7 ms·
A Linguistic Enclave in Central Europe
- jagger11 8y agoI wonder if modern Dutch speakers can understand any of this? https://youtu.be/lfg3jHV1TzE?t=246 https://youtu.be/lfg3jHV1TzE?t=246 https://youtu.be/9bfgEgFKccw?t=3 https://youtu.be/9bfgEgFKccw?t=3
- richardfeynman 8y agoIf it's any help, I speak pretty good dutch, some german, and some czech (which is similar to polish) and can only understand about 1/4 of this. Any native dutch speakers can feel free to chime in, but I don't think speaking dutch is a major advantage in understanding this.
- jorgen123 8y agoNative Dutch here. I agree. I understand some words that are more like numbers in German but nothing much else.
- jwildeboer 8y agoNative dutch from the eastern part that has lived in the southern part too, now in Munich and knows (and speaks) quite a lot of dialects. This sounds like someone from Luxemburg would be better at understanding. It's a mixture of dutch spoken in Limburg (soft tones, not the "hard" r and g pronounciation that is typical for the western parts of the Netherlands) but also not that modern vlaams melody. I could understand it roundabout a sgood as when I hear someone speaking Afrikaans.
- pvg 8y agoI speak (Austrian) German and it sounds a lot more like a German dialect than Dutch to me (there are so many of them, though, this is not really saying an awful lot). Like the Dutch speakers who've chimed in, I don't understand much of it but can pick out enough words to tell where the other, incomprehensible words are.
- bipson 8y agoI agree, I have no idea how to pronounce the words unfortunately, but lots of it resembles bavarian, or even allemanic dialect. E.g. "s’błimła (‘flower’)" - "s'Blüamle" (allemanic) Obviously this comparison would benefit from using a phonetic scripture. At first I thought it was related to yiddish...
- bipson 8y agoHaving listened to the above youtube video, I think resemblance to allemanic might be coincidental, as it is so often. Judging from the pronunciation, I would also put some "idioms" of this dialect in Dutch/Flemish regions (there is maybe a distinct polish influence in there that throws one off?). As so often for me, the written word it seems is way more understandable than the spoken word. I had the same experience with Swedish. Weird how some languages kept similarities in writing longer than similar pronunciation.
- pvg 8y agoThere are also a lot of strange tricks personal perception and familiarity play on you. I found this easier to listen to first and then listen and look at the text together later. I similarly find myself thrown for a loop whenever I see Viennese/Bavarian written. 'Wir sind' - easy to read and hear, 'mia san' easily matches up with the former when heard. 'Mia san' written down and for a moment I have no idea what I'm looking at. Feels weird to even type it out.
- qbaqbaqba 8y agoGerman influence. Before ~1918 area was a part of German language 'island' of Bielitz. A town nearby called Hałcnów had a similar local language that was much more similar to German.
- cies 8y agoIt sounds like some Dutch farmer dialects. I cannot understand a word of it, but it surely does not sound anything like a slavic language to me.
- RikNieu 8y agoAfrikaans speaker here. Might as well have been Russian. Didn't get any of it.
- gpvos 8y agoThe first fragment with the old woman sounds a bit more like Dutch or Low Saxon but with heavy German influence. The second clip with the young man sounds very much like a German dialect to me (Dutch native). Understanding either of them completely would take a lot of effort.
- singularity2001 8y agoSounded like "1+1 am Tag macht 2" at 4:33 2nd video: "Das sind die Sproech" "Da kann ich gehn, da kann ich meditieren, da kann ich alles machen" almost plain German. at 0:44 - 1:00 and many other German snippets
- anvandare 8y agoTranslated trying to use approximating modern Flemish-Dutch words ("slaap-voerde af" isn't really an existing word, but its meaning should be obvious). ny ołys ej gułd, wos zih fynklt, glanct oba łiöeht? Niet alles is geld, wat zo fonkelt, glanst vol{?} licht All that glitters is not gold Fylón yr wełt an ganc ałłán Verloren in de wereld en gans alleen Lost in the world and quite alone ząs ych óm mjer óf hóhym śtán; zat ik aan zee op een hoge steen I sat down by the sea on a high stone. der mond kąm raus hyndróm gybjég, de maan kwam van ginder om de berg the moon came up behind the mountain szłyfyt myjch áj, wi s kynt yr wig. slaap-voerde mij af, als een kind in de wieg he puts me to sleep like a child in a cradle
- deltron3030 8y agoNicht alles ist Geld, was funkelt, glänzt im Licht verloren in der Welt, ganz allein saß ich an der See, auf einem hohen Stein der Mond kam hinter dem Berg hervor wog mich in den Schlaf, wie ein Kind in der Wiege
- dahauns 8y agoI'd go with: der Mond kam raus hinterm Gebirg, schläfert mich ein, wie's Kind in der Wieg'. (the latter being a rhyme in many Austro-Bavarian dialects)
- singularity2001 8y agoalso "ząs ych óm mjer" = "saß ich am Meer" why unnecessarily divert from original? It's more about orthography/dialect than being a truly different language.
