text:
Low German
|Low German
|Low Saxon
|Plattdütsch, Plattdüütsch, Plattdütsk, Plattdüütsk, Plattduitsk (South-Westphalian), Plattduitsch (Eastphalian), Plattdietsch (Low Prussian); Neddersassisch; Nedderdüütsch
|Native to
|Northern and western Germany
Eastern Netherlands
Southern Denmark
Germans (including East Frisians);
Historically Saxons
(both the ethnic group and modern regional subgroup of Germans)
Native speakers
|Estimated 4.35–7.15 million[a][1][2][3]
Up to 10 million second-language speakers (2001)[4]
Early forms
|Official status
Recognised minority
language in
|Language codes
nds (Dutch varieties and Westphalian have separate codes)
lowg1239 Low German
Present-day Low German language area in Europe.
Low German or Low Saxon[b] (Low German: Plattdüütsch, Neddersassisch and other names[c]) is a West Germanic language variety spoken mainly in Northern Germany and the northeastern part of the Netherlands. The dialect of Plautdietsch is also spoken in the Russian Mennonite diaspora worldwide.
Low German is most closely related to Frisian and English, with which it forms the North Sea Germanic group of the West Germanic languages. Like Dutch, it has historically been spoken north of the Benrath and Uerdingen isoglosses, while forms of the High German language (of which Standard German is a standardized example) have historically been spoken south of those lines. Like Frisian, English, Dutch and the North Germanic languages, Low German has not undergone the High German consonant shift, as opposed to Standard High German, which is based on High German dialects. Low German evolved from Old Saxon (Old Low German), which is most closely related to Old Frisian and Old English (Anglo-Saxon).
The Low German dialects spoken in the Netherlands are mostly referred to as Low Saxon, those spoken in northwestern Germany (Lower Saxony, Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Bremen, and Saxony-Anhalt west of the Elbe) as either Low German or Low Saxon, and those spoken in northeastern Germany (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Brandenburg, and Saxony-Anhalt east of the Elbe) mostly as Low German. This is because northwestern Germany and the northeastern Netherlands were the area of settlement of the Saxons (Old Saxony), while Low German spread to northeastern Germany through eastward migration of Low German speakers into areas with a Slavic-speaking population (Germania Slavica).
It has been estimated that Low German has approximately 1.6 million speakers in Germany, primarily Northern Germany,[12] and 2.15 million in the Netherlands.[13]
Geographical extent[edit]
Inside Europe[edit]
It has been estimated that Low German has approximately 2 to 5 million speakers (depending on the definition of 'native speaker') in Germany, primarily in Northern Germany.[14]
Variants of Low German are spoken in most parts of Northern Germany, for instance in the states of Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hamburg, Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony-Anhalt, and Brandenburg. Small portions of northern Hesse and northern Thuringia are traditionally Low Saxon-speaking too. Historically, Low German was also spoken in formerly German parts of Poland as well as in East Prussia and the Baltic provinces (modern Estonia and Latvia). The Baltic Germans spoke a distinct Low German dialect, which has influenced the vocabulary and phonetics of both Estonian and Latvian. The historical sprachraum of Low German also included contemporary northern Poland, East Prussia (the modern Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia), a part of western Lithuania, and the German communities in Estonia and Latvia, most notably their Hanseatic cities. German speakers in this area fled the Red Army or were forcibly expelled after the border changes at the end of World War II.
The language was also formerly spoken in the outer areas of what is now the city-state of Berlin, but in the course of urbanisation and national centralisation in that city, the language has vanished (the Berlin dialect itself is a northern outpost of High German, though it has some Low German features).
Today, there are still speakers outside Germany to be found in the coastal areas of present-day Poland (minority of ethnic German East Pomeranian speakers who were not expelled from Pomerania, as well as the regions around Braniewo).[citation needed] In the Southern Jutland region of Denmark there may still be some Low German speakers in some German minority communities, but the Low German dialects of Denmark can be considered moribund at this time.[citation needed]
|'Well' or 'very well'[15]
|'Very well' only[15]
|% of pop.
|% of pop.
|North Rhine-Westphalia
|Lower Saxony
|Entire Low German dialect area
The Netherlands[edit]
Dialects of Low German are spoken in the northeastern area of the Netherlands (Dutch Low Saxon) and are written there with an unstandardized orthography based on Standard Dutch orthography. The position of the language is, according to UNESCO, vulnerable.[16] Between 1995 and 2011 the numbers of parent speakers dropped from 34% in 1995 to 15% in 2011. Numbers of child speakers dropped from 8% to 2% in the same period.[17] According to a 2005 study 53% speak Low Saxon or Low Saxon and Dutch at home and 71% could speak it in the researched area.[18] The total number of speakers is estimated at 1.7 million speakers.[3] There are speakers in the Dutch north and eastern provinces of Groningen, Drenthe, Stellingwerf (part of Friesland), Overijssel, Gelderland, Utrecht and Flevoland, in several dialect groups per province.
Outside Europe and the Mennonites[edit]
There are also immigrant communities where Low German is spoken in the Western hemisphere, including Canada, the United States, Mexico, Belize, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. In some of these countries, the language is part of the Mennonite religion and culture.[19] There are Mennonite communities in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Kansas and Minnesota which use Low German in their religious services and communities. These Mennonites are descended from primarily Dutch settlers that had initially settled in the Vistula delta region of Prussia in the 16th and 17th centuries before moving to newly acquired Russian territories in Ukraine in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and then to the Americas in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The types of Low German spoken in these communities and in the Midwest region of the United States have diverged since emigration. The survival of the language is tenuous in many places, and has died out in many places where assimilation has occurred. Members and friends of the Historical Society of North German Settlements in western New York (Bergholz, New York), a community of Lutherans who trace their immigration from Pomerania in the 1840s, hold quarterly "Plattdeutsch lunch" events, where remaining speakers of the language gather to share and preserve the dialect. Mennonite colonies in Paraguay, Belize, and Chihuahua, Mexico, have made Low German a "co-official language" of the community.[citation needed]
East Pomeranian is also spoken in parts of southern and southeastern Brazil, in the latter especially in the state of Espírito Santo, being official in five municipalities, and spoken among its ethnically European migrants elsewhere, primarily in the states of Rio de Janeiro and Rondônia. East Pomeranian-speaking regions of Southern Brazil are often assimilated into the general German Brazilian population and culture, for example celebrating the Oktoberfest, and there can even be a language shift from it to Riograndenser Hunsrückisch in some areas. In Espírito Santo, nevertheless, Pomeranian Brazilians are more often proud of their language, and particular religious traditions and culture,[21] and not uncommonly inheriting the nationalism of their ancestors, being more likely to accept marriages of its members with Brazilians of origins other than a Germanic Central European one than to assimilate with Brazilians of Swiss, Austrian, Czech, and non-East Pomeranian-speaking German and Prussian heritage[clarification needed] – that were much more numerous immigrants to both Brazilian regions (and whose language almost faded out in the latter, due to assimilation and internal migration)[clarification needed], by themselves less numerous than the Italian ones (with only Venetian communities in areas of highly Venetian presence conserving Talian, and other Italian languages and dialects fading out elsewhere).[clarification needed]
|Speakers of low German outside Europe
This section needs additional citations for verification. (June 2019)
The language grouping of Low German is referred to, in the language itself as well as in its umbrella languages of German and Dutch, in several different ways, ranging from official names such as Niederdeutsche and Nederduits to more general characterisations such as "dialect". The proliferation of names or characterisations is due in part to the grouping stretching mainly across two different countries and to it being a collection of varieties rather than a standardised language.
There are different uses of the term "Low German":
- A specific name of any West Germanic varieties that neither have taken part in the High German consonant shift nor classify as Low Franconian or Anglo-Frisian; this is the scope discussed in this article.
- A broader term for the closely related, continental West Germanic languages unaffected by the High German consonant shift, nor classifying as Anglo-Frisian, and thus including Low Franconian varieties.
In Germany, native speakers of Low German call their language Platt, Plattdütsch, Plattdüütsch, Plattdütsk, Plattdüütsk, Plattduitsk (South-Westphalian), Plattduitsch (Eastphalian), Plattdietsch (Low Prussian), or Nedderdüütsch. In the Netherlands, native speakers refer to their language as dialect, plat, Nedersaksisch, or the name of their village, town or district.
Officially, Low German is called niederdeutsche Sprache or plattdeutsche Sprache (Nether or Low German language), Niederdeutsch or Plattdeutsch (Nether or Low German) in High German by the German authorities, nedderdüütsche Spraak (Nether or Low German language), Nedderdüütsch or Plattdüütsch (Nether or Low German) in Low German by the German authorities and Nedersaksisch (Nether or Low Saxon) by the Dutch authorities. Plattdeutsch, Niederdeutsch and Platduits, Nedersaksisch are seen in linguistic texts from the German and Dutch linguistic communities respectively.
