Dying Languages

[Kiskaanak]

I think monolingualism is a plague, btw. It seems to be a relatively recent plague too. Luckily a fairly geographically isolated one.

[Angleter]

like "Heroin store"

But seriously- sometimes I wish that the Normans never invaded, so that Celtic Nationalists will stop bitching.

Whats wrong ith the Celtic Nationalists? Arent you proud of your heritage? you should be

The Celt nationalists invest entirely in their Celtic heritage and forgo their united British heritage- this is especially ironic in Southeast Scotland, where the inhabitants have never had a Gaelic heritage and have an Anglo-Saxon one dating back as far as Gaelic Scotland.

The little Englanders who advocate jettisoning the other nations are little, if at all, better.

[Shper]

That's a horrible thing to say.


That's happened here as well. There was a time when speaking Irish at school or in public would've earned you a beating, or even being killed. It's still mostly frowned upon in Northern Ireland, but that has more to do with being ignorant of the language than hating it. Many would be eager to learn the language if it was allowed to be taught in schools.

But would speaking Ireish connotate separatist sentiment?

Uh, no, not really.

[Churchilland]

Some, I think we should get rid of (eg less than 1,000 speakers) but anything above I think we should try and preserve them...

[Vestr-Norig]

Fucking hilarious.

That's a horrible thing to say.

Yeah, its sad, we have about the same problem here in Norway, with Nynorsk (true Norwegian language), being discriminated, hated, exposed for rascist comments in public , etc by the Bokmål (Danish) users

That's happened here as well. There was a time when speaking Irish at school or in public would've earned you a beating, or even being killed. It's still mostly frowned upon in Northern Ireland, but that has more to do with being ignorant of the language that hating it.

So, Nynorsk is the true language, while Bokmål has so much Danish in it that it is not truly Norwegian anymore?

Well, Old Norse, which was used in Norway long back ago, was extinct in the Norwegian-Danish union by the Danes, so there were only Danish written language in Norway. In the late 1800s, two languages were formed, one, Nynorsk, made by Ivar Aasen from Sunnmøre in Western Norway, based on Old Norse and the Norwegian Dialcets, and another, Bokmål, made by Knut Knudsen from Oslo in eastern Norway, based on Danish and Oslo dialect (which for a long time was a Danish colony).

[The Archregimancy]

But Scottish Gaulic isn't needed. It's just an unfortunate leftover from the tribal days.

Is that what the Scotts think? Tha fact that they had to submit to English rule makes the survival of their language that much more important to them, I would think.

Can I gently correct a common North American misconception here?

The retreat of Gaelic had been underway for centuries before James VI of Scotland inherited the throne of England - which, it's worth pointing out, had nothing to do with 'submission', and everything to do with the Scottish king simply inheriting the English throne as of right.

I don't deny that the suppression of Highland culture in the wake of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion contributed significantly to the decline of Gaelic, but the Kings of Scotland and the Scottish governing class were largely English/Scots (depending on how we define the latter)-speaking from David I (1124-1153) onwards The Stewart monarchs (1371 onwards) deliberately set out to reduce Gaelic and Highland linguistic and cultural influence in their Kingdom on the grounds that Gaelic Highland culture was barbarian and backwards. Up until the 19th-century romanticisation of Highland culture, few Lowland Scots - many of whom enthusiastically participated in the post-'45 suppression of Highland culture - would have wanted anything to do with their Highland brethren.

There are many reasons behind the decline of Scots Gaelic, but placing the emphasis on 'submission to the English' - and implicitly on post-1745 events - completely ignores the low status Gaelic (wholly unfairly in modern terms) had within Scotland itself from the 12th century onwards, and the efforts that Scottish monarchs made to suppress Gaelic long before the union - whether personal or political - with England.

[Haalstad]

Grammatically correct English is a dying language

[Lospadotemaletaselanpaloielepolkgikoi]

I don't think we should be saving languages, we should be working towards exterminating more of them.

Why?

And only if we start with the bastard language of English. Really, germanic structure with romance words, ugh.

lol, English parents were sick!

[Forsakia]

You could have a universal language for documents to make communications more easy say English or Esperanto. It's ironic how some languages are dying but people create new languages and are teaching them, such as Klingon and Sindrian. We could use dying languages to construct new languages.

I'm intrested in the Aku-Jeru creole and Cornish languages.

Cornish is interesting in that it's an (attempt at a) revived language where it effectively died out and they've made attempts to bring it back. They had to fudge a lot of the language together due to gaps in the remaining Cornish language resources, so how authentic the 'Cornish' that a small minority speak (and colour me skeptical on estimates of thousands of fluent speakers). From memory it was dying out naturally beyond or in addition to government interference.

Welsh has of course survived by far the best out of the Celtic languages, I'd suggest that was because it had a far more solid ongoing base that when government interference came along it was able to resist better. But I'm not hugely well versed on the histories of Irish and Scots gaelic.

[Shper]

Whats wrong ith the Celtic Nationalists? Arent you proud of your heritage? you should be

The Celt nationalists invest entirely in their Celtic heritage and forgo their united British heritage- this is especially ironic in Southeast Scotland, where the inhabitants have never had a Gaelic heritage and have an Anglo-Saxon one dating back as far as Gaelic Scotland.

The little Englanders who advocate jettisoning the other nations are little, if at all, better.

"British heritage" is a social construct, carefully engineered by the English and Scottish ruling classes during the time of the British Empire to give the common man something to work for. The fact that Celtic nationalists are finally wising up is a sign that those imperial days are at an end.

