Re: introduction Middelsprake

Hello!

There seems to be some technical problem. Your mail arrived without
any line breaks whatsoever. I've now inserted some where it made
sense...

On 6/29/05, Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder@...> wrote:
> >
> >> >> Wat ig wilde wete gerne, is:
> >> >> *kan du lese dis?
> >
> >Javisst. I mean, yes. :-)
> #Dat is fantastisch
:-D

> >> *in fal du kom fran en land mid en Germanisch sprake, helpe dat di to
> >> forsta Middelsprake?
> >
> >Yes and no. (Which reminds me -- does Middelsprake have a word that
> >corresponds to that extremely useful German word _jein_/_jain_,
> >meaning "yes and no"?)
> #You just added a word to MS vocabulary: [jEi] = yes&no, cross word
> from = yes + = no, a synonym of MS [ja:"nEi], like in Dutch where we
> just say
Glad to hear that I helped you there. I guess _jein_ is also on my
(unofficial because not written-down) list of words that absolutely
*have* to go into the vocabulary of any conlang of mine...

> >First of all, I sort of come from two countries with Germanic
> >languages (depending on your definition of "coming from"); I'm from
> >Germany originally, and I'm a native speaker of German, but I've been
> >living in Finland -- to be precise, in the south of Finland, where
> >there's a sizable Swedish-speaking minority -- for more than ten
> >years.
> # MS means both and , so: where are you from (country, city) and
> where are you coming from/where do you come from (any place).
Ah, I see. So MS, like so many other languages, has the ambiguity of
"I come from Finland (because my place of residence is there)", "I
come from Germany (because I was born there)", and "I come from the
library (because that's where I spent the last two hours)". And
probably also "I come from $name_of_company (because that's my
employer and they sent me here to help you, get information from you,
drop off the merchandise you ordered, or whatever)".

But I'm sure you have ways to distinguish these things if you want to,
right? Something like (guessing from German and Swedish and the things
I know about Dutch phonology) _bue_ (Sw. _bo_) or _woone_
(G. _wohnen_) for "have one's place of residence"; _stamme fran_ or
_stemme fran_ (G. _stammen aus_) for "be (originally) from"; and so
on. (I'm probably way off on everything except _fran_ here, but you
get what I'm trying to say. ;)

> # Spreke du okso Swedisch on Finnisch, oller alene Swedisch? Leve du
> in en stad/torp war de folk spreke Swedisch oller Finnisch, oller
> boide?
Jag bor i Vanda, där det finns både finsk- och svenskspråkiga folk och
där alla trafikmärken är tvåspråkiga (fast finnarna är i majoritet).

OK, back to English now: I live in Vantaa (if you speak Finnish) /
Vanda (if you speak Swedish), and there are Finnish- and
Swedish-speaking people there and all the road signs and street names
and so on are bilingual; but the majority of the people here is
Finnish-speaking. (That's probably true for most coastal regions in
Finland, except for some of the islands, which have a strong
Swedish-speaking majority.)

I speak both languages (or at least I do my best ;) . I came here to
learn Finnish originally, but I noticed soon that if you already know
German and English, Swedish doesn't require that much extra effort.
(Besides, some knowledge of Swedish is very useful when dealing with
Finnish slang!) However, my Swedish-speaking friends tell me that it's
quite unusual for a foreigner in Finland to study Swedish, unless they
happen to live in Åland (probably the only part of Finland where
*everybody* speaks Swedish).

> >However, it wasn't so much my knowledge of German and Swedish (and the
> >bits and pieces I know of Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch) that helped
> >me... My German didn't help much at all (I'm from the south, not even
> >close to the area where Low German is spoken). My Swedish was much
> >more useful; but the most important factors were my knowledge of the
> >history of the Germanic languages and my ability to use simple
> >(guesstimated) phonetic correspondences to "convert" unknown
> >Middelsprake words into some German or Swedish word I know. :-)
> #Du ha forgeted Engelisch ;-)
Nej, det har jag inte. :-) Actually my English was about as useful (or
useless) as my German here, unless you count the time I spent reading
your English translations and explanations, of course.

> Ig is lükkig dat du segge du kande forsta MS meer fordat du kenne
> Swedisch den fran Dütisch. Mennisches fran Skandinavie segge ofte MS
> is meest likas West-germanisch, folk fran (Süd-)Dütischland segge
> det is likas Saksisch, on anderes tenke an Frisisch oller
> Nederlandisch. Doch de kan al lese on forsta det. Dat mene dat al
> folk kan kenne weder tinge fran forskillig sprakes in MS, on ig mag
> lide dat.
Well, my Swedish helped me more than my German because MS, like
Swedish (but unlike Standard German), never went through the second
(High German) sound shift (the one that gave us e.g. _Wasser_ in
German, as opposed to _water_ in English, _vatten_ in Swedish, and so
on). If German and Swedish were the only options to choose from, I'd
have to say that all Germanic languages except for Standard German and
the High German dialects look sort of Swedish to me (except for
English, which looks like a weird cross between Swedish and Latin).
;-)

But since German and Swedish are not the only options, I can say that
MS looks sort of Danish-Dutch-Low German (which probably includes
Frisian) to me. Even though I'm technically from southern Germany, it
doesn't look Saxon at all -- maybe because it's so different from what
little I remember of the Saxon-colored German my grandmother spoke.
Too strong influences from the west (Dutch) and north (Scandinavian
languages) in MS, I guess. -- Or maybe the language/dialect I call
"Saxon" ("Sächsisch", the German dialect spoken in the bundesland of
Saxony, and to some extent also in other regions in eastern Germany)
just isn't the one you call "Saksisch"?

> >> *forsta du al uter problem, kan du forsta de halfte, oller alene en lüttel
> >> af dis?
> >
> >Almost everything. The two words I could make no sense of with my
> >historical-phonological method (_meen_ and _krüsworde_) I was able to
> >guess from the context. (Of course my guessing was made easier by your
> >explanation of _krüsworde_ in another mail. ;)
> # meen = E mean, G gemein, NL gemeen = common
That's what I guessed from the context. My method led me to _mean_ and
_mine_ -- and also _moan_, _moon_, and _mane_ at a very low
probability -- and one of them made somewhat more sense in that
sentence than the others. ;-)

Regards,
Julia

--
   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
_@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)