Hi Mark!
I was quite perplexed to read that they write Missingsch in the Low Saxon Wikipedia. So I
just went there and checked out ten random pages. Having grown up in a rural area near
Hamburg, it`s easy for me tell apart Low Saxon from Missingsch. The whole issue seems to
be very exaggerated. All ten articles I've read were without a doubt in Plattdüütsch.
Of course single articles might not be - I haven`t checked the whole Wikipedia. However,
one can note that depending on the subject of the article the share of words that very
closely resemble standard German words or are even identical (in writing !) is sometimes
quite high. But this is a usual phenomenon in Low Saxon. Generally speaking, the more
scientific a text gets the closer it comes to Hochdeutsch. Surely, sometimes this can lead
to the fact that certain passages of articles don`t look too much like Platt. This can
been seen very clearly in this article:
http://nds.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilia . It has
two sections, both written by the same author, as far as I can tell. The first
("Norddüütsche Slangen") is very "pure" Low Saxon. The second
("Systematik") looks very much like standard German, due to its topic. I think
even without knowing both languages in detail you can easily tell the difference. But this
is not to be confused with Missingsch. You just couldn`t say that differently or more
"real", if you want.
I don`t who actually brought up this Missingsch issue (native speaker? hobby linguist?).
But as a matter of fact, nds-WP is written in Low Saxon. If individual pages are in other
languages (which to some degree happens in many Wikipedias) the guys at nds can certainly
cope with that. However, I disbelieve that this part of the reason native speakers of Low
Saxon in the Netherlands ask for a separate WP.
Boris
Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com>om>, wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org schrieb am 04.07.05
01:38:06:
Also, it seems to me that Walter, Wouter, and Servien are intent on
ignoring the issue of nds.wiki being in Missingsch rather than real
nds. But this is a real issue, and we need to deal with it. I have
personally received complaints from members of lowlands-l about
nds.wiki being in Missingsch, which is not actually Low Saxon but
rather a "contact variety".
Surely, mutual intelligiblity would be increased very much if this
huge problem were solved. I'm sure one of the main problems is the
fact that it's written in Missingsch.
Perhaps before starting nds-nl.wiki, somebody should start
real-nds.wiki, and after that we can see if things are any better.
Mark
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