Thread:User talk:CodeCat/German words from Low German/reply (5)

Btw, I do "admit" that I'm not a professional linguist. But this is the normal definition of Low German. Of course, also excluding Frisian which I forgot above.

How can I group Middle Low German and German Low German together? Middle Low German is an earlier form of Low German, which later may have split into DLS and GLG.

The point is that Low German has been spoken in northern Germany from the earliest days to the present. Over time words have made their way from the various dialects of Low German (because there has never been Low German as one language) into High German and later standard German. All of these are from Low German, in my point of view.

I'm not saying that there's no difference between Middle Low German and modern Low German, but nearly all Low German words in standard German date back to 15th ~ 17th century (the time when Low German adopted standard German). We're arbitrarily splitting them into two groups, just because one is attested a few decades earlier than the other.