I generally agree, though there’s cases where you want to be selective with what you’re describing. This Low Saxon dictionary, for example, has a policy of not listing loans and calques from Dutch, German, or English unless they’ve been well-established, doubly so if there’s an already existing Low Saxon word which fits the bill.
The justification is that the language is in a vulnerable state with native proficiency having jumped at least a full generation so many speakers’ vocabulary is lacking. E.g. my repertoire of words for plants and animals in Low Saxon is negligible, so in speech I have to improvise i.e. use a loan. I occasionally look stuff up and I don’t want to find the loan I just used listed, giving it dictionary blessing would amount to aiding and abetting the decline of the language. Why the hell would anyone want to aid and abet the sidelining of wonderful words like Huulbessen, “howl broom”.
That exception makes sense. Both because their prescription isn’t in the dictionary itself, but rather in their choice of scope for it, and because it’s trying to protect a threatened variety, instead of just creating some meaningless division (like plenty prescriptions do).
Language! High German may have an army but we have the fleet.
More seriously if you class Low Saxon as a non-standard variety of Standard German and then have a look at the family tree you’d have, for the sake of consistency, call English a German variety. Sure they’re all West Germanic languages but we need taxa for the taxonomy god: Low Saxon is more closely related to the Anglo-Frisian languages than to the Allemannic/Bavarian line, which is where Standard German stems from.
I generally agree, though there’s cases where you want to be selective with what you’re describing. This Low Saxon dictionary, for example, has a policy of not listing loans and calques from Dutch, German, or English unless they’ve been well-established, doubly so if there’s an already existing Low Saxon word which fits the bill.
The justification is that the language is in a vulnerable state with native proficiency having jumped at least a full generation so many speakers’ vocabulary is lacking. E.g. my repertoire of words for plants and animals in Low Saxon is negligible, so in speech I have to improvise i.e. use a loan. I occasionally look stuff up and I don’t want to find the loan I just used listed, giving it dictionary blessing would amount to aiding and abetting the decline of the language. Why the hell would anyone want to aid and abet the sidelining of wonderful words like Huulbessen, “howl broom”.
That exception makes sense. Both because their prescription isn’t in the dictionary itself, but rather in their choice of scope for it, and because it’s trying to protect a threatened variety, instead of just creating some meaningless division (like plenty prescriptions do).
Language! High German may have an army but we have the fleet.
More seriously if you class Low Saxon as a non-standard variety of Standard German and then have a look at the family tree you’d have, for the sake of consistency, call English a German variety. Sure they’re all West Germanic languages but we need taxa for the taxonomy god: Low Saxon is more closely related to the Anglo-Frisian languages than to the Allemannic/Bavarian line, which is where Standard German stems from.