A sketch with the best-known Swiss tongue twister

Philippe Verdy via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Fri Mar 9 08:52:16 CST 2018


In summary you do not object the fact that unqualified "gsw" language code
is not (and should not be) named "Swiss German" (as it is only for
"gsw-CH", not for any other non-Swiss variants of Alemannic).

The addition of "High" is optional, unneeded in fact, as it does not remove
any ambiguity, in Germany for "de-DE", or in Switzerland for "de-CH", or in
Italian South Tyrol for "de-IT", or in Austria for "de-AT", or even for
"Standard German" (de)

Note also that Alsatian itself ("gsw-FR") is considered part of the "High
German" branch of Germanic languages !

"High German" refers to the group that includes Standard German and its
national variants ("de", "de-DE", "de-CH", "de-AT", "de-CH", "de-IT") as
well as the Alemannic group ( "gsw" , "gsw-FR", "gsw-CH"), possibly extended
(this is discutable) to Schwäbish in Germany and Hungary.

My opinion is that even the Swiss variants should be preferably named
"Swiss Alemannic" collectively, and not "Swiss German" which causes
constant confusion between "de-CH" and "gsw-CH".


2018-03-09 15:11 GMT+01:00 Mark Davis ☕️ via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>:

> Yes, the right English names are "Swiss High German" for de-CH, and "Swiss
> German" for gsw-CH.
>
> Mark
>
> On Fri, Mar 9, 2018 at 2:40 PM, Tom Gewecke via Unicode <
> unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> > On Mar 9, 2018, at 5:52 AM, Philippe Verdy via Unicode <
>> unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > So the "best-known Swiss tongue" is still not so much known, and still
>> incorrectly referenced (frequently confused with "Swiss German", which is
>> much like standard High German
>>
>> I think Swiss German is in fact the correct English name for the Swiss
>> dialects, taken from the German Schweizerdeutsch.
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_German
>>
>
>
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