Hello all,
What with the recent heated debate about nds: while I've been on a (less-than-brilliant) trip to Ghana, I thought I'd talk ramblingly at you fine members of the list for a while.
As we all know, English has a number of standards for spellings, usually termed "British" and "American". What some might not know is that these are not real standards at all; they are just conventions. It's similar in many ways to those parts of the UK constitution termed "conventions": Things are done that way because they always have been, it's tradition - not because it has to be. Ui kan rui' luik dhis in Inglish if ui won'. But that's just the point; I can't write like that in English, and expect to be taken seriously or even to be understood well, even though that's a reasonable go at representing my accent. It's a symptom of an age-old problem for descriptivists. Even if prescriptivist notions might stymy certain aspects of language, they still exist, and are as valid a reason for language change as borrowings or sound changes. They're certainly needed so that a Geordie could talk to a Ga in writing; in speech, they have a damn hard time understanding each other's English.
So, with that in mind, what about Plattdüütsch? There's a large number of conventions, some only accepted by small amounts of people, and there's even the complicating factor of bilingualism - Just what bits of High German do you call borrowings? From what I can see, Sabine and Gerard want to take the descriptivist route and describe all spelling and pronunciation variants on a reasonably-equal footing, and for that, they must be congratulated. It's quite a task to undertake. However, Heiko, who, I take it, is a native speaker of the Sass dialect, wants a bit of space to give students and enthusiasts something to actually learn consistently. Now, let's not be too quick to jump to it being one of those descriptivist-prescriptivist debates. I seriously urge you to listen to Heiko here, he's got a point. Those more common forms should be listed precisely as that, more common forms - They shouldn't quite be on a level pegging, IMHO. Orthography is a real problem, and it'll probably never be fully unified, as the dialects diverge and merge more and the situation gets worse.
To put a bit of perspective on it, allow me to teach you something about Ga orthography. The alphabet is your basic Latin-influenced-by-IPA, like this:
a b d e ɛ f g h i j k l m n ŋ o ɔ p r s t u (v) w y (z)
The consonants I've stuck in brackets are because they're quite uncommon, extant though they are.
The alphabet is phonetic, and there's not really much of a situation with dialects. So, everyone spells everything the same way, right? Well, almost. Take the digraph 'ts'. This is pronounced, consistently, as English 'ch', German 'tsch', etc. But, its voiced companion is 'j'... Usually. You can also write it as 'dz' (as in the family name 'Obadzen') or even as 'dj'. So even here there's room for orthographical preference. Still, that's not quite the end of it.
A tilde (~) placed over a letter indicates nasalisation. My stepfather pronounces nearly all of his vowels this way, in actuality, though he only writes the tilde where it is canonically present. But if you go look at http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eny%C9%94 ("enyɔ", two) you will notice there is an alternative form listed, http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eny%C9%94%CC%83 ("enyɔ̃"), and it is precisely that.
By now you may be thinking "That's all well and good, but what the hell are you talking about?!". My point is, we can't simplify nds:'s problems to the extent we may like to. It has quite a unique position and we have to represent _every_ aspect of the language, if we can. That doesn't mean merely list every form we can find, it also means we have to state which forms are preferred, most common, where and when. Take "abschreim", supposedly Low Saxon, but presumably in High German orthography, and even High German pronunciation. It's a slang term, right? Slang is very often cross-language; you'll hardly ever hear a Ga saying "buulu" (fool; very, very offensive), but "motherfucker"? They've been exposed to it, and to the younger ones it seems cool to use it, even while speaking Ga for the entire conversation. Do young Low Saxon speakers use "abschreim" while speaking in their native dialect? It's worth thinking about.
So, thanks for reading this far, and I hope some of what I said made sense, and didn't offend anyone.
Wes gesund,
Wytukaze