In Danish it is called Plattysk, Nedertysk or, rarely, Lavtysk. Mennonite Low German is called Plautdietsch.
"Low" refers to the flat plains and coastal area of the northern European lowlands, contrasted with the mountainous areas of central and southern Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, where High German (Highland German) is spoken.[23] Etymologically however, Platt meant "clear" in the sense of a language the simple people could understand. In Dutch, the word Plat can also mean "improper", "rude" or "too simple" which is why the term is not popular in the Netherlands.
The colloquial term Platt denotes both Low German dialects and any non-standard Western variety of German; this use is chiefly found in northern and Western Germany and is not considered to be linguistically correct.[24]
The ISO 639-2 language code for Low German (Low Saxon) has been nds (niedersächsisch or nedersaksisch, neddersassisch) since May 2000.
Low German is a part of the continental West Germanic dialect continuum. To the West, it blends into the Low Franconian languages, including Dutch. A distinguishing feature between the Southern Low Franconian varieties and Low German varieties is the plural of the verbs. Low German varieties have a common verbal plural ending, whereas Low Franconian varieties have a different form for the second person plural. This is complicated in that in most Low Franconian varieties, including standard Dutch, the original second-person plural form has replaced the singular. Some dialects, including again standard Dutch, innovated a new second-person plural form in the last few centuries, using the other plural forms as the source.
To the South, Low German blends into the High German dialects of Central German that have been affected by the High German consonant shift. The division is usually drawn at the Benrath line that traces the maken – machen isogloss.
To the East, it abuts the Kashubian language (the only remnant of the Pomeranian language) and, since the expulsion of nearly all Germans from the Polish part of Pomerania following the Second World War, also by the Polish language. East Pomeranian and Central Pomeranian are dialects of Low German.
To the North and Northwest, it abuts the Danish and the Frisian languages. In Germany, Low German has replaced the Danish and Frisian languages in many regions. Saterland Frisian is the only remnant of East Frisian language and is surrounded by Low German, as are the few remaining North Frisian varieties, and the Low German dialects of those regions have influences from Frisian substrates.
Most linguists classify the dialects of Low German together with English and Frisian as the North Sea Germanic or Ingvaeonic languages. However, most exclude Low German from the group often called Anglo-Frisian languages because some distinctive features of that group of languages are only partially observed in Low German, for instance the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law (some dialects have us, os for "us" whereas others have uns, ons), and because other distinctive features do not occur in Low German at all, for instance the palatalization of /k/ (compare palatalized forms such as English cheese, Frisian tsiis to non-palatalized forms such as Low German Kees or Kaise, Dutch kaas, German Käse).
Language or dialect[edit]
The question of whether today's Low German should be considered a separate language or a dialect of German or even Dutch has been a point of contention. Linguistics offers no simple, generally accepted criterion to decide the question.
Scholarly arguments have been put forward for classifying Low German as a German dialect.[25] As stated above, the arguments are not linguistic but rather sociopolitical and revolve mainly around the fact that Low German has no official standard form or use in sophisticated media. The situation of Low German may thus be considered a "pseudo-dialectized abstand language" ("scheindialektisierte Abstandsprache").[26] In contrast, Old Saxon and Middle Low German are generally considered separate languages in their own right. Since Low German has strongly declined since the 18th century, the perceived similarities with High German or Dutch may often be direct adaptations from the dominating standard language, resulting in a growing inability by speakers to speak correctly what was once Low German proper.[27]
Others have argued for the independence of today's Low German dialects, taken as continuous outflow of the Old Saxon and Middle Low German tradition.[28] Glottolog classifies six varieties of Low German as distinct languages based on a low degree of mutual intelligibility. Eastern Low German and Plautdietsch are classified as part of Greater East Low German, while Eastphalian, Westphalic, and the North Low Saxon languages, German Northern Low Saxon and Gronings, are classified as part of West Low German.[29]
Legal status[edit]
Low German has been recognized by the Netherlands and by Germany (since 1999) as a regional language according to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Within the official terminology defined in the charter, this status would not be available to a dialect of an official language (as per article 1a), and hence not to Low German in Germany if it were considered a dialect of German. Advocates of the promotion of Low German have expressed considerable hope that this political development will at once lend legitimacy to their claim that Low German is a separate language, and help mitigate the functional limits of the language that may still be cited as objective criteria for a mere dialect (such as the virtually complete absence from legal and administrative contexts, schools, the media, etc.).[30]
At the request of Schleswig-Holstein, the German government has declared Low German as a regional language. German offices in Schleswig-Holstein are obliged to accept and handle applications in Low German on the same footing as Standard High German applications.[31] The Bundesgerichtshof ruled in a case that this was even to be done at the patent office in Munich, in a non–Low German region, when the applicant then had to pay the charge for a translator,[32] because applications in Low German are considered not to be written in the German language.
Varieties of Low German[edit]
- Low Saxon or West Low German (Niedersächsisch)
- East Frisian Low Saxon
- Northern Low Saxon
- Holsteinian (Holsteinisch)
- Schleswigian (Schleswigsch)
- Dithmarsch (Dithmarsisch)
- North Hanoverian (Nordhannoversch)
- Emslandish (Emsländisch)
- Oldenburgish (Oldenburgisch)
- Gronings and Noord-Drents
- Westphalian (Westfälisch)
- Westmünsterländisch
- Münsterländisch
- South Westphalian (Südwestfälisch)
- East Westphalian (Ostwestfälisch)
- Stellingwerfs
- Drents
- Twents
- Twents-Graafschaps
- Twents
- Gelders-Overijssels
- Achterhoeks
- Sallands
- Oost-Veluws (partly classified as Veluws)
- Urkers
- Veluws
- Oost-Veluws (partly classified as Gelders-Overijssels)
- West-Veluws
- Eastphalian (Ostfälisch)
- East Low German (Ostniederdeutsch)
- Brandenburgisch
- Mecklenburgisch-Vorpommersch
- Central Pomeranian (Mittelpommersch)
- East Pomeranian (Ostpommersch)
- Low Prussian (Niederpreußisch)
- Plautdietsch (Mennonite Low German, used also in many other countries)
Old Saxon[edit]
Old Saxon (Altsächsisch), also known as Old Low German (Altniederdeutsch), is a West Germanic language. It is documented from the 9th century until the 12th century, when it evolved into Middle Low German. It was spoken on the north-west coast of Germany by Saxon peoples. It is closely related to Old Anglo-Frisian (Old Frisian, Old English), partially participating in the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law.
Only a few texts survive, predominantly in baptismal vows the Saxons were required to perform at the behest of Charlemagne. The only literary texts preserved are Heliand and the Old Saxon Genesis.
Middle Low German[edit]
The Middle Low German language (Mittelniederdeutsch) is an ancestor of modern Low German. It was spoken from about 1100 to 1600. The neighbouring languages within the dialect continuum of the West Germanic languages were Middle Dutch in the West and Middle High German in the South, later substituted by Early New High German. Middle Low German was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League, spoken all around the North Sea and the Baltic Sea.[33] It had a significant influence on the Scandinavian languages and other languages around the Baltic Sea. Based on the language of Lübeck, a standardized written language was developing, though it was never codified.
There is a distinction between the German and the Dutch Low Saxon/Low German situation.
After mass education in Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries, the slow decline which Low German had been experiencing since the end of the Hanseatic League turned into a free fall. The decision to exclude Low German in formal education was not without controversy, however. On one hand, proponents of Low German advocated that since it had a strong cultural and historical value and was the native language of students in northern Germany, it had a place in the classroom. On the other hand, High German was considered the language of education, science, and national unity, and since schools promoted these values, High German was seen as the best candidate for the language of instruction.[34]
Initially, regional languages and dialects were thought to limit the intellectual ability of their speakers. When historical linguists illustrated the archaic character of certain features and constructions of Low German, this was seen as a sign of its "backwardness." It was not until the efforts of proponents such as Klaus Groth that this impression changed. Groth's publications demonstrated that Low German was a valuable language in its own right, and he was able to convince others that Low German was suitable for literary arts and was a national treasure worth keeping.[34]
