In these country districts round Brunswick nothing but Low German
("Platt-Deutsch") was talked. Low German is curiously like English
at times. The sentence, "the water is deep," is identical in both
tongues. "Mudder," "brudder," and "sister" have all a familiar
ring about them, too. The word "watershed," as applied to the
ridge separating two river systems, had always puzzled me. In High
German it is "Wasser-scheide," i.e. water-parting; in Low German
it is "Water-shed," with the same meaning, thus making our own
term perfectly clear. "Low" German, of course, only means the
dialect spoken in the low-lying North German plains: "High"
German, the language spoken in the hilly country south of the Harz
Mountains. High German only became the literary language of the
country owing to Luther having deliberately chosen that dialect
for the translation of the Bible. The Nibelungen-Lied and the
poems of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were all in Middle-
High German (Mittel-Hoch Deutsch).
I remember being told as a boy, when standing on the terrace of
Windsor Castle, that in a straight line due east of us there was
no such corresponding an elevation until the Ural Mountains were
reached, on the boundary between Europe and Asia.
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