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

Quoting John Cowan <cowan@...>:

> 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 :-) ).
Since Dutch is essentially Low German with an army and a fleet, and I figure
that Polish must've been in atleast as much contact with eastern variants of
Low German as with NE ones of High German, it seems very possibly that they
may've spread along the North Sea and Baltic Sea coasts, but getting wiped in
Northern Germany by the inroads of High German.

                                                                Andreas