Talk:Plautdietsch
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I put the example of Homer Groening in but perhaps it should go, i'll put it in for now. :)
P. Stoltzfus
I am not sure that it should be included either, but I think it is important to mention the stigmatisation of Mexican born Old Colony Mennonites in places like Ontario. I grew up in the midst of it and it was quite severe. I have seen classmates who were Mennonites of Mexican origin deny their culture and language. These are the same forces which helped cause the death of Pennsylvania German in the non-Anabaptist communities of Southeastern Pennsylvania and Gaelic in Cape Breton.
P. Stoltzfus
Is Plautdietsch different from the language used for the Plattdüütsch wikipedia. Is it different from Pennsylvania German language (which claims to be a mennonite language), Hutterite German, Texas German? Thanks. Secretlondon 13:13, Nov 12, 2003 (UTC)
- As far as I know, Plattdeutsch is a colloquial term used for both low and middle german dialects. My grandparents in Lower Saxony, Germany spoke both "Plattdeutsch" (Low Saxon) and "High German". Plattdeutsch is going to die off. 82.82.117.83 13:24, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Not really. Plattdeutsch is a Low German dialect. Actually even I (who am from Germany) can't tell the exact differences between Plautdietsch, Plattdeutsch (or Plattdeitsch)(or Plattdüütsch) or Low Saxon. These are all variants of Low German from what I understand. While it is true that High German is spoken by almost all in the area where Plattdeutsch is spoken, they are still a signficant number of speakers who can speak (or snack :-)) Plattdeutsch as well to some degree. I am not so sure that it is going to die off. True, there was a significant decline in it's use in recent decades, especially in cities with many migrants from other parts of Germany, like Hamburg, but I don't think it is going to completely die anytime soon. Middle German actually is also a colloquial term for a number of dialects. But out of these dialects High German evolved during the 16th century. But that does not mean this dialects of Middle German completely eroded. Quite a number of them are still used in everyday life. I for instance who am from the border area of Bavaria and Hesse, which is somewhat on the borders of the Middle and Upper German dialects, still mainly use some local variety of High German. I am surely able to speak High German perfectly but because doing so needs a bit more concentration, I use it only when dealing with non native German speakers or when dealing with Germans from the North, South or East. Within my immediate area I speak my local dialect. I think most Germans do it the same way. First they speak in there own variety of German (Alemannish, Bavarian etc) and if they notice the other has difficulties to grasp what you are talking about, then swap to High German. I don't think this is comparable to, for instance, English spoken in the southern USA and the one in New England. Some Northern German who goes into the bavarian forest and hears only the local dialect of High German is pretty lost if the other is unwilling to speak High German. I don't think that is the case with the above mentioned examples in English.
--Lucius1976 17:04, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
Perhaps Plattdeutsch (or Plattdüütsch), Low Saxon, and Plautdietsch sound very similar. I spoke Mennoninite Plautdietsch as a child, now my knowledge of it is passive; I can understand it, but I speak High German. I've never heard Low Saxon or Plattdeutsch, but numerous speakers of Plautdietsch have told me that these dialects are mutually comprehensible. It is important to note, however, that Plautdietsch refers to the Mennonite dialect; so it also includes borrowings and other changes that have taken place over the past three centuries, first in the Ukraine, then in Western Canada, and finally, for some groups, in Latin America and/or Ontario. For instance, the Plautdietsch word for tomato is "Bockel'zhonn"; I remember the word sounding like "Buckle-John". I suspect that this word is of Slavic, or at least non-Germanic, origin. Perhaps a speaker of Low Saxon or Ukrainian could confirm its origin. I think some of the names for traditional dishes are also of (Ukrainian?) origin. Perhaps "Wreninkje" for their cottage cheese pockets. I could be entirely wrong about these, but, again, a Plattdeutsch speaker from Germany or a speaker of Ukrainian could shed some light on the issue. A more recent example; Mennonites recently arriving in Ontario from Mexico use the word "pluma" for pen. When discussing Canadian Citizenship, they've borrowed the English "Citizen." I'll try to find some more specific examples, and in the case of earlier borrowings, reliable etymology. Perhaps the article could be expanded to include such developements.
I am Mexican born Plautdietsch speaker. Plautdietsch as I learned it, has a handful of words borrowed from English, but frequently adapted to Plautdietsch Phonetics. For instance, Kjäkj for cake, Beissikjel for bicycle, Heiwä for highway, Peinaupel for pineapple. One area with many borrowings has words for auto parts. Bumper, fender, brakes (pronounced Brikjs), "Ploggen" (spark plugs)were all words I learned as Plautdietsch vocabulary. Borrowings from Spanish are very common in speech, nevertheless it seems that, when Mexican Plautdietsch speakers move to other countries, as US or Canada, they seem to abandon those borrowings for English equivalents. However, two words that seem to be completely assimilated, are "Burra" for donkey, Spanish "burro", and "Wrastch" for sandal, Spanish "Huarache". Also very common is "Schiekle" for chewing gum. As a child someone corrected my Plautdietsch saying that "Schiekle" was not correct, I had to use "Shuagumm" instead. Good observation, isn't it?
