Re: Schöffe I

>
> >>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.)

The same as in Germany, getting rid of French influence, plus many were bilingual, Danish and High German.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Molesworth,_1st_Viscount_Molesworth
writes in 'An Account of Denmark as it was in the Year 1692' that several civil servants in the administration of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_V
bragged to him that they knew no word of Danish. The general attitude was summed by
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Holberg
IIRC, that 'fransk med sin kone, tysk med sin tjener og dansk med sin hund man talte'. One third of the population of Copenhagen was German-speaking up to the two Schleswig wars, after which German became an unpopular language.

>
> >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.

High German has never been used as anything but a foreign language in the Netherlands, in fact you could define the border between Germany and the Netherlands as the border between Low/High German diglossia and Low German monoglossia.

> 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.

I know. Also that's hardly relevant. Danish is a written language with a long and continuous history as a state-bearing language, no German dialect is (unless you want to insist that Dutch is German).

> Compared with these phenomena, English, esp. in North America,
> is a "homogenous"/"uniform" language, from coast to coast. :)

You can't have spent much time in the country there.

> >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.

I know, and not relevant in this situation, nor at the edges of Germandom, where German was the language of the elite.

> >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).

I know.

> >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.
>

I haven't heard it used in Germany, nor in Sweden formerly where immigration opposers were ideologically Blut und Boden, the adoption of the Danish idea of belongingness through choice by the new party the Sweden Democrats has caused considerable tactical difficulties for their opponents who now have to resort to attempting to prove that they don't *really* mean that, but are still old-school nationalists.


Torsten