It kinda does my head in that Midwestern State University is, in fact, in Texas.
It’s even more confusing that the university is in a town called Wichita Falls.
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Next up: We open a University of Saxony in rural Bavaria.
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@tkinias Lower Saxony and the lower Midwest, amiright?
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@brian_gettler @tkinias and one "lower" means north of and the other south of - isn't languange fun?
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@lavaeolus
well they’re both downriver!
@brian_gettler
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@lavaeolus
but if Texas might be “lower lower lower Midwest,” Bavaria must be “upper upper upper Saxony”
@brian_gettler
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@tkinias No, no, no. Stop trying to bamboozle us with your egghead notions that down is up. As Texas is beneath the Midwest, so too is Bavaria under Saxony. One only has to look at a map. @lavaeolus
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@brian_gettler
Joking aside, I really have had some students’ heads explode when we talk about Upper and Lower Egypt
@lavaeolus
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@tkinias Yeah, I've had similar experience with Upper and Lower Canada. "Up north" has seriously deformed our ability to think about orientation in so many places/times. @lavaeolus
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@brian_gettler @tkinias You can probably imagine how many times I had to point out that "High German" and "Low German" isn't about 'social status etc.'...
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@lavaeolus
So, funny story about that: My American grandmother’s family were Minnesota German, and they spoke German at home till 1917. My great-grandmother, as my grandmother recalled, couldn’t speak “high German” but only dialect—but that part of the family were from Carniola, which is hardly Plattdeutsch country!
I suspect that in their minds in the diaspora, “Hochdeutsch” has come to mean “proper German” rather than a regional thing.
@brian_gettler
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@tkinias Not only in the diaspora!
After some guy named Luther (I'm simplifying a lot^^) High German became the de-facto 'proper German' - Something something 'dialect with an army and navy'...
Outside of non-linguist-/non-medievalist-circles nearly nobody knows this history/difference
@brian_gettler
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@lavaeolus
wait, so even in Germany people confuse what the “High” and “Low” refer to?
@brian_gettler
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@tkinias YES! Most people don't even think about the meaning of "Low"/"High" in words like "Lower Saxony", "the Low Countries" or "High German".
But if you ask around, most would point to "Low German"/"High German" as class-related. (This could be different in areas/regions were Low German is still spoken)
@brian_gettler
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@tkinias And people's brain get blown after you tell them that "Swiss German" is closer to "(proper) German" than "proper German" to "Low German" (this one is closer the Dutch)
@brian_gettler
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@lavaeolus
WOW.
See, I’m used to explaining this to American students—I tend to use German as an example when talking about the arbitrariness of linguistic boundaries etc.—but I had no idea that Germans had lost so much understanding of their own historical linguistic landscape.
@brian_gettler
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@tkinias Usually, "Low German" isn't talked about as "Niederdeutsch", but as "Platt/Plattdeutsch".
And all this lower/higher stuff is simply treated as names - therefore no explanation/understanding necessary.
@brian_gettler
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@lavaeolus
Hmm, yeah—we don’t really have a good translation for “Platt” in English, so both “Niederdeutsch” and “Platt(deutsch)” get translated as Low German, which makes what’s going on actually clearer...
@brian_gettler
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@tkinias "Plattdeutsch" would be "Flat German" :D
@brian_gettler
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@lavaeolus
and at least according to Wiktionary, it’s obscure how the word evolved its linguistic sense—whether it originally referred to dialect (flat as in ‘not elevated’) or to the low country of North Germany
@brian_gettler
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@lavaeolus
this makes me wonder how they called Low German in the Middle Ages, during the height of the Hanse when the Hanseatic towns certainly didn’t think of their language as ‘low’ in a social sense
@brian_gettler
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@tkinias a short dive later:
"Sassisch, Dǖdisch, Nedderlendisch, Ôstersch" - "sassesche sprâke" or "nedderlendische sprâke"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Low_German
@brian_gettler
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