Hi Wouter,
Can you tell me, do you think Zeelandic is further or the same
distance linguistically from Dutch as Limburgish??
Mark
Yes Mark, I can. It is closer to Dutch than Limburgish. That is why I am not
sure at all if Zealandic can get a Wikipedia of its own. Limburgic is
clearly different from Dutch for its tonal nature and features like umlaut
in diminutives and irregular verbs. I already pointed out the main
differences at this list earlier. The differences between Dutch proper and
Zeelandic are comparable with those between English and Scots. An advantage
is that Zeelandic is far more coherent than Limburgic: the differences
between the dialects are minor. While some Zeelandic sentences will be so
similar to their Dutch equivalents that it would seem madness to request a
separate Wikipedia, spoken Zeelandic remains very problematic to be
understood by those who speak Dutch as their native language.
Imagine Western Europe having remained in earlier stages of development, and
Africa being the leading area in modern politics and science. Imagine an
African linguist coming in through the polders, trying to record the
languages of the Lowlands that need yet to be investigated. He would
probably conclude that Zeelandic and Hollandic (Dutch) are two closely
related but separate languages, connected by a dialect continuum, that
Limburgic is slightly more distant but also connected to both of them with a
dialect continuum (being is the Brabantic dialect area), and that Frisian is
also somewhat more distant, but unlike Limburgish hardly connected with
Hollandic by a dialect continuum. Respecting to the Low Saxon dialects in
the Northeast part of the country, *we* consider it a seperate language on
for historical reasons, but our African linguist would draw a similar
conclusion for Netherlands Low Saxon as for Zeelandic.
Interestingly, Ethnologue names a lot of Low Saxon dialects in the
Netherlands as separate language: Veenkolonial, Twentish, Stellingwervish,
Achterhoeks... It is ridiculous, I think, to consider them all seperate
languages. But they made a big mistake /not/ to mention Zeelandic - I think
they just forgot, considering the otherwise low threshold for language
variants to be called languages.
As I said before: I myself am not absolutely convinced Zeelandic (and Town
Frisian) should get a project of its (their) own. But I would like to know
if it could get your support, as I have the impression the defintion for
languages/ dialects in the Netherlands is rather strict. If most of you
can't approve this, I could request a Wikicity, of course, but for cases
like these (imo on the border of what it a language and what isn't) I found
a discussion desirable.
Wouter
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