Re: Announcement: New auxlang "Choton"

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

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