[Tsa-la-gi Nation]

Some, I think we should get rid of (eg less than 1,000 speakers) but anything above I think we should try and preserve them...

Funny, I think we should get ride of any language with over 10 million speakers & preserve that rest.

[Churchilland]

like "Heroin store"

But seriously- sometimes I wish that the Normans never invaded, so that Celtic Nationalists will stop bitching.

Whats wrong ith the Celtic Nationalists? Arent you proud of your heritage? you should be

Why should anyone really be proud of the Celts? They thought culture and manners and hygiene, the languages are confusing and backwards and they never really had a golden age. And that's from someone who's lived in Wales all of his life!!!

[Lackadaisical2]

Fucking hilarious.

That's a horrible thing to say.

Come on, theres only two people who speak it left, and they won't speak to each other. Thats funny.

[Der Teutoniker]

As a linguist, I find Lack's comment about one language supplanting others very interesting.

On the one hand, the loss of languages would mean more people can communicate with each other easily. We would more easily see each other's points of view and global communication would in theory become much easier.

Yet, within each language are so many idiosyncrasies, I think the idea of shedding all other languages rather than just the smallest ones means that humanity would lose a lot in the long term. The reason is that it's these idiosyncrasies that determine the thought patterns a person must undergo when communicating in any given language. This must surely then influence cultures; for example, many jokes are reliant upon the languages they're told in. Not only can you immediately tell a Russian joke or anekdot even after it has been translated into English, but you also lose a lot of the initial meaning too. This is because Slavic languages work very differently to Germanic ones and so demand different thought patterns.

Different languages mean different ways people can communicate, but ultimately, all the ways people communicate through language have come from within us, human beings; is it not a shame therefore to damn all that to history? I think we'd be losing a hell of a lot in getting rid of any more languages than we need to. A far better solution in my opinion is to encourage multilingualism from an early age, that way bridging the gaps between different languages.

The cultures, thought processes, and perspectives of the strong deserved to be preserved. Not others.

[Vestr-Norig]

That's a horrible thing to say.

Come on, theres only two people who speak it left, and they won't speak to each other. Thats funny.

No, it's really not

[Varazhdin]

Personnally, I support the preservation of languages on the ground of principles.

Simply, a language is a merker of identity for the group who speaks it, something that links people to their ancestors who have spoken it before. If a member of that group abandons that language in favour of another one, he's suggesting that that other language is worthier than his own. So, in other words he is suggesting that being a part of a larger group that speaks a language is worthier than being a part of a smaller group that speaks a language, and accordingly that a larger language group is worthier than a small language group.
That is something I don't accept.

[Tsa-la-gi Nation]

That's a horrible thing to say.

Come on, theres only two people who speak it left, and they won't speak to each other. Thats funny.

I agree, I thought it was funny too.

[Shper]

Whats wrong ith the Celtic Nationalists? Arent you proud of your heritage? you should be

Why should anyone really be proud of the Celts? They thought culture and manners and hygiene, the languages are confusing and backwards and they never really had a golden age. And that's from someone who's lived in Wales all of his life!!!

For your information, the Celts used soap hundreds of years before anyone else.

And how can a language "confusing and backwards"? As I've said before here, Celtic languages have a lot of features that English doesn't. English even contains a fair few celtic loanwords. That hardly makes them backwards.

[Der Teutoniker]

No, it's really not

Actually, it's pretty damned hilarious.

[Lackadaisical2]

The Celt nationalists invest entirely in their Celtic heritage and forgo their united British heritage- this is especially ironic in Southeast Scotland, where the inhabitants have never had a Gaelic heritage and have an Anglo-Saxon one dating back as far as Gaelic Scotland.

The little Englanders who advocate jettisoning the other nations are little, if at all, better.

"British heritage" is a social construct, carefully engineered by the English and Scottish ruling classes during the time of the British Empire to give the common man something to work for. The fact that Celtic nationalists are finally wising up is a sign that those imperial days are at an end.

All types of heritage are social constructs.

[Der Teutoniker]

Simply, a language is a merker of identity for the group who speaks it, something that links people to their ancestors who have spoken it before.

And if the group to which the language belongs died off? Then what principle could there be? In this case, these groups are dying off. They have not earned preservation.

[Shper]

"British heritage" is a social construct, carefully engineered by the English and Scottish ruling classes during the time of the British Empire to give the common man something to work for. The fact that Celtic nationalists are finally wising up is a sign that those imperial days are at an end.

All types of heritage are social constructs.

How? You could maybe argue that they're geographical constructs, if anything, but social? I don't get how that works.

[The Archregimancy]

Welsh has of course survived by far the best out of the Celtic languages, I'd suggest that was because it had a far more solid ongoing base that when government interference came along it was able to resist better. But I'm not hugely well versed on the histories of Irish and Scots gaelic.

Welsh survived as well as it did largely due to a single book published in 1588: Henry Morgan's Welsh Bible.

It was the only one of the British Celtic languages where a Bible translation was sanctioned, and where church services were permitted in the local language. In a period where Church attendance was both religious and political, the importance of Elizabeth I's decision to sanction an official Welsh Bible - some decades before the King James Version - is hard to underestimate.

[Vestr-Norig]

No, it's really not

Actually, it's pretty damned hilarious.

And you are English? American? A user of a language that most likely will not be dead for thousands of years? For me it isnt funny at all, it is just bad, sadistic humour.

[Rokartian States]

All types of heritage are social constructs.

How? You could maybe argue that they're geographical constructs, if anything, but social? I don't get how that works.

They're based on minute differences in humans' genetic makeup that have been magnified by society.