fritzsaxl@ wrote:
>You´re right there (about the german stuff). And I can
>also add that the future of Hochdeutsch is the same
>future of the Latin tongue. Hochdeutsch will become a
>"dead" tongue in the sense that nobody will speak it
>anymore (we know that in other senses the Latin still
>lives...). Nowadays the austrians and germans speak
>according the various local dialects and some of these
>dialects are virtually incomprehensible for those who
>understand only the "written german", the Hochdeutsch.
Well, I think that linguists esp. Germanists will beg
to differ (-: quite the contrary, it's Hochdeutsch that
has spread, not dialects. Besides, that's what dialect
fans themselves have for decades complained about (esp.
in the South, where they complain that the Zuagroaste
= Zugereiste = immigrants from the North, "de Saupreissn",
keep playing a major role with their artificial
Hochdaitsch :-)).
>(Those who have already been to München know that in a
Hehe, z'Minga... ("It's nice to be a Preiss, but it's
higher to be a Bayer." :))
>lot of restaurants and bars the "menus" are bilingual:
>Hochdeutsch / Bairisch.)
This is an exaggeration (I guess: on (jocular)
purpose). And if in the Bairisch area of German (that
is in Bavaria proper and in Austria, say, between
Suebia and Western Pannonia) menus prefer these words
Semmel, Schlagrahm, Topfen, Blaukraut etcetera to
pan-Deutsch Broetchen, Sahne, Quark, Rotkohl etcetera,
this doesn't mean that the former are completely unknown
to the rest of German speakers; it's a mere usage of...
synonyms.
The real Bavarian dialect (actually the subdialects of
Bavarian) is spoken in villages, and even there no
longer the genuine one, but some kind or another of...
diluted dialect i.e., heavily influenced by Hochdeutsch.
OTOH and after all, Oberdeutsch dialects (in the South) and
Mitteldeutsch dialects (in the middle of the "Reich")
are very close - linguistically - to the artificial
Hochdeutsch. Compared to different kinds of Plattdeutsch
(or in professional jargon: Niederdeutsch), Bavarian
is almost Hochdeutsch, lexically and phonetically (esp.,
say, Munich Bavarian or its Salzburg or its Vienna
counterparts, even if the outsider gets the impression
that Bavarian were very different from the "papierene
Sprache," which is Hochdeutsch). So, just listen to
some bla in Koelsch or Westfalen-Platt, or Hamburger
Platt or Rostocker Platt. ;-) (Even the Swiss subdialects,
belonging to the Oberdeutsch branch too, are a bit more
intelligible after a while of training of one's "antennas.")
So, in the era of information revolution and of glo-
balization, it's rather the language of uniformity the
one that has real chances to vanquish dialects: des
is gwiss. These dialects turn to more and more variants
of Hochdeutsch merely preserving peculiarities of
dialect phonology and some kind of regional vocabulary
that's actually known to almost everybody, even in the
realm of the "Nordlichter" -- whereas the real dialect
vocabulary disappears for good.
Only one example: where do Bavarians-Austrians still
preserve the pronouns "ets" and "enk"? I expect
them to have been replaced by pan-German "ihr" and
"euch" (moreover, "enk/euch" has been replaced by "eahna"
= "ihnen" in most of situations where the accusative
plural has to be used, for I dunno how many decades
or centuries now). Both these words are rather preserved
in... Yiddish (also an Oberdeutsch dialect of German,
i.e. from the South, in the vicinity of the greater Alps
region). But this dialect is vanishing at a greater speed.
>Klaus.
a scheenes WE,
Schorsch