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<span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">L O W L A N D S - L - 10 October 2007 - Volume 03</span><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">Song Contest: <a href="http://lowlands-l.net/contest/">lowlands-l.net/contest/</a> (- 31 Dec. 2007)</span><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">
========================================================================</span><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">From: </span>
<span id="_user_luc.hellinckx@gmail.com" style="color: rgb(0, 104, 28); font-family: arial,sans-serif;">Luc Hellinckx</span><span style="font-weight: normal; font-family: arial,sans-serif;" class="lg"> <<a href="mailto:luc.hellinckx@gmail.com">
luc.hellinckx@gmail.com</a>></span><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">Subject: LL-L "Language politics"</span><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">
<div style="direction: ltr; font-family: arial,sans-serif;">Beste Ron,<br><br>You wrote:<br>> What still gets in the way in the case of Low Saxon and which has been<br>> of decreasing importance in the case of Nynorsk is that people are
<br>> hung up on purism: they insist that a dialect must not change and that<br>> dialects must not be mixed, that "older and purer is better." (As<br>> Sandy explained, language change is inevitable, and I should add that
<br>> language contacts are inevitable unless you build a wall around a<br>> speaker community.) Get off it already! The Nynorsk crowd in Norway<br>> used to grapple with the same "problems" in the beginning. It's much
<br>> better these days as people have learned that changes and mixing did<br>> not cause the world as they knew it to explode or implode. And because<br>> they pulled their heads out of their tight, purist backsides and
<br>> learned to relax they are actually getting things done and literature<br>> written, and they get to enjoy themselves.<br><br>Regarding "mixing".<br><br>Personally, I don't mind anybody mixing vocabularies, syntaxis and even
<br>semantics. If enough people are doing it, it will stick, and eventually<br>enrich the language. That's precisely how language has always evolved in<br>the past. True, the rate of change is higher than ever before, and the
<br>scale on which processes are taking place is much bigger. Yet, one major<br>principle remains valid: usability. If certain linguistic features no<br>longer serve a purpose, they will become extinct. No use reanimating
<br>them, either they relate profoundly to their environment, or they don't.<br>For example: I don't consider it sheer coincidence that "case endings"<br>are still around in Germany (and considerably less or not at all in the
<br>rest of the Germanic world). Probably shows that "case endings" relate<br>slightly better to a German environment (than to an English one).<br><br>On the other hand, there's spelling. I'm all for a single method of
<br>spelling a language. Here however, I'm _not_ in favor of mixing up two<br>(or more) spelling systems.<br>If, for instance, a certain language would use both "o(o)" (like in<br>English), "oe" (like in Dutch) and "u(u)" (like in German) for a
<br>[u:]-sound; reading becomes a drag. Moreover, it would obscure many<br>relationships that exist in Germanic languages. Just look at the word<br>"house"; the actual pronunciation differs less than the spelling in all
<br>the different languages may suggest.<br><br>Quite often, speakers want to set their language apart from a<br>neighboring one, so called "taalparticularisme" in Dutch. One of the<br>ways to stress difference is to use spelling as a visual aid. Consider
<br>Scots, which has "mither" for English "mother". Sure, in some words<br>(e.g. "thing", "wis"), this rounded "i" is pronounced pretty much (or<br>even exactly) like the sound they wish to portray in "mother". In other
<br>words like "smile" or "happiness", "i" has different phonetic value.<br>Whether this improves readability in general, I dare not say, but<br>personally I would use such an effect sparsely.
<br><br>Writing phonetically can be entertaining for a while, I guess it's part<br>of the infancy of every language, but eventually one has to come up with<br>some sort of "greatest common divisor". Once you have that: keep it.
<br>Never change a winning horse :-D .<br>Just look at the English spelling system for that matter. Ultra<br>conservative for centuries, and yet the language itself flourishes as<br>never before.<br><br>Kind greetings,<br>
</div><div style="direction: ltr; font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span class="sg"><br>Luc Hellinckx<br></span></div><div style="direction: ltr; font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><br>PS: Why not take the spelling system of Middle Low German for Low Saxon?
<br>Reflects the heyday of the Hanseatic League and enjoyed wide acclaim.<br><br>----------<br><br><font style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;" size="2">From: R. F. Hahn <<a href="mailto:sassisch@yahoo.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
sassisch@yahoo.com</a>><br>Subject: Language politics<br><br></font>Thanks, Luc.<br><br>I don't disagree with any of your basic premises. Just please bear in mind the following:<br><ul><li>Loss of case endings comes with loss of syntactic flexibility.
</li><li>The English, Scots and Dutch writing systems are in fact mixtures of Germanic and French orthographic devices. (They are the "aberrant" ones.)<br></li><li>My experimental ANS spelling for Low Saxon is in fact a regularized version of Middle Saxon spelling and does potentially cross borders (also to Dutch etc.), but it makes the
<span style="font-style: italic;">Suppenkaspers</span> cry because the herbs in the soup are a bit different from those Mom used to use.<br></li></ul></div><span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">Kumpelmenten,</span>
<br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">Reinhard/Ron</span><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">
•
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