Through the works of advocates like Groth, both proponents and opponents of Low German in formal education saw the language's innate value as the cultural and historical language of northern Germany. Nevertheless, opponents claimed that it should simply remain a spoken and informal language to be used on the street and in the home, but not in formal schooling. In their opinion, it simply did not match the nationally unifying power of High German. As a result, while Low German literature was deemed worthy of being taught in school, High German was chosen as the language of scholarly instruction. With High German the language of education and Low German the language of the home and daily life, a stable diglossia developed in Northern Germany.[34] Various Low German dialects are understood by 10 million people, but many fewer are native speakers. Total users of Low German (nds) are approximately 2.5 million, with 300,000 native speakers in Brazil and 1,000 in Germany as of 2016.[35]
The KDE project supports Low German (nds) as a language for its computer desktop environment,[36] as does the GNOME Desktop Project. Open-source software has been translated into Low German; this used to be coordinated via a page on SourceForge,[37] but as of 2015, the most active project is that of KDE.[38]
In the early 20th century, scholars in the Netherlands argued that speaking dialects hindered language acquisition, and it was therefore strongly discouraged. As education improved, and mass communication became more widespread, the Low Saxon dialects further declined, although decline has been greater in urban centres of the Low Saxon regions. When in 1975 dialect folk and rock bands such as Normaal and Boh Foi Toch became successful with their overt disapproval of what they experienced as "misplaced Dutch snobbery" and the Western Dutch contempt for (speakers of) Low Saxon dialects, they gained a following among the more rurally oriented inhabitants, launching Low Saxon as a sub-culture. They inspired contemporary dialect artists and rock bands, such as Daniël Lohues, Mooi Wark, Jovink en de Voederbietels, Hádiejan Nonetheless, the position of the language is vulnerable according to UNESCO.[16] Low Saxon is still spoken more widely than in Northern Germany. Efforts are made in Germany and in the Netherlands to protect Low German as a regional language.
Sound change[edit]
As with the Anglo-Frisian and North Germanic languages, Low German has not been influenced by the High German consonant shift except for old /ð/ having shifted to /d/. Therefore, a lot of Low German words sound similar to their English counterparts. One feature that does distinguish Low German from English generally is final devoicing of obstruents, as exemplified by the words 'good' and 'wind' below. This is a characteristic of Dutch and German as well and involves positional neutralization of voicing contrast in the coda position for obstruents (i.e. t = d at the end of a syllable.) This is not used in English except in the Yorkshire dialect, where there is a process known as Yorkshire assimilation.[39]
For instance: water [wɒtɜ, ˈwatɜ, ˈwætɜ], later [ˈlɒːtɜ, ˈlaːtɜ, ˈlæːtɜ], bit [bɪt], dish [dis, diʃ], ship [ʃɪp, skɪp, sxɪp], pull [pʊl], good [ɡou̯t, ɣɑu̯t, ɣuːt], clock [klɔk], sail [sɑi̯l], he [hɛi̯, hɑi̯, hi(j)], storm [stoːrm], wind [vɪˑnt], grass [ɡras, ɣras], hold [hoˑʊl(t)], old [oˑʊl(t)].
The table below shows the relationship between Low German consonants which were unaffected by this chain shift and their equivalents in other West Germanic languages. Contemporary Swedish and Icelandic shown for comparison; Eastern and Western North Germanic languages, respectively.
|High German
|Northern Low German
|High German
|West Frisian
|maka (arch.)
|Keerl (Kerl) (fellow)
|Kerl *
|tsjirl (arch.)
|eten (ȩten, äten)
[Westphalian: iäten]
|z- (/t͡s/)
|teihn (tein)
|-tz-, -z- (/t͡s/)
|-f, -ff
|Schipp, Schepp, and Schüpp
|skepp ***
|Wiew, Wiewer; Wief, Wiewer; Wief, Wiever; Wief, Wieber
|wijf, wijven **
|wife, wives
|Weib, Weiber **
|wiif, wiven
|viv **
- * High German Kerl is a loanword from Low German
- ** The series Wief–wijf, etc. are cognates, not semantic equivalents. The meanings of some of these words have shifted over time. For example, the correct equivalent term for "wife" in modern Dutch, German and Swedish is vrouw, Frau and fru respectively; using wijf, Weib or viv for a human is considered archaic in Swedish and nowadays derogatory in Dutch and German, comparable to "wicked girl". No cognate to Frau / vrouw / fru has survived in English (compare Old English frōwe "lady"; the English word frow "woman, lady" rather being a borrowing of the Middle Dutch word).
- *** Pronounced shepp since the 17th century
This article needs additional citations for verification. (May 2016)
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. The specific problem is: Besides being unsourced, the article is wrong (or at best incomplete and misleading). Also, as there are different Low German dialects with different grammar, it probably makes more sense to give the dialectal grammar in articles like Northern Low Saxon, Low Prussian dialect, Westphalian language etc. (October 2017)
Generally speaking, Low German grammar shows similarities with the grammars of Dutch, Frisian, English, and Scots, but the dialects of Northern Germany share some features (especially lexical and syntactic features) with German dialects.
In Low German verbs are conjugated for person, number, and tense. There are five tenses in Low German:[citation needed] present tense, preterite, perfect, and pluperfect, and in Mennonite Low German the present perfect which signifies a remaining effect from a past finished action. For example, "Ekj sie jekomen", "I am come", means that the speaker came and he is still at the place to which he came as a result of his completed action.
Unlike Dutch, High German, and southern Low German, the northern dialects form the past participle without the prefix ge-, like the Scandinavian languages, Frisian and English. Compare northern Low German slapen to the German past participle geschlafen. This past participle is used with the auxiliary verbs hewwen/hebben "to have" and wesen/sin/sien "to be". When the past participle ends with -en or in a few oft-used words like west (been).
There is also a progressive form of verbs in present, corresponding to the same in the Dutch language. It is formed with wesen (to be), the preposition an (at) and dat (the/it).
|Low German
|Main form
|Ik bün an't Maken.
|Ik ben aan het maken.
|I am making.
|Main form 2
|Ik do maken.1
|Alternative form
|Ik bün an'n Maken.2
|Ik ben aan het maken.
|Alternative form 2
|Ik bün maken.3
|Ik ben makende.
|I am making.
- 1 Instead of wesen, sien (to be) Saxon uses doon (to do) to make to present continuous.
- 2 Many see the 'n as an old dative ending of dat which only occurs when being shortened after prepositions. This is actually the most frequently-used form in colloquial Low German.
- 3 This form is archaic and mostly unknown to Low German speakers. It is the same pattern as in the English example "I am making." The present participle has the same form as the infinitive: maken is either "to make" or "making".
The forms of Low German's adjectives are distinct from other closely related languages such as German and English. These forms fall somewhere in between these two languages. As in German, the adjectives in Low German may make a distinction between singular and plural to agree with the nouns that they modify,[40] as well as between the three genders, between the nominative and oblique cases and between indefinite (weak) and definite (strong) forms.[41] However, there is a lot of variation in that respect and some or all of these distinctions may also be absent, so that a single undeclined form of the adjective can occur in all cases, as in English. This is especially common in the neuter.[41] If the adjective is declined, the pattern tends to be as follows:
|indefinite singular
|en starke(n) Kerl
|en(en) starke(n) Kerl
|'a strong man'
|indefinite plural
|starke Kerls
|starke Kerls
|'strong men'
|definite singular
|de starke Kerl
|den starken Kerl
|'the strong man'
|definite plural
|de starken Kerls
|de starken Kerls
|'the strong men'
|indefinite singular
|en(e) smucke Deern
|en(e) smucke Deern
|'a pretty girl'
|indefinite plural
|smucke Deerns
|smucke Deerns
|'pretty girls'
|definite singular
|de smucke Deern
|de smucke Deern
|'the pretty girl'
|definite plural
|de smucken Deerns
|de smucken Deerns
|'the pretty girls'
|indefinite singular
|en lütt((e)t) Land
|en lütt((e)t) Land
|'a little country'
|indefinite plural
|lütt Lannen
|lütt Lannen
|'little countries'
|definite singular
|dat lütte Land
|dat lütte Land
|'the little country'
|definite plural
|de lütten Lannen
|de lütten Lannen
|'the little countries'
As mentioned above, alternative undeclined forms such as dat lütt Land, de lütt Lannen, en stark Kerl, de stark Kerl, stark Kerls, de stark Kerls etc. can occur.
- A common feature of the Low German speaking dialects, is the retraction of /s z/ to [s̠ z̠].[42][43]
- The sound [ɣ] can occur as an allophone of /ɡ/ among dialects.
- /r/ and /x/ can have allophones as [ɾ] and [ç].
- /r/ can be articulated as uvular [ʀ] among Northern dialects and younger speakers.
- The sound /j/ can also be realized as fricative or affricate sounds [ʝ~ʑ~ʒ], [dʒ], in word-initial position.[44][45]
- [ɒ] and [ɐ] can occur as allophones of /a/ and /r/.[44]
- Vowel backness of /a/ to [ɑ] may also occur among dialects.[46]
|ia, iɛ, iə
|ua, uɛ, uɔ
|eˑi, ea
|øˑi, (øa)
|oˑu, oa
|ɔʊ, ɔˑi, ɔˑy
|aˑɪ, aˑi
|aˑʊ, aˑu
- [ɑ] can be heard as an allophone of /a/ within diphthongs.
- Long phonemes /eː/, /øː/, /oː/, occur mostly in the Geest dialects, while in other dialects, they may be realized as diphthongs.[47][45]
Writing system[edit]
Low German is written using the Latin alphabet. There is no official standard orthography, though there are several locally more or less accepted orthographic guidelines. Those in the Netherlands are mostly based on Dutch orthography and may vary per dialect region, and those in Germany mostly follow German orthography. To the latter group belongs the orthography devised by Johannes Sass. It is mostly used by modern official publications and internet sites, especially the Low German Wikipedia. This diversity, a result of centuries of official neglect and suppression, has a very fragmenting and thus weakening effect on the language as a whole, since it has created barriers that do not exist on the spoken level.[48][citation needed] Interregional and international communication is severely hampered by this.[citation needed] Most of these systems aim at representing the phonetic (allophonic) output rather than underlying (phonemic) representations.[citation needed] An alternative spelling based on etymology was the Algemeyne Schryvwyse developed by Reinhard Franz Hahn, which was designed mostly with Northern Low German dialects in mind. In 2020, a group of Dutch and German Low German Wikipedians took Hahn's principles and used them to create the Nysassiske Skryvwyse (New Saxon Orthography), which is aimed to cover all dialects on both sides of the Dutch-German border. That being as it may, many writers follow guidelines only roughly. This adds numerous idiosyncratic and often inconsistent ways of spelling to the already existing great orthographic diversity.[citation needed]
