How Are Accents Caused?

>>Travis: Re: "Just to be a pedant, but sorry, Plattdeutsch (Plattdüütsch in itself), that is, Low Saxon (Neddersassisch in itself and Niedersächsisch in German) is a distinctly different language from German"

Not exactly Travis. You know, Hitler considered even the English to be Germans. That's why he wouldn't invade them during World War II. He was expecting them to voluntarily support Germany against Russia; Also, an attempt by a few Swiss in the early 1970's to get the Swiss government to officially declare 'Schweitzerdeutsch' a language separate from German was a flop.<<

And just what does this have to do with the status of Low Saxon linguistically, Brennus? Another thing is what does it matter what governments may happen to officially recognize in this department, from a linguistic standpoint? Of course, that said, one major difference between Swiss German and Low Saxon is that Swiss German is still within the High West Germanic dialects, along with all of the German dialects, whether or not they are mutually crossintelligible with standard Hochdeutsch itself, while Low Saxon is not within the High West Germanic dialects at all.

Rather, Low Saxon is within the Low Non-Anglo-Frisian West Germanic dialects, along with Dutch, East Low German (if one considers it separate from Low Saxon), West Flemish, and Afrikaans. Actually, the distance between German and Low Saxon is about the same as that between German and Dutch, and if one tries to include Low Saxon within German, then one will have to include Dutch within German as well. Of course, the status of Dutch today is rather unambiguous, and few seriously call Dutch a "dialect of German", one way or another.

<<Not exactly Travis. You know, Hitler considered even the English to be Germans. That's why he wouldn't invade them during World War II.>>

?!?! Yeah, he only dropped bombs on London every night.

<< Also, an attempt by a few Swiss in the early 1970's to get the Swiss government to officially declare 'Schweitzerdeutsch' a language separate from German was a flop.>>

That has absolutely nothing to do with its linguistic classification, as Travis pointed out. Irrelevant.

<<Kirk:

I made a slight mistake. 'Christmas' in Japanese should be spelled kurisimasu. However, other nationalities often do hear sounds we take for granted in English differently. Chinese pronuciations for the name 'Brian' which I have heard include Rán (Mandarin); Buh-lai-yun and Ba-yun (Cantonese) and there are probably more. 'Steve' will be pronounced Si-tai-fu by a Chinese who hasn't had strong exposure to English or learned it as his native language.>>

Yes, I know. I wasn't disagreeing what that. What I was saying was:

1) this is not unique to other languages that adopt English words, because it happens the other way around when we adopt foreign words too, and

2) it doesn't necessarily mean that people can't *hear* the sounds of the original language, but that everyone applies their own native phonologies when adapting the words to their respective native languages.

It might not be so much a matter of not hearing, as not registering the subtleties of a set of sounds that have no equivalent in your own language. If there are different types of clicks in Xhosa, for example, an English speaker might not discriminate between them and register them all as a similar sound.

I'm specifically thinking of R/L for Japanese-speakers and B/V for Spanish-speakers. Because those sounds are either somewhat interchangeable or indistinguishable in their own languages, they will often treat them the same way in English -- I remember seeing a globe labelled with "Austraria" in a Japanese department store, as well as "stliped skunk" in a pet store there, and I've seen people with a Spanish background substitute B for V in spellings or have to concentrate extra hard to remember which is which in an English word.

<<It might not be so much a matter of not hearing, as not registering the subtleties of a set of sounds that have no equivalent in your own language.>>

Good point and good examples, Uriel. One example for English speakers learning Spanish may be the difference between the "r" in "pero" and the "rr" in "perro." Most English speakers can indeed hear and recognize the difference as spoken by a native Spanish speaker, but not all can replicate the difference (or at least all the time). For those who haven't mastered "rr" (or simply can't do it), they substitute "r" even tho they know it's incorrect for Spanish. My brother is one such person. He's pretty good at Spanish but he can't for the life of him produce the rolled "rr" necessary for a word like "perro." He's fully aware of the difference and can easily hear the difference when Spanish is spoken to him but he can't ever seem to produce the sound on his own so he pronounces "pero" and "perro" the same (as "pero"), even tho he's pretty semi-fluent and otherwise relatively capable in Spanish.