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I'm curious about this "Plautdietsch". dietsch=deetsch. deitsch=dytsch. I've never heard any pronunciation other than "plattdeitsch". "ie" is pronounced "ee" in German. "ei" is pronounced "eye" in German.
Just my view on the issue of Plattdeutsch:
As I am aware the term Plattdeutsch encompasses a wide variety of languages/dialects spoken in the whole northern part of Germany. It is important to note however that the Plattdeutsch spoken in the more southern and eastern parts (mecklenburg vorpommern (sorry don't know the english term), lower saxony etc.) is regarded as a dialect and can be quite easily understood by someone speaking high german. The Plattdeutsch spoken in the northern part (Schleswig Holstein) however is regarded as a language of it's own and is harder to understand.
Also I have to contest the notion that the use of Plattdeutsch is dying out in Germany. While this may be true for the big cities, in almost all rural areas of northern Germany that I know (basicly Schleswig-Holstein) Plattdeutsch is still the predominating language used. I myself grew up on an island where most people in the "rural" part learned Frisian as first language, then plattdeutsch and only when they went off to school they started to learn high german.
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[edit] Dutch influence??
The article claims that Plautdietsch is influenced by the Dutch language. I would like to see some kind of source for this claim, as Plautdietsch is an 'East' Low German dialect and Dutch lies on the opposite (i.e. western) end of the Dutch/German dialect continuum. Dutch and East Low German lie hundreds of miles apart. Unoffensive text or character 15:18, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
- Here you are: *De Smet, Gilbert 1983: 'Niederländische Einflüsse im Niederdeutschen', in: Gerhard Cordes and Dieter Möhn (eds.), Handbuch zur niederdeutschen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, ISBN 3-503-01645-7, pp. 730 - 761. Ad43 00:41, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] merging
I have contributed lately a little to the Mennonite Low German article and definitely, both articles should be merged, as they are about the one and the same thing. I am not sure if I am able to do that.
[edit] Three plural articles?
I have contributed extensively to this article in the last few weeks. I am an average native speaker of Plautdietsch but unlike the most of them, have studied and researched a lot about it, and I though it could be a good idea to share some of my findings with people who might care about this special language.
Lately I have discovered that I have a few "correcters". While I do not claim to have absolute or definite knowledge on the matter, I would appreciate contributions if they are true. Someone lately corrected the article and noun section claiming that there are three different articles in the Singular Nominative and in the Plural as well!!! No Germanic language has three plural definite articles, not even High German which is known as being one of the most complicated languages on the world.
Plautmex 21:26, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
In a sense, there are three different singular nominative definite articles in Plautdietsch: two of them (the feminine and the masculine) simply share the same form in the nominative. I would agree, though, that most varieties of Plautdietsch would appear to make no distinctions on the basis of either case or gender for the plural definite article, using 'de' throughout. Likewise, Standard German makes no distinction between genders in plural definite articles; it does, however, make a distinction on the basis of case, separating 'die' (NOM/ACC.PL) from 'der' (GEN.PL) and 'den' (DAT.PL). That might have motivated the changes you noticed earlier, but I'm really not sure.
You might be right that no living Germanic language has maintained a three-way distinction between nominative plural definite articles, though Gothic would appear to have had exactly such a distinction, and the reconstruction of Proto-Germanic presented on Wikipedia has this distinction, too. I'd be very interested to read more about this, if any typological comparisons of Germanic article systems are available. Whether or not High German is indeed one of the most complicated languages in the world, however, would seem to me to be a different and much more difficult claim to defend: I'm not sure how one might compare the complexity of individual languages empirically, or how one would know High German to be among the most complex without such a comparison.
(Whatever the case, great work with the most recent updates -- a lot of interesting information has been added to the article!)
Ccox 05:14, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
[edit] "Vowel Lowering"
While a more thorough discussion of diachronic Plautdietsch phonology would certainly be a welcome addition to this article, I am a little puzzled by the discussion of "vowel lowering" in the present revision, which appears to assume High German as its benchmark. If the goal here is a cross-linguistic comparison of these two vowel systems, then this would seem more than alright. If, on the other hand, this section is suggesting that the present Plautdietsch vowel system has developed from that of High German, then one would seem to run into the problem that Plautdietsch is not descended from High German, nor would Plautdietsch vowels have necessarily "lowered" from any such historical state.
This isn't to say that vowel lowering hasn't occurred in the history Plautdietsch, or even in these particular contexts -- it is insisting, however, that High German shouldn't be taken to be the historical source of present-day Plautdietsch vowels, since no such genetic relationship is generally assumed to exist. A number of authors discuss historical developments in Plautdietsch phonology with reference to Old Saxon and Middle Low German: cf. the work of Jacob Quiring (1928), J. W. Goerzen (1952/1972), and most recently Larissa Naiditch (2005).
Ccox 18:36, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
