Ship of Fools: Language Revival

Thread: Language Revival Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Pancho (# 13533) on :

This was reported at the end of last year but I only read about it recently: the number of Welsh speakers is declining. I'm surprised because I thought the Welsh language revival was relatively successful.

The one truly successful case of language revival that I can think of is that of Modern Hebrew. I think there might have been some minor successes with a few other languages like Hawaiian and, or so I thought until recently, Welsh but now I'm not so sure.

What do shipmates thing about language revival? What are the prospects for endangered and heritage* languages where you live? Has anyone here attempted to learn a endangered or heritage language?

*By 'heritage language' I mean a language that was spoken recently or in the past by your family. See the Wikipedia article.

[ 28. September 2013, 18:47: Message edited by: Pancho ]

Posted by Pyx_e (# 57) on :

Welsh can't compete with Smash Hits.

Or put another way 99.9% of the fun language input is in English, the tradition can never win.

A bit like Christianity, it is something for later life.

Fly Safe, Pyx_e

Posted by the giant cheeseburger (# 10942) on :

It can be a good thing - in South Australia a few years ago we suffered from a lack of people able to perform Pitjantjatjara/English translation services for when native speakers of the Pitjantjatjara language came before the courts. Through a teaching program that particular problem of the court system failing Pitjantjatjara people is not a problem any longer.

It comes with dangers though, a local group in the Adelaide area made the misguided decision that their best contribution to the cause of White/Indigneous Reconciliation would be to have somebody teach them some of the Kaurna language. They then went off and showed off their new skills, and got promptly slapped down by actual Kaurna people for being patronising and not first asking what would be considered most useful before charging ahead with their language classes.

Posted by Try (# 4951) on :

Hebrew is an interesting exception to the rule of language revival because it was NOT a declining heritage language like Welsh or Gaelic. The Jewish equivalents of those languages are Yiddish and Ladino, both of which are still in steep decline. Hebrew was a dead language preserved in liturgy and scripture, very much like Latin. No one had spoken Hebrew as their native tongue in over 1800 years when Jewish settlers in Palestine began using it.

Posted by Galilit (# 16470) on :

Urdu in Pakistan.
Maori in New Zealand.

Posted by Pancho (# 13533) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Try:
Hebrew is an interesting exception to the rule of language revival because it was NOT a declining heritage language like Welsh or Gaelic. The Jewish equivalents of those languages are Yiddish and Ladino, both of which are still in steep decline. Hebrew was a dead language preserved in liturgy and scripture, very much like Latin. No one had spoken Hebrew as their native tongue in over 1800 years when Jewish settlers in Palestine began using it.

That's a good point, that Hebrew was a scholar's and liturgical language although I suppose some Jews might still consider it a heritage in the sense that it's a part of their ethnic heritage. What is also interesting is that the revival of Hebrew may have come at the expense of Yiddish and Ladino.

Posted by anteater (# 11435) on :

It depends on why it declined. Where it was due to political oppression, I think it is likely to bounce back as is the case with Catalan.

In the case of Irish, I don't think it was ever proscribed, but most of the speakers were removed by death or immigration due to the potato famine, and it is doubtful if it can reach a critical mass now.

It's interesting to add the disappearance of dialects, which have to be pretty strong to survive the homogenising effects of mass communications. There are no real dialects now in the UK. A status check of other countries would be interesting.

Posted by Garasu (# 17152) on :

quote:
Originally posted by anteater:
There are no real dialects now in the UK.

Not sure. I've run into several occasions of incomprehension. In the sense that they've always been resolvable by recourse to the hegemonic linguistic system, then sure. But they weren't the native language of either speaker...

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

I am speaker of a Lower Saxon dialect that is sadly dying out. Some money is being put into trying to save it, but there are almost no children who still speak it.

Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :

I tried to learn (on my own) Scots Gaelic, as my grandfather hailed from a village on the outskirts of either Glasgow or Edinburgh (I've forgotten which, he's no longer piping with us, and I think the village has now vanished or been re-named).

