Re: CHAT: Being taken for a furriner ...

On Wed, 1 Sep 2004 12:16:50 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

>Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>:
>
>> On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 20:54:24 +0200, =?iso-8859-1?q?Steven=20Williams?=
>> <feurieaux@...> wrote:
>
>> >He used articles with proper names, which I find
>> >awesomely cool, if a bit comical. I'd use them myself,
>> >if I felt brave enough.
>>
>> In German, that is? It's considered to be a southern regionalism, and
>> maybe northern speakers consider it to be vulgar.
>
>Where'd you draw the South-North border for this purpose? Articles with
>proper names was very common in Aix-la-Chapelle, in students' speech at
>least. I went from an occasional to a habitual user of it there.
Here in the southern German speaking area, if see a feature our dialects
have but standard German doesn't, then we assume this feature to be a
southern peculiarity. But I'm not sure of it in the case of the use of the
article with nouns.

I know of one feature that is sais to occur all over the German speaking
area except for standard German: The use of dative + possessiv pronoun in
order to express possession in a noun phrase:

dem Deutschen seine Sprache
the-DAT German(-DAT) his speech
'the speech of the German'

The standard is:

die Sprache des Deutschen
the speech the-GEN German(-GEN)

So the use of the article could be a similar case of a feature occurring all
over the German speaking area except for standard German. I don't know it.

gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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