So, are you saying that a man from Lars cannot
understand a man from
Gramsbergen??
Of course, this must be so, since the man from Lars speaks "German Low
Saxon" and the man from Gramsbergen speaks "Dutch Low Saxon"... since
of course languages always follow exactly political divisions.
Mark
On 26/06/05, Wouter Steenbeek <musiqolog(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
As I noted
before, it is a dialect continuum.
All of the continental West Germanic language
variants form a dialect
continuum, with the possible exception of the Frisian tongues.
Stellingwarfs and Middel-pommersch are surely not
mutually
intelligible, but Grunnegers and Oostfreesk very well should be.
Yes, so are
Berlinic and High German. And East-Veluws and Dutch. But
Grunnegers and Oostfreesk are not or barely mutually intelligible when
written down, because of the different spellings.
You are foolishly dividing Platt by nations. This
is illogical. If we
had an Oostfreesk Wikipedia, Grunnegers-speakers would surely
understand it and vice-versa, even though Grunnegers is in the
Netherlands and Oostfreesk is mostly in Germany.
"Foolishly"... Mr. I-owe-all-the-world's-languages'-wisdom.... May I
point
at the difference in spelling once more? And don't you think that the bulk
of the Dutch Low-Saxon dialects share some features most German dialects
don't?
The problem of dialect continuum is a very
difficult one.
Yes, so it can't be solved by one such disregarding message.
HOWEVER, given the community reaction to a request
for a Baseldytsch
Wikipedia, I think the same is logical for a request for a "Dutch Low
Saxon" Wikipedia
Is it? Is Servien requesting a Wikipedia for just one town,
or region? No,
she obviously realises that, though the speaking communities hardly link
dialects on any higher level than their own region (they will never say they
speak Low Saxon, but always either the dialect of their own village or
region, Twents, Sallands, Drents etc.), we should group some of them
together. This is very different from what the proposer of the Baseldytsch
Wikipedia did: he simply said: "I have no affinity with the other Alemannic
dialects, so I want to open one for my dialect only".
-- your language may be different to whatever
degree
than what many people on X Wikipedia use, but there is no rule
forbidding its use. There is no rule against writing pages and pages
and pages of content on nds.wiki in Stellingwarfs or Achterhooks. When
I suggested doing this, I got a cold response that Dutch Low Saxon and
German Low Saxon aren't mutually intelligible. Before whinging to us
about that, can you at least actually try to use your dialect on
nds.wiki to prove to us that it really doesn't work?
Some users of nds: made
clear that they only use one spelling: the Sass one.
Dutch Low Saxon dialects are /never/ written in German spellings, except
with some German-initiated projects.
Mark
Imo, the combined facts of mutual confusion in both speach and spelling
makes this idea a valuable one.
Wouter
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