[ILUG] Re: Languages (completely OT) was: Red Hat in Easons.

[Niall O Broin]

On Mon, Oct 01, 2001 at 11:06:57PM +0100, Paul Jakma wrote:

> On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, Niall O Broin wrote:
> 
> > Language pollution, similar to the universal use of "merci" for thank you in
> > German (more or less) speaking Switzerland.
> 
> except they don't speak german in the germanic parts of switzerland,
> they speak swiss-german. :)

Indeed, and what is Schweitzer-Deutsch (or schweetser-douche, as it's
pronounced)  but German with an (actually, one of many) accent, very many
different spellings (some quite interestingly phonetic) and words imported
from French, Romansch and Italian.

> "thank you" in swiss-german /is/ "merci" (with another word tacked
> on). so no language pollution.

In 5 years living in Kanton Bern (officially bi-lingual, but mainly a German
speaking canton) and in visits to many other parts of the country, North,
South, East and West, I never heard anything other than "merci" used as
thank you, whether speaking French or German. Can't speak for Italian - my
Italian doesn't go much beyond "Two beers please - my friend will pay". What
other word do you refer to ? (Unless perhaps viel Mals, pronounced awfully
like fieldmouse, and meaning simply "many times" - quite analogous to "Cead
Mile Failte" except of course that in the Irish version, there's only one
source language involved.)

And I don't mean pollution in a bad sense here - I actually love the sound
of Swiss German - much more mellifluous than High German in any of its many
regional variations. And they use SuSE Linux a lot in both Germany and
Switzerland (in a vain attempt to bring a little Linux in here, and to
rekindle the distro wars :-) ). Came to mind because I just picked up a copy
of SuSE 7.2 today which I'm valiantly hoping to get installed before 7.3 is
released in a fortnight or so :-(





Niall