Description and Character
The dialect ranges from a 'standard' Swabian, spoken in Stuttgart, to a variety of stronger, thicker forms found in the countryside. Older people can often tell the town a person comes from merely by hearing their accent.
Swabian is difficult to understand for speakers of Standard German, not just for its pronunciation but because it contains some vocabulary that differs altogether from Standard German. For example, jam in Standard German is Marmelade while in Swabian it is Gsälz.
Read more about this topic: Swabian German
Famous quotes containing the words description and, description and/or character:
“He hath achieved a maid
That paragons description and wild fame;
One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)