LL-L "Language diversity" 2009.12.17 (02) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 17 December 2009 - Volume 02
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From: Hellinckx Luc <luc.hellinckx at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language diversity"

Beste Ron,

Truly wonderful article about life and death of a language...with a number
of Lowlands twists in it of course ;=):

Q and A: The Death of
Languages<http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/q-and-a-the-death-of-languages/>

Kind greetings,

Luc Hellinckx, Halle, Belgium

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

Thank you so much for sharing that article with us, dear Luc!

After some initial skimming I decided to read it more thoroughly tomorrow.
Obviously, it is on a subject near and dear to the hearts of many of our
fellow-Lowlanders. It would be quite suitable to announce even *if* there
were no direct reference to Lowlands languages (which is pretty much
impossible because of English). After all, the theoretical framework that
can be applied to most situations.

Today I killed a few minutes of 60 in a couple of bookstores and again had
to realize that not only books about language diversity intended for the
layperson but even those intended for academic readerships are sorely
lacking in accuracy, even those that by way of their titles make you assume
that they are be-all and end-all in the field. Most of the information is
either of date or is simplified to the degree of ridiculousness. For
example, Low Saxon is still portrayed as a German dialect group
distinguished only by the lack of sound shifts, west of it there's only
"Dutch" and "Flemish," Standard West Frisian is implicitly used in both the
Netherlands and Germany, Occitan is presented as the "Provençal dialects of
French," and languages like Picard and Walloon were not even mentioned. And
forget about Scots! The same goes for the European Languages Charter.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

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