Re: Why a creole is handy in Germania

--- In cybalist@..., markodegard@... wrote:

> Torsten writes:
> --
> This means that with the wide-spread use of English (and the
> consequent(?) reduced knowledge of their own language) people will
> resort to using English when communicating with other

Scandinavians.

> Knowing and understanding the other Scandinavian languages is
> considered nerdy.
> --
>
> Ah. The North-Germanic speakers don't really love their languages.
>
> We AmE speakers love funny Norsk accents. You all speak English so
> funnily nice. And just about all of you speak English. Aggh! Your
> languages are at risk!

The reason we all speak English is that the syntax and partly the
vocabulary is very much like our own languages. Personally I think of
English as a Pidgin West Jutland dialect.
I recall once a late night in a Sausalito bar, a woman was trying to
pick me up. She asked me how come I spoke English so well. I wasn't
really interested (I'd brought my own), so I decided to make a little
experiment (sometimes I'm really not very nice) to probe the contents
of the Anglophonian mind. I told her this was because Danish was a
Germanic language and so was English and that's why it was easy for
me to learn it (I know of course you should never say that to a non-
linguist, and of course I'm really sorry I said it). Bam, she hit the
ceiling, and said a whole lot of things, most of the words of which
seemed to be derived from PIE *blaH, redupl. *blaH-blaH. I promise
never to do it again.

> Do you remember the novel _Buddenbrooks_, where the old man of the
> family had almost switched from Low German to French, and the whole
> family with him?
>
> French almost won, but Napoleon defeated it.

And then English almost won, in Hamburg and Lübeck and environs.
Hamburg was the most Anglophile city in Germany, for obvious reasons.

Torsten