Westphalian vs. Winterwijks (Was: German+Hungarian question)

Hi!

Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder@...> writes:
> Whoa, that is really hard core Westphalian, with all those diphthongs.
:-)

> The whole sound system seems to be mutated, it's not so easy to get at
> first sight. Very interesting, very exotic, very nice!
And unfortunately, very dead. :-<

> I would guess that this is a dialect from a mountainous, wooded and
> somewhat remote country, completely outside the mainstream of Low Saxon.
Haha! :-)  So I'm from the end of the world...

For a precise location: my grandma was from Hoyel, Kreis Melle.  When
looking at the map, you'll see that that's actually in Lower Saxony,
not in Eastwestfalia, though it's only 10km from where she then moved
and to where I grew up, too.  The dialect is much more closely related
to the (East-)Westfalian dialects than to typical Lower Saxony
dialects.  And Osnabrück is typically classified as having Westphalian
dialect, too.  I don't know how the classification is done precisely,
though.

Anyway, I once stumbled on a book about 'Eastphalian' dialect and was
surprised to see that the diphthong system was so close to that of my
grandma's that I immediately bought the book.  And not only the
diphthongs are similar, but the whole language.  I had no problems
understanding every word of the sample texts.  Anyway, some texts on
the Internet about Eastphalian describe a totally alien language, so
someone has a misclassification/misnomer there -- those just can't be
about the same thing.

> An attempt:
Very good!  So Winterwijks has the word 'butz' (in some variation) and
'dal' for 'down'.  'kuiern' for 'to speak' is very local, I think.  I
think it still existed in Old High German or even Middle High German,
I forget which, but most modern languages seem to have dropped it.

Very interesting comparison. :-)

**Henrik