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Low German and Dutch

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Thursday, October 25, 2007, 11:07
Hi!

Benct Philip Jonsson writes:
>... > Effectively this would mean that the written language made > more potential distinctions than any single dialect, and > choosing graphemes that can conveniently be mapped to > different phonemes by speakers of different dialects. IMHO a > principle which ought to be tried more when creating written > languages.
Faroese is an example: it unifies the dialects by not being suited well for any of them... It looks a bit like being a historical spelling like English, but in fact, it was modelled quite recently. A good balance is always important and I am not sure whether Faroese really has that balance. It has the advantage that with some knowledge of Icelandic and Old Norse, you can read Faroese quite easily. But the price is high. A description of the spelling is in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroese_language Don't get me wrong: I quite like the spelling for being so special. **Henrik