Re: Creole Romance?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, g <george.st@...> wrote:

>
> >Take the weak inflection of German adjectives
> >
> >xxx ms. fm. nt. pl.
> >nom --e --e --e -en
> >acc -en --e --e -en
> >gen -en -en -en -en
> >dat -en -en -en -en
>
> If preceded by der/die/das, jener/jene/jenes etc. Otherwise
> there are several more endings (-es, -er, -em).

I know. I was making a point. The other inflections take more wearing
down.

> >(which is my strategem also when I speak German. Mumble.
> >It beats using 'der' for everything.)
>
> Hehe, that's exactly the impression upon hearing Danish with
> German "geschulten" ears. :-)

Nono, you misunderstand me. The reason Danish sounds like that
(p,t,k > w, D, G: German > f, s, x) is we don't want the Germans to
understand what we are saying (OTOH the Germans VERY MUCH want us to
understand what they are saying). How we speak German is another
matter. Usually you can pass yourself off as a Hamburger.
On the other it would seem that with German eyes Germans, when they
see Danish women, have a deep conviction that they belong to the same
people.

>On the other hand, what would
> you say upon hearing such Oberdeutsch things as "sowossamma"
> "ramawoima" "ageweida" "wanninimmamengdaad gangadihoam"? :)

Austronesian.

> >And if you mumble it's because you don't know the language
> >properly. You speak it as a foreign speaker
>
> Yes, but I would beg to differ -- a little bit. Let's take...
> Gastarbeiterando (-: "Was du gucken? Ich nix wollen! Du
> verstehen? Nix wollen. Du mir andere geben".
>

Yes, I know. I think it was invented originally to boss Slavic-
speakers around on the German 'frontier' (in the American sense of
the word), 400 basic words, etc. The sentence heard most in tourist
traps is: 'Du wollen mein Geld, du sprechen meine Sprache'. But
Danish doesn't have a similar 'register' (vel sim.)

> This is what you can encounter everywhere in Germany,
> Austria and Switzerland, and this I would deem as similar
> to something creolized. OTOH, methinks that even Jiddish
> can't be seen as a "creolized" German dialect, although it
> has highly simplified morphology and syntax: it behaves
> IMHO like any other German dialect (with those transfor-
> mations/simplifications typical of dialects, e.g. gwen [gve:n]
> < gewesen "been", shared with Bavarian).

A trade language, if there ever was one ;-)

I read a book on the history of Yiddish, I forgot the title, but one
thing I recall is that the author was very insistent that Rhine-
German s-plural ('Doktors') was _not_ due to Yiddish influence, but
_had to_ be from French. Through the text you got the impression that
there was a moral-sociological question hidden here: s-plurals are
_bad_ and whoever introduces them into German is also _bad_. Which is
why most Germans have a hard time learning English; somewhere in the
reptile part of their brain a voice tells them that this reasonable-
looking gentleman can't possibly want to speak like a Hamburg
dockworker, so let's be reasonable and speak like humans, okay?

Torsten