- Koshkin 8y agoLooks like it... I wonder if the same can be said about Yiddish.
- 8y ago
- lkrubner 8y agoPoland was a frontier country during the 1100s, 1200s, 1300s and into the 1400s. People poured into Poland from all over Europe. Especially before 1492, Poland was the great frontier where people could go and get rich. Merchants criss crossed the territories. And after the Union with Lithuania, the territory was immense. So it is all together believable that Flemish merchants might have started this community. I was just recently reading a good history of Poland and I posted my notes, and some excerpts, here: http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/poland-was-shockingly-liberal-in-the-1400s http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/poland-was-shockingly...
- deltron3030 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uerdingen_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uerdingen_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benrath_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benrath_line Seems related, those isoglosses stretch from Belgium to Poland.
- ed_balls 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walddeutsche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walddeutsche
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoI had a former student who wanted to work on Wymysorys.
- neonate 8y agoPlease say more.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoHe is interested in Polish and German (and, I suppose, Slavic and Germanic more generally) and he had wanted to do field work on Wymysorys. He did an MA with me (not on Wymysorys), and now is doing a PhD (at a different university on another continent). I've sent him a link to the 'parent' article; I"m not sure if Wymysorys is still something he plans to work on or not.
- mmjaa 8y agoIt seems to me that Europeans will use any excuse under the sun to fork language, branch and create a new dialect. If one Austrian village has brown goats, and the other white, or if there is a lake between them, or maybe a mountain, or if maybe there's an apocryphal tale of a farmers daughter going off to live with a shoe-makers son, across a few days of travel - well then, its time for a new dialect ... And I honestly think its not productive, in the sense that dialects are intentionally propagated in a fashion as to cause one "in-group" to have its detractors. It really seems to me that the forces driving us to create new, unintelligible dialects, are the same forces which allow us to justify heinous crimes against others - just at a different scale. Speaking in such a way as to differentiate oneself from others, I believe, is a root cause of so much of humanities stress. But the quandary is, I also believe we should not let these odd languages die. As an Australian, I find it a terrible shame that we've lost 70,000 years of this factor, in the genocides against the Australian aborigines. But, on the other hand, I think Europeans have taken the tribalism just a little too far. Its a contradiction that I haven't quite resolved, although I've come close: perhaps the solution is to continue to encourage the creation of dialects, as long as there are tools such as the Internet around to assist with overcoming the confusion that results when two dialects clash...
- polipoxy123 8y agoThat's a very ignorant opinion. History shows that it's the opposite - there's a strong correlation between some of the worst atrocities the human kind has committed, and the drive to unify languages. From overseas colonies, to German and Russian occupations of Central Europe and Asia (read up on forced Germanisation and Russification).
- mmjaa 8y agoOh, in fact I think it goes both ways. I don't think its either/or. The drive to create a unique cultural identity separate from other, existing identities: a cause of war. The drive to create non-unique cultural identities: also a cause of war. Its not as dialectic as you imply. That said, I've seen it time and again: villagers with different dialects, arguing with each other because they can't understand each other or don't like the sound of each others ü's and ä's ... And, I propose that the solution is to relax ones resistance against new language, by embracing all language and not just ones own.
- akrasuski1 8y agoFrom the listed words only two have immediately obvious Polish connotations (dźjada (grandpa), and dziadek is grandpa in Polish; śpjelik (sparrow), where śpiewać is "to sing"). Most words have German-ish sound to them, somewhat similar to Silesian subdialect of Polish (though Silesia was occupied by Germany, which is the reason for its influence). The spelling is mostly Polish-like, perhaps from older centuries though; except for some umlauts which clearly originate in German and similar.
- nathell 8y agoI’ve personally listened to Tymoteusz Król giving a seminar lecture on Wilamowian. Lots of historical background in there. This guy is a heck of a geek, of the rarely-encountered kind.
- twelvechairs 8y agoTheres plenty of linguistic oddities across Europe. On the opposite side of this (Slavs in Germany as opposed to Germans in Slavic countries) there's the Sorbs. Other isolated languages/peoples include the Cimbrians (German dialect in Italy), Istriot and Istriot-Romanian (Romance language in Croatia), Italiot-Greek, Arbëresh (Albanian dialects in Italy), Gagauz (Turkic dialect in Moldova), etc.
- emodendroket 8y agoBasque is a language isolate.
- singularity2001 8y agoI liked the possible paleolithic stratum of adze, axe, Erz(ore) ... in Basque