You're actually very wrong in saying that I had never heard of these dialects before this discussion.
That's where you're wrong in your beliefs about me. You assume in your whole ideas about my involvement in languages on Wikipedia that I don't, or can't, know anything about the majority of the languages. But nearly all of the languages I've been involved in are ones I've heard of before, and quite often I've read a lot about them.
I've been subscribed to lowlands-l for months now, well before this discussion started, and I've seen a lot of back-and-forth discussion about Low Saxon from people in Germany and the Netherlands.
Certainly, being a native speaker does not mean you know _about_ your language. A rural farmworker in Montana will not know how many people speak English worldwide, and he probably wouldn't know that English is a SVO language. He probably also wouldn't know about Scots, a language closely related to English, or about English pidgins and creoles spoken in Africa, the Carribean, and beyond.
Mark
On 03/07/05, Walter van Kalken walter@vankalken.net wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
Servien, at this point you have gone beyond even a distortion of reality to pure fantasy.
Node a couple of native speakers are telling you constantly you are wrong. And you who had never heard of the dialects before this discussion is all of a sudden accusing native speakers of fantasizing???????? You are going way to far. First me, than Wouter and now Servien are telling you you are wrong. Why can't you just accept the fact that you are wrong and that one person cannot know about every language in the world. There is a reason people specialize you know.
<skipped rest of nonsense>
Walter/Waerth