Notable Low German writers and performers[edit]
- Heinrich Bandlow
- Hans-Friedrich Blunck
- John Brinckmann
- De fofftig Penns
- Gorch Fock
- Friedrich Wilhelm Grimme (Westphalian: Sauerländisch)
- Klaus Groth (Dithmarsisch)
- August Hermann
- Joachim Mähl
- Johann Meyer (Dithmarsisch)
- Martha Müller-Grählert
- Fritz Reuter (Mecklenburgisch-Vorpommersch)
- Willem Schröder
- Julius Stinde
- Rudolf Tarnow
- Augustin Wibbelt (Westphalian: Münsterländisch)
- Wilhelm Wieben
- Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi
- Normaal
- Daniël Lohues
Middle Low German authors:
Plautdietsch authors:
See also[edit]
- 1614 Low German Bible
- Bible translations into German
- Friar Rush
- Hamborger Veermaster
- The Juniper Tree (fairy tale)
- Meuse-Rhenish
- Moin
- Ohnsorg-Theater
- Masurian dialect
- ^ 2.2–5 million in northern Germany and 2.15 million in eastern Netherlands
- ^ "Low German" is known by the following other names in other languages. It is known in the Low German of Germany as Plattdütsch, Plattdüütsch, Plattdütsk, Plattdüütsk, Plattduitsk (South-Westphalian), Plattduitsch (Eastphalian), Plattdietsch (Low Prussian), or Neddersassisch, or Nedderdüütsch; in the Low Saxon of the Netherlands as Nedersaksisch; in (Standard) High German as Plattdeutsch, Niedersächsisch, Niederdeutsch (in a stricter sense) or Platt, pronounced [plat] (listen) (which can also mean dialect and refer to non-Low German varieties); in Dutch as Saksisch, Nedersaksisch, Platduits, Nederduits [ˈneːdərdœyts] (listen) (in a stricter sense); in Danish as Plattysk; plus, other dialectal variants exist.
- ^ Low German is known by a large number of names, usually depending on the dialect; however in modern linguistics Plattdüütsch and Neddersassisch are the mostly commonly used native names for it German linguistics.
- ^ Taaltelling Nedersaksisch, H. Bloemhoff. (2005). p88.
- ^ STATUS UND GEBRAUCH DES NIEDERDEUTSCHEN 2016, A. Adler, C. Ehlers, R. Goltz, A. Kleene, A. Plewnia (2016)
- ^ a b The Other Languages of Europe: Demographic, Sociolinguistic, and Educational Perspectives by Guus Extra, Durk Gorter; Multilingual Matters, 2001 - 454; page 10.
- ^ Saxon, Low Ethnologue.
- ^ Maas, Sabine (2014). Twents op sterven na dood? : een sociolinguïstisch onderzoek naar dialectgebruik in Borne. Münster New York: Waxmann. p. 19. ISBN 978-3830980339.
- ^ German: § 23 Absatz 1 Verwaltungsverfahrensgesetz (Bund).
Die Frage, ob unter deutsch rechtlich ausschließlich die hochdeutsche oder auch die niederdeutsche Sprache subsumiert wird, wird juristisch uneinheitlich beantwortet: Während der BGH in einer Entscheidung zu Gebrauchsmustereinreichung beim Deutschen Patent- und Markenamt in plattdeutscher Sprache das Niederdeutsche einer Fremdsprache gleichstellt ("Niederdeutsche (plattdeutsche) Anmeldeunterlagen sind im Sinn des § 4a Abs. 1 Satz 1 GebrMG nicht in deutscher Sprache abgefaßt." – BGH-Beschluss vom 19. November 2002, Az. X ZB 23/01), ist nach dem Kommentar von Foerster/Friedersen/Rohde zu § 82a des Landesverwaltungsgesetzes Schleswig-Holstein unter Verweis auf Entscheidungen höherer Gerichte zu § 184 des Gerichtsverfassungsgesetzes seit 1927 (OLG Oldenburg, 10. Oktober 1927 – K 48, HRR 1928, 392) unter dem Begriff deutsche Sprache sowohl Hochdeutsch wie auch Niederdeutsch zu verstehen.
- ^ Unterschiedliche Rechtsauffassungen, ob Niederdeutsch in Deutschland insgesamt Amtssprache ist – siehe dazu: Amtssprache (Deutschland); zumindest aber in Schleswig-Holstein und Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
- ^ Verein für niederdeutsche Sprachen in Brandenburg
- ^ Bundesrat für niederdeutsche Sprache, Neuigkeiten aus Brandenburg
- ^ Los Menonitas en Bolivia Archived 3 December 2013 at the Wayback Machine CNN en Español
- ^ El Comercio: Menonitas cumplen 85 años en Paraguay con prosperidad sin precedentes
- ^ "STATUS UND GEBRAUCH DES NIEDERDEUTSCHEN 2016" (PDF). ins-bremen.de. p. 40. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 January 2021. Retrieved 13 March 2021.
- ^ Bloemhoff, H. (2005). Taaltelling Nedersaksisch. Een enquête naar het gebruik en de beheersing van het Nedersaksisch in Nederland. p88. Groningen: Sasland.
- ^ "Gechattet wird auf Plattdeusch". Noz.de. 21 August 2013. Retrieved 14 March 2014.
- ^ a b Based on figures cited in STATUS UND GEBRAUCH DES NIEDERDEUTSCHEN 2016 Archived 13 March 2018 at the Wayback Machine, page 15.
- ^ a b "UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in danger". www.unesco.org.
- ^ Driessen, Geert (2012). "Ontwikkelingen in het gebruik van Fries, streektalen en dialecten in de periode 1995-2011" (PDF). Radboud University Nijmegen. Retrieved 29 April 2017.
- ^ Bloemhoff, H., 2005, Taaltelling Nedersaksisch. Een enquête naar het gebruik en de beheersing van het Nedersaksisch in Nederland. Groningen: Sasland
- ^ "Platdietsch". 27 January 2008. Retrieved 29 February 2008.
- ^ "O trilinguismo no Colégio Fritz Kliewer de Witmarsum. (Paraná) [The trilingualism the College of Fritz Kliewer Witmarsum (Paraná)]" (PDF) (in Portuguese). Elvine Siemens Dück. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 June 2013. Retrieved 23 September 2012.
- ^ (in Portuguese) Claudio Vereza, Espírito Santo's state assemblyman by the Workers' Party | The Pomeranian people in Espírito Santo Archived 21 December 2012 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Shin, Hyon B.; Kominski, Robert A. (1 April 2010). Language Use in the United States: 2007 (Report). USCB.
- ^ Cf. the definition of high in the Oxford English Dictionary (Concise Edition): "[…] situated far above ground, sea level, etc; upper, inland, as […] High German".
- ^ "Mundart/Platt". www.philhist.uni-augsburg.de. Retrieved 6 June 2018.
- ^ J. Goossens: "Niederdeutsche Sprache. Versuch einer Definition", in: J. Goossens (ed.), Niederdeutsch. Sprache und Literatur, vol. 1, Neumünster 1973.
- ^ W. Sanders: Sachsensprache — Hansesprache — Plattdeutsch. Sprachgeschichtliche Grundzüge des Niederdeutschen, Göttingen 1982, p. 32, paraphrasing Heinz Kloss: "Abstandsprachen und Ausbausprachen", in: J. Göschel et al. (edd.), Zur Theorie des Dialekts, Wiesbaden 1976, pp. 301–322.
- ^ Hubertus Menke: "Niederdeutsch: Eigenständige Sprache oder Varietät einer Sprache?", in: Eva Schmitsdorf et al. (edd.), Lingua Germanica. Studien zur deutschen Philologie. Jochen Splett zum 60. Geburtstag, Waxmann, Münster et al. 1998, pp. 171–184, in particular p. 180.
- ^ Hubertus Menke: "Niederdeutsch: Eigenständige Sprache oder Varietät einer Sprache?", in: Eva Schmitsdorf et al. (edd.), Lingua Germanica. Studien zur deutschen Philologie. Jochen Splett zum 60. Geburtstag, Waxmann, Münster et al. 1998, pp. 171–184, in particular p. 183f.
- ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forke, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2020). "Low German". Glottolog 4.3.
- ^ Cf. Institut für niederdeutsche Sprache – Sprachenpolitik
- ^ Sprachenchartabericht of the regional government of Schleswig-Holstein for 2016, p. 14 f.
- ^ Cf. the German Wikipedia article on Niederdeutsche Sprache.
- ^ Sanders, W. (1982) Sachsensprache, Hansesprache, Plattdeutsch. Sprachgeschichtliche Grundzüge des Niederdeutschen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht.
- ^ a b c Langer, Nils and Robert Langhanke (2013). "How to Deal with Non-Dominant Languages – Metalingusitic Discourses on Low German in the Nineteenth Century". Linguistik Online. 58 (1). doi:10.13092/lo.58.240.
- ^ "Low Saxon". Ethnologue. Retrieved 28 April 2022.
- ^ http://l10n.kde.org/stats/gui/trunk-kde4/nds/[dead link]
- ^ "Linux op Platt". 1 July 2012. Archived from the original on 1 July 2012. Retrieved 6 June 2018.
- ^ "Hartlich willkamen bi KDE op Platt". nds.i18n.kde.org. Retrieved 6 June 2018.
- ^ See John Wells, Accents of English, pages 366-7, Cambridge University Press, 1981
- ^ Biddulph, Joseph (2003). Platt and Old Saxon: Plattdeutsch (Low German) in its Modern and Historical Forms. Wales: Cyhoeddwr JOSEPH BIDDULPH Publisher.
- ^ a b SASS Plattdeutsche Grammatik 2.5.2. Deklination der Adjektive
- ^ R.E. Keller, German Dialects. Phonology and Morphology, Manchester 1960
- ^ Adams (1975:289)
- ^ a b Höder, Steffen (2013). Low German. A profile of a word language. Syllable and word languages; Chapter: Low German: de Gruyter.
- ^ a b Goltz, Reinhard H.; Walker, Alastair G.H. (1990). North Saxon. The Dialects of Modern German: A Linguistic Survey: Routledge. pp. 31–58.
- ^ Prehn, Maike (2012). Vowel quantity and the fortis-lenis distinction in North Low Saxon (PDF). Amsterdam: LOT.
- ^ Lindow, Wolfgang (1998). Niederdeutsche Grammatik. Leer: Schuster. pp. 25–45.
- ^ Dieter Stellmacher: Niederdeutsche Grammatik - Phonologie und Morphologie. In: Gerhard Cordes & Dieter Möhn: Handbuch zur niederdeutschen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag 1983, p.239.
- Adams, Douglas Q. (1975), "The Distribution of Retracted Sibilants in Medieval Europe", Language, Linguistic Society of America, 51 (2): 282–292, doi:10.2307/412855, JSTOR 412855
External links[edit]
- http://www.plattmaster.de/
- http://www.platt-online.de/
- http://www.niederdeutschzentrum.de/
- https://www.deutsch-plattdeutsch.de/
Online dictionaries[edit]
- Plattmakers dictionary with more than 20,000 word entries, with translations and interface available in several languages (English too)
- Dictionary of the Drents dialect (Dutch)
- Mennonite Low German-English Dictionary
- Nu is de Welt platt! International resources in and about Low German
- Building Blocks of Low Saxon (Low German), an introductory grammar in English and German
- Niederdeutsch/Plattdeutsch in Westfalen, by Olaf Bordasch
- Mönsterlänner Plat, by Klaus-Werner Kahl
- Plattdeutsch heute
- IJsselacademie (Overijssel and Veluwe, the Netherlands)
- Staring Instituut (Achterhoek, the Netherlands)
- Stichting Stellingwarver Schrieversronte (Friesland, the Netherlands)
- SONT (General, the Netherlands)
- Oostfreeske Taal (Eastern Friesland, Germany)
- Diesel - dat oostfreeske Bladdje (Eastern Friesland, Germany)
- Institut für niederdeutsche Sprache e.V. (General, Germany)


