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>Mark Twain did what 99% of Germans,Austrians,Swiss are never going to do. Stop and overthink it too much. The Swiss do not speak German at all. They speak va

>Mark Twain did what 99% of Germans,Austrians,Swiss are never going to do. Stop and overthink it too much. The Swiss do not speak German at all. They speak various forms of Swiss-German dialects, which are related to German, but altogether different languages. And very wisely, Swiss-German dialects have entirely done away with all the useless grammatical garbage German is settled with. As a result, Swiss-German - while being far from the most aesthetically pleasing thing to hear - is way easier to learn than hochdeutsch. Yet somehow, you can perfectly express complex thoughts in Swiss-German and still be understood, so all I've read in this thread about how grammatical complexity is a form of error-correction ... sorry I have to call BS.

anoncake 8y ago
> The Swiss do not speak German at all. > They speak various forms of Swiss-German dialects, which are related to German, but altogether different languages. These statements are at best wrong, but actually not even that. There is no hard difference between languages and dialects. Whether a variety gets called "language" or "dialect" is mostly a matter of convention. The Swiss German dialects are obviously not Standard German. But neither are the dialects spoken in Germany. They are still German dialects. Also, I'm pretty sure that all German-speaking Swiss also speak Standard German even if it's not their native dialect. > Yet somehow, you can perfectly express complex thoughts in Swiss-German and still be understood, so all I've read in this thread about how grammatical complexity is a form of error-correction There is a difference between "you cannot express complex thoughts in Swiss German" and "Swiss German does not have a particular method of error correction that Standard German has". It's not like Swiss German were just a simplified variant of Standard German.

anoncake 8y ago

> The Swiss do not speak German at all. > They speak various forms of Swiss-German dialects, which are related to German, but altogether different languages. These statements are at best wrong, but actually not even that. There is no hard difference between languages and dialects. Whether a variety gets called "language" or "dialect" is mostly a matter of convention. The Swiss German dialects are obviously not Standard German. But neither are the dialects spoken in Germany. They are still German dialects. Also, I'm pretty sure that all German-speaking Swiss also speak Standard German even if it's not their native dialect. > Yet somehow, you can perfectly express complex thoughts in Swiss-German and still be understood, so all I've read in this thread about how grammatical complexity is a form of error-correction There is a difference between "you cannot express complex thoughts in Swiss German" and "Swiss German does not have a particular method of error correction that Standard German has". It's not like Swiss German were just a simplified variant of Standard German.