Subject: [Ltru] Re: Alemanic & Swiss German

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2006 22:07:43 -0800

Gerard Meijssen <gerardm at wiktionaryz dot org> wrote:

> The label is “Schwyzerdütsch” and not "Swiss German". Using the latter 
> confuses with German spoken by the Swiss which is something different 
> again and as evidently happens makes people concentrate on the Swiss 
> (again) and not at the whole of what is intended.

I don't believe there is any confusion in this debate between "de-CH", 
which is Standard German spoken in Switzerland, and "gsw", which is 
Schwyzerdütsch (or substitute your favorite spelling) and well 
understood to be a different language from Standard German.

Rather, the debate is whether "gsw" represents only Schwyzerdütsch per 
se, or other "Alemanic" languages and/or dialects which are not usually 
identified as Schwyzerdütsch, such as Swabian.  The problem, as is often 
the case, is partly in determining the line between "language" and 
"dialect."

Unless this thread has something to do with adding or changing an entry 
in the Registry, I agree with Michael that it should be confined to 
LTRU, and will post any future comments only to that list.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
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From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2006 01:13:15 -0500

Doug Ewell scripsit:

> Rather, the debate is whether "gsw" represents only Schwyzerdütsch
> per se, or other "Alemanic" languages and/or dialects which are not
> usually identified as Schwyzerdütsch, such as Swabian.  The problem, as
> is often the case, is partly in determining the line between "language"
> and "dialect."

Almost.  It's clear that the name "Alemannic" is a genetic grouping.
What's not clear is whether it is *also* the name for a single
language.  As I pointed out a while ago, "Japanese" is such a case:
it names both the Japanese language and the genetic grouping that
includes Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages.

-- 
Henry S. Thompson said, / "Syntactic, structural,               John Cowan
Value constraints we / Express on the fly."                 [email-masked]
Simon St. Laurent: "Your / Incomprehensible     http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Abracadabralike / schemas must die!"