text:
I cry to the universe –
You decide!
Should I live,
or should I die?
It gives me an answer,
I can't ignore;
so I pick up my pen,
and write some more.
With this decision,
comes peace and oneness,
acceptance of life,
which hurts none the less.
The die is cast,
but with that said,
I patiently wait,
for the day of the dead.
© Day of the Dead 2012
By Alexandra Carr-Malcolm

subset: commoncrawl


text:
This post was written by Lindy Shopper.
The Triangle dancers are in a flurry preparing for the inaugural Bull City Swingout (July 12-14, 2019) and we are so excited to share with you all the lovely things our area has to offer – doing my part here and sharing all of my local vintage clothing and jewelry haunts. While the event is walkable within downtown Durham, North Carolina, if you want the full vintage shopping experience, you will need to venture out in a car – however, there are two vintage stores in the downtown area, so even if you don't have a car you won't miss out. I'll start with the stores closest to the event and work our way (distance-wise) out from there.
213 W. Main St. (2 blocks from the Durham Armory)
Durham, NC
Tuesday – Friday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Dolly's is a vintage clothing store and gift shop, offering both men's and women's clothing in addition to some fun Durham merch, cute gifts, and some downtown necessities (i.e. umbrellas in case you forgot yours, socks for jurors who get cold at the courthouse). Most of the clothing will be 1950's-1980's, but there are a few Art Deco gems hanging around – there's a brown crepe and sequin evening gown and matching bolero from the 1930's in there right now that better go home with someone! Dolly's is only two blocks away from my office and is my haven when I need a cheerful place to be during a lunch break – say hi to Larisa Harrison, the owner, or maybe local artist Anna Wallace will be working that day. This is also where I take most of my vintage clothing that no longer fits.
1001 W. Chapel Hill St.
Durham, NC
Open 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. (closed on Mondays, open 'til 8 p.m. on Thursdays)
Owner Sara Spissu opened Gibson Girl Vintage a few months ago and she's already got a full shop with more inventory coming in all the time – every time I go in, there's new things to see, which is all very exciting. Gibson Girl has both men's and women's clothing, as well as a good bit of furniture and housewares. Like Dolly's, it will mostly be 1950's-1980's clothing, with a sprinkling of earlier clothing – there's a lovely yellow lace 1930's dress and some hawt black 1940's pumps (size 7.5) in there right now that I wish fit me! It's about a 20 minute walk from the Durham Armory – if you decide to take that hike, there are some other great things within this block of the city, like the Durham Co-op Market, Grub (a yummy restaurant), and a Joe Van Gogh coffee shop.
112 S. Churton St.
Hillsborough, NC
Tuesday – Friday 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Saturday – 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday – Monday 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
If you like vintage jewelry, Carlisle & Linny is the stuff dreams are made of, stocking Victorian through 1970's jewelry, and not in a token way – there are so many Art Deco pieces that I spent about two hours in the store the first time I went, mulling over the pieces I should buy. I am fairly indecisive, particularly when there are so many lovely things…regardless, this tiny shop is packed to the gills and there's even more in the back. If you are looking for something specific, reach out to owner Lindsley Bown ahead of time to see if she might have something – her inventory is deep, jewelry is small, so it takes some effort to find things. This shop is about a 17 minute drive from the Durham Armory and downtown Hillsborough is adorable – there are several good restaurants and a wonderful chocolate shop, Matthew's Chocolates, within a couple of blocks of the shop.
18 Glenwood Ave.
Raleigh, NC
Thursday – Saturday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
If you attended the Eastern Balboa Championships, you may already be familiar with Raleigh Vintage, as they were our wonderful lobby vintage vendors who saved all their good swing era stuff all year for our selection. You can also get a nice selection of their inventory on their website, but obviously nothing beats going in person and being able to try things on. This shop is a 30-35 minute drive from the Armory and can be a little hard to find if you don't know what you're looking for – the entrance is down a ramp, between a shop and a parking lot, look for a door and a Raleigh Vintage sign at the bottom of the ramp. Once you're inside, it doesn't even feel like you are in a basement, the space is a light and airy salon with a selection of Victorian through 1970's clothing and accessories that reflects the excellent taste of the owners, Andi Shelton and Isaac Panzarella. It's also a few doors down from my favorite Triangle bakery, The Cupcake Shoppe.
302 S. West St.
Raleigh, NC
Monday – Saturday 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Sunday 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Father & Son is a Raleigh institution, predating any of the aforementioned shops and was one of those places before the downtown area started revitalizing that was an admirable and crowded mix of excellent junk, vintage clothing, and awesome furniture. They have moved to a location that is less crowded and less dank and it is just not the same and my heart will always belong at that old location. Father & Son tends to be better for menswear than women's clothing, but it's still worth a trip, particularly if you love mid-century furniture – they always have a beautiful selection and furniture makes up about half the store. This shop is also about a 30-35 minute drive from the Durham Armory.


text:
When Should Management Push Enterprise 2.0 Adoption?
June 23, 2010 10 Comments
After the Boston edition of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, IBM's Rawn Shah wrote a great follow-up post outlining ten observations from the event. A couple points that I found myself agreeing with wholeheartedly were:
Adoption is about transforming human behaviors at work – More folks are starting to recognize that it is not trivial to bring communities and other social environments to life.
'Let's get beyond "adoption"' – This was another sentiment I heard several times, but I attribute it to short-attention span. The general statement was 'adoption' was last-year's thing, and we needed a new 'thing'.
[tweetmeme source="bhc3″]
The underlying philosophy of his post contrasts with that of Paula Thornton, who finds talk of driving adoption to be antithetical to the true nature of Enterprise 2.0. As she described in a post from several months ago:
If you have to "drive adoption" you've failed at 2.0 design and implementation. The fundamentals of 2.0 are based on design that is organic — meets the individual where they are and adapts based on feedback — it emerges. The 'adoption' comes from rigorous 'adaptation' — it continuously morphs based on involvement from the 'masses'. If done right, you can't keep them away…because you've brought the scratch for their itch.
While I empathize with her design-driven perspective, I personally find there to be more to people's adoption patterns. Sometimes the superior design does not win. Existing network effects may prove a high barrier to adoption of something new. Embedded history makes the current approach valuable. And other reasons intrude.
In considering adoption, we have the push strategy (by management), and the pull strategy (viral, organically spreads). Both are viable approaches. The key factor is to determine when each needs to be employed.
A Decision Framework for Pushing Enterprise 2.0 Adoption
The graphic below outlines a basis for determining when Enterprise 2.0 adoption must be pushed, and when to let adoption be pulled:
The two key factors in the framework are user-centric and organization-centric.
The X-axis highlights a key reality. If a current approach/technology is working well enough for users, there is an inertia to making a switch of any kind. This principle is nicely captured in the "9x problem", an explanation by Harvard professor John Gourville that was highlighted by Andrew McAfee. The 9x problem is this:
Users will overvalue existing products/solutions by 3 times, and undervalue the benefits of a new products/solutions by 3 times.
We're for the most part risk-averse (e.g. technology adoption lifecycle is back-end loaded), and giving up existing ways presents a level of uncertainty. It's the devil we know versus the devil we don't. We place a value on the certainty of current methods, even if flawed.
The other part of the 9x equation is that users will place an uncertainty discount against new products/solutions enumerated benefits. Yes, it's true. We don't always buy everything we're told.
The Y-axis speaks to the value of E2.0 to organizations. Certainly there will be use cases that can drive high value for the organization. And just as certainly, there will be those use cases that contribute little to organizational value.
Let's run through the different approaches mapped on the graph, clockwise from top right.
Requires a Top-Down Push
- Existing ways are 'good enough' for employees
- Executives see great potential for value from adoption
What might this be? Imagine management has seen too many examples of people missing key information and connecting the dots well with others are working on. An enlightened C-level type knows there is an opportunity to pick it up a level.
So some sort of social software – e.g. wiki, collaboration groups, etc. – is selected to make this a reality. But guess what? People keep emailing to one another and saving docs to the LAN.
Why? Because those are the tools they know, there is no learning curve and everyone operates on a shared set of processes and assumptions. Things work "as is".
This is where management needs to wield its power, and come up with ways to influence employees to alter their entrenched behaviors that work "good enough".
Mix a Push-Pull Strategy
- Existing ways are actually not "good enough"
- There is high value in large-scale adoption
This is the home run of initiatives. Solves a "what's in it for me" need of individuals, while also presenting a great chance to advance the value of the organization.
An innovation platform is a good example here. A place for individuals to express those ideas that fire them up or just plain solve annoyances. Which get lost in the email inbox.
But the opportunity for new ideas that deliver to the bottom line gets management's attention.
Pull works here, as word spreads about the initiative. But management has an interest in making sure everyone is aware of the initiative, as soon as possible. Push tactics are good supplements.
Let It Grow Organically
- Existing ways are actually not "good enough"
- There is low value in large-scale adoption
This is a tough one. Clearly the "Enterprise 2.0 way" can solve a problem for employees, but its adoption cannot be seen to lead to high impact on company value. An example here? Hmm…tough one. Enterprise bookmarking might be one area. Solves the, "how do I find things?" conundrum, for me personally and for others. But hard to see just how it will increase firm value. At least on a standalone basis.
Best to let these initiatives grow of their own accord. Let their value emerge, often with stories.
Don't Waste Your Time
- Existing ways are 'good enough' for employees
- There is low value in large-scale adoption
Suffice to say, this one should be killed before it ever starts.
[tweetmeme source="bhc3″]


