At 19:04 03/01/15 -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>In other cases where several countrys have adopted to speak the same
>language the origional country is the default, eg de == de_DE not de_AT
>or de_CH etc.
Is modern-day Germany really the source of modern German?
Yes. Standard German is very close to the German spoken
somewhere in the middle (according to some definition of middle)
of Germany, roughly around the city of Hanover. The farther
you get from there, the more differences you get.
I think with most standardized languages, it is the case that
they are very close to the language spoken in a particular
place. True for French and Paris, Japanese and Tokyo, and
so on.
de is only
German since 1500 (German from 1050 to 1500 is gmh),
One of the main reasons that standard German is centered where
it is is that this is the area of Germany where Luther translated
the Bible into German. That was around 1500.
and doesn't include
the spoken language of north Germany (nds - Low German)*.
It includes what's mostly currently spoken in northern
Germany. It does not include the traditionally spoken
dialects/languages (Friesisch, Plattdeutsch).
Did Austria
speak a different language prior to recent times?
Austrians, Swiss, and many parts of Germany still speak various
dialects. The dialects affect the local use of the written
standard language, but not to a great extent.
How did a bunch of
city states that didn't come together until the 1880's force Austria,
the head of the Austrian-Hungary empire, to change its language?
It wasn't governments, it was culture. Luther, Goethe, Schiller,
and many others.
* Disputed by some Germans, but that's how the tags are assigned.
I strongly suspect that the language covered by de didn't originate
soley in Germany; that it's the union of several dialects over that
whole area that have been converging and diverging for the past few
centuries.
Apart from the fact that Germans may not always have lived in
the current area, for which you have to go more than 2000 years
back, standard German mostly originated in a single region.
There are of course influences from other regions, but the
aren't too strong.
Regards, Martin.
Why does this matter? Because it makes it clear that language to country
assignments are arbitrary, which they are in real life. For every case
where you can point to one origin country, there are cases - Basque,
German - where you can't point to one country as the origin.
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