LL-L 'Language politics' 2006.09.24 (03) [E]

Sun Sep 24 22:05:05 UTC 2006

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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
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L O W L A N D S - L * 24 September 2006 * Volume 02
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From: 'Roger Thijs, Euro-Support, Inc.' [roger.thijs at euro-support.be]
Subject: LL-L 'Language politics' 2006.09.24 (02) [E]

> From: 'Global Moose Translations' [globalmoose at t-online.de]
> Subject: LL-L 'Language politics' 2006.09.23 (01) [E]
>
> ... There are linguists
> out there who want it to be a strong, unified language, after all! They
need
> to change their evil ways! I am going to come up with my own phonetic
system
> and propagate it, and compel everyone to talk like that henceforth in
order
> to "save the language"!

Actually this happened in Northern Belgium. It started with the commission
orthography in 1844 in despite of strong opposition by West-Flemings in the
parliament.
"Belgian low Franconian" (Flemish, Brabantish and Limburgish) got Dutch as
standard. I think in 1844 hardly anyone could speak it decently - it was
more a written koinÃ©. Curiously this standardization was imposed by the
goverment itself, since the different provincial "Memorials" used different
spelling systems (Des Roches, Behaeghel) for translating law at the time.

The "Dutch" language became the main token against the omnipresence of
French (cf. the "vernederlandsing" of Ghent university in the beginning of
the 20th century.)
I think this is different from Northern Germany. "Low Saxon" movements, to
the best of my knowledge, have no program for banning "High German"
completely in the Northern states. Btw, the process in Belgium took about
150 years (7 generations?).

So what were our bernefits:
- We got French out
- We got Dutch in.
- Our Flemish, Brabantish, and Limburgish dialects have a difficult time.
When we compare with Northern France, where the West-Flemish dialects
coexisted still for some generations with French, I think we are better of.
The drawback: the knowledge of French by young Flemings is becoming rather
poor.

Regards,
Roger

----------

From: Paul Finlow-Bates [wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk]
Subject: LL-L 'Language politics' 2006.09.24 (02) [E]

From: 'jonny' [jonny.meibohm at arcor.de]
Subject: LL-L 'Language politics' 2006.09.23 (01) [E]

In special the ancient mutualities between the Netherlands/Fleming-Land and
Northern-Germany can't be discussed away, only because of 5 years of bloody war-
and nazi-times. We should'nt forget that, for my opinion, all the people along
the German coast of the North-Sea have some drops of 'hOllansch'/Vlaams blood in
their veins- maybe from the ancient Frisian explorations, from some medieval and
new-aged waves of Dutch settlers between Ems and Memel or at least from all the
Dutch people coming to live and build their houses in Germany in present days.
Greutens and regards

Johannes "Jonny" Meibohm

Hmm. Perhaps I'm an outsider speaking out of turn (though as an Englishman I
might lay claim to being as "Lowlands" as anybody else). But I find talk of
"blood in their veins" when it comes to language issues, a trifle disturbing....

Paul Finlow-Bates

----------

From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject: Language politics

Paul,

> Perhaps I'm an outsider speaking out of turn (though as an Englishman I might 
> lay claim to being as "Lowlands" as anybody else).

Of course you are a part of it, o island brother with at least some noble Saxon
blood running through your veins!  ;-)

> But I find talk of "blood in their veins" when it comes to language issues, 
> a trifle disturbing....

I hear you. However, I give our Jonny the benefit of the doubt, am assuming that
he didn't mean it the blood-curdling way. Unfortunately, idiomatic expressions of
this sort are dying a very slow death on the "Continent," are often used
unthinkingly. Remember that Jonny has joined me in confessing and embracing our
checkered "blood" descent from the eastern melting pot.

Change of gears ...

As for the orthographic question, let me just add that the German-based system
used in Germany for Low Saxon now is not very old at all, and it isn't an actual
system but an amorphous collection of guidelines that very few people follow
thoroughly. 

In the course of the language revival movement of the 19th century, culminating
in a modest flood of publications late in the century and early in the 20th
century, writers did a lot of orthographic experimentation, mostly with
German-inspired systems to assure easy access for the mostly rural readership
which at that time typically had minimal education (typically 1-3 years in
German, a foreign language, their own language being banned from schools) and
typically had no knowledge of any foreign language and foreign writing system,
aside from having lost touch with the ancestral spelling of their suppressed
language (though you would and still find snippets of it carved and painted above
doorways and onto old trusseau chests). 

Virtually all writers of that time, including Groth and Reuter, wrote the
language in very inconsistent ways and changed their "systems" in the course of
their lifetimes. Wilhelm Wisser used his own system when he published his
collection of folktales (including the wren story), and he drew from the Middle
Saxon system but added diacritics to distinguish long monophthongs from dipthongs
more successfully than they are today. 

In the 1920s and early 1930s, a short-lived period of relative liberty and
world-openess between the two world wars, there was even more experimentation and
a movement away from basing Low Saxon spelling on the Modern German system. (This
was concurrent with efforts to rid German spelling of things like "ÃŸ" and noun
capitalization, a movement that dissappeared under Nazi power.) Some authors did
not capitalize nouns in Low Saxon either, and some used Middle-Saxon-inspired "y"
for the long [i:] sound, probably bearing in mind also "y" > "ij" for the cognate
in neighboring Dutch (perhaps even "y" in Afrikaans). This was but a little step
farther than what had been current during the time of the Brothers Grimm, e.g.,
"Vom fischer un syne fru"). (Some graphically very beautiful books with such
systems were published in the 1920s.) At the same time, there were those that
rejected "un-German" systems and advocated making Low Saxon spelling as close to
the "High German" one as possible, even to the degree of sacrificing consistency
(e.g., sg. _Tiet_ vs pl. _Tieden_), and foremost of these was Johannes SaÃŸ
(1889-1971) who first published his guidlines in 1935. It was his camp that won
the day, not suprisingly, considering that it coincided with the Fascist surge
and eventual rejection and banning of anything "un-German." Please bear in mind
that at the time the official line was that Low Saxon was a German dialect group,
not a language in its own right.

The SaÃŸ guidelines were reprinted in 1955 (during a period that some consider the
"dark age" for the language), and for some reason the red herring was created and
passed down that this system was an old one and was an inherent part of the
language.  

Furthermore, it would be quite wrong to assue that these German-based writing
systems somehow came into existence among the "common" people. Groth, Reuter, SaÃŸ
and practically the entire rest of the bunch were academics. Groth and SaÃŸ were
Germanistics-trained philologists (the closest thing to linguists at the time),
and Reuter studied law but would have had to study humanity subjects as well,
which typically included Germanistics and the classics. The _modus operandi_ was
to publish folksy material with broad appeal and thereby promote one's spelling
systems among Low Saxon speakers with minimal education.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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