USAGE: (YAGPT?): Swiss German (was: Intergermansk)

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 15:19:13 -0500, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:

>JMW = "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>:
>
>JMW> None of these differences make a language. I mean, I'm speaking a
>JMW> dialect that is not mutually intellegible with the standard language
>JMW> and differs from the standard language phonologically, lexically,
>JMW> morphologically and grammatically.
>
>Assuming you mean Swiss vs. Standard German, I'm somewhat surprised.  I
>know there are some huge differences, but I thought they were still
>mutually intelligible.
Swiss German speakers understand standard German because most of TV and much
of radio (and of course almost everything written) is standard German. And
because of school, of course, which they now say makes the people hate
standard German (before school, speaking German is a natural game for the
children).

Germans who come to Switzerland need a certain time until they can catch it.
I guess most Germans manage to understand most of it within a week. It
depends hugely on the linguistic ability and also on the dialect. There are
Swiss German dialects of remote valleys in the mountains that even I don't
understand, though I'm not very good at catching other dialects. Many Swiss
Germans have the astonishing ability to tell where someone come's from just
by the melody of the speech, whereas I need to listen carefully at
*linguistic features*... I've learned Swiss German only when I was ten, and
I still have a faint accent most won't notice and even fewer will be able to
localize because we are only very few who speak Swiss German with a German
accent, since most Germans wouldn't ever dare to speak it.

A friend of mine grew up without standard German (in Italy). When they came
to Switzerland (she was about 14), she wouldn't speak or understand standard
German. The teachers couldn't deal with it (it's an unusual case). They
said, you're not good in German, but you still can be good in maths. This
wasn't true, since maths also requires standard German (because of all the
school books and because teaching is supposed to be in standard German).


On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 17:05:35 -0500, Pascal A. Kramm <pkramm@...> wrote:
...
>Well, I'd say it's borderline. Some of it is still understandable, but not
>too much. To name another "dialect": Bavarian is far worse there, as it is
>so totally different from High German (much more so thatn Swiss German)
>that it is totally incomprehensible to a High German speaker, so I'd say
>it's rather a language of its own than a "dialect".
I would have said they're pretty much comparable. I don't believe that
Bavarian is more distant from standard German than Alemannic (of which Swiss
German is a part). The dialectological main distinction between Bavarian and
Alemannic is that Bavarian has diphthongized the Middle High German
monophthongs, as in standard German, whereas Alemannic has not.

kry@s:
j. 'mach' wust