From: pielewe
Message: 37728
Date: 2005-05-07
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, g <st-george@...> wrote:
[On learning German]
> I assume you perceived it as a torture because of the insistence
> of your teachers that you learn correct cases, declensions,
> conjugations, prepositions & the like.
No, I loved that. (Few Dutch do, though. And I never understood
plural formation.) But it didn't help because the crux was lexical.
> ... In the
> end, among all languages, German is the closest to your own
> language. Way much closer than... English.
In a sense that is obviously true, but I suspect it is just not close
enough to make enough of a difference.
I'd written:
> > 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.
Then St. George wrote:
> Then what should say an Italian, a Russian, a Greek, a Turk
> or a Japanese and a Chinese? :-)
Yes of course, but I thought that a knowledge of the grammar plus the
tyep of elementary lexicon you learn during a first year in school
would do the trick. And it didn't. I was nowhere. I felt cheated. By
linguistics.
[On Letzeburgisch.]
> But you are in command of both Dutch and German. I for one,
> am only in command of German, but in spite of that, I am
> able to follow, to a certain extent, Letzelburgish newscasts
> (on TV via the Astra satellite).
"Command" is a slippery word. My command of German is extremely
limited compared with a native's. I suspect that the type of command
you have as a native prepares you a lot better for the task [sc. of
understanding Letzeburgisch] than a native command of Dutch plus some
knowledge of standard German.
I'd written:
> > (1) Unprepared people not from Limburg would find it strange,
because
> > to them German is just as foreign as any other foreign language.
St George reacted:
> How come? (I refer to "as foreign as any") It's the closest
> kinship: it can't be thrown into the same bowl with, say,
> pushto and ketchua. :)
Well, in a way it can because somehow the kinship just is not close
enough to really pay unless, of course, you're interested in language
and/or have other incentives. Ultimately, the kinship is much more
transparent to people schooled in historical linguistics than to the
ordinary citizen, particularly because most obvious cognates offer
semantic problems of the type _Meer_ is _zee_ but _See_ is _meer_ and
_laufen_ is not _lopen_ and _gehen_ is not _gaan_. If you multiply
that by a thousand you get an idea of the basic problem.
[On the problem of standard languages.]
>
> ... virtually in all languages the main corpus of it
> reflects one dialect and the rest contains features found in other
> dialects. Hence, in German, Southerners seem to be reluctant to
> learn/use Hochdeutsch - this is because the Southern dialects are
> a bit closer to the "artificial" language, despite superficial
> observations. Whereas the Northerners (Low German dialect speakers)
> must learn Hochdeutsch almost as a foreign language, so big is the
> gap between Niederdeutsch/Plattdeutsch/Low German and Hochdeutsch.
> Hence, paradoxically, the best professional blabla people tend to
> be recruited in Northern Germany.
That is true, but do I detect the fruits of an East European
upbringing here? Brezhnevian and Titoist linguists were always going
on about standard languages being "based on" dialects, completely
losing from sight how irrelevant that is and, more importantly, what
standard languages are about. Your account of the German standard
language shows very well that the Brezhnevian picture is of limited
relevance. Dialects are about what you talk in the street. Standard
languages are basically about schools, culture (both high and low),
mass media, etcetera. Those are different universes.
W.