text:
Afghanistan for Dummies, Part 2: Just say "No" to drugs -- and weapons
I just got an e-mail from my secret deep-throat covert expert source on Afghanistan and this was an occasion of note. "And why is that?" you might ask. Here's why. Unlike the many and various Washington "Deciders" that have vociferously held forth on the subject of Afghanistan since even before Charlie Wilson's War (including the terrible blunders Bush and Cheney committed before, during and after they bombed the crap out of Afghanistan), MY source actually knows what he is talking about. And so I have decided to do all these benighted Washington "Deciders" a big favor and let them in on the stuff that my favorite Afghanistan source has just revealed. And I'm going to call this instruction manual "Afghanistan for Dummies".
About three weeks ago, I found out that Prof. Peter Dale Scott, a noted Berkeley historian most widely known for his research into the JFK assassination, had begun doing research on the opium trade in Afghanistan. Hmmm. I want to know about opium in Afghanistan too! So I asked my covert source what he thought.
"In my own research," answered my source, "I have not looked at the opium trade -- mainly because others (such as Barnett Rubin at NYU's Center for International Cooperation) have already covered this field intensely. However, I have checked in on various urban sectors to see how the 'trade' is affecting urban development in Kabul, and the role seems to be indirect: People are using real-estate investments in Kabul as a way of laundering money, a pretty typical phenomium worldwide." Yeah. I've heard about that too. It appears to be going on in America as well.
"The two inferential bits that I can only speculate about are these," continued my source. "First, the U.S. started helping the Afghan mujahideen in the same years that the CIA in Central America started trafficking cocaine to help fund the Contras. That was exposed in the San Jose Mercury News -- so I'm pretty confident the CIA actually did that. They may have also set up opium-trafficking networks for the mujahideen at the same time. And those may still be the ones used."
That makes sense. If the CIA did it successfully in Latin America (and probably also in Burma) then what would keep them from trying the same thing elsewhere? Our fierce watchdog Congress? LOL.
"Second, an opium culture existed historically in Badakhshan Province (extreme NE Afghanistan), but not in south. Now, 70% of Afghan opium comes from Helmand Province, where there was no history of it before 2002. US has been in Helmand, both militarily and supplying rural-rehab aid, since 2002. Weird coincidence, if that is all that it is. Note that opium grown in the southern provinces seems to be trafficked out by Baluchi truckers who cross south into Pakistan, west into Iran, then through northern Iraq (Mosul) into Turkey, then to the EU. So, also weird that they can travel through US-occupied Iraq without trouble; but probably because traffickers are the least of American concerns in Iraq."
My source has come through again! Sort of.
Then my source gave me his "Afghanistan for Dummies" speech. Like Matthew Hoh, my source is truly concerned that America's biggest problem in Afghanistan is that Washington and the Pentagon don't really KNOW what their mission in Afghanistan actually is. To quote Hoh, "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war but why and to what end. To put it simply, I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year-old civil war." My source also asks the same question.
"What is the U.S. mission in Afghanistan? And, since we don't seem to have one, what should it be? Here are some of my brief recommendations: First, we need to completely distinguish our military mission from our humanitarian activism. Operationally, they are incompatible regardless of what we at home might feel about 'military humanitarianism'."
Next, my source suggests that we "distinguish the pursuit of transnational terrorism completely from counterinsurgency. I am not sure if we should even be fighting this counterinsurgency; however transnational terrorism remains a serious threat to domestic security."
Regarding the difference between transnational terrorism and counterinsurgency, Matthew Hoh also notes that it is a local insurgency by the Pashtuns that we are fighting, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban. "The US and NATO presence and operations in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified. In both RC East and South, I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul."
Then my recommends that, "the U.S. should seriously consider a 'development campaign' in Afghanistan. Oddly, we are used to the idea of a military campaign in other countries clear across the planet, which is a very difficult thing to accomplish and sustain. But we think that development interventions are too difficult. Okay, I accept the problem that significant cultural variation means you cannot feasibly do all aspects of development. But you don't need to (and shouldn't even try). There is actually a thick literature on this, which just doesn't get publicly discussed enough. So here I boil it down: Use the Human Development framework as a guide. Why? Because the United Nations Development Program has been refining this framework since 1990, and even the most rudimentary interpretation of the framework is useful."
Then my source offers up the following restatement of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan:
"First, we will raise the literacy rate by one percentage point per year. Second, we will raise life-expectancy by one percentage point per year.
"What would it take to meet these two targets? A lot of close involvement, yes; and it can be done in myriad ways, including many that are culturally sensitive! But rather than proximal goals (we built 250 schools! Only 100 have been blown up by insurgents!), it would mean actual change: prevalence of literacy. Instead of how many needles or pills or whatever the short-term metric of health aid might be, we should look at long-term, actual outcomes: Can Afghans expect to live longer? Longevity is influenced by many things, from de-mining to better nutrition to lower levels of domestic violence to healthcare. Tackling some or all of these in a culturally-respectful way is do-able."
Here comes the next chapter in my source's "Afghanistan for Dummies". It's long and I don't quite understand it all myself but here it is. "I have described this operation as a development 'campaign' because we are used to military campaigns, no matter how complex, expensive, and long-term they may be. Yes, a development campaign might cost several billion dollars a year in one small country. That seems expensive until it is compared to military campaigns."
I just read somewhere that it takes a million dollars a year to keep just one soldier in Afghanistan. A development campaign has GOT to be cheaper than that.
"And yet, I think it might achieve the same intended effect, as far as US congress and the American people are concerned: long-term improvement of domestic US security. If you finish your involvement in a country with a population who are healthier and more capable in their life-options, they are likely to remember that and have your back for at least a whole generation. Note that this is not a kumbaya argument: I would not argue to American taxpayers that we should help Afghans because it is the right thing to do in some abstract sense, or even appeal to our sense of loyalty by pointing out that Afghans bled for our sake as they demoralized the Soviets with their insurgency. But I would argue that major intervention to get their political economy back up and running is worth it for our own security. Even if the US is not likely to remain a hyperpower indefinitely, we are very likely to remain a major global player for the very long term. We need policies that match that understanding."
I can see what he means. According to Robert Parry, "As security worsens in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is clear that al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies outwitted President [sic] George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers by tying down U.S. forces in Iraq for five years while the Islamic militants rebuilt their forces for the war on their 'central front'." And what is Al Qaeda's 'central front'? America, of course. So it could be very beneficial to our own security if we upped our "development campaign" in Afghanistan.
As for my own self, I am torn between the realization that America CANNOT afford to stay in Afghanistan -- because the money we are spending there is coming directly our of our budget for decent schools for our children. However. I sort of do want our troops to stay there because I have a dear friend in Kabul who somehow survived the Russian invasion, who somehow surrived Charlie Wilson's War and who somehow survived Taliban rule -- and I would hate to have anything violent and nasty happen to him now. And if it costs American taxpayers 100 billion dollars every few months just to keep my friend in Kabul safe, that's fine with me!
But wouldn't it be more cost-efficient if we could think of a better way to protect him -- and us -- than to spend a million dollars per year per soldier in Afghanistan? Maybe we could spend a thousand dollars per year per school over there instead? And perhaps a thousand dollars per year per school over here too?
PS: So. What can we expect things to be like in Afghanistan in 20 years if Washington and the Pentagon keep using their current policies and techniques? My guess is that the U.S. will be lucky if Afghanistan only resembles the Israel-Palestine situation right now -- an uneasy truce between the "haves" in charge and the "have-nots" in the occupied territories, draconionally maintained by an enormous outpouring of funds from American taxpayers, spent mainly on things like F-16s, drones, white phosphorus bombs, tanks and check-points the size of three football fields -- not to mention a Wall or two -- as these things become increasingly necessary to separate the "haves" in charge in Kabul from the "have-nots" in the occupied Pashtun tribal areas.


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June's First Half: Honorable Mentions (Songs, Music Videos, Full Streams)
The first half of June carried plenty of surprises. This month has been, notably, dominated by major hip-hop artists and included the release of several major records that have the capacity to hijack year-end lists. Those releases have never been the focal point of this site and this won't be the post where that changes. Every item on this list, as always, deserves more attention than it'll receive. Following this list, there will be a few other key releases that get highlighted but these songs, clips, and records deserve all the support they can get, including the below listings and anyone willing to click their links. Enjoy.
Rob Dickson, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, Dead Sullivan, Henrik Appel, Cuesta Loeb, Protomartyr, Amos and Spencer, Fleabite, Thin Lips, Dumb, The Molochs, Spencer Radcliffe, Kevin Krauter, Bleeth, Everything By Electricity, Scattered Clouds, Susie Scurry, MOURN, The Rareflowers, Clean Spill, Guts Club, Darren Jessee, Orions Belte, Late Bloomer, Laurel Halo, The Ophelias, Freedom Baby, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Alexander BIggs, Manatree, Runtom Knuten, Manchester Orchestra, Sun June, Angelo De Augustine, Ancestors, ShitKid, Icecapades, Deafheaven, Baby Blue, Frida, Cigarettes After Sex, R+R=NOW, Van Common, Hana Vu, The Dirty Nil, Stalagmites, Wild Nothing, Birdtalker, Jon Spencer, Two Meters, Claw Marks, El Ten Eleven, Birds In Row, Color Tongue, serpentwithfeet, Estrons, Echo Courts, Lazyeyes, Death Grips, Mom Jeans, Gold Star, and a massive offering from Ben Seretan (which accompanies a behemoth multimedia art project that's worth tracking).
Clearance, Strange Relations, Death Bells, LIFE, oso oso, The Essex Green, White Woods, Devon Welsh, NEEDS, Thirsty Curses, lemin., Spiritualized, Cold Fronts, Empath, Dirty Projectors, Anna Calvi, VedeTT, The Beths, Cornelia Murr, King Princess, The Fur Coats, Stringer, The Due Diligence, NOTHING, Howard, White Denim, Animal House, and Sad Baxter.
Miranda Winters, Petal, Spiritual Cramp, Deux Trois, Dark Thoughts, Dos Santos, Some Gorgeous Accident, Johnny Conqueroo, Tancred, Blushh, Juliana Daugherty, Giant Peach, Hala, Anthony Green, Two Meters, Cold Meat, June Gloom/Rock Solid, CASCINE and Stadiums & Shrines' Dreams compilation, Palberta, Bloody Knives, Will Henriksen, Surf Dads, God Bless Relative, GRLWood, and Ana Egge.


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Pleasantville ★★★½ 1998 (PG-13)
Nerdy David (Maguire) and his slut wanna-be sister Jennifer (Witherspoon) are sucked into the sterile and innocent world of Pleasantville, a 1950s B/W TV show in constant reruns, where they find themselves in the roles of Bud and Mary Sue, the blandly adorable children of George and Betty Parker (Macy and Allen). After Jennifer shows a classmate what lovers' lane is really for, the townspeople begin to lose their innocence; the black-and-white world becomes more colorful as each new human passion is realized. The performances are dead-on, particularly Allen as the sexually awakening mom. The transition from straight comedy to social commentary is adeptly handled. The great character actor J. T. Walsh gives his usual excellent (and sadly, last) performance as the stubborn head of the chamber of commerce bitterly fighting change. 124m/C VHS, DVD . Tobey Maguire, Reese Witherspoon, William H. Macy, Joan Allen, Jeff Daniels, J.T. Walsh, Don Knotts, Paul Walker, Jane Kaczmarek, Marley Shelton; D: Gary Ross; W: Gary Ross; C: John Lindley; M: Randy Newman. L.A. Film Critics '98: Support. Actress (Allen); Broadcast Film Critics '98: Support. Actress (Allen).


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Back-to-school shoppers expected to flock to discount stores
Expect longer lines at dollar stores and discount retailers for back-to-school shopping this year.
That's what shoppers are telling big retail consulting firms like Deloitte and the National Retail Federation, groups that each year interview consumers about their spending habits during peak shopping times like holidays.
Both organizations say shoppers will be frequenting dollar and discount stores in attempts to stretch their budgets even further during a tough economy. Shoppers say increased fuel and food costs are the biggest factors causing them to cut back.
Seventy percent of Illinois respondents plan to spend less on back-to-school items this year and 40 percent plan to reduce their household spending by more than $100, according to the Deloitte study. A whopping 91 percent said they plan to change the way they shop this year.
"This is not a year of wants for the consumers," said Gary Levin, a partner in Deloitte's retail group. "Consumers are spending to meet their needs, on the basics like housing, food and fuel. Some of the wants are being absorbed by rising costs" elsewhere in the family budget.
But the National Retail Federation estimates the average family with school-aged children will still spend $594.24 on back-to-school purchases, up from $441.60 in 2002. That includes purchases like clothing, shoes, electronics and school supplies.
Total back-to-school spending for kindergarten through 12th grade is estimated to reach $20.1 billion.
Levin expects apparel will see the biggest hit, and parents will recycle or reuse school supplies from last year when they can. He said consumers likely will plan their shopping trips after consulting advertisements and coupon books for the best deals and drive to strip malls and shopping centers where they buy from several outlets to save gas money.
Family Dollar has eight locations in Rockford, and Josh Braverman, the company's public relations manager, said stores have seen an increase in traffic recently because of people spending their economic stimulus checks.
"Back-to-school is certainly an important time of the year, no matter what the economic environment," he said. "In this economy, it's even more so."
The company has nearly 6,600 stores in 44 states, and officials are seeing more requests from residents wanting to see stores built in their communities. Braverman noted that the stores carry name-brand, first-run products, not secondhand or discontinued items.
Back-to-school time marks a big advertising push for Family Dollar. Braverman said a back-to-school book is going out to consumers Aug. 11 and will highlight deals beyond notebooks and pens, such as computer desks, apparel, snacks and items like towels for college students moving into dorms.
Levin said retail outlets will have the best luck luring shoppers in with incentives and last-minute deals similar to tactics used during the holiday season.
And speaking of holidays, the spending changes expected for back-to-school shopping have retailers worried about Christmastime spending compared to last year.
"Retailers are nervous right now about the holiday season more so than before," Levin said. "They're waiting for that snap in consumer confidence, and so far, we're not seeing that. If unemployment continues to rise, that's just adding fuel to the fire."
Melissa Westphal can be reached at (815) 987-1341 or email@example.com.
Illinois numbers
79 percent will buy more back-to-school items on sale
Nearly 70 percent will buy only what the family needs
70 percent will buy lower-priced items
57 percent will use more store coupons
47 percent will shop at less expensive stores than usual
44 percent will put off buying certain items as long as possible
25 percent will research more products online to find the best price
Source: Deloitte
Average consumer spending on back-to-school items for 2008
Clothing: $234.51
Electronics: $151.61
Shoes: $109.75
School supplies: $98.37
Total consumer spending on back-to-school items
Clothing: $7.9 billion
Electronics: $5.1 billion
Shoes: $3.7 billion
School supplies: $3.3 billion
Source: National Retail Federation


