LL-L "Language politics" 2007.10.11 (01) [E]

[Lowlands-L List]

L O W L A N D S - L  -  11 October 2007 - Volume 01
Song Contest: lowlands-l.net/contest/ (- 31 Dec. 2007)
=========================================================================

From: Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder at WORLDONLINE.NL>
Subject: LL-L "Language politics" 2007.10.10 (04) [E/German]

Ron, I think we can not really compare the Nynorsk (New Norwegian)
situation with LS. First, Nynorsk is spoken only in one country, Norway.
LS in Germany and the Netherlands (and some more). Second, Nynorsk
orthography is no big problem: it just uses the general spelling used for
Standard Norwegian as well, which is fit for both languages. German and
Dutch have quite different orthos, and they're both not really fit for LS.
Third, Nynorsk and Norwegian are much closer to eachother than Low Saxon
and German. Actually, Danish and Swedish are too. Fourth, Standard
Norwegian was adapted to be closer to Nynorsk itself in the past. Fifth,
the West Norwegian dialects, which formed the bases for NN, are not by far
so diverse as the Low Saxon ones are. Sixth, Nynorsk is spoken in a
relatively compact area. Etc. Still, Nynorsk isn't very successful

Ingmar

----------

From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language politics" 2007.10.10 (03) [E]

From: Luc Hellinckx < luc.hellinckx at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language politics"
(Regarding spelling)

"Just look at the English spelling system for that matter. Ultra
conservative for centuries, and yet the language itself flourishes as
never before."

Kind greetings,

The thriving and expansion of English has nothing to do with any feature of
the language itself, including its spelling.  The current and previous
global superpowers have used it;  the Global Economies Numbers 1, 5 and 6
use it as a home language. (Actually, I'm not sure where UK and Canada sit
in the rankings).  Those facts have then had a snowball effect such that
international communications unrelated to military power or economic
necessity now use it.  If you happen to be Swedish and want to talk to an
Indonesian or a Russian, odds are you'll use English.

A few tricks of history and I could be writing this in Spanish, Dutch,
German, French or even Japanese.

And as I've said before, despite the fact that it makes life easy, I'm not
terribly proud or pleased about this internationalisation.

Paul Finlow-Bates

----------

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

Thanks, Ingmar. That's a very well thought through and compelling set of
arguments against using Nynorsk as a model.

Whilst I agree with you regarding orthography (and I hadn't really intended
to use Nynorsk as a model for orthography per se) and interrelations with
the power language and the absence of an international border, I still think
that with regard to setting only a loose grammatical and lexical standard
and thereby leaving room for dialectical variation in writing it offers
something of a model, since the main argument against a standard in the Low
Saxon community has been concentrating on opposition to forced constraints
and possible loss of diversity. This is why I brought the Nynorsk case up in
the first place.

If you followed this model, there would of course be the added hurdle of an
international border that comes with centuries of influences from the
respective power languages (Dutch vs German). However, my feeling is that
the differences are widely overblown (for what I consider political or
territorial reasons) and would seem less if there were a common orthography.
Many Dutch loans and idioms are understandable to LS speakers on the German
side, especially to those closer to the border. Even within one country we
now cope with many differences; we understand them from context and
gradually learn them. Furthermore, many of them are cognates of older Low
Saxon words that in Germany have been replaced by German loans (including
calques). Take for instance the many words for 'to talk', such as praten ~
praoten, kallen, küren, snacken and spreken ~ spräken; they are all used in
Germany and everyone that communicates with or reads works of people from
other regions is aware of them and understands them. If such a
cross-(disappearing-)border approach were successful, I am fairly confident
that a fair number of Low Saxon speakers right of the border would have more
of an incentive (or "bridge") to study Dutch, much like those living closer
to the border have been doing for a long time already (not to mention Dutch
people studying German). Perhaps this is similar to Catalan in Spain, France
and Andorra, and to Basque in Spain and France, where people are able to
cope with Castilian vs French influences.

Personally, I perceive the differences between Northern Low Saxon and
Westphalian Low Saxon (within German and including the Twente dialects of
the Netherlands in the latter) greater than between, say, Northern Low Saxon
on the German side and the Groningen dialects on the Netherlands side.
Obviously, this is so because the Groningen dialects are Northern Low Saxon,
albeit on Frisian substrates, as are the dialects of Eastern Friesland,
Emsland and the Oldenburg area on the German side. Nevertheless, personally
I have no particular problem understanding Westphalian, and I know that
Westphalian speakers understand me.

Of course I agree with you, Ingmar, when you say that neither the Dutch- nor
the German-based orthography is quite suitable for Low Saxon. I go as far as
saying that the way Low Saxon is being commonly spelled in Germany (omitting
important phonemic distinctions in the "sloppy" version) has been leading to
much of the rapid deterioration in pronunciation among second language
speakers. (For instance, there is /beydn/ 'to offer' vs /beedn/ 'to pray',
'to plead', both of which tend to be spelled beden and pronounced by second
language speakers equally as [bEIdn] when there should be and among
competent speakers is a distinction between [bE.Idn] (~ [ba.Idn])  and
[be:dn] ~ [bE:dn] respectively. In the AS orthography they would be beydenvs
beden.)

Paul, I quite agree with you that the success of English is not due to any
inherent features of the language but rather to twists of historical events.
Yes, recent and current power dynamics are the most important reasons for
this, but I want to add to this that it began with particularly successful
colonialism and colonial policies on the part of Britain, closely followed
by those of Spain, France, Belgium, Russia and Portugal (possibly in this
order).

In fact, the success of English seems perhaps even more remarkable if you
consider its historical and thus relatively cumbersome spelling.

The relatively lesser success of Dutch (except in territories that are still
under Netherlands power now) may well be due to less of a push of
Netherlands colonial administrations to make the populations adopt Dutch,
unless it was absolutely vital to job performance. In colonial Indonesia it
was mostly servants in Dutch homes, administrators and academics that had to
have Dutch proficiency. Otherwise you could function very well without
Dutch, the actual lingua franca being Indonesian Malay (later to become
Indonesian) which also many Netherlanders and their descendants spoke (and
many of them also spoke Sundanese, Javanese, Balinese and other local
languages). So, one of the ingredients here may have been that Netherlanders
did not expect the Dutch language to run the colonies and that most of them
were willing to learn at least the non-European-based linguae francae of the
colonies. On the other hand, fewer British, Spanish, French, Belgians,
Portuguese and Russians were willing to learn local languages, most of those
that did being academics, or "oddball adventurers gone native."

I believe that Dutch had virtually no impact in Belgian colonies.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lowlands-l/attachments/20071011/b99b0a3a/attachment.htm>