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| I would agree with Gautsch here - if you look at it from the characteristics' point of view: As Deutschschweizer, we have two past tenses less - no imperfect, no past perfect - than whoever speaks German - and, with the exception of a few remaining pronouns, two cases less, no genitive, no accusative. If you look at it from the point of view of evolving languages, Swiss German has stopped in its evolution at the point where Middle German was - just as you could say of Scots - especially the Doric that is spoken in the Aberdeen area - that it has stopped at Middle English evolution level. | |
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Don't know what you're talking about. Simplification in language is the main sign of language development. The cases and the different tenses used to be there but have disappeared over the centuries because there was no need for them. There are strong parallels to this in English, btw - English, too, used to have a case system but by now, most case markers have entirely disappeared. Because there's no written language, Swiss German is developing much faster than other languages. Language evolution slows massively once a written languages is fixated.
It's true that some elements in Swiss German were retained from Middle German (for example parts of the vowel system - the word "brueder" for example still has its diphthong while the "ue" changed to "u:" in other German dialects) but that doesn't say much about language evolution - the languages simply took different turns.