "zone out," probably because the 
phonology is too "strange," and I have not been exposed to it enough.

Native American people tell me that they experience this a lot with 
indigenous North American languages, especially within the area of the 
Pacific Northwest (ca. from northernmost California to Central Alaska). 
This occurs between languages that are not even genealogically related (if 
you put aside the hypothesis that all the world's languages are ultimately 
related).  The reason is that the phonologies of these languages (and to a 
degree also many or most other North American languages) greatly overlap in 
terms of areal features.  In other words, even unrelated languages of a 
given area come to share a lot in terms of sound inventories and 
phonological rules, and this makes them sound as though they were closely 
related with each other, even if they are not related at all.  In the 
Pacific Northwest, those are for instance glottalized stops, vowel devoicing 
(creating what sounds like enormous consonant clusters), lateral fricatives 
(like Welsh <ll>) and affricates, and syllable-final glottal stops and /h/ 
(which are common all over the continent).  In other areas, especially the 
Northern Plains and the Northern Atlantic Coast regions, there are parallel 
oral vs nasal vowel series, and there are phonemic tones (both of these e.g. 
in Mohawk, http://www.lowlands-l.net/anniversary/index.php?page=mohawk). 
Partly as a result of widely spread areal features (and in part as a result 
of a good century of intertribal contacts and mixing), "typical" Native 
American English sounds rather similar everywhere, irrespective of the 
speakers' native or ancestral language.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron 

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