XPost: alt.usage.english   
   From: sergiogatti@meine-wahrheit-deine-wahrheit.de   
      
   Christian Weisgerber hat am 04.09.2024 um 20:17 geschrieben:   
   > Also, endings can be lost in specific grammatical contexts while   
   > persisting elsewhere.  Since the reduction of vowels in final   
   > syllables to [ə] between Old and Middle High German, there hasn't   
   > been a general change affecting endings in German, I think.  However,   
   > people who studied German as a foreign language are probably very   
   > aware of the masculine/neuter singular strong dative -e, e.g. "mit   
   > dem Kind(e)".   
      
   It depends very much on the question: when did foreigners like me learn   
   German as a foreign language? Which learning material did they use?   
      
   I guess that foreigners learning German _now_ will possibly never find   
   out that there was a masculine/neuter singular strong dative -e. I would   
   have found it out at a much later stage, if I had only had the language   
   course on Italian TV in the 60s and my learning experience at a school   
   for interpreters in the late 70s. But I also had a learning book in   
   Fraktur, written in the 1920s, where that dative was still pretty much   
   alive.   
      
      
      
   > Standard German is notably conservative.   
      
   As a native Italian, I have to point out that this statement is utterly   
   ridiculous. I don't know the present situation, but 50 years ago   
   Italians attending grammar schools read Dante in the last three years   
   before university (he died 1321, so he must have written the Divine   
   Comedy before that) and could understand most of it. Can you read the   
   Nibelungenlied as it was written in the 13th century? Can English native   
   speakers read the Canterbury Tales (written well over 60 years after   
   Dante's death) as Chaucer wrote them?   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)