Re: OT: Composing (jara: My girlfriend is a conlanger!)

Jan van Steenbergen scripsit:

> One thing that has never ceased
> to amaze me is that Polish and Dutch have so many expressions in common that
> don't exist in German. I have never really understood how such a situation
> could have emerged.
My first guess would be that German had them once but lost them, and that
they might remain current in German dialects.  Dutch and Polish are at the
extreme ends of the German dialect continuum, after all (particularly if
you believe the essentialist explanation that Polish is a light form of
Russian that even Germans can understand :-) ).

This sort of patchy replacement of dialect forms with the standard (or
nothing, if the standard lacks the item) is well-known e.g. from English
dialectology, and there is the odd distribution of the centum/satem
languages, where the geographical core of I-E became satem but the
periphery remained centum.

--
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There
are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language
that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
        --_The Hobbit_

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