Standard German is considerably more inflected than English, but still less so than Old German or even Old English, or Icelandic today. It has a healthy system of adjective declination according to three genders and four cases, although there are not as many distinct inflections as there are possible combinations of gender, number, and case. For example, all three genders in the plural number call for the same declination of adjectives and articles.
There’s also a system of inflection for the nouns themselves, although this is far more vestigial. Pretty much, you just have a genitive inflection alongside poetic or obsolescent -e added to some neuter and masculine nouns to mark the dative case.
German also has a far more vibrant array of dialects than most languages. I’d say that German Swiss to the south and Plattdeutsch speakers to the north are all but mutually unintelligible, yet they all speak and understand Standard German. So what I’m wondering now is whether there are any dialects that are morphologically more archaic than the standard language. Are their any dialects that retain more noun inflections, or perhaps the very archaic dual number? I’m guessing no, since from what I’ve seen of the dialects they usually seem simpler in that regard. For instance, the Plattdeutsch dialects near the Netherlands share the Dutch characteristic of the male and female grammatical genders merging. But then I haven’t seen many dialects.
I’m not quite sure what we are supposed to be talking about here but I suspect it is the variety of dialects in modern German.
I can say that there are regional dialects. Even my untrained ear could sense differences between the German spoken in Kaiserslautern, Frankfurt a.M., Stuttgart, Würzburg, Munich and Berlin – especially Berlin. If I could hear the differences they must have been pronounced differences. My boss had been trained at the Armed Forces Language Institute and claimed to have acquired a Hamburg accent strong enough that some native speakers asked if he came from there. The guy spoke English with a pronounced North Texas accent so I have my doubts about his German pronunciation.
My Great-grandfather was a Swiss immigrant who wrote Swiss dialect poetry in his old age. It was published in a little hardbound book by the Monroe, Wisconsin, newspaper in the late 1920s. My daughter took my copy of it to her college German professor who could no make hide nor hair of it. He said no only was it written in an obscure dialect it used all sorts of antique words. The old man came from the high mountain valleys south of Lake Constance to Wisconsin in the 1870s so the professor my well have been right.
Here is the Ethnologue’s page on Schwyzerdütsch. That site says that this language is “[n]ot functionally intelligible to speakers of Standard German.” There is also Walser, which the Ethnologue says is “[c]lose but different from Schwyzerdütsch spoken in Wallis Canton in Switzerland.”
Thanks for the reply, but that’s not it. As they say in court, we stipulate the existence of numerous dialects of German. What I’m getting at is whether any of these dialects are morphologically archaic, meaning that they carry more inflections–case marking or verb conjugations–than the Standard German.
What do I mean by morphologically archaic? I’ll try to explain by a rough analogy. Italian today has no case marking whatsoever. Vulgar Latin had some case endings, but not as many as Classical Latin. So Vulgar Latin is morphologically archaic with respect to Italian, but not so much as Classical Latin is.
IANALinguist (and not a dialect speaker either; I am a speaker of standard German).
From what I have heard of various North German and Swabian dialects I have not come upon more inflection than in standard German. What grammatical deviation from standard German there is appears more a matter of different application of the same grammatical categories (assigning different genders to some nouns; “to sit” being conjugated as a verb of movement in Swabian; the genitive being replaced with dative constructions (standard “meines Vaters Haus” -> “meinem Vater sein Haus”), or even grammatical simplification (North German dialects tending to folding dative and accusative into one case).
That’s not conclusive as I am no expert on dialects (or on grammar).
In addition to the standard frour cases there is a vestigal locative case in some standard German phreses (“zur Rechten” - to the right side, “zu seinen Füßen” - at his feet, etc.) - but that’s in standard German.
The description tschild used for himself applies to me too, but at least I adopted some kind of Swabian accent in the region where I grew up.
My impression is that German dialects inflect less, not more, than Standard German. In many cases, dialects (and even speakers of Standard German not well versed in its grammar) use the wrong case; common examples include prepositions that ought to be followed by a genitive form of the noun, but in spoken German, almost always the dative case is used instead. As has been pointed out, the genitive case is about to disappear from colloquial spoken German.
In many instances, the variances between German dialects consist of different pronunciations, very often contractions or omissions of syllables. And here two different word forms that appear differenty in writing tend to coincide when spoken. Take "kein, " “keine,” and “keiner,” all of them different forms of “no.” Each of them is likely to result in something sounding like “koy” when pronounced by somebody speaking a heavy Bavarian-Swabian dialect.
In earlier centuries, many proper names of persons used to be inflected as if their were an ordinary noun, a practice which is totally out of use now (“Ich hör Ulyssen reden,” as Goethe writes in Iphigenie auf Tauris, putting “Ulysses” into the adjective case). But that’s not an issue of dialect.
What tschild said about casual vestigial remainder of a lost locative case is true, but my impression is that what he quotes are not examples of this. “Rechten” and “Füßen” are in the dative case because the preposition “zu” is always followed by dative.
When it looked like this thread was about to sink irretrievably, along come a couple of prominent German dopers to bounce it back up. Thanks guys.
tschild, I thought that “zu seinen Füßen” merely demonstrates the correct dative plural of contemporary German. As for your other example, wouldn’t “zur Rechten”, which should be equivalent to “zu der Rechten” also just be a modern feminine singular dative?