Thank you Klaus Vahlbruch
Plattdeutsch really is still alive. In the northern of Germany many people are speaking Plattdeutsch. In many villages and smaller citys, many children are learning Plattdeutsch at school. It is an important part of the local history. And many teachers and private people are working hard to save this wonderful old language! It never will be dead !
Uwe Weddige, native speaker from the Lueneburger Heide
Could you give us an example of the same sentence in both Plattdeutsch and in High German ? That would be interesting. Is the difference mainly in vocabulary or in inntonation?
PJ V schrieb:
Hi Plattdeutschers
It seems that there were/are several dialects of Plattdeutsch. Below is the version of the Lord's Prayer used in parts of the Midwest.
Below is the The Lord's Prayer (In Midwestern Plattdeutsch)
Uns Vader, de is in Himmel.
Heiliget is dien Naam.
Dien Riek sall komen.
Dien Will doch doon,
up Welt as dat is in Himmel.
G�v uns dis Dag
uns dagliks Brod.
Un verg�v uns uns Schuld,
as wi verg�ven uns Schuldners.
Un bring uns nich in Versuchung.
Aber spaar uns van de �bel.
Denn dien is dat Riek
un de Kraft
un de Herrlichkeit
in Ewigkeit!
Amen.
I chose to add it to Klaus' string so that comparisons could be made.
Gale
In this discussion I would like to aff two points:
1. Platt is still alive but it seems to vanish in our region: Westphalia around M�nster. The reason is: people who are native speakers usually talk in High German with children. This started over 100 years ago. My grandparents (grandmother was a farmer's daughter) used to speak Platt in their families, but decided to speak high German with their children when my mother was born in 1919 because they feared Platt raised children would have problems in school. For the same reason my neighbour women in our small village here never taught their grandchildren Platt, although they still spoke it in their families. Probably there are no or very few children in our village who are native platt speakers. In school they just will learn one or two poems in this language and once a year there is a contest for children to read a text in Platt. If they had to read in French it would not be difficulter for them - they just try to learn the sound by heart.
In fact I had class mates who could speak platt as well as high German from their first year in school, just as children from other countries are able to speak in two languages. I don't thimk, these children had more problems. Now we have the problem people who usually used to speak Platt and now speak High German language still use the grammar forms of Platt - the grammar is not the same as in fact these are different languages - so many people speak High German in a wrong grammar...
2. Platt is a language that was more used for speaking then for writing. You can write it just as you like - there is no special rule and as far as I know never was. It might be interesting, in the 17.th century I found texts of most official documents were written in High German although all people in our region spoke Platt as language than. Their were a lot of Platt terms included, but the language is High German.
Our bishop Christoph Bernard von Galen urged even farmers to send their children to school around 1660 - I don't know in which language these children were taught writing.
By the way, reading old documents I found the y which started this discussion always in variations. For example one of my ancestor's name was Kreimer, also written at the same time as Kreymer or Kreijmer. If there were dots above an y they usually looked more ij. Platt language is closer to the Dutch language than to High German and I am rather sure this ei or ey was written as our Dutch neighbours still do it if for this sound: ij. But the names have much more variations all the time so this really does not matter very much.