Re: Intergermansk

Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:

> I know the distinction between dialect & language is not precisely defined.
>   There are, for example, some people who maintain that Swedish, Norwegian
> & Danish are not really different languages - merely dialects of
> 'Continental Scandinavian'. IMO the differences between Dutch & Afrikaans
> are greater than those between the continental Scandinavian languages.
Somebody else is actually maintaining that? Cool.

A couple of months ago, a guy posted on an online forum I frequent a linguistic
tree of Europe's languages as it, according to him, would be if purely
linguistic considerations were used in determining languages vs dialects.
Chiefly because of me feeling contrarian, I alleged that dividing the
Scandinavian languages into East and West made very limited sense, and pointed
out that Norwegian and Swedish dialects near the border are more like one
another than more distance 'lects of "their" respective languages. When he
eventually asked me to suggest another grouping instead, I suggested that,
synchronically speaking at least, one could go by "hard" dialect barriers, and
divide the Scandinavian languages into Icelandic, Faeroese, Gutnish, and
Continental.

Being contra-contrarian, I'd also like to question the utility of having a
purely linguistic division into languages and dialects. From the purely
linguistic PoV, there are speech varieties that are more or less close to one
another, the closeness of any two being continuous variable - drawing a
language/dialect border her will always be arbitrary. Why not then accept that
languages and dialects are also matters of ethnic identity, and admit a measure
of politics into the definition?

> >>> 1 Nu ganz werld hafte en sproch med sam words.
> >>
> >> But one difference I can spot immediately: sproch ~ spraak    :)
> >
> > Well, spro-/språ-  is the most universal part, whereas the ending is
> > either
> > -k, -g or -ch, of which I decided for the ch.
>
> Yes - I think either -k or -ch is what is wanted as the final.
>
> The Folkspraak Charter stated: "The primary design principle is that
> Folkspraak omit any linguistic feature not common to most of the modern
> germanic languages."  So it /x/ as it doesn't occur in English (and indeed
> seems to present the same sort of problems to my fellow countryman as /T/
> and /D/ do to yours) nor the continental Scandinavian languages (tho it
> does occur in Afrikaans :)
I'll take exception to that - [x] is all over my Swedish, and over that of a
great many other Swedes. That the phoneme in question is traditionally denoted
/S/ should not be allowed to influence our judgement as to whether it's "the
same" as the /x/ of German or Afrikaans.

It may be noted, tho, that my lect - unlike BP's, I know - doesn't like syllable
-final [x]. I actually had an interesting example of this today; a guy at the
maths institute was introducing me and some other students to the wonders of
LaTeX, and told us that the name, by the decree of Knuth, is to be pronounced
as [la'tEx] - afterwards, he and everyone else said [lA'tES], except me, who
for no specific reason maintained the final velar, despite the foreign flair it
gives.

(This takes me to another beef of mine with the traditional phonematicization of
Swedish, which would, modulo treatment of consonantal length, have that
_schack_, _tjeck_ and _krasch_ are /Sak/, /CEk/ and /kraS/; to me, who
pronounce them as [xak:], [SEk:] and [kr\`aS:], this seems quite wrong,
especially since the [S] of _krasch_ persists if endings are added to make it
syllable initial.)

                                                     Andreas