Thread:User talk:CodeCat/German words from Low German/reply (3)

They're not all words from Low German if some of them were borrowed in 1400.

I imagine the confusion arises because "Low German" is, in the minds of non-linguists, an imprecise term. Some people group Dutch Low Saxon + German Low German, some people group DLS + GLG + Plautdietsch, you seem to group GLG + Middle Low German, someone else might group DLS + GLG + Plautdietsch + MLG. But as a linguistic work, we can't use non-linguists' conceptualizations of these lects. After all, some non-linguists group some or all of the preceding lects into "German" (which in turn may or may not include Middle High German); they would probably expect a list of e.g. English words derived from German to include words derived from Low German. I don't know of any practical way Wiktionary could cater to such people, except the way we already do, which is that we have linguistically-based categories which people can, on their own computers, combine any way they want.

Tangentially, I note that it isn't even necessarily the case that all words derived from modern Low German varieties derive from Middle Low German: in some cases, a Low German variety borrowed a word from another language (e.g. Polish) in the post-MLG period.