Another example with a more exotic language, Korean. In Korean there is a three-way contrast between stops like /t/. There is unvoiced, unaspirated /t/, there is unvoiced, aspirated /t/ (/t_h/), and a "tense" /t/. The difference is very hard for the average native English speaker to hear and much less to reproduce accurately without practice in learning Korean. Thus, when Korean words are loaned over to English, they are modified by English speakers to fit our phonology. For example, the name "Daewoo" really has unvoiced, unaspirated /t/ in it in Korean but if we said "Taewoo" in English it would be an aspirated unvoiced /t_h/ which would be completely inappropriate and a completely separate word. Thus, where Korean has /t/ we make it /d/ in English because according to English phonological rules we cannot reliably produce an unvoiced unaspirated /t/ in such a position so /d/ is the closest substitute we have.

This also applies to sounds like /p/ and /k/. Take the a city name like "Busan." "Busan" is /pusan/ in Korean but if we wrote it "Pusan" it would imply /p_husan/ in English, which is the completely wrong sound (/p_h/ being phonemically contrastive with /p/ in Korean unlike in English) so according to modern official Romanization the city's name is "Busan" because that's the best English can do.

The difference seems tiny and insignificant to English speakers, but if it's not mastered when speaking Korean, the result is miscommunication. For instance, /pi/ means "rain" while /p_hi/ means "blood." Two very different liquids! If you're not careful you can end up saying "it's blooding outside" when you intended to say "it's raining outside." ;)

Damian of Alba,

Thanks for your reply. I'm glad you're interested in the topic enough to think about it and to respond articulately.

Nevertheless, I still beg to differ with you a little bit. The truth is that Hitler had England beat; his generals told him to take it but he wouldn't do it. Britain's main problem was that they simply didn't have enough pilots.

British classified documents declassified in the 1980's indicate that the British felt the probability of a Nazi invasion was so real that they were even considering the use of nerve gas despite the fact that it was prohibited by international law.

Furthermore, Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess himself, later admitted that Hitler wanted British help against Soviet Russia and that is why he did not attempt a land invasion of England. In retrospect, it is easy to think that Hitler was foolish in thinking that England would aid him against Russia but if you know your history and know how feared Stalin and the Comintern were throughout the world in the 1930's it's not hard to understand why Hitler thought this way.

My question is what does any of this have to do at all with the status of Low Saxon and its relation to German?

Travis,

I agree with you that it's beyond the pale to call Dutch a German dialect (even though Sander thinks it is and I still respect his belief, just don't quite agree with it). However, everything spoken within Germany, Switzerland, Austria and even Tyrol (North-Central Italy) and Luxembourg I think can be safely considered one German language.

During the Cold Wa,r however, it looked as though the German of West and East Germany was slowly separating into two languages. As one newspaper article pointed out, West Germans did their grocery shopping in a Supermarkt while East Germans did their grocery shopping in a Kaufhalle; West German children addressed their mothers as 'mama' while East German children still used the older 'mutti'. '' But as you know, that all ended in 1990 when the two German states were reunited. Now, I notice that the German government is trying hard to purge all traces of vocabulary that was specific to East Germany during the Communist period. You can't find any of it in the Duden or hardly any current German dictionaries. For example who ever heard of 'Kolkhozbauer'?... the word for a collective farmer in the former East Germany.

Uriel, Kirk,

There is quite a bit of emerging information on the differences of vowel and consonant sounds from one language to another. Dr. Patricia Kuhl at the University of Washington in Seattle is one of the world's leading experts. She has talked and written a lot about how people learn to distinguish things like Swedish Y, American English l,r; Japanese r and Spanish b/v all before 10 months of age, and how people who try to learn these sounds later will have some difficulty in recognizing them and pronouncing them properly.

