LL-L 'Grammar' 2007.02.11 (03) [E]

Sun Feb 11 23:45:04 UTC 2007

L O W L A N D S - L - 11 February 2007 - Volume 03

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From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L 'Grammar'

Hello all,
 I'm not sure if this is 'Resources' or 'Grammar', but just Stumbled
across this article:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004175.html<http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/004175.html>

Paul Tatum

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From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L 'Grammar' 2007.02.10 (05) [E]

From: Jonny Meibohm <altkehdinger at freenet.de>
and from Ron; Subject: LL-L 'Grammar' 2007.02.09 (08) [E]

Re grammatical genders.
I've been looking at the Lowlands languages that ditched this, trying to get
a handle on timescales.  Old English had gender, Middle English seems
largely to have lost it, but I suspect that in the spoken form it was
probably gone before 1066, only surviving in the formal, written version.
I'm not sure if Scots retained the feature longer than English, assuming it
no longer has it  (Sandy?).
And how soon after settlement in South Africa did Afrikaans lose it?
presumably the parent form of Dutch still used gender in the mid 17th
Century.

Paul Finlow-Bates

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From: Luc Hellinckx <luc.hellinckx at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L 'Grammar'

Beste Ron,

You wrote:

John, Lowlanders, another way you can distinguish genders is by the way
adjectives are treated:

Masculine:
de lütte Placken (the little/small spot)
'n lütt en Placken (a little/small spot)

Feminine:
de lütt e Stuuv' (the little/small room)
'n lütte Stuuv' (a little/small room)

Neuter:
dat lütte Huus (the little/small house)
'n lütt(et) Huus (a little/small house)

In Southern Dutch dialects, also through the use of either "die"
(masculine), "diene" (feminine) or "dat" (neuter) as a demonstrative
pronoun, e.g.:

that man = diene man ~ "daa(ne) man" (B)
that woman = die vrouw ~ "dèè vraa" (B)
that child = dat kind ~ "da kint" (B)

But also for something/somebody nearby, the pronoun differs according to
gender (in Brabantish):

this man = "deze man"
this woman = "dees vraa"
this child = "tees kind" (< 't dees kint)

Kind greetings,

Luc Hellinckx

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From: Jonny Meibohm <altkehdinger at freenet.de>
Subject: LL-L 'Grammar' 2007.02.10 (05) [E]

Ron wrote:

*Steg *[stEC] m~n (walk, path) [German *Steg *[ste:k] m]

*Stieg'* f~n (set of 20) [German *Stiege *f]

Just to complete it, Ron, in our LS _*Steg*_ m always means a small bridge
crossing a water, and _*Stieg*_ m always is a path. Both words here we also
use when talking Standard German.

This is very interesting in so far as the „Herkunfts-Duden" says:

Das altgerm. Substantiv mhd. stec »Steg, schmaler Fußpfad«, ahd. steg »Steg,
Aufstieg«, niederl. steg »schmaler Weg, Pfad«, älter schwed. stegh »Pfad«
gehört zu dem unter steigen behandelten Verb und bezeichnete zunächst einen
schmalen, erhöhten Übergang über ein Gewässer, auf den man meist
hinaufsteigen musste. Die reimende Fügung »Weg und Steg« ist schon mhd.
bezeugt. In ihr bedeutet »Steg« bereits »Pfad«.

Duden - Das Herkunftswörterbuch, 3. Aufl. Mannheim 2001 [CD-ROM]

Very archaic, isn't it? Maybe, DUDEN didn't know the Kehdinger marshlands
;-)...

For G _*Stiege*_ f ~n ; DUDEN: (quote)"(Verschlag, flache [Latten]kiste;
Zählmaß [20 Stück]; enge Holztreppe;* bes. südd., österr.
für*Treppe[nflur]")(unquote)

native people here like to say _*Stiege*_ or even _*Steige*_ f but only in
the meaning of ‚crate' or the mentioned ‚set of 20'. This way they try to
avoid confusion with the LS _*Stieg*_ as shown above.I also heard people use
_*Halvstieg*_ f (meaning set of 10) but it's no longer in daily use.

*Hacksel* m~n (mince)

Here we say _Hackels_ m

*Laak *f~n (brine) [German *Lake *f]

This at first would be a shallow water (s. E:‚lake'), a swamp, but it also
is used for brine

*Spitt *m~n (spit, stake) [German *Spieß *m]

This would be a G _*Spatenstich*_ m, ‚cut with a spade', often as a measure
(about 20cm/8'' into the ground)

Kumpelmenten

Johannes "Jonny" Meibohm
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From: Jacqueline Bungenberg de Jong <Dutchmatters at comcast.net>
Subject: LL-L 'Grammar' 2007.02.10 (05) [E]

Re the "gender" issue.:

Ron's list of words with different gender in the different dialects has some
interesting ones.

It struck me that the word Laak meant brine. Does that mean that the word
Laak used in German as E:Lake must be a saltwater lake? In Dutch laak is
defined as a small stream.  It is difficult to make sense of all these words
since all of Northwestern Europe was at one time one gigantic brackish
wetland. In this respect there is also D:meer= G:See and D:zee = G:Meer.

"Het baantje" ( a job that is fun and is not necessarily to be taken
seriously ) must be of Dutch origin since it has the typical Dutch
diminutive ending. Because it is diminutive it must have a neuter gender in
Dutch. It is derived from "de baan" (a job as a life-path, complete with
watch-fob and bowler hat). Does this imply that the speakers of one dialect
take their work more seriously than the other? Jacqueline

Jonny notes that many of my fellow Dutch resort to using "die" as the
general article when they are faced with the choice between die, das and der
and their forms in different cases. I remember Miss Roberts, my German
teacher in high school, yelling at me "und Sie mit einer Deutschen
Grossmutter und noch so slechtes Deutsch"….  It is indeed difficult to keep
track of the difference between masculine and feminine nouns when your own
language has lost the feeling for the difference between them. More
recently, my solution for the problem has been to become an equal
opportunity speaker of bad German. I alternate "Gender" across the board.
"Der" on Monday, "Die" on Tuesday and "Das" on Wednesday etc. etc. At least
I am right some of the time…..  Just musing, Jacqueline
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