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