The reason why I brought up Dutch is that Low Saxon is really not any closer to German than Dutch is, so if one did call Low Saxon a subset of German, then one would have to do the same with Dutch. While in some ways Low Saxon might be closer to German than Dutch is, such as with respect to at least some vocabulary, in other ways German and Dutch are closer to each other than either is to Low Saxon, such as with respect to vowel systems, verb conjugation, and possessive constructions, and yet in other ways Dutch and Low Saxon are closer to each other than either is to German, such as with respect to consonant phonology and articles. The relationship between the two is not linear, with German on one end and Dutch on the other, with Low Saxon in between, but rather is triangular, with each about equally distant from and equally close to the other two, and each pair of them sharing some characteristics not shared by the third. Because of this, to call Dutch independent from German and yet to call Low Saxon part of German seems more political rather than linguistic in nature one way or another.

When East German Communist dictator Walter Ulbricht died in 1971, "Time Magazine" gave a short biography of him and talked about how as a young Communist he always gave speeches in his "whiny Saxon dialect." Presently, I know a German woman from Saxony (Doris) who came to America as a child shortly after World War II. She still learned to speak German fluently from her parents. She said that her father was from Thuringia and that when he married her mom there were some words and regionalisms in the Saxon dialect that he didn't know and had to learn. Yet, I think that Doris would be offended if someone said that "Saxonian" was anything but German. It seems to me that Saxonian is simply a peculiar dialect of German which probably sounds as quaint to someone from Frankfurt or Berlin as Brooklyn English does to an American from Seattle or Milwalkee but that's about the extent of it.

I think you missed something one of my earlier posts: Low Saxon is NOT the same thing as the Saxon dialect of German, which is, yes, a East Middle German dialect. The Saxon dialect of German is spoken in what is now today named Saxony, which was in southern East Germany, whereas Low Saxon is spoken across northern Germany, including what is now named Lower Saxony, which is not the same thing as present-day Saxony, which is significantly to the southeast of it. As for your mentioning the word "offended", now you're just brining emotions into the whole discussion, which have no place here.

Thanks for that info, Brennus...I really never knew all that....only what we were taught or what I've read. Anyway, maybe we shouldn't say any more on that as it is truly so off-topic and it may make Travis a wee bit wraithed!

wraithed = angry (just a wee bit)

Damian of Alba,

There are so many World War II buffs out there that I was expecting a flurry of people wanting to talk about Hitler and the Battle of Britain even if it is off-topic.

Damian, no matter how I sound. I don't want to force any particular historical viewpoint on you . I just thought I would let you know how I see it and you can take it or leave it. In middle school and high school I was taught the same thing about the Battle of Britain that you were. Going to college, however, made me think differently about a lot of things that I was taught in regular school. It's a long story, but to be brief...to sum it up in a nutshell, college will do that to you.

Otherwise, take care and I hope to read more postings from you regarding English and foreign Languages.

--- Brennus

<<Uriel, Kirk,

There is quite a bit of emerging information on the differences of vowel and consonant sounds from one language to another. Dr. Patricia Kuhl at the University of Washington in Seattle is one of the world's leading experts. She has talked and written a lot about how people learn to distinguish things like Swedish Y, American English l,r; Japanese r and Spanish b/v all before 10 months of age, and how people who try to learn these sounds later will have some difficulty in recognizing them and pronouncing them properly.>>

Yes, I'm aware of such research. Brennus, I'm sorry, but your posts seem to have a slightly curious tendency to not really answer skirt around responding to what was actually being talked about.

<<Yet, I think that Doris would be offended if someone said that "Saxonian" was anything but German.>>

You're confusing Low Saxon and Saxon German. They're very different terms.

<<However, everything spoken within Germany, Switzerland, Austria and even Tyrol (North-Central Italy) and Luxembourg I think can be safely considered one German language.>>

Actually, it's not safe at all to say that. Linguistically speaking, many speech varieties in those various regions you listed don't share high degrees of mutual intelligibility despite being united under the banner of "German." Linguistically speaking, many of those are actually separate languages.

<<During the Cold Wa,r however, it looked as though the German of West and East Germany was slowly separating into two languages. As one newspaper article pointed out, West Germans did their grocery shopping in a Supermarkt while East Germans did their grocery shopping in a Kaufhalle; West German children addressed their mothers as 'mama' while East German children still used the older 'mutti'. ''>>

While those were interesting dialectal differences, slight lexical differences are not good evidence to claim they had begun to diverge into two languages.