LL-L "Orthography" 2005.12.21 (07) [E]

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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West) Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeeuws)
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21 December 2005 * Volume 07
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From: Global Moose Translations <globalmoose at t-online.de>
Subject: LL-L "Orthography" 2005.12.21 (02) [E]

Ingmar wrote:
>  Well, unfortunately I can't agree with you totally, Gabriele.
> First of all you don't seem to get that Ron's LS orthography is something
> else than a standardization of his coastal Platt, but that he just writes
> in that variety all the time because it is the LS of his home area.
> I think that Ron maybe should write for a while in other LS varieties,
> e.g. Westphalian or Eastphalian in AS, to show that AS does not equal
> Northern Niedersachsen LS. And please please don't forget that Low Saxon
> is not just spoken in Germany but also in The Netherlands, so a German
> based orthography divides the language in two.
>
> What would you say if  German in Germany was written as it is today, but
> in Luxembourg in French orthography, in Switzerland in Italian spelling
> and that of Austria in Hungarian? That may sound ridiculous but in fact it
> is what happened to Low Saxon... Why can a language of its own not have
> its own orthography, but must it be written in that of other languages
> (German + Dutch)?
>
> But I don't say AS is perfect, what you probably dislike most about it are
> all the y's, well, for me that is the same. I hardly use them, because my
> varieties of Low Saxon don't have all those diphthongs. At the A-site you
> can click on the Low Saxon translations of mine and see the AS-versions as
> well, next to the Dutch based and German based spellings.
>
> Once again: AS does NOT try to standardize the Low Saxon language itself,
> but just the orthography.

But don't you see that the orthography IS the language? I don't know about
the rest of you, but every spoken word I hear appears in front of me in
writing on some sort of mental screen, from which I read it. The same is
true for anythig I say: I mentally read the script at the same time. The
look of a word is just as essential, if not even more so, because it is not
subject to individual modifications (or shouldn't be) as the way it sounds.
So what would Ron say if I tried to comnpletely change and "standardize" the
pronunciation?? He would laugh, or declare me crazy, along with everybody
else. So where is the difference?

Take the German spelling reform. The word "rau" is not at all the same as
"rauh" (rough), "Gämse" is much different from "Gemse", and "Tunfisch" is a
previously unheard of animal, barely similar to the "Thunfisch" we all know.

So, anyway, why call the current spelling "German based" if it is actually
based on Roman letters? Why stop there? Shouldn't we use a different
alphabet altogether? Those of us who speak more than one language - English,
French, Dutch and German, for example - know exactly that "important" in
English does not at all sound the same as "important" in French. So, is
anyone coming along trying to change the spelling of French, in order to
emphasise that it is NOT English, oh no no no? Not even the French would go
that far.

The outward appearance of a word is every bit as important as the sound it
makes when spoken, and I'll thank everybody not to mess with it or call me
stubborn and worse just because I know how to use more than one of my
senses.

Gabriele Kahn

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Orthography

According to Gabriele:

> But don't you see that the orthography IS the language?

Following this, an unwritten {whatever} is not a language, or a {whatever} 
becomes only a language if it is written.

Mongols, for example, are therefore bilingual by virtue of using two 
entirely different scripts and systems (Cyrillic- and Uyghur-based) to 
render the same speech, as are Serbs by being able to use both Cyrillic and 
Romance systems for Serbian.

It would therefore have to be proposed that the UNESCO and its likes adjust 
(reduce) the number of currently surviving languages accordingly.  Since 
this would eliminate the majority of indigenous languages of Australia and 
Latin America and numerous languages of Africa and Asia, and hundred of 
languages of Papua-New Guinea alone (including languages written mostly by 
linguists and educators, not by the average speaker), the world's linguistic 
scene would be vastly simplified.  On the other hand, however, languages 
that *are* written but have a large number of dialect-specific as well as 
individually idiosyncratic systems rather than a single standard system 
would need to be reclassified as consisting of several languages, which in 
the case of Low Saxon and Scots would probably number in the hundreds.  The 
bottom line number would therefore probably not change all that much, but at 
least we'll end up only with the languages that really count: those that are 
written.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron 

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