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

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