Lowland Scots

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 3/6/2003 7:25:21 PM Eastern Standard Time,
pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU writes:

> Another source of information about Scots is an e-mail discussion group
> like this one called Lowlands-l.  (The name of the list refers to a group
> of languages such as Dutch, Low Saxon, Afrikaans, Scots and others spoken
> in lowland areas of Europe, not just to Lowlands Scots.)

(Afrikaans presumably is listed here as being derived from Dutch, spoken in
an area called the "Lowlands" ("Netherlands").  Many of the Boers lived in
highlands areas of South Africa.)

Do the members of Lowlands-l collectively subscribe to a hypothesis that
there are certain features, forces, group solidarities, etc. common to
speakers of Germanic languages in the lowland areas around the Baltic and
North Seas?  If so, could you please identify the most obvious of these
features etc?

It can't be navigation and trade on the Baltic and North Sea, because the old
Hanseatic League shared seagoing navigation with Sweden, "the land of ten
thousand fjords" (Sweden once included Norway and Finland).

Are there systematic differences between Danish (Denmark is a lowland
country) and Norwegian and Swedish?

Is Old Prussian a topic for the list?  How about Lettish and Lithuanian?

Is there a lowland dialect of Polish?  I'm not sure because much of what is
now Polish coastline was once East Prussia.  However, according to a college
professor of mine who came from Gdansk, circa World War I there were a lot of
Poles in Gdansk, and they could have been there for a long time before that.

Why isn't the Queen's English considered to be lowland?  Oxford and Cambridge
may be inland, but the city of London is on or very close to tidewater.

Does the boundary between Low German and High German match the boundary
between Protestant Germany and Catholic Germany?

                - Jim Landau