Dear Auntie Beeb

[karohemd]

please do your research properly. Quite a few items in your article about the Yorkshireman wanting to write a Bavarian dictionary are appallingly incorrect or at least one-sided, starting with calling the languages mentioned "Bayerische" and Hoch Deutsche" when it should be "Bairisch" and "Hochdeutsch".
ETA: Wow, I sent a site comment before I went for lunch and they corrected those two bits and a few typos I pointed out.

If you take the federal state of Bavaria as a whole, there is no common dialect, what he's talking about is the dialect spoken in Upper Bavaria, which is just one region. Southern and Northern Bavarian are completely different languages which in turn have countless local variations, then there's Franconian and Swabian (neither of which are Bairisch but spoken in Bavaria) as well as a few more minor dialects.

I wonder if everything else is so badly researched?

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I wonder if everything else is so badly researched?

Certainly every article in their tech section on a subject I already know about has always been either uninformative or outright misleading.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

:o(

[diasporal-waves.livejournal.com]

They may get all thier information off wikipaedia which is, of course, a bastion of research :)

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Heh.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Press-release "journalism"...

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

Bah, lj ate my comment!

- in summary - didn't Johnson write a dictionary in English about English words? So unless the plan is to write this dictionary about dialect in dialect, it's not really analagous anyway....

- hey, we could get pernickety about calling the man a Yorkshireman too, since there's also sub-divisions there...

Talking of Yorkshire/dialects, have I waved this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_Tan_Tethera - at you before?

Irony?

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Was that deliberate, calling it "Auntie Beep"?

Didn't know if you were doing a deliberate pun on "Auntie Beeb" which is the nickname of BBC, but putting in "beep" to indicate you were covering up a profanity or similar?

Some articles are great, some are much less so ... they are reasonably good about fixing things though when you write in ...

... I think the funding for a lot of these "not breaking news" pages is really low, so they don't have a good copy-editor or the budget to hire specialists ...

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

+1 science section too.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

So all in all a poor piece of journalism, then.

I'm not sure if it was you but yes, I've seen it before.
I find dialects fascinating and think they are a very important aspect of culture. While I also think that everybody should be able to speak the common language of the country clearly, I have no problems with encouraging the teaching of dialect in schools.
It's very sad that dialects are dying out everywhere. Even when I was in school, I was one of two or three people in my class who could speak proper dialect and even mine is rather diluted compared to the dialect my grandparents spoke. Still, it's so strong that people living less than 20km North will have a hard time understanding everything as it's not just different pronunciations but completely different words and even the grammar changes.

Re: Irony?

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

I wish I could claim that pun but I used "Auntie Beep" because it sounded better with "Dear..." than "BBC" would have.

[whollyrandom.livejournal.com]

Much as I've no interest in defending journalists against ... well, much of anything, I think that the level of detail that you raise, while correct, would make the article unreadable. It would fail before it even started to say anything. It should get stated facts right, obviously, and have some sort of disclaimer as to the situation being rather more complex but a line needs to be drawn in order to make it approachable.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely.
My main objections were to the incorrectly quoted names and phrases which they have corrected in the meantime.
The whole bit about the variety of dialects was more of an afterthought, one of my usual ramblings, prompted by a friend's comment on facebook.

[whiskeylover.livejournal.com]

I wonder if everything else is so badly researched?

Like the text of the German national anthem during football games?