Fun Stuff > CHATTER
English is weird
Cornelius:
That sounds all too familiar here. What dialect I speak, is rather eclectic, due to not having learned at home, but later in life, in school. It's good to see the dialects in a bit of a renaissance, and taking a place in popular culture again.
Erpelman sounds and reads very familiar to me. Erpelschelder is what we call a potato peeling knife around here.
--- Quote from: Case on 17 Nov 2020, 05:04 --- 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')[/size]
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Ehm... Either I'm misremembering, or my German teacher dropped the ball on this in high school. :roll:
Case:
--- Quote from: Cornelius on 17 Nov 2020, 07:57 ---
--- Quote from: Case on 17 Nov 2020, 05:04 --- 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')[/size]
--- End quote ---
Ehm... Either I'm misremembering, or my German teacher dropped the ball on this in high school. :roll:
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(click to show/hide)Which one? The rhenish regiolect version of the continous aspect, or the standard German construct with 'gerade'? I wouldn't blame your German teacher - Personally, I wasn't aware that German had a 'continous aspect', nor that my local people used a different one, until I stumbled upon this Wikipage a couple years ago. None of my teachers pointed out to us that German had a 'Verlaufsform'. I only noticed, while learning Dutch, that certain constructs appeared odd to me, but oddly familiar at the same time - likely because I had heard similar constructs used in my neck of the woods.
Might also depend on where your teacher learned German - this is one of the regiolects spoken in parts of Northrhine-Westphalia, the state that borders both Belgium and the Netherlands. Small wonder we Rhenish folk would 'borrow' stuff from our neighbors (aka "you guys"). Otoh, Northrhine-Westphalia alone has the same population size as the Netherlands ... so it's big enough that 'we' can harbour delusions about our speaking 'proper' standard German. Other Germans ... might regrettably (and erronously :wink:) beg to differ. The 'thing about Germans' is ... there's rather a lot of us, yknow?
(Or when they learned it - in '96, Switzerland, Austria and Germany sat down and agreed on an updated specification of Standard German. Doesn't mean everybody outside the chattering classes feels honour-bound to use it at all times).
In my hometown, nobody would look askance at you for mixing both 'continous aspect forms', eg: "Ich bin gerade am Lesen" (roughly "Ik ben nu(!!) aan het lezen" - "I am at (the) reading right now"). You might even throw in a 'jetzt' ('now') for good measure without anybody batting an eye: "Ich bin jetzt gerade am Lesen" ("I am nowrightnow at (the) reading") - that'd be double redundancy. And everbody would insist that this is indeed proper standard German. Until we meet some poor Germans from another region, who also believe that their regiolect is "Proper High German".
We also code-switch a lot between formal- and casual speech, and tend mix our regional dialects into our speech subconsciously - in many social settings, standard German might feel outright stilted, in others, it'd feel boorish not to use it.
TL;DR - The 'thing about German' is that Germans actually believe it is one language.
cybersmurf:
German is as diverse as any language with 100 million native speakers. If you look at British Isles, you have several different countries with several variations of one language. And German is no different. Admittedly, Germany is by far the largest and most contributing country, but you have so much variation within. Even if you look at Austria, a country of mere 8.9 million inhabitants has several distinctive dialects. Not even including Western Austria, because that's more Swiss whatever than German 😜
The only reason why everyone thinks German is actually so uniform: we managed to agree to a common ground. Something most people can switch to, at least to a certain degree. Plus the cliché of the meticulous, exact German.
As far as "ich bin gerade am Lesen" is concerned: that kind of sentence is something I actively use, at least in spoken language. You made me realise although I might use that quite regularly, I've probably hardly ever used it in written form apart from direct speech.
Case:
--- Quote from: cybersmurf on 17 Nov 2020, 13:37 ---As far as "ich bin gerade am Lesen" is concerned: that kind of sentence is something I actively use, at least in spoken language. You made me realise although I might use that quite regularly, I've probably hardly ever used it in written form apart from direct speech.
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IDK, I just read that one wiki a while ago and realized only then that this is maybe not how all Germanophones would speak? "Ich lese gerade" or "Ich bin am Lesen" or "Ich bin gerade am Lesen" - all feel correct to me. The wiki sez that this is no longer a Rhenish-exclusive thing, that it has spread across most of Germany recently (and apparently Austria, too)
Then again, I figure there's so much weird shit you can do with German that a nabbed piece of Dutch grammar hardly stands out?
P.S.: How do Austrians feel about the 'Rechtschreibreform' and their northern cousins endlessly tinkering with it? Is it more "Ohey, good idea!" or "This is SO Piefke!"? (bcs, to be honest, it's totally Piefke ...)
cybersmurf:
--- Quote from: Case on 17 Nov 2020, 14:19 ---P.S.: How do Austrians feel about the 'Rechtschreibreform' and their northern cousins endlessly tinkering with it? Is it more "Ohey, good idea!" or "This is SO Piefke!"? (bcs, to be honest, it's totally Piefke ...)
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Well, a lot of people thought it was confusing. And whenthey made some changes (so, now we're talking "Neue neue Rechtschreibung") it felt like they made some things clearer. It's not something I feel "oh, that's so German!", probably because I was too young when it happened.
I was born in '85, so I started out learning the old spelling, but switching somewhere... mid-education? The year I graduated was the year only the new rules were valid. Until then you were allowed to use either, as long as you stuck to one.
TL:DR of my thst entire conversation: if you think English was weird, you've never delved into the depths of any other language. Any language grown naturally has so many inconsistencies, it just makes them weird too. Just differently weird. looking at French numbers
English spelling rules are just so ancient switching to Cyrillic might be an easier task than a spelling reform.
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