Re: German+Hungarian question

Hi!

Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder@...> writes:
> "Ringeles" (Ringel-S) is Dutch? It's the term we learned at German class
> at secondary school, and pronounced as if it were German...
I vaguely remember that the Dutch I met in Groningen told me the same
about their German classes.  But it's definitely not German, in German
it's either 'Eszett' (from the letter names for 's' + 'z') or
'scharfes S'.

> But Henrik, what dialect do you speak?
East-Westphalian High German.  No Low German unfortunately, my grandma
was the last generation to be fluent.  I understand it and know a few
phrases, but my mother tongue is High German with dialectal colour.
It was a very, very nice language.

By moving around in Germany, my spoken language's dialectal colour has
vanished a bit, because some expressions were weird to other people
and you just change your language when people are surprised each time
you say some perfectly normal word.  It's disturbing and unnatural, so
it changes.  So my language is more Standard High German now that it
was 13 years ago.

> In the LS of my native town, Wenters (Dutch Winterswijk) in the Guelders
> (Gelderland) Ächterhook (Dutch Achterhoek), <krigste> ["krIxst@) etc also
> has a short [I], while <kriegen> to get = ["kri:g=N] or ["kri:G@n].
So the vowels are exactly the same in my home town dialect. :-)

It's interesting -- my home town High German dialect is definitely
influenced my the Low German that used to be spoken there, so the
linkage to Dutch and even more often, to some West-Netherland's local
language, is interesting (and not unexpected).  Talking to people in
Groningen, I also found that some dialectal words had equivalents in
some of those language, e.g. dialectal 'nölen' ~ [n9:ln=] in Hengelo
dialect (I think its 'zeuren' in Standard Dutch, right?).  Also some
correspondences to Standard Dutch exist, often in vowel quantity:

   'dag'   [dAX]      ~ 'Tag'  [tax]    (Standard: [ta:k])
   'dagen' [da:X@(n)] ~ 'Tage' [ta:g@]

It's all a large continuum of dialects. :-)

> I'm still curious about Hungarian...
Unfortunately, no idea.  Hmm, I will ask a Hungarian and tell you then
unless someone else is faster.

**Henrik

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