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Re: Announcement: New auxlang "Choton"

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Friday, October 8, 2004, 18:36
Hi!

"Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...> writes:
> quick interruption here . . . > > You German folks seem to be using "dialect" to mean something specific; > normally it just refers to any variety of speech, regardless of whether > or not said variety is recognized as some standard. What do you mean > by it?
I'd say there are two meanings: a) a variant of High German This then means a minor difference to the standard pronunciation of that language ('standard pronunciation' obviously being a concept not applicable to English). This is a minor usage of 'dialect' however. b) a different German language/dialect (sorry for repeating the same word in the definition) This then refers to usually mutually intelligible variants of German that have undergone different sound changes and and often use different vocab. It could often be said that those are different languages, but that's not usually done, because they are so intelligible and there is not political motivation to distinguish them as a language. However, Bavarian or Plattdeutsch (both of which again occur in many variants) and some others seem to be accepted as different languages. Plattdeutsch is closer to Dutch than NHG, for example. This is the major usage of 'dialect'. For myself, for example, I can say that I do not speak a local dialect (def. b) anymore, but my grandma did (the last generation who did). I can understand it, however. But I speak some variant of NHG (def. a), e.g. I lack some phonemic distinctions (seldom) and some phonetic distinctions (often) of NHG involving diphthongs in vocalic /r/ and there is no initial /pf/ affricate for me. E.g. I have: |Pfad| /fa:d/ [fa:t] |fad| /fa:d/ [fa:t] |Fahrt| /fart/ [fa:t] The standard NHG would predict the following: |Pfad| /pfa:d/ [pfa:t] |fad| /fa:d/ [fa:t] |Fahrt| /fa:rt/ [fa:6t] In the text above, b) is meant. **Henrik

Replies

Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>