LL-L "History" 2010.07.09 (01) [EN]

Fri Jul 9 15:32:10 UTC 2010

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*L O W L A N D S - L - 09 July 2010 - Volume 01*
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From: Jonny <jonny.meibohm at arcor.de>

Subject: LL-L "History" 2010.07.08 (03) [EN]

Beste Marcus,

thanks for your voluminous answer!

First of all: did you miss the little joke at the beginning of my posting
and the smiley at the end, right after my name? So this could have shown you
that I'm acting more as an imp than as an *annoying devil(s)* ;-) advocate.
I'm trying to give the whole matter an easy touch with a hard core, and so I
shall continue.

Second of all: let me tell you that one of my most important dialogue
partner of Low Saxon, my dear and very next neighbour Amandus Ahlf (you
might google for him, Marcus!) claims to avoid the use of Low Saxon names
for locations which are situated outside of an undestinated home district,
even in a pure Low Saxon talk. It's just good to cause confusion amongst the
speakers.

And now  - you wrote:

> 'Holschen' and 'Hanschen' vs. 'Holzschuh' and 'Handschuh' ('clog' and
'glove' in English)

I'm not sure that I would type it this way. I think I'd prefer "Holtschen"
and "Handschen", or perhaps "Hann'schen".

> It's the fault of the fact that 'Beers' is Low Saxon.

Are you sure that it really *is* Low Saxon? Where is the proof?

Just a couple of sentences above you wrote:

> You are right, that the German word (which is just the former Low Saxon
word conserved in an earlier state) is closer to

> the etymological origin.

So I repeat: what about my guess that "Beers" is just a result of local
dialect, perhaps closer to Standard German than to LS?! I don't mind if it
is just 50 or even 100, 200 or 300 years old! I'm pretty sure that a lot of
'Beersters' (to make things even weirder: suddenly appears a "t"!) use it
this way though they are completely unable to speak Platt.

> You may know another language, that has heavily worn forms. How do you
pronounce "London"? Do you speak two "o"s? > Or is it rather "Landen" (I use
German-based spelling)? How do you pronounce "situation"? It's
"sittjuäyschen". "Language" > is pronounced "längwidsch"! "Worcestershire"
is "Wustersche"! "Plymouth" is "Plimmes"!...

> So, Jonny, would your critique also apply to English? Or French?

Asking me this way I would answer: yes! And I feel myself being in good
companionship with a lot of native speakers of the mentioned languages ;-).
*Man - ick gloyv ne' recht, watt ick daor watt an maoken kunn'. Dey hoyrt
mii jao ne' tou ;-)!* (I don't think that I would be able do change anything
there. *pun:* They don't listen to me / they don't belong to me.)

> Why do you speak about abuse? It's just the normal development of the
word. The 'd' lacks cause 'd' between vowels was > lost. Your dialect of Low
Saxon has "Lü" instead of "Lüde" too, hasn't it? The 'a' lacks cause
unstressed vowels in the last > syllable were reduced to schwa and then
subject to apocope (just as - again - 'Lü' vs. 'Lüde'). That would lead to
'Beerks'. > I don't know about the 'k', but there'll be some reason too.

A kind of vowel shifting XXL?

I would prefer to write *Lüüd* or perhaps *Lüü'*, but generally I don't like
it very much to write 'opp Platt' - as easy and comfortable as it is to
speak for me, as hard it is to pen.

> I really have to say that you irritate me with your positions about Low
Saxon language use. I am unable to understand your

> position. In your Low Saxon posts you put much emphasis on writing it
exactly like it is pronounced in your own dialect and

> in the past you have criticized the compromise Sass Platt (which I write
most of the time). That's a position I don't share,

> but it's a valid position. But every now and then you seem to take a
totally different position and tell us that the "worn"

> pronunciation of the dialects is like totally bad and you rant about
"poorly educated mumble-brothers". That seems

> contradictory to me. Perhaps you can shed some lights on the to me
invisible bridge between these two positions?

Let me bring the light! "Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust!" (Goethe,
'Faust')

The first one is my closeness, my strong emotional relationship to our local
dialect of LS. I'm trying to help to conserve its *sound* for futural
generations. So I aspire to write it as close to the archetypical
pronunciation as I am able to do.

The second soul is eager to help other people, the readers here and
elsewhere, to understand an old *'mumble-brother'* like me, and therefore I
have to make compromises. My model in many aspects is Reinhards kind of
typing. It's he who taught me how and where to set e.g. apostrophes to
illustrate missing letters.

Sometimes I think I could things make go much easier using Sass Platt, as
you prefer, Marcus, but I'm really unable to do so. All my trials end in a
desastrous bad Low Saxon, because I have to *'write with my inner ear'*. But
even in my very special kind of typing - which in greater parts is another
loan from Reinhard - I mostly don't like my works.

What is the problem for Dr. Faust with his just two souls? *Al'ns
Kinnerkraom* (kids' stuff) ;-)! *Me *is the pitiful one with a really big
problem - there is a *third* soul within my chest, the
etymological-puristical one. And this one always cries: "Stop the downfall
of a language!". I feel a kind of responsibility for those poor old words
which can't defend themselves against bad, but spreading books, dictionaries
and Google-results. I've told about this previously: the standard languages
have a huge lobby keeping an eye on them, but vanishing minority languages
can be spoiled like devil, and no one, or just an irrelevant handful of
freaks, even will realise it.

In the sum all of this of course may cause in many people the convincement
towards me that I am a notorious but inconsistent naysayer.

To reach my momentary level of development it has demanded a long way to go
for me. For example, Reinhard still might remember my hefty resistant
against the usage of characters from the archaical Hanse-type, and now I
seem to be the last to prefer it ;-)! I had to learn laboriously to open my
eyes and ears for etymological relations and have spent a lot of hours to
learn some basic rules. And I don't see an end of learning and improving my
convincements.

Let's go on struggling to save Low Saxon and all its dialects, thus let
fight us against all those toxic halfhearted and just trendy trials (though
they might be well-intended) to change, and therefore to spoil our heritage!
They are really dangerous, because they are up to tear down Low Saxon to a
100% dialect of standard languages.

Invent new words where a new word is demanded, but use original words
wherever you can. In this aspect I very much agree with our Joachim
Kreimer-de Vries: a loan from Middle Low German often is better than a *
'breitgeklopftes'* ('flat hammered') word from Standard German.

Crazy people, we ...!

Allerbest!

Jonny Meibohm

Lower Saxony, Germany

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