LL-L 'Grammar' 2007.02.07 (11) [E]
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Wed Feb 7 22:57:30 UTC 2007
L O W L A N D S - L - 07 February 2007 - Volume 11
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From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L 'Grammar' 2007.02.06 (03) [D/E/V]
From: "Mathias Rösel" <Mathias.Roesel at t-online.de>
Subject: LL-L 'Etymology' 2007.02.05 (01) [A/E]
"Lowlands-L List" <lowlands.list at GMAIL.COM> schrieb:
From: " heatherrendall at tiscali.co.uk " <heatherrendall at tiscali.co.uk >
Subject: LL-L 'Etymology' 2007.02.04 (08) [E]
German past tense is like in English built with ablaut. Take, took, taken :
Nehme, nahm, genommen.
Tun (to do) is added in German so as to build progressive forms. Ich tue
arbeiten : I am working. In some German dialects, there is no difference
between simple and progressive present tense in terms if meaning.
Mathias
----------
From: Roland Desnerck < desnerck.roland at skynet.be>
Subject: LL-L 'Etymology' 2007.02.05 (01) [A/E]
Beste Lowlanders, Ron, Roger en alle anderen,
In West-Vlaanderen gebruiken we inderdaad, net als in het Engels, het
hulpwerkwoord "doen". Ik geef jullie de vervoeging van zowel bevestigend als
ontkennend:
J'en go gie nie komm! 'k Doen of Bakdoe of Tdoet!
'k En gon nie komm! Jedoet of Bajedoet! of Tdoet
Hj' en god hie nie komm! Hjedoet of Bahjedoet of Tdoet!
Z' en go zie nie komm! Zedoet of Bazedoet of Tdoet!
't En god ie nie komm! Tedoet of Batdoet, Tdoet of Tdoetdoet
(klinken als toet, toetoet = et doet, it does)
J' en go giender nie komm! Medoen of Bamedoen of Toet!
M' en gon wiender nie komm! Jedoet, Bajedoet, Tdoet, Tdoetdoet !
Z' en gon ziender nie komm! Zedoen of Bazedoen of Tdoet of Tdoetdoet!
Je go gie komm! 'k En doen doen nie of Bakendoenie!
'k Gon komm! J' en doen nie, Bajendoenie!
Hje god hie komm! Hje 'en doen nie of Bahjendoenie!
Ze go zie komm! Z' endoenie of Bazendoenie!
't Go reegn! 't Endoenie of Batendoenie of
Tendoet of Tendoenie!
Je go giender komm! M' endoenie of Bamendoenie of Tendoet of
Tendoenie!
Me gon wiender komm! J' endoenie, Bajendoenie!
Ze gon ziender komm! Z' endoenie, Bazendoenie, Tendoenie!
Tdoet (toet) betekent zoveel als "toch wel"
Tendoenie betekent zoveel als "toch niet"
Ik hoop dat de verbazing bij Heather nu wegebt!
Roland Desnerck uut Ostende, Stad an Zai!
This is very interesting. In the area of Anglo-Saxon discussion there is a
trend (I consider it a political one) to diminish Germanic imput into
England and English. A stumbling block to this argument is the overwhelming
Germanic nature of English (before the relatively recent French and Latin
elements came in). An argument doing the rounds is that the English
construction using "do" with a verb is not typical of Germanic languages,
and thus the early English got it from the "natives", thus proving a basic
Celtic nature of English despite it being almost devoid of Celtic words.
Whether the underlying population of England is "Celtic" is not relevant ot
this group, and may or may not be true. But the "do" argument would not seem
to be a strong piece of evidence.
Paul
----------
From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Grammar
Paul,
"Do" as an auxiliary is definitely very strong and widespread in West
Germanic and apparently has been for a long time. It isn't that obvious
because it is avoided and usually totally absent in standard languages. It
is used a lot in Low Saxon. It is not confined to the Lowlands in that it
is also quite common to many non-standard German varieties, though I suspect
it's stronger in the northern ones, may thus be due to Saxon influence.
(Yiddish doesn't have it, or at least doesn't use it to that extent, which
may indicate that it spread in German fairly late.)
And the Low Saxon area was never inhabited by Celts and never colonized by
Romans, as far as we know.
Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
----------
From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L 'Grammar' 2007.02.07 (04) [E]
> From: "Mathias Rösel" <Mathias.Roesel at t-online.de>
> Subject: LL-L 'Grammar' 2007.02.06 (13) [E]
> Sandy Fleming http://scotstext.org/ wrote:
>
> Surely there's no such language as standard German, and surely
> if there
> is, it'll soon be obsolete!
> I do think there is such a thing. You can find it in the better of
> German newsapers. It is being taught in Goethe institues abroad and in
> any Deutsch als Fremdsprache courses. On the other hand, I doubt you
> will find it in Duden dictionaries, because Duden is merely
> descriptive and encompasses anything that is around, including wrong
> grammar such as wegen + dative case.
But this would be dismissing a dictionary because it records language as
it's found in the wild, in favour of those that give a more artificial
form of the language. Why is the language as it's spoken, wrong? Why is
the language as developed for writing, right? And do all the newspapers
write it the same?
----------
From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L 'Grammar' 2007.02.07 (08) [E]
> From: Jonny Meibohm <altkehdinger at freenet.de>
> Subject: LL-L 'Grammar' 2007.02.06 (13) [E]
>
> But- if there isn't any standard- what shall I hand down for example
> to my
> children? What about schools which examine their pupils in grammar,
> spelling, pronunciation? Should they perhaps stop it?
> A language isn't a language whithout rules.
Surely you're using a very circumscribed definition of "language" here?
Languages as used are pretty wild. Children learn a language without
knowing any rules, teenagers put it through a mincer, adults continually
make what academics would call language errors, and grammars and
dictionaries represent only a relatively easy-to-understand slice of the
real complexities of language study (semantics, phonetics, syntax,
discourse, pragmatics, idiom, dialect, creolisation and so on, and of
course the processes by which all of these change over time).
I don't think someone who's reading, writing, speaking and listening in
a language every day needs rules or a standard. Rather, such people
have plenty of different language samples from different books,
newspapers and speakers and make their own decisions from that
about how they want to speak and write. This is important because it's
not enough to have one single form of a language: a person needs many
different registers for many different real life situations and writing
styles, so what do people mean when they say a standard? They always
seem to imagine you can take a snapshot of the language. But at what
point in time? And where? Which publication and which speech register?
There's no such thing as a standard form of a language.
> I'm born exactly 200 years later than Goethe, but I dare to guess that
> 98%
> of his grammar still is used in Standard German.
> That means: 2% have been changed within ~250 years, that is 0,008% a
> year-
> just as grammar is concerned.
You realised that 2% is actually quite a lot didn't you? That's why you
had to divide it into tiny units of time (a year doesn't hold much
significance for language change) to make the percentage look much
smaller :)
> All of Goethes writing still can be understood (only as far as his
> language
> is concerned, not the intellectual contents) by a person of average
> education.
I imagine most Germans have had Goethe at school and they'll be
acclimatised to it. I'm not sure how important that is, but whatever, as
you said, the language has changed. Either Goethe didn't write in
standard German, or you don't. Which is it?
> The famous German physician, writer and philosopher G. A. Lichtenberg,
> a
> contemporary of Goethe, even made a disposal that his words never
> should be
> changed by later generations of people, otherwise they would be
> comdemned
> ... ;-) As far as I could watch today's writers (in magazines, books
> etc.
> about his person or works) still don't.
Of course they do. They truncate his last words to make them seem more
profound than they really were :)
Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/
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