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English is weird
cesium133:
Consonant clusters are fairly common in Germanic languages (e.g. “Deutschland”). The sounds represented by “th” also used to be more common in Germanic languages, but they’ve been lost in almost all of them. As far as I know the only remaining ones with those sounds are English and Icelandic.
N.N. Marf:
--- Quote from: Morituri on 16 Nov 2020, 21:37 ---ESL speakers almost always wind up saying 'tweffs' or something like that.
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The trick, I found, is to say it like ``twelths.'' Anytime I listen closely, I hear the ``f'' subsumed in the dental friction. Even stressed. Not listening closely, it sounds like it's just there.. It's not. Not that I've heard, at least.
Case:
--- Quote from: Morituri on 16 Nov 2020, 18:42 ---'Weird' is usually said to be from old english, because any other source is uncertain or unknown. But old english, like modern english was a shapeshifting thief. I'm fairly sure we originally got 'Weird' from an *earlier* theft of 'qwer' from German.
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Nitpick: When you talk about 'German' spoken centuries ago, it's usually a good idea to add the time-period you have in mind - or better still, the period-appropriate name. German and Dutch eg parted ways only about a millenium ago.
(click to show/hide)Secondly, it's important to keep in mind that there's no such thing as a neat evolution of the German language - the idea that there was always just one universal version spoken by all Germanophones of their respective period everywhere in Europe who all agreed on 'periodic updates' simultaneously. That's not even really true today - standard high German is our 'lingua Germanica', the language we (Germans, Austrians, some parts of Switzerland and Belgium) all learn in school so we can understand each other. German dialects vary substatially and even native speakers can have trouble understanding other native speaker's regional dialects. I have trouble understanding the regional dialect spoken in my current place of residence, and I only moved 250km south (Aaaaand Wiki informs me that my local version is considered the 'East Bergish' variety of the 'Low Franconian' dialect of German, and is part of the 'Limburgish group', which includes parts of the Netherlands and Belgium. Well, now I know ... )
TL;DR - I'm no linguist, but afaik: There's Germans, a smorgasbord of related ethnicities, who lived practically everywhere in Central and Central Eastern Europe. They are old as balls (and never called themselves 'Germans'). There's a nation called Germany, and it's a bit younger than the GoP. There's a germanic language called German, and ... afaics, historically, it's rather a very broad river with multiple tributaries - and there's sister-rivers like Dutch and Frisian that split off at some point in history. And if anyone has dibs on 'Germanic' culture, I'd venture that the Danes might be hot contenders for the title rather than the people that Anglos insist on calling Germans.
Edit: Apparently, there's some debate even today as to whether there's one German language with multiple, strongly varying dialects, or whether those dialects constitute different languages in their own right.
Cornelius:
Limburgish has actually been recognised as a separate minority language in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, so there's that. Though it seems that for this language, it's only ratified by the Netherlands. Then again, I don't see Belgium recognising another language anytime soon - it's complicated enough as is.
Hendrik van Veldeke/Heinrich von Veldeke is just about at the moment where German and Dutch started to part ways - and as such is the foundation figure for German, Dutch, and Limburgish literature.
Case:
--- Quote from: Cornelius on 17 Nov 2020, 04:44 ---Limburgish has actually been recognised as a separate minority language in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, so there's that. Though it seems that for this language, it's only ratified by the Netherlands. Then again, I don't see Belgium recognising another language anytime soon - it's complicated enough as is.
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What makes me a bit sad - the standardisation process that led to standard (high) German wasn't really neat and completely voluntary. IMO, it was very much part of the top-down effort to consolidate unification and didn't really cherish the richness of local varieties: I don't speak 'my' local dialect because my maternal Grandmother made a conscious decision not to teach it to her daughters, since she feared it would condemn them to being snubbed as lower caste. I have some fragments - my Granddad would say he'd go 'op dorp' ("(in-)to the village"), and he called the guy making rounds every odd week selling potatoes "de Erpelmann" (I've never seen those written out, so ... take the spelling with healthy doses of scepticism).
When I studied in the Netherlands, I didn't find Dutch that hard to acquire (especially compared to French ...), and was bemused by some of my fellow German students' reluctance to familiarize themselves with the language. I actually thought it snobbery back then - why did they rely on our Dutch hosts' generosity and skill to facilitate communication without at least making an effort for politeness' sake? Now I'm wondering whether I had an advantage growing up amongst people who still retained knowledge of a regional dialect more closely related to Dutch and Belgian dialects than some other German ones?
Edit: Amongst 'my' Bergish folk, it's still not uncommon to use some grammatical constructs that don't exist in standard German, but in standard Dutch (though, these days, they're sometimes used 'ironically' - the speaker signals awareness that it is not 'proper German' grammar) -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinelandic_regiolect (Especially the continuous aspect that is absent in standard German: Using 'am' or 'beim' in a way similar to the Dutch usage of 'aan het' - Rhenish people will say 'Ich bin am Lesen' just like Dutchfolk will say 'Ik ben aan het lezen', whereas Standard German is 'Ich lese gerade')
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