LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.07.28 (03) [D/E]

Thu Jul 28 14:47:34 UTC 2005

======================================================================
L O W L A N D S - L * 28.JUL.2005 (03) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
http://www.lowlands-l.net * lowlands-l at lowlands-l.net
Rules & Guidelines: http://www.lowlands-l.net/index.php?page=rules
Posting: lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org or lowlands-l at lowlands-l.net
Commands ("signoff lowlands-l" etc.): listserv at listserv.net
Server Manual: http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/1.8c/userindex.html
Archives: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/lowlands-l.html
Encoding: Unicode (UTF-8) [Please switch your view mode to it.]
=======================================================================
You have received this because you have been subscribed upon request.
To unsubscribe, please send the command "signoff lowlands-l" as message
text from the same account to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org or
sign off at http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html.
=======================================================================
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 (Zeêuws)
=======================================================================

From: David Winterburn <david.winterburn at steinmuller.co.za>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.07.26 (07) [E]

Heather and Jonny Meibohm,

wrote:

> If the Lowland languages didn't take part in the great High German Sound
> Shift, then doesn't that indicate their languages must be purer , more
> original than HG??

More original, I have to agree, but also 'poorer' in vocabulary and grammar.
HG is a synthesis of many languages, may be of Germanic origin or from
somehere different. This I guess is one of the reasons why it is dominating
the Old German forms.

I heard a rumour though I have never seen it written anywhere that Hitler 
wanted to restart the Old Saxon language (like Hebrew in Israel)  as a sort 
of Lingua Franca for the Germanic languages in Western Europe. If it is 
true, he must have considered it to be the mother tongue of the general 
area. I believe he considered the Germans of the North to be closer to being 
pure Germans than the South. He apparently also showed a lot of interest in 
the Frisians. He must of had some kind of vision of uniting all 
Germanics.(Don't confuse me as a Hitler fan)

Regards

Dave Winterburn

----------

From: Global Moose Translations <globalmoose at t-online.de>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.07.25 (13) [E]

Luc wrote:
> I've heard such a lax (Spanish) /s/ also in English. Sometimes American
> singer Dolly Parton and British actress Gilian Anderson (Scully in "The
> X-Files) talk/sing this way.

And Elvis!! "You're the devil in disguise... oh yesh you are..." - sounds a
bit like Mooch the cat from the great cartoon "Mutts".

Actually, I found that quite a few Americans talk like that, too, turning an
"s" sound into "sh", especially at the end of a word. Even news anchors do
it.

And there are words whose "official" pronunciation has a "sh" sound in
American English where there is none in British English, such as "groceries"
and "issue".

Gabriele Kahn

----------

From: David Winterburn <david.winterburn at steinmuller.co.za>
Subject: Pidgin languages

Mark wrote,

>If you go to Papua New Guinea, and meet a man in an upscale area of
>Port Moresby, and proceed to speak to him in Tok Pisin, there is a
>good chance he will be insulted.

I used to live in the Seychelles Islands as a child (Indian Ocean) and the 
most spoken languages were English and Creole ( Seychellois) French was 
widely taught but not widely spoken. Seychellois was a pidgin French and 
very close to the Creole spoken in Mauritius.

At school the children were forbidden to speak Creole and would be punished 
if they did. Creole was only a spoken language and written communication was 
mostly English and occasionally French.

I remember everybody telling me, don't learn Creole before you learn French! 
It will ruin your French. It was quite different from French and must 
Frenchmen would battle to understand it.

Regards

Dave Winterburn

----------

From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: "Language varieties" [E]

> From: jonny <jonny.meibohm at arcor.de>
> Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.07.26 (04) [E]
>
> But this also implies a special distance between the speaker himself and 
> the
> language which you won't find in eg LS. HG is not suited for singing, as I
> feel, and even when spoken there is a lack of rhythm.
> Even when put into rhymes it doesn't loose its artificial character-
> completely different from the English of a Shakespeare, for example. 
> That's
> much closer to my ears and the anatomy of my tongue.

Isn't this a purely subjective view? As a Scots speaker, I find English or 
American Englishes extremely unnatural to pronounce. Luckily we Scots have 
our own form of English pronunciation that's completely based on Scots 
phonemes (although even that can seem a bit unnatural for me to speak due to 
less familiar grammatical constructs).

Different languages have different rhyming capabilities - which is why, for 
example, rime riche is more popular in French than in English, and few 
languages have the rhyme schemes of Arabic where whole verses are written 
with every word rhyming. However, rhyme is irrelevant to the poetic 
capabilities of a language - the Latin poets avoided it and poetic forms in 
a language will develop acording to the sort of structures poets find 
workable in the language.

As for singing, I think a lot depends on tradition. I don't feel comfortable 
with traditional Scots songs being sung in an English accent, and neither 
would I be comfortable with hearing blues from the American tradition sung 
in a Scots accent.

