LL-L: "Mutual comprehension" 16.JUL.2000 (04) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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 L O W L A N D S - L * 16.JUL.2000 (04) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject: Mutual comprehension

Dear Lowlanders,

During the past couple of weeks or so we have been discussing mutual
comprehension, not only in the thread by this name but also under "Language
varieties," namely in connection with (Anglo-Norse) language contacts
possibly leading to simplification.

I was reminded of this after an interesting encounter and experiment that
took place yesterday.  I met a woman who was born and raised in New York
City, originally a monolingual English speaker with less than two years of
high school French.  She never learned German and only knew a few Yiddish
words and phrases.  Not long ago she lived in Amsterdam for a little more
than four years and there acquired what to me sounded like rather good and
certainly fluent Dutch.  She greatly misses Amsterdam as well as speaking
and hearing Dutch.  She was not aware of Low Saxon (Low German) and its
changing status, and she said she had never heard it and was curious to
find out about it.  When I told her about its relative closeness to Dutch,
she immediately switched to Dutch and wished to find out if a bilingual
conversation was possible.  We talked about everyday matters, mostly about
her time in the Netherlands.  There were no problems whatsoever on my
parts.  She, who was used only to Standard Netherlands Dutch and close
approximates, had initial problems with LS _ie_ = D _ij_ (e.g., LS
_blieven_ ['bli:v=m] = D _blijven_ ['blE.Iv_0@] 'to remain') and LS _uu_ =
D _ui_ (e.g., LS _Huus_ ~ _hoes_ [hu:s] = D _huis_ [h9.Ys] 'house'), but
she soon caught on to that.  She seemed to have no problems with prevocalic
LS _g_ [g] = Netherlands Dutch _g_ [x], LS _aa_ [O:] = Standard Dutch _aa_
[a:], and LS _-old_ = D _-out_ (e.g., LS _kold_ [k`o.lt] = D _koud_ [kaut]
'cold').  (She said she had assumed that my use of _kold_ and _old_ for
_koud_ and _oud_ was English interference until I explained that it was
not, just a case of conservatism of Low Saxon.)

(By the way, she had no problem with the absence of _ge-_ from Low Saxon
past participial forms, assumedly because she is an English speaker; e.g.,
LS _daan_ = D _gedaan_ 'done'.)

All in all, our experiment was successful, and she came away with the
impression that Low Saxon was merely a "weird" type of Dutch, that at least
simple conversations were possible.  This was certainly interesting
because, unlike the vast majority of Dutch speakers, she had no German
proficiency.  I used to explain the relative ease with which Dutch speakers
seem to understand Low Saxon dialects of Germany, even if they had not
heard them before, to a combination of proficiency in Dutch, German and
English.  The German part was missing in this case.

However, especially when I thought about it afterwards, I realized that
both speakers had made some compromises to enhance mutual comprehension,
most of it I, the speaker of a language the other speaker had never
previously encountered:

(1) Both of us spoke more slowly and enunciated more clearly than we would
normally do.

(2) Mostly inadvertently, I "filtered out" words and expressions that I
perceive as too German-like, as "un-Dutch." To avoid "un-Dutch" elements, I
would choose alternative words or phrases.  This included going outside my
dialect area by choosing alternatives from far-western Low Saxon dialects
(e.g., _maar_ for _man_ 'but', 'merely', _keer_ for _maal_ 'time') two or
three times.

I could imagine a Scots speaker modifying his/her speech similarly if
he/she were asked to try an English-Scots conversation with a non-Scot,
unless, of course, he/she were bent on proving that Scots is nothing like
English.

In other words, we spoke two closely related languages and both made some
efforts to enhance mutual comprehension.  Not only did we both slow down
and enunciate clearly, but my familiarity with Dutch also led me to
slightly modify my own variety to accommodate what I assumed to be the
other speakers' limitations, also avoiding very complex structures.  I have
observed similar compromises when Danes, Swedes and Norwegians talk with
each other, each in his/her own language (e.g., a Norwegian choosing _pike_
over _jente_ for 'girl' to accommodate a Dane's familiarity with _pige_
'girl', or a Dane using pan-Scandinavian numerals rather than Danish ones).

I also wonder if the simplifications I applied are something like what used
to happen when in olden times contacts and merging of related languages led
to simplifications, for instance in a reduction of the number of suffixes
and consequent simplification and loss of flexibility of English sentence
structure.

Best regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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