I was stopped cold in my tracks by lenitives and other linguistic paraphernalia. I think I'd need a teacher, plus some others to speak with fairly regularly.

That said, I think the loss of any language renders us all poorer. I have what amounts to a superstitious sense that thoughts and insights probably exist which can only be expressed in their language of origin.

Mebbe there's something to back this notion up, but if so, I haven't come across it.

Posted by Palimpsest (# 16772) on :

I heard an interesting lecture on Cherokee at a typography conference I went to several years ago. Cherokee has an independent written /Cherokee syllabary which was used to print the Bible and a newspaper.

A few years ago Cherokee was going out of common usage for reading and writing, only a few old people used it. The tribe decided to revive it. The speaker was responsible for teaching a high school graphic design course. They created a typefaces using in part type sorts that had been tossed down a well near the printer's house when he came home from work and cleared out his pockets.

In addition to teaching the high school students to design books, the elementary school students are being taught to read and speak the language. It's very impressive to see a vision that says, we'll start making books, and we'll have an audience in ten years when they grow up.

I'm not sure how much having a written form is critical to survival but it may be. There's also a good documentary by a linguist who was a Massachusetts Pequod Indian who is reviving language from written records of the colonial period.

Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Porridge:

That said, I think the loss of any language renders us all poorer. I have what amounts to a superstitious sense that thoughts and insights probably exist which can only be expressed in their language of origin.

I do not think this is superstitious. Language and culture are intertwined. Even between two extant languages, the concepts can be translated, but the feel, the essence is much more difficult.
Saving a language whilst the culture dies is worth an effort, but only part of the whole still exists.

Posted by Sergius-Melli (# 17462) on :

Interesting questions...

Fundamentally it is about the ethos behind the revival, the extent to which you push the revival and how you go about doing it.

I think the problem with Welsh revivalism (or recent lack thereof) is the manner in which millions of pounds has been funnelled away from the NHS and education to fund the translation of documents which don't need translating, as well as the appointment of a language Tsar who acts outside of the democratic process, things which have caused resentment and frustration amongst the majority of the population of Wales... When Welsh Language fanatics take over shopping centres and cause mayhem until the demands of a minority are met it doesn't do much to foster an attraction to the cause.

The other issue is that it is being forced upon young people in schools, something which is always capable of causing a less than satisfactory desire to learn or continue to use a language, thereby continuing to contribute towards a reduction in the revival of the language...

Interestingly for me I have seen the other way of doing language revival with my own Manx, where the approach is very much more relaxed, being a labour of love rather than dictate as in Wales, which has seemingly produced an environment on the Isle of Man where people will willingly learn some of the basic bits and pieces and those who truly love go on to a daily fluency, language revival may be going slowly but it is not costing the earth as in Wales, nor being taken to ridiculous levels as in Wales either...

Posted by Jane R (# 331) on :

Porridge:

quote:
I have what amounts to a superstitious sense that thoughts and insights probably exist which can only be expressed in their language of origin.

Mebbe there's something to back this notion up, but if so, I haven't come across it.

Ah, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis! AKA linguistic relativity.

The current Received Wisdom is that the language you speak does influence some cognitive processes - spatial perception, for example - but the strong version of the hypothesis isn't supported by any research evidence.

However, learning another language is very good for you due to the bilingual advantage.

The problems with maintaining a minority or heritage language are, as you say, finding someone to learn it from in the first place and secondly, finding other people to use it with. Welsh has been under extreme pressure for centuries - it hasn't changed much since the 12th century, which is a bad sign - and despite efforts from the Welsh government to communicate in both Welsh and English and to encourage Welsh-language education, it's not carved out an exclusive domain. I'd be surprised if there were any monolingual Welsh speakers; it's probably impossible to get a job without knowing English as well.