Sandy
http://scotstext.org/

----------

From: Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder at WORLDONLINE.NL>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.07.25 (13) [E]

Voor Standaard-Nederlands is dat niet helemaal waar, er zijn natuurlijk
wel inheemse NL woorden met sj- aan het begin, bv <sjouwen> ["Sauw@(n)],
<sjokken> ["SOk@(n)], <sjorren> ["SOr@(n)] maar die zijn inderdaad
zeldzaam.
Maar vergeet niet de talloze verkleinwoorden met -sj-:
<meisje> ["MEiS@] (een ex-verkleinwoord), <baasje> ["ba:S@], <kastje>
["kaS@], <puistje> ["p2yS@] etc.

In the case of Standard Dutch, that is not entirely true, of course there
are native Dutch words with initial [S], e.g. <sjouwen> ["Sauw@(n)] to
carry, to drag, <sjokken> ["SOk@(n)] to jog, trudge, <sjorren> ["SOr@(n)]
to lash, but they are few indeed.
But don't forget the countless diminutives with [S]:
<meisje> ["mEiS@] girl (an ex-dim.), <baasje> ["ba:S@] boss, <kastje>
["kaS@] cupboard, <puistje> ["p2yS@] pimple etc.

Ingmar

Diederik schreef:
>Dutch (and our dialects) only have the [S] as a more recent borrowing but
>not through development from Germanic.

I always learned and understood that the Brandenburg area was settled by
colonists from the West, a lot of them from the Netherlands, both North
but especially from the South, and that the local dialects still have a
lot of traces from Dutch/Flemish etc.
So that's something else than Eastphalian, which does have a load of
diphthongs and breaking for instance, and a different set of pronouns.
In the dtv-Atlas zur deutschen Sprache, which has a lot of dialect maps,
a large area around Berlin has uo or ue like in older and Southern Dutch,
for ProtoGermanic long o, but Eastphalian has au, in a word like Bruder.
In two quite large areas to the North of Berlin, Bruder even has a -j-
for -d- (which no other area in Germany has on this map), very typically
for Southern Dutch too.
Whereas Eastphalian has forms like "jÃ¼k", "dek", "ek", "mek", "us" for
you, I, me, our area has forms without -k, and "ik" and "uns" as in Dutch.
Also, it has "klein" (D klein) in stead of EF "lÃ¼ttig", "Flieder" (D
vlier) for EF "Kalken" = Holunder, "trecken" in stead of "teien" etc.
Plural verbs end in -en like in Dutch, not -et like in Eastphalian.

Furthermore, my own theory has always been that this j- for g- is from the
West too. You think it's Slavic influence, but does this "shift" really
occur only before front vowels? We find j- for g-also in German areas
adjacent to the Netherlands and Belgium, like in KÃ¶ln, Aachen, and I think
in the Ruhrgebiet too. We find it in the Netherlands in South Eastern
Limburg.
You have to take this into account: g is pronounced very palatal, called
<zachte g> "soft g", like a voiced variety of German ich-laut [Ã§] in the
Southern half of the Dutch language area, i.e. Brabant, Flanders, Limburg
and Southern Gelderland, as well as in some more Northern areas like the
province of Utrecht. Exaclty the area where the Brandenburg settlers were
from. In fact, this palatal g closely related to j, try to pronounce j
with more force, more intensively and you say soft g. Btw, oft g is
nowhere limited to front vowels. I think j is from this soft g rather than
from Slavic, what's more, Slavonic doesn't have j from g itself, does it?
Well, maybe Old Slavonic did, but I doubt this process was still going on
in the time the Lowlands settlers came to Brandenburg, or that the Slavs
could transfer it to their dialects.

 Ingmar

Reyn wrote:
In my book, those dialects are
>the easternmost extension of Eastphalian (of which our Gabriele's secret
>dialect is a westernmost representative).  The reason why they are classed
>as Eastern is mostly because of noticeable Slavonic influences, most
notably
>the shift g > j before front vowels (e.g., _Jejend_ for _Gegend_ 'area'),
>possibly also the scarcity of diphthongs in comparison with North Saxon;
>e.g., _Been_ 'leg' = Berl/Br [be:n] vs NS [bE%In] (like "bane" in
English).
>
>Further about your examples _Been_ 'leg' and _alleen_ (Brl/Br [?a"le:n],
NS
>[?a"lE%In]) 'alone'.  It is my theory that in the North Saxon region
>adoption of German /ai/ (spelled <ei>) was easier because the sound
already
>existed in those Low Saxon dialects and was absent or rare in the
>Brandenburg dialects.

==============================END===================================
* Please submit postings to lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org.
* Postings will be displayed unedited in digest form.
* Please display only the relevant parts of quotes in your replies.
* Commands for automated functions (including "signoff lowlands-l") are
  to be sent to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org or at
  http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html.
====================================================================== 