Re: Intergermansk

On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 21:38:08 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

>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?
There are good reasons for either classication of the languages. I'd say
that the political aspect is probably the deciding elements in that it
supports one of those systems, making it popular, whereas an other system
would be just as good (or even better). The decision taken by politics has
generally nothing to do with linguistics (as most politicians don't have a
clue about it), but for completely other reasons.

>> >>> 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's what I already found out when I looked through the Swedish course of
the Business school of Stockholm, so I figured it would be no problem then.

> 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.
Over here, I always hear it pronounced /lateks/. (Not that I would ever
touch it with pincers, mind you, but I don't need it as I'm avoiding
anything maths-related like the plague, as far as possible).

>(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.)
I see... I've already read about the /S/->/x/ change in the course.

--
Pascal A. Kramm, author of:
Intergermansk: http://www.choton.org/ig/
Chatiga: http://www.choton.org/chatiga/
Choton: http://www.choton.org
Ichwara Prana: http://www.choton.org/ichwara/
Skälansk: http://www.choton.org/sk/
Advanced English: http://www.choton.org/ae/