I do wonder if (paradoxically) greater independence from Westminster may have something to do with it. When Wales was treated as simply an extension of England, learning to speak Welsh could be an expression of political defiance; now that Wales has some political autonomy, perhaps fewer people are inclined to learn Welsh for political reasons.

[ 29. September 2013, 10:03: Message edited by: Jane R ]

Posted by Morlader (# 16040) on :

Morladres and I decided to learn Cornish as we were in a choir that sang evensongs* in Cornish and we like to understand what we are singing. We were created language Bards in 2000.
Cornish is a revived (reviving?) language and is subject to some of the problems mentioned above: it is difficult, after completing the formal courses and exams, to find people to converse with; there are no tv programs and only 5mins a week on BBC Radio Cornwall and enthusiasts bicker about how to write the language.
I'd like to raise one thing about reviving/endangered/minority languages not mentioned so far. Even if a language hasn't actually been banned by a conquering power there is often a reluctance by "locals" to speak it as it is seen as a peasant language - if you want to progress you adopt the language and other characteristics of the rulers.

* Ironic, as it was the imposition of the English Prayer Book which at least hastened (arguably caused) the demise of Cornish. We should've been singing Vespers.

Posted by pererin (# 16956) on :

I find Cornish faintly amusing, because it looks rather too much like mediaeval Welsh. It has that "should be intelligible" look about it, and then one hits the occasional not-a-clue word. It's rather the same experience as trying to read Scots.

Posted by Chorister (# 473) on :

In Wales they have to learn Welsh in school. And, as with everything you HAVE to do in school....

Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Morlader:
... it is difficult, after completing the formal courses and exams, to find people to converse with; there are no tv programs and only 5mins a week on BBC Radio Cornwall and enthusiasts bicker about how to write the language. ...

Do you use it in the home?

Posted by pererin (# 16956) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Chorister:
In Wales they have to learn Welsh in school. And, as with everything you HAVE to do in school....

And second-language Welsh is taught to about the same standard as French or German. And we know how effective teaching those is...

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

quote:
Originally posted by pererin:
I find Cornish faintly amusing, because it looks rather too much like mediaeval Welsh. It has that "should be intelligible" look about it, and then one hits the occasional not-a-clue word. It's rather the same experience as trying to read Scots.

Sounds like Middle English. I preferred either Anglo-Saxon, which was obviously another language, or Chaucer - where you're essentially home and dry in modern English.

I try to retain the Anglo-Irish dialect of my childhood - though after mumble decades in Scotland I have a certain uptake of a Lallans. I love the connectedness to the past language affords. Times I just sit and blow the dust off fossilised similies and think of when life contained pitch and horses and pigs and whetstones and brass buttons and whey. I dislike the current phase of abstract, polysyllabic, circumlocutory techno-English.

But it never stops. If it did, we'd all be speaking proto-Sanskrit. If you do manage to drag a language back into currency, it too will continue to morph, merge, borrow, corrupt and become something other.

Posted by Morlader (# 16040) on :

We used to speak Cornish in the pub when it was full of tourists ("A vynnta mos dhe'n dre?" - Do you want to go home?) as a sort of private language, but latterly at home? Only rarely. There are some Cornish idioms which don't work nearly so well in English, so we might use them sometimes.

There is a "Yeth an werrin" (People chat) monthly in a fairly local pub but we haven't been for a long time.

There is of course good reason why Cornish might look like mediaeval Welsh: they were the same language for centuries before the Saxons drove them back either side of the Severn. But modern lithographies look quite different.

We were disappointed to hear so little Breton/Welsh when we visted Brittany/Wales some time ago. French/English imperialism!

Kemmereugh wyth, onan hag oll. (Take care, one and all).

Posted by pererin (# 16956) on :

I just love that Cornish uses a verb that's obviously a cognate of mynnu as its normal verb "to want". [Smile]

Its tone to me is more in line with:

"Canys ni chwenychi aberth; pe amgen, mi a’i rhoddwn: poethoffrwm ni fynni."

