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From: Sergio Gatti <sergiogatti@meine-wahrheit-deine-wahrheit.de>
Newsgroups: alt.usage.english, sci.lang
Subject: Re: Somewheres
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2024 21:51:04 +0200
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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?