Limburgish (Limburgs)

[sa wulfs]

Ich zeen namelijk det se "ik" zaes.

Yeah, I was wondering about that. I suppose the "ich" forms are due to High German influence, right? Are other common words affected in a similar way - say, maache vs. maake or whatever? (both forms are a wild guess on my part, I hope they're not too far off).

I kind understand some bits and I like how this language looks

[Sean of the Dead]

I agree Sa Wulfs, Limburgs is awesome.

Are there any speakers left or did they all leave? Anyone else want to learn it besides ''' and I?

[Boes]

I'm really fascinated but the tones and how the orthography would work but there are NO resources I can find for it. Anythign anyone can recomend?

The Limburgish dialect is not standardized, when it is written it the orthography used (like with all Dutch dialects today) is that of Standard Dutch. Also; Limburgish isn't a tonal language. What is meant, and which only a small portion of it has, is a pitch accent.

Ich zeen namelijk det se "ik" zaes.

Yeah, I was wondering about that. I suppose the "ich" forms are due to High German influence, right? Are other common words affected in a similar way - say, maache vs. maake or whatever? (both forms are a wild guess on my part, I hope they're not too far off).

I kind understand some bits and I like how this language looks

Yes, though it's not pronounced /ɪç/ but /ɛç/. Limburgish is the only Dutch dialect of which the southern part has experienced (some) of the High German consonant shifts. About half is below Uerdinger, while a minute portion is below Benrather and Speyer.

[''']

I'm really fascinated but the tones and how the orthography would work but there are NO resources I can find for it. Anythign anyone can recomend?

The Limburgish dialect is not standardized, when it is written it the orthography used (like with all Dutch dialects today) is that of Standard Dutch. Also; Limburgish isn't a tonal language. What is meant, and which only a small portion of it has, is a pitch accent.

Accordign to the wiki though, there are two acents and they can be used to differenciate singular and plural or unrelated words. That is to say, there exist minimal pairs differing only in which tones is used. Since this means tone is phonemic isn't that the definition of a tonal language, or does it require that every syllable be tonic?

[Boes]

I'm really fascinated but the tones and how the orthography would work but there are NO resources I can find for it. Anythign anyone can recomend?

The Limburgish dialect is not standardized, when it is written it the orthography used (like with all Dutch dialects today) is that of Standard Dutch. Also; Limburgish isn't a tonal language. What is meant, and which only a small portion of it has, is a pitch accent.

Accordign to the wiki though, there are two acents and they can be used to differenciate singular and plural or unrelated words. That is to say, there exist minimal pairs differing only in which tones is used. Since this means tone is phonemic isn't that the definition of a tonal language, or does it require that every syllable be tonic?

Does the specific Wikipedia sentence have any sources? In any case, what is meant is far closer to the "foot/feet" phenomenon in English than tonality.

[peterlin]

Also; Limburgish isn't a tonal language. What is meant, and which only a small portion of it has, is a pitch accent.

Accordign to the wiki though, there are two acents and they can be used to differenciate singular and plural or unrelated words. That is to say, there exist minimal pairs differing only in which tones is used.

That wiki page (btw, obviously written by someone quite partial) itself says "Limburgish distinguishes two tones in stressed syllables" which would mean it's a pitch accent language, like Boes says.

Minimal pairs like those cited routinely exist in pitch-accent languages (if they didn't exist there would be no point in talking about phonemic pitch):
cf. Swedish:
tomten(tone 2) = Santa Claus; tomten(tone 1) = the garden
anden (tone 2) = the spirit; anden (tone 1) = the duck

It would appear that the claim that the pitch accent system of Limburgish is the most developed in Europe could be defendable, but nothing written on that wiki page suggests the existence of genuine lexical tone of a kind found in, say, Yoruba.

Since this means tone is phonemic isn't that the definition of a tonal language, or does it require that every syllable be tonic?

The latter, broadly speaking, is true.

[''']

ninja'd

I was of the impression that pitch accent languages do nto have the ability to place a range of pitches on a stressed syllable. More that the nature of the pitch was predetermined by phonological context. The wiki page on it was slightly confusing.

[peterlin]

ninja'd

I was of the impression that pitch accent languages do nto have the ability to place a range of pitches on a stressed syllable.

Well, there have to be at least two different and phonemically distinctive 'intonations' possible (at minimum: 'marked' vs. 'unmarked') for us to be able to talk about phonemic pitch.

In all the cases mentioned thus far, there were exactly two of them, not more. SerboCroat (or at least some variants of it) is described as having four, but that's because of the vowel lenght (ie. 2 contrastive pitches on short vowels and 2 different ones on long vowels, for any vowel there're only 2 options).

Anyway, as my thinking goes, the distinction between "phonemic pitch" and "phonemic tone" can be blurred a bit, as there may be little contrast between a very developed phonemic pitch system and marginally phonemic tone.