German & al. Germanic [Re: Italo-...]

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

> Then how about vice-versa: to any German, Plattdeutsch
> (that's the vernacular for Niederdeutsch/Low German) is
> also Deutsch (i.e. Moin-Moin in Hamburg or Moin in Munich is
> perceived to be the same despite 1,000 years of "Kleinstaaterei,"
> which is much more than federalism)? By this token, Flanders,
> The Netherlands cum Danmaerk, Sweden, Norway & Island are also
> Deutschland. And don't we forget... UK, USA, Canada, Australia,
> New Zealand, Namibia and South Africa. :-)

I quite agree, as I said, it is just a matter of definition. If you
change your definition you change the result.

> Quite a curious phenomenon (that I, for a certain period of time,
> saw myself years ago at in areas near Venlo and Aachen): local
> Germans, whose Plattdeutsch kind of dialects are pretty close
> to the neighboring dialects beyond the border by and large don't
> try mumbling anything in a common Low Dutch/Deutsch (unlike
> Slavs such as Czechs, Slovaks, Poles), whereas virtually every
> or every second Dutchman or Vlaamser from Belgium and Luxemburg
> is able to speak German.

Yes, but that was years ago. (Luxemburg doesn't belong here, by the
way, there German is official and Dutch never has been unless I have
missed something important. There is also a tiny corner of Belgium
where German is official.)


Before the arrival of cable television, the entire population of the
eastern part of the Dutch linguistic territory watched German TV most
of the time. That predictably made huge differences to their command
of the language.

> ... anyone in good command of German (even someone
> who has no idea of the elementary Plattdeutsch rules, such as
> <ik, wat, dat, ete, make, ut dem hus, janz, jestern, to, he...>),
> is able to understand a lot reading a Dutch text (listening,
> agreed, is a bit more difficult).

I don't exclude the possibility that there is some asymmetry here and
that it is easier for unprepared carriers of German to read Dutch
than vice versa. Such things also tend to become easier as you get
older. I was thinking about my own experiences when I was fifteen
years old and learning German in school. I was passionately
interested in cars, but even after a year of German, reading "Das
Auto, Motor und Sport" with the help of a dictionary proved to be
torture and had to be abandoned. I hadn't expected that at all.

> Flemish/Dutch is almost
> as intelligible as Schwizer Düütsch, Jiddisch and Transylvanian
> "Saxon" (which is actually Rheinfränkisch, i.e. close to
> Mosel & Luxemburg German).

That sounds reasonable.


Then you ask:

> Which of these do you perceive closer to Dutch? -> Letzelburgisch
> Deutsch (Luxemburg German) or the Plattdeutsch spoken, say, in
> the Oche-Kölle-Düsseldorf or in Münsterland regions. (The Rhineland
> Platt is separated from the Münster Platt by the Ruhr Basin; I
> mean linguistically, although Ruhr people also have some features
> belonging to the 1st Lautverschiebung and are located North of the
> line Aachen-Köln-Berlin-Königsberg (Kaliningrad), i.e. the border
> Low German-Middle German.)

That is very difficult simply because I lack the necessary
experience. Even with a knowledge of German, newscasts in
Letzeburgisch tend to be pretty difficult for me to understand unless
I know beforehand what it's all about. Some kinds of Platt are easy
to understand, some aren't, much depends on superficial differences
like vowel shifts and the like.

> And finally, I reiterate my question (from a strict linguistical
> and... psychological point of vies): taking into consideration
> that Dutch is so much closer to German dialects than the rest of
> the Germanic idioms, would it be perceived as false or gross
> exageration if one said Dutch is actually sort of a German
> dialect?

As I said before, you would have to stage an experiment. Purely
intuitively I would say the following:


(1) Unprepared people not from Limburg would find it strange, because
to them German is just as foreign as any other foreign language.


(2) People with a linguistic background would probably tend to say
that, of course, German and Dutch constitute a single dialect
continuum, so there is no problem in principle with using
formulations expressing the idea that one is a dialect of the other
etc. They would also tend to point out that your formulation is
misleading from a sociolinguistic point of view because it is unclear
whether you are speaking about dialects or standard languages. If you
are speaking about the latter, then you are making a category mistake
because a standard language is not a dialect. (As far as I can see,
the only important difference between the Dutch and the Swiss
situation is the existence of a distinct standard language in the
Dutch case.)


(3) I've no idea what people from the area would say.

> (Here, it is necessary to forget for a moment the
> recent sad history & memory that prompt the Dutchman shout
> to a German "Gib mir mein Fahrrad [bicycle] zurück!" So, only the
> linguistic viewpoint.)

I've always found it slightly sinister that my compatriots tend to
concentrate on those bicycles, forgetting about more important
things.


Then you relate the following interesting story:

> PS: A propos politics & history: many years ago I was a tourist
> with a group of friends in Luxemburg. A mixed group: lads & gals
> from Romania and Poland. In a hotel, where we (i.e. some of us;
> me & other 2 slept in a Ford Transit :-)) in the end could sleep,
> the personnel wouldn't speak German. It was me who negotiated
> everything in *English* with the daughter of the owner of the house.
> But the other day, as those people realised that we weren't
> Germans despite our passports, esp. since our language, when
> communicating with one another was Romanian or Polish (and German
> only between the Romanians and Poles), those Vlaams people all
> of a sudden could speak a (nearly) perfect German, with
> idiosyncrasies that resembled those in the neighboring Rheinland.
> Moreover, their own Dutch-like idiom was strikingly close to
> the Rhineland Platt. [I cannot say now whether they spoke Flemish
> or Letzelburger Deutsch.] The very same evening, after the
> conversation in English, the owner of the hotel issued a few
> orders to a subordinate, a guy called... Hans, and their idiom
> sounded in such a striking way that we, the guests, at once
> understood that those people could also speak German. But we
> understood afterwards why the fuss: the population over there
> still resented Teutonic deeds during two world wars (esp. WW2).

I can't say anything about Luxemburg, but I do recall that there was
a quite lot of that in Holland when I was a child (i.e. in the
fifties). I just read a novel by Maarten 't Hart (who is a few years
older than me) containing an episode where it is said that at the
time parents gave their children money for getting failing grades in
German. If my experiences are representative, that habit must have
died out pretty soon. I lived near Zandvoort at the time, which
became very popular with Germans in the early fifties already.
Germans were a normal sight and they brought in money, so nobody was
grumbling. One would like to have more specific information about
this type of thing, particularly about the frequency of such
practices. What are the sociologists doing!?!?!?



W.