Hoi,
In the discussion on nds, there is one thing that you do not mention and
that is rather relevant.to this discussion. Sass is not a dialect, it is
an orthography so nobody can claim to speak Sass. I have been told that
Lower Saxon has some 200 distinct orthographies. Heiko wants to have a
resource for Sass, this has everything to do with the fact that the
nds.wikipedia is Sass only. The fact that a great resource is created
for this I fully endorse. The problem is about how to treat the non-Sass
content. Sabine did get permission to use a resource. She uploaded this
list onto the it and the nds wiktionary and was told by Heiko that there
were many "errors" in it. It turned out that the words were from many
resources, they should represent different orthographies all considered
to be nds. Heiko started to change these entries to Sass and remove many
entries as well.
At issue is that Sabine informed Heiko and the other people on
nds.wiktionary that she is actively persuing research on this list.
Words have however been deleted some of them have even been identified
as "Missingsch". Now this is something I do not apreciate at all. Words
that are only indicated as nds have no clear pedigree and have a limited
use. When they have been identified as something specific, they can be
attributed to one of the orthographies or even to non nds dialects. When
atributed these words make valuable content. This is given the confusion
that results from the lack of standardisation in nds not unrealistic.
Heiko is aware that Sabine puts real effort in her research and I am
disapointed that he has deleted many words regardless.
On a more positive note, Heiko and I are cooperating in creating a
template that he will use for uploading a large number of nds-sass
content. This will facilitate the inclusion of the nds-wiktionary data
in the Ultimate Wiktionary..
Thanks,
GerardM
Wytukaze wrote:
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