>Historically it's been explained as 'op å' -> oppå -> på
>(cf. English 'up on' -> upon -> 'pon, as in 'pon my word!).
Aha (ich hab's vermutet :)).
>You never know. What's the origin of Romanian 'pe'?
They say it's a contracted form or a relic of Lat. per or/and super.
It's main meaning is "on + upon" (in strong accusative environment
when preceding nouns and adj.) An archaic variant of pe is pre,
which is preserved in the composita: presus, precum, prejos.
Its kin is peste "over=über".
>>Is a rådgiver a... Ratgeber? ("advice giver").
>
>Yes. There are many German and Low German calques in the
>Scandinavian laguages. Most of the German 18th cent. purisms
>were loan-translated into Danish and Swedish.
But why did purists picked up such lexems from German? What
was the idea? (Esp. since one's own lexical material contained
råd and giver.)
>It's also a difference in mentality, or was. To Germans, the ideal
>was a layered society, where people know their place. To Danes, the >ideal is a flat society where no one has a pre-assigned authority.
Maybe. But throughout all German-speaking provinces (actually
Flanders and Netherlands included) German ("Hochdeutsch") is a
mere "artificial" language: each province has a dialect. Some
dialects are close or very close to the artificial-standard
language, other dialects are so different, that one might be
prompted deem them as separate languages. Thus, most of German-
speaking people live in diglossies. In Switzerland and Luxemburg,
they have 2 different artificial/Hochdeutsch German langauges;
in Swiss TV, they use both intermittently, the one they share
with Vienna and Berlin and the one which is sort of a common
Swiss Alemanian dialect understood and spoken by everybody
and understood to a considerable extent by South Germans, esp.
those living in Allgäu, Württemberg and Baden, as well as by
Tyrol and Vorarlberg Austrians.
Compared with these phenomena, English, esp. in North America,
is a "homogenous"/"uniform" language, from coast to coast. :)
>That's also why the so-called ethnically Danish party in Southern
>Schleswig is also ideologically different from the (previously) >authoritarian German state;
The "authoritarian state" is something extremely recent, after
the Napoleonic occupation and during Prussia's expansion of
power and way of life towards "building of a nation" (culminating
in 1871 with the creation of Germany without Austria). Otherwise,
"East Francia" was sort of a chaotic centrifugal patchwork of
states between the 10th c. and 1871 (roughly thousand years), and
the kaiser was usually a weakling, dominated by his underlings.
Look at the contrast: "West Francia", France, with its Capetian
centralistic approach, with its effect in the language as well.
>ethnically German parents too send their children to Danish
>schools for that reason.
In Schleswig-Holstein and Friesland they are anyway multilingual:
in school and official situations they use the standard "artificial"
German, among themselves forms of low German/Plautdietsch and
Nedersaksesch, so that Danish, East-Frisian and North-Frisian
are further dialects within a greater "family" (where remote
dialects such as that in Cologne or the one in Luxemburg or
Alamanian in Alsatia and Switzerland or Suebian and Bavarian
may be perceived as mere "cousin" dialects). I mean, it's a
different situation than the one in Saxony, Bohemia and Carinthia
where German dialects coexist with Slavic dialects or in
Burgenland where Hungarian is also spoken or in Switzerland
where Swiss Alemanian dialects coexist with Romance languages
(French, Italian and Rumansh-Rhaeto-Roman).
>Also from that comes the Danish definition of Danishness: intent,
>not roots; you're Danish if you want to be, otherwise you're not.
Well, this (more or less) is also valid in many places of the world.
Much depends on one's (family) option: for one language or for
another.
George