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Art has always been a passion of mine. I knew from a very early age that art was going to be a strong influence in my life and that I wanted to know as much about art as I could possibly learn. I still strive to learn something new every day. It takes practice and patience to be a full time artist and I am finally able to devote one hundred percent of my professional life to my studio work.
After many years working in and around art, making a living as an advertising designer, art teacher, art consultant, photographic artisan and many other niches, I finally opened my art studio to the dedication of purely fine art. I am a trained artist, receiving a BFA and a MFA in the seventies and eighties, respectively. I loved the years I put forth to formal art training. It is invigorating to be around people with that same passion to learning and exploring the creative and problem solving side of your personality. The people who share this passion greatly influence your thought patterns about your art work. It is really great to see the different outcomes from the various people when working on a creative project. We are all looking at the same thing, painting or sculpting or drawing, but each individual will see it a little different and the creation of beautiful works, each individually unique. It is truly amazing.
For myself, I love oil painting. I love animals and flowers and nature itself. I believe that I was given a talent by God to share His beauty about the world through the use of paint and canvas. I try to relate the love of nature and His Blessings through my art. I hope that the collectors of my work can be touched in some way to Stop and Smell the Roses for a moment and reflect on the joy and beauty that has been given to us each day.
I live in a very beautiful state, working and living on the shores of a lake surrounded by huge tall pine trees and stately southern live oaks. Nature is bountiful. Foxes play and romp across my front lawn. Squirrels and birds hop from one feeder to the next. Wildflowers and flowering trees such as redbuds and dogwood are a blanket of beauty through undergrowth among the trees. It is truly a blessing that I have been given this time to work in my art studio and be surrounded with this serenity. I hope that the passion I have for art and the passion I have to share natures beauty is reflected in my work.


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Brenda Pearson – REALTOR® – Royal LePage Locations West Realty, Penticton, BC
Buying or selling a home is a big decision – you need an experienced professional to guide you through the process. When you work with me, you can count on personal, attentive, patient service, excellent knowledge of the area, great negotiation skills and expert selling strategies.
Business Name:
Brenda Pearson – REALTOR® – Royal LePage Locations West Realty, Penticton, BC
484 Main StPenticton British Columbia V2A 5C5Canada
About Penticton
Penticton ( pen-TIK-tən) is a city in the Okanagan Valley of the Southern Interior of British Columbia, Canada, situated between Okanagan and Skaha lakes. In the 2016 Canadian Census, its population was 33,761, while its census agglomeration population was 43,432. == Name origin == The name Penticton is derived from a word in the Okanagan language. It is conventionally translated as "a place to stay forever" but is actually a reference to the year-round flow of Okanagan Lake through Penticton where it enters Skaha Lake. Differing accounts of the meaning are given in the BC Geographical Names entry for the city: Place where water passes beyond.
Neighborhoods in Penticton, British Columbia
Belgo - Black Mountain, Brexit Pub, Caravilla Estates, Central City, Chichester, Cultural District, Dilworth, Dilworth - Enterprise, Dori Lionello - Royal LePage – Locations West, Downtown, Dunant Neighbourhood Park, Duncan Corner Store, East Kelowna, Figueiras Mobile Home Park Ltd, Gellatly
Things to do in Penticton, British Columbia
Our Newest Profiles


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Keeley Hazell is adorable!
Next we have Carli Banks from busty solos. The clowns who made this video made it sleazy instead of more family oriented and I was forced to cut it short, but I have had no luck finding videos of Carli Banks that any Pastor I know of would approve of for family viewing.
Yeah, what was up with that video. Couldn't the makers let the body of a beautiful woman stand for itself, rather than making her show weird and fake displays of arousal? I couldn't even watch it all, despite finding her very attractive. This video is insulting to straight men, by implying that they need such strange antics to be aroused by a beautiful and feminine woman.
The video with Keeley Hazell was much hotter, because it showcased her feminine personality traits, demure voice, little dances, and cute laugh (though there were some moments where she was acting, but even then it was a lot more convincing). Expressions such as cute smiles are often lacking in the current images of women influenced be the fashion world, which opt instead for a monotonous series of glares and stares.
Furthermore, the convention in a lot of pornography is for women to ape a kind of masculinized horniness that is incongruent with female-typical sexuality, and probably even beyond the somewhat masculinized sexuality of many women in porn. A woman authentically acting in this manner can definitely be sexy, but the subset of women for whom such sexual behavior is authentic is probably relatively low (but there are some, such as Nina Hartley, who definitely has a more masculinized sexuality; when I met her, my impression was that her involvement in porn was a natural expression of her sexuality, which is an outlier among women).
Can't we just have feminine women 2+ standard deviations above the mean in attractiveness, acting in a feminine way? This can't really be found consistently anywhere, neither in fashion nor in porn. This website focuses on feminine beauty and its influence on attraction; perhaps feminine personality traits and sexual presentation is also an important influence in attracting typical straight men, which is being overlooked in both fashion and in porn; yet this is being masked, because it doesn't take much to arouse straight men, and the current stuff they have access to is "good enough" for accomplishing that task considering that they haven't been exposed to anything better.


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Vollkorn – full grain distillate by Schmidt & Sons
I was able to finally try the brand new Distillate by Eugen Schmidt Söhne and decided I had to have a bottle of this fine one afterwards. It is made out of various full grains from the south german region, a special "soft" water and great distillery skills to bring out a taste of grain, flour, bread "into the bottle". With it´s 40% alcohol it´s still a soft and mild spirit absolutely worth a try and beyond comparison to the typical german "Korn". Check out the website which will show more info soon: http://www.voll-korn.de


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Q: How to improve our Extra Sensory Perceptions?
A: Human being is conditioned since birth. Learning language, enhancing vocabulary, acquiring motor skills for movements, learning vocals, basic expressions, gestures, territories and identities, emotions, fight or flight syndrome, processing so many forms of inputs from so many sources. Doing all this using a tiny 'limited brain' creates havoc to the 'unlimited' nature of higher mind.
All extra sensory perceptions require two basic things: 'peaceful environment' and ability to discern the 'silent soft perception' using inner senses. These soft perceptions are overshadowed by your current level of noisy sounds, continuous distractions to the open eyes, erroneous breathing and thinking process and a need to 'train' your mind and sensory organs to process data from 'out there' and ignore all the so-called 'junk' coming out from 'inside' as it does not meet the 'generally accepted standards of belief about reality'…. <Read more>


