Re: KT boundry event


Andre G. Isaak wrote:
In article <1146653644.527962.260620@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Richard Forrest" <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Andre G. Isaak wrote:
In article <e39r9i$1aha$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
John Wilkins <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Back around 1000CE, an English speaker, a Lowlander, and a German speaker
were
mutually comprehensible. The dialects have diverged due to unique
histories,
but there's no reason to think that Germans inhabit some kind of
different
world view because they have different terms with different extensions of
use.

Although I agree with the general points you make, the date you give
here seems suspect. 500 CE is probably more reasonable (though whatever
date we pick is going to depend a lot on what 'mutually comprehensible'
is taken to actually mean).

Andre

There is considerable variety of dialects which are still spoken in
parts of Germany, and even TV and radio programmes broadcast in the
local "Plattdeutsch". In general these dialects are incomprehensible to
other German speakers.

I worked for a year in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, on the Baltic coast of
north-eastern Germany. My secretary was local, had married an American
airman and escaped to the West before the border controls were
tightened up, and returned to her home when the wall came down. Her
father was a local fisherman, and spoke both "Hochdeutsch" and the
local dialect. She found that her husband (who never learned to speak
any German) and her father (who had never learned English) could
understand each other: the dialect was close enough to English to be
comprehensible to an English speaker.

This could be a bit disconcerting at times. I was there only a couple
of years after the wall came down, and there were very few English
speakers around. If an English tourist arrived in the area, it was such
a rare event that people made a point of mentioning it to me. Yet I
could be sitting in a bar, and suddenly hear a sentence in which
sounded English from another table. It would be locals talking in
dialect.

The family relations between the various germanic languages are somewhat
complicated, and in many respects the low german dialects have a closer
affinity to dutch and frisian than they do to high german (though not in
others -- one of the reasons why the use of phylogenetic trees in
linguistic taxonomy is somewhat controversial), and a certain degree of
intelligibility can exist between English, Dutch, and Frisian (depending
on subject matter), but not without considerable effort.

At any rate, the 500CE date I chose is a reasonable one to demarcate the
split between what was to become English and the various continental
dialects of Dutch and Low German. Of course, this split did not entail
an immediate loss of intelligibility, nor that similarities between some
dialects should could persist even to this day.

I had a point but I seem to have forgotten what it was. Ah well...

Andre


I don't think I had any particular point, but it's something I find
fascinating!

RF

--
Andre G. Isaak
n.b. there are no monotremes in my email address

.

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