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Re: Diglossia (was Re: Nur-ellen in the world of Brithenig)

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Monday, September 11, 2000, 22:47
On Tue, 12 Sep 2000, =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F6rg?= Rhiemeier wrote:

> John Cowan tetent: > > > > "Jörg Rhiemeier" wrote: > > > > > I guess that Kerno was officially held to be a dialect of Brithenig > > > until a few decades ago, while in fact it is a language of its own. Are > > > Brithenig and Kerno mutually intelligible or not? > > > > Um. There really is no fact of the matter about it. Are High and Low > > German mutually intelligible, or not? > > They are not, or only marginally so. My mother language is High > (Standard) German (though the language of my forebears was Low German), > and I still find it quite difficult to understand spoken Low German even > though I have familiarized myself with it a bit. It is practically a > foreign language, though quite an easy one because it is notably > similar. In fact, in many ways Low German is more similar to *English* > than to High German. (This also makes it easier to me.) At any rate, > it is closer to Dutch than to anything else. The situation, however, is > complicated by the fact that Low German is itself splintered into about > half a dozen main dialect groups (and countless local verieties) some of > which are barely mutually intelligible.
<despairing look> You mean I'm taking German and I'll be able to read abstruse German topology text but I won't be able to *talk* to anyone? I should've listened harder when my boyfriend made some vague mention of High/Low German. Yoon Ha Lee, now depressed