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I've seen a bunch of posts bubble up over the past few days that are really sparking my curiousity about what is really going on with Twitter, so I need to do a little brain dump. Bear with me.
Insight #1
An article by Rosabeth Moss Kanter was just published today on the Harvard Business Review website, titled On Twitter and in the Workplace, It's Power to the Connectors. In it, she highlights the fact that there is an organizational trend moving away from the hierarchical networks of the 20th century, and towards complex, distributed, non-hierarchical structures of business organization and leadership.
She also points out that success today is based on a person's ability to leverage power and influence within their social networks, to act as "connectors" between people and information, and in turn build social capital.
She leaves the evaluation of the significance of Twitter open-ended, but she lays out a few characteristics of Twitter that I found most interesting:
In the World According to Twitter, giving away access to information rewards the giver by building followers. The more followers, the more information comes to the giver to distribute, which in turn builds more followers. The process cannot be commanded or controlled; followers opt in and out as they choose. The results are transparent and purely quantitative; network size is all that matters. Networks of this sort are self-organizing and democratic but without any collective interaction.
(just keep those points in mind, I'm going to come back to it)
Insight #2
Also published today over on Stowe Boyd's blog, /Message, was a post titled The Rise Of Networks, The End Of Process. He makes a case for the abandonment of worn out systems of industrial management thinking, and a move towards a social way of structuring work.
He points out that the explosion of the social web is allowing us to connect with others in a previously impossible way, and the ability it's giving us to share information and ideas is actually reforming our learning process and the way we think:
People are thronging on social sites like Facebook and Twitter because they are a straightforward way to stay connected with others, and this in turn shapes our worldview.
This same sentiment was also hit upon by JR Johnson on mashable in the post Social Media can Change the World through Common Ground.
He also points out that as we are awakening to the power of this interaction on the web, the most progressive companies and individuals are the ones actively creating new business models around this information, hybrids that combine existing frameworks with new social models.
From a social viewpoint, the architecture of business seems all wrong.
It's becoming clear that to constrict a person's capabilities into rigid, set roles that limit creativity and innovation just doesn't make sense. Diving talent into silos is an outdated paradigm. Rather, we should be encouraging the facilitation of diverse groups of people working together on common problems. I touched on the potential power of this in a previous post, "The Future of Collaboration Begins with Visualizing Human Capital."
I think his points completely validate the need for a new approach to thinking in general, which is exactly what I'm outlining in my 'metathinking manifesto'.
Insight #3
Wim Rampen is also noticing a trend, with yesterday's post, Connecting the Dots, referencing Graham Hill's recent post, A Manifesto for Social Business, and Mitch Lieberman's post Social Just is…, both acknowledging the power of customer networks, looked at through the lens of Social Business. Hill laid out fifteen trends shaping the future of business, which clearly outline the fundamental shift underway:
I would almost go as far to say that we are fast approaching a period of 'Business Enlightenment', based not so much on the linear thinking that drove the Enlightenment in the 18th Century, as on networked, emergent thinking which is driving so much new thinking in the 21st.
Everyone is catching on – Lieberman's post also references Esteban Kolsky's new 5 part series on the Roadmap to Social CRM, an in-depth series of blog posts that outlines how to develop a Social Business strategy.
Insight #4
Here's where things get interesting. From a learning standpoint, there is proof emerging that using Twitter builds intelligence. A study revealed these benefits:
All of the study participants were new to Twitter and had not previously used it or any similar microblogging service…..In a relatively short period of time, the participants formed quite sophisticated peer networks…..Peer support became a key feature of this student network, with activity rising just prior to assessment deadlines or during revision for exams. Content analysis of the messages indicated clear evidence of the emergence of personal learning networks…..Twitter is also very attractive as a data collection tool for assessing and recording the student experience, with a wide range of free and increasingly sophisticated online analysis tools available.
At the surface level, one could look at this information and agree that yes, social networks, and specifically the real-time network of Twitter, enable people to communicate and collaborate on new levels. I think there's something deeper happening.
I've been reading about complex adaptive systems lately, and many of its key properties seem strikingly similar to what's occurring on Twitter:
- Emergence: Rather than being planned or controlled the agents in the system interact in apparently random ways. From all these interactions patterns emerge which informs the behaviour of the agents within the system and the behaviour of the system itself.
- Co-evolution: All systems exist within their own environment and they are also part of that environment. Therefore, as their environment changes they need to change to ensure best fit.
- Requisite Variety: The greater the variety within the system the stronger it is. In fact ambiguity and paradox abound in complex adaptive systems which use contradictions to create new possibilities to co-evolve with their environment.
- Connectivity: The ways in which the agents in a system connect and relate to one another is critical to the survival of the system, because it is from these connections that the patterns are formed and the feedback disseminated. The relationships between the agents are generally more important than the agents themselves.
- Simple Rules: Complex adaptive systems are not complicated. The emerging patterns may have a rich variety, but like a kaleidoscope the rules governing the function of the system are quite simple
- Iteration: Small changes in the initial conditions of the system can have significant effects after they have passed through the emergence – feedback loop a few times (often referred to as the butterfly effect)
- Self Organising: There is no hierarchy of command and control in a complex adaptive system. There is no planning or managing, but there is a constant re-organising to find the best fit with the environment.
- Edge of Chaos: Complexity theory is not the same as chaos theory, which is derived from mathematics. But chaos does have a place in complexity theory in that systems exist on a spectrum ranging from equilibrium to chaos. A system in equilibrium does not have the internal dynamics to enable it to respond to its environment and will slowly (or quickly) die. A system in chaos ceases to function as a system. The most productive state to be in is at the edge of chaos where there is maximum variety and creativity, leading to new possibilities.
- Nested Systems: Most systems are nested within other systems and many systems are systems of smaller systems.
Complex adaptive systems are all around us. Most things we take for granted are complex adaptive systems, and the agents in every system exist and behave in total ignorance of the concept but that does not impede their contribution to the system. Complex Adaptive Systems are a model for thinking about the world around us not a model for predicting what will happen. I have found that in nearly all situations I can view what is happening in Complex Adaptive Systems terms and that this opens up a variety of new options which give me more choice and more freedom.
Is this perhaps the framework that we've all been hitting upon without realizing it? Many people have been sensing there is something special about the way we're able to access and exchange information and ideas on Twitter, organize into Twibes and niche groups to tackle problems together, and develop strategies (like using lists and separate accounts) to filter out the content that matters most to us.
Final question: Is Twitter not a social media platform, but an actual entity, an intelligence made up of all of us?
further thoughts: If you have room for one more idea to provide another context, consider yesterday's post by Tim O'Reilly on The War For the Web. If we start to experience real, measurable collective benefits from our ability to leverage the intelligence of the real-time web, will it be exploited, or will we ensure a system that keep our information and knowledge flows open source?
sources of the thoughtstream:
I would also highly suggest taking a look through Pierre Levy's slideshare on Collective Intelligence & Cyberspace, which I found on Victor Godot's site.
Insights from the Twittersphere
@SmartStorming Innovation is really a game of connect-the-dots. Try combining two or more seemingly unrelated things in a new way that creates value.
@spikenlilli Halpern: "How does one learn to see?" "Make associations between data points" – relational, generative, gestalt, anticipatory design #IPF09
@Innovation360 Can innovation be systematized? http://is.gd/4VCpm
@acarvin Hargadon: social media can unleash our latent creativity. #ncti2009
@WebStudio13 RT @craignewmark – RT @AlecJRoss: "The more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes." via @ariannahuff
People referenced in this post
Rosabeth Kanter @RosabethKanter
Stowe Boyd @stoweboyd
mashable @mashable
Wim Rampen @wimrampen
Graham Hill @grahamhill
Mitch Lieberman @mjayliebs
Estaban Kolsky @ekolsky
Tim O'Reilly @timoreilly
Victor Godot @victorgodot
This post made possible by:
@SameerPatel – RT'd @stoweboyd's article
@SocialNetDaily – RT'd @AnneDGallager @HarvardBiz @KellySpors to @RosabethKanter's article
@Wildcat2030 – RT'd @UniofLeics @TheHistoryWoman @timeshighered to Twitter in academia study
@emahlee – RT'd @anildash to @timoreilly's article
@phaloo – tweeted @mashable article
@ekolsky – tweeted Roadmap to Social CRM article
note: I'm going to try as often as possible to reference posts in this way, because I think it's a good illustration of how thoughts and ideas are developing as a result of distributed knowledge, and it's easier for me to follow my own train of thought.
I saw all of these posts within the last 48 hours in my twitterstream…. I don't know that I would have come up with this by reading RSS feeds or by using other news sites.


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text: Virginia Public Radio (VPR) is a news and information service providing daily news reports and in-depth weekly features to public radio stations in the Commonwealth. With a team of experienced journalists based both at the State Capitol and in Virginia's diverse regions, VPR is able to provide breaking news coverage, in-depth issues reporting and lighter features. Most all Virginia residents have access to this programming through participating public radio stations. From the environment to politics, education to technology, health care to economics, Virginia Public Radio provides a depth of coverage and analysis important to Virginia residents.


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- Event date: Jan. 18, 2022 - Feb. 15, 2022
- Kansas City, MO
Attendance at all five sessions is HIGHLY encouraged.Do you dream of owning your own business? Are you ready for a realistic perspective on whether or not people really want to buy what you want to sell? We help aspiring entrepreneurs look at all... Read more ...


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NOTE: This is a repeat of a former posting, but relevant now, if you have just received failing results. Therefore I have posted it again. Good luck to all of you who are either repeating the bar exam this February or taking the bar exam for the first time this February. Time is on your side, especially if you utilize it. Here is my earlier post about "What to do if I failed the bar exam" – Also, please visit our bar review website at: barnonereview.com and check out our calendar of workshops – we will offer a variety of free workshops for students taking the Feburary 2012 bar exam (some will be specifically geared to those who are faced with repeating the exam this February).
If you have failed the bar exam, keep in mind that you are in good company. Also, realize that the bar exam is not an IQ test. Many very bright and hardworking examinees fail the exam. If you have failed, you will need to do the following:
1) Get past being devastated as quickly as possible – as harsh as this sounds, you really do just need to get back to work as soon as you can. Those that do, have the best chance of passing the next exam. Start by doing MBEs.
2) This is going to hurt, but – find out why you failed – this starts by getting your scores back from the bar. The bar will automatically mail score sheets to all examinees who failed the bar. This usually takes 1 – 3 days after bar results come out. When you get your scores, don't panic and don't make assumptions about any one section. You will receive both a raw score and a scaled score. Take the time to read the materials that come with your score sheet that explain the raw and scaled scores. See also, other posts on this blog about making it to re-read and interpreting bar scores. And, if you need help interpreting your scores, you can get it free through Bar None Review barnonereview.com
3) Commit to taking and passing the next exam – in almost every case, I would recommend taking the very next bar exam. Obviously there are sometimes reasons to sit out a bar exam administration – but in most cases, the best advice is to take the very next exam. Think about it, the material seems like it has fallen out of your head right now – just think how hard it will be to put it all back together if you wait another six months – that would be a whole year since your last review – not a good plan.
4) Develop a plan of attack – Your plan might include taking another bar review course, hiring a tutor, or continuing your studies on your own. There are many courses available (assuming you already tried barbri) that cater to different needs – small classes, private tutorials. Do your research and due diligence before enrolling in a course. Ask for references, ask to see the course materials before enrolling, make sure the bar review provider is a good fit for your needs. And, don't abandon your common sense – if it sounds too good to be true – it probably is.But, whatever you do (take a course or study on your own) make a plan – figure out how many hours you will study each day, where you will study, how long will you have to review each topic, how many essays you will write each week, how many MBEs you will do each day, how many PTs you will write – figure it out, map it out and develop a plan.
5) Work hard – no matter how hard you worked the first time, you are going to have to work just that hard again. And, if in your honest assessment of your prior bar studies you conclude that you did not work hard enough – well then you are going to have to work harder. There simply is no magic bullet.
Lisa Duncanson
Program Director/Founder
Bar None Review
(949) 891-8831


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£60 per private session
Contact Details
- Qualified with Body Control Pilates in March 2011
- Body Control Pilates Reformer certification
- Level 3 Award in Pilates and Bone Health
- Level 3 Award in Pre and Postnatal Pilates
- Level 3 Diploma in Exercise Referral
- Level 4 Exercise Specialist in Chronic Respiratory Disease
- Supervising teacher for Body Control Pilates student teachers
- Body Control Pilates Regional Coordinator
Jo is available to teach private sessions on Thursdays. She teaches group classes at the Body Control Pilates Centre on Monday and Thursday evenings.
Jo trained as a dancer at Northern Ballet School, graduating with several dance teaching qualifications. During her time at NBS she was also awarded a distinction in Anatomy after studying at Manchester Medical School.
Jo was introduced to Pilates as part of her dance training at the age of eleven. Finding it to be an invaluable addition to her training, she continued to practise Pilates-based exercises throughout her training and performance career. After suffering a severe neck injury on her last contract, Jo was treated by a physiotherapist who used specific Pilates exercises for her rehabilitation, enabling her to continue dancing. Due to this experience she decided to train with Body Control Pilates, qualifying in 2011.
Jo is continuously amazed by the improvements that this method can bring to the body and is especially interested in working with performers and people with respiratory disease.
You can contact The Body Control Pilates Centre to book a Private Session on 020 7636 8900 or contact the Teacher directly.
£60 per private session