Re: introduction Middelsprake

Hello!

On 6/26/05, Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder@...> wrote:

[snip snip]

> Wat ig wilde wete gerne, is:
>
> *kan du lese dis?
Javisst. I mean, yes. :-)

> *in fal du kom fran en land mid en Germanisch sprake, helpe dat du 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"?)

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.

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. :-)

> *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. ;)

Regards/Gruß/Hälsningar,
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)