IE and Substrates and Time

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a post dated Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Sheila Watts wrote:

<<I _do_ hope this is not the UN's info. Though it could be a good reason to
persuade them to hire some linguists at large salaries.
Just a few things:
- 'speakers are bilingual in Standard German' - not necessarily, most of
the Alsatian ones speak French as their standard language.
- 'similiar to Swabian'. Facile. They're German dialects. You could add
'similar to Bavarian, not unlike Franconian etc.'.
- 'not having undergone the second lautverschiebung or vowel shift'. Wow!
Swiss German has more second Lautverschiebung than most, e.g. kchind. It
doesn't have anything to do with vowels. What they probably mean is 'the
NHG Diphthongisation', which really is absent in that southwestern corner.>>

To be more accurate, I only saw that UN data was cited and the UN probably has
nothing to do with this site.  I don't know anything about "the Summer
Institute of Linguistics" or what kind of organization they are, though I did
note that the year of the first translation of the Bible is included in most
of the language descriptions.

Also, Alsatian is called a distinct dialect in Comrie and certainly deserves a
separate historical and political identity.  And yes I think they are
referring to the retaining of dipthongs in Upper German, calling the shift
towards monophthlongs in High German a "vowel shift" (and perhaps confusing it
with the Second Consonant Shift.)  Can't say that other information isn't also
off.  But it is at least interesting that someone tried to catalogue the
world's lanuages in this way and put some emphasis on cross-"intelligibility"
in  many of their descriptions. If this is perhaps a guide for religious
missionaries (I don't know that) maybe its based on reports from the field or
something.  And perhaps it's of some small use in that way.

I just hope I haven't referred everyone to a cult site or something like that.

Regards,
Steve Long