floofballsammy

[floofballsammy]

btw if you're on this site it is your duty to reblog any post that has been prophecied to reach 10k notes. let's all annoy op

[floofballsammy]

Nightmare Freddy really just pulled up with the halloween gang for no reason in particular.

Literally everyone is different. The Jack-O's for Bonnie and Chica, Mangle instead of Foxy, BB instead of Plushtrap, Nightmarionne instead of Nightmare. And then Freddy and his three hellspawns are just there. Showed up with the second friend group just vibing.

[floofballsammy]

Emotional Support Robot

[floofballsammy]

an australian walks up to a bar

[floofballsammy]

Funniest thing about security breach to me is just how unreasonably attached everyone gets to Glamrock Freddy. You just cannot hate the guy. You know him for a few minutes and you already trust him with your life. Instant new father figure.

[floofballsammy]

‘You better not be ninth doctor green screen lightning kill yourself when i get there’

Me:

[floofballsammy]

'Child' in the dialects of North Brabant, Netherlands

Today I’m here with a different kind of post: not an infographic about etymology this time, but a dialect map of the word for ‘child’ in Brabantine, the native language of my grand-parents, which I’d like to tell you more about below (reading time: 5 minutes).

What you’re seeing is a map of the Dutch province of North Brabant, where I was born. It shows cognates of Standard Dutch kind (related to German Kind but not to English child). The data were collected in major study conducted by professor Antoon Weijnen in 1937. Minor pronunciation differences aside, he found nine different forms across an area that only spans 126 kilometers from west to east.

This map doesn’t include the plural forms. In the west, you’ll find the plural endings -ere and -ers (e.g. kind ~ kindere and kiend ~ kienders), while in the center and east, the plural ending is -er (e.g. kijnd ~ kijnder). Compare Dutch kind ~ kinderen and German Kind ~ Kinder. In certain central and eastern dialects, the plural stem also slightly differs from the singular, e.g. kijnd ~ kender or kèènd ~ kender, with the stem exhibiting vowel shortening.

A small country, huge differences

According to an estimation by linguist Joop van der Horst (1999), at the end of the 19th century only 5% of the Dutch population spoke Standard Dutch. This standard language – originally a literary language based on the urban Hollandic dialects in the west – was only widely adopted as the spoken language during the interwar period (1918-1939).

What language did the other 95% percent speak? Every city, town, village and hamlet had its own descendant of Old Dutch (in the west and south), Old Saxon (in the northeast), or Old Frisian (in the north). You couldn’t find two places where the spoken languages were identical.

In whatever direction you traveled, every few kilometers you’d hear differences, not only in vocabulary but also in phonology, morphology and syntax. For example, while the westernmost dialects had up to 19 vowel phonemes, the easternmost had 30 or more – diphthongs excluded.

For instance, here’s the sentence ‘That girl very often walks around the house barefoot’ (construed for the sake of showing differences) in two dialects spoken 90 kilometers apart: - Helmond: Dè durske lupt heil duk op bloute vuujt dur 't hois. - Hoogerheide: Da maske lwop jeel dikkels op blwoote vóéte dur 't èùs. Two words are the same: op (on) and dur (through).

The West Germanic dialect continuum

The dialects gradually changed from one to another, without clear-cut borders. Every word and every feature has its own map, with areas demarcated by different boundaries, called isoglosses. For instance, the map of the word for ‘house’ has entirely different isoglosses than this map of ‘child’.

This situation is called a dialect continuum. The West Germanic continuum extended into Belgium in the south and Germany in the east, stretching across Germany, Switzerland and Austria, bordered by Danish in the north, Slavic in the east and south, and Romance in the west and south.

The demise of the dialects

The situation has changed a lot since 1937. In the urban west of the Netherlands – around the cities of Rotterdam, The Hague and Amsterdam, where the standard language was developed between the 16th and the 20th century – most of the traditional dialects have been replaced by mere local accents of Dutch. The farther from this region you travel, the more living dialects you’ll find.

While the dialectal differences still exist in the province of North Brabant, with every generation they’ve become fewer. That’s because the Brabantine dialects have been massively influenced by Standard Dutch. They’ve been losing their characteristic vocabulary, phoneme distinctions that Dutch lacks have been fading away, and grammatical features – such as a two-way case system of proper names – have disappeared.

The sociolinguistic situation has changed too: few people born after 1985 speak Brabantine anymore. One of the reasons is that their parents and grand-parents had been raised to be ashamed of their mother tongue. Standard Dutch was long propagated as ‘Common Civilised Dutch’ (Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands), the local languages being considered uncivilised, boorish corruptions – while they existed long before Standard Dutch was developed.

As children are raised in Standard Dutch and the languages of North Brabant are still stigmatised as being uncivilised and not worth passing down, the dialects are expected to go extinct in the 21st century.

Me and Brabantine

As I’m 34 years old now, I was born in a generation that wasn’t raised with Brabantine. My parents speak Dutch with Brabantine influences, but my grand-parents (born in the 1920s) were highly proficient speakers of Brabantine – in fact, they were part of a generation that could hardly speak Standard Dutch. They were born in the village of Drunen, in the north of the central light blue area of kèènd. I was their klèènkèènd, ‘grand-child’.

When studying linguistics at Utrecht University, I became interested in their language. I did my master’s thesis about the changes the dialects of my home region underwent during the 20th century. Afterwards, I started writing a grammar.

As I had passively picked up my grand-parents’ Drunen dialect during the many holidays I spent with them, I was able to acquire most of it in my twenties. I have fond memories of interrogating my maternal grand-mother about her language during the four years before she passed away at the age of 93 (2019). I’d now call myself a peculiar mixture of a native speaker and a second-language speaker.

If you’ve reached this point, thank you very much for reading my post!

[floofballsammy]

Tip: You can also just get a Kipferl.

Tip: you can microwave stale croissant for 15-20 seconds and it will become soft and warm and nice. Cut it open, put butter in it. Peace and love

[floofballsammy]

How are people pulling legendary costumes, this shit's impossible. I'm around 75 000 - 86 000 rainbow cubes in.

PLEASE CAN YOU COME HOME AT THIS POINT??? I'D BE HAPPY WITH ANY OF YOU TWO.

[floofballsammy]

i appreciate the content warnings and understand their importance but i can’t help but giggle a little bit when i click on a fnaf fic and half the chapters have child death warnings in their notes. sir this is the Child Death Game i think i know what i’m signing up for

[floofballsammy]

i need a spiritual successor to the english willy saga about the pizza sim location

[floofballsammy]

Something about FNAF 3 and Fazbear Frights taking place in 2023 in our current social media landscape

[floofballsammy]

Fuck it. So many of you asked for this so I’m delivering. English Willy part 2. Enjoy

(part 1)

[floofballsammy]

Back by popular demand. English Willy part 3

(Idk if I'll do another bc I feel like its run its course and unlike Scott Cawthon I would like to end my series on a high note! But to everyone who sent in asks or showed support or generally took part I love all of you and had so much fun with this. I might do more in future but I don't want part 4 to hang over me as something I HAVE to do)

[floofballsammy]

Something about FNAF 3 and Fazbear Frights taking place in 2023 in our current social media landscape

[floofballsammy]

It's back(?)

NOT AGAIN