(Take a "vein" too! That's exactly the thing I meant about Cornish — so "(g)wyth" means care, and not vein...)

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

People in Ireland who spoke fluent Irish used to get grants - maybe they still do. There were all kinds of stories about seeing a guy in a suit, and starting to speak Irish, as he might be checking up from the govt.

I think it was proscribed at various periods? In N. Ireland wasn't it banned in schools for a period?

But there are supposed to be kids in Dublin now who speak a new urban dialect, use it in texts and so on.

Posted by Morlader (# 16040) on :

quote:
Originally posted by pererin:

(Take a "vein" too! That's exactly the thing I meant about Cornish — so "(g)wyth" means care, and not vein...)

Hope I'm not taking the tangent too far: gwyth means both care and vein. Some spellings have gwith for care, and care=gwyth/gwith is masculine but vein=gwyth is feminine.

On Irish, I was told that when Ireland joined the EU she was offered Irish as her language for communications, but said she would use English. Dunno if she could've had both, but I got that impression at the time. Not exactly a blow for Celtic language preservation, was it? [Disappointed]

Posted by Anglican't (# 15292) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Morlader:
On Irish, I was told that when Ireland joined the EU she was offered Irish as her language for communications, but said she would use English. Dunno if she could've had both, but I got that impression at the time. Not exactly a blow for Celtic language preservation, was it?

But what would be the point? The Irish fisheries minister is hardly going to speak to his Greek counterpart in Irish Gaelic, is he?

Is there such a problem in having one language for administration and another for cultural stuff? I've never been able to understand, for example, why it's such a triumph for a Welshman to be able to claim the dole in Welsh. What's achieved by this?

Posted by Chamois (# 16204) on :

Originally posted by Morlader:

quote:
On Irish, I was told that when Ireland joined the EU she was offered Irish as her language for communications, but said she would use English. Dunno if she could've had both, but I got that impression at the time. Not exactly a blow for Celtic language preservation, was it?

My father came from County Cork in the far west of Ireland, and his family were native Irish speakers. He was utterly opposed to the Irish Republic's making learning Irish compulsory in schools. He told me that the language didn't have a modern vocabulary, so practically all you could talk about was farming, fishing and fighting, unless you were prepared to use a lot of loan words from another language. "What's the point of that?" he used to ask, "The kids would be much better off spending the time learning Spanish or Japanese which will be some use to them in their careers and help the Irish economy."

He refused to teach me or my sister any Irish. "Concentrate on your French" he said (my school didn't teach Spanish or Japanese).

I suspect the Irish government shared his views on what was best, language-wise, for their economy.

Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Anglican't:
I've never been able to understand, for example, why it's such a triumph for a Welshman to be able to claim the dole in Welsh. What's achieved by this?

I won't answer that directly- I'll let a native Welsh-speaker do so- although part of the answer is probably about the kind of assumptions about the normativeness of English that are inherent in your question.
But I suspect that people may be more happy to use another language for administrative purposes if it is not the same language that they associate with cultural or political domination. For example, I understand that many people in south India are happier to use English than Hindi- the latter being associated with north Indian dominance.
I have long favoured, semi-seriously, making Latin the sole language of EU administration. (It'd piss off the Greeks, of ccourse, but so what?). The Welsh, BTW, might well be happy with Latin as an administrative language- pride in the Romano-British inheritance is not quite dead here!

Posted by Jonah the Whale (# 1244) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Chorister:
In Wales they have to learn Welsh in school. And, as with everything you HAVE to do in school....

My nephew lives in Wales, right on the English border, and has always gone to school in England. I asked him last year how much Welsh he knew. "None" he said. OK, but you must know the Welsh for "slow" or "school" or "weak bridge". No, he shrugged. He must have gone past signs with that in both languages almost every day of his life. I've been past them only when I've visited my sister, but I still know them. It depends how curious you are.

Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Jonah the Whale:
My nephew lives in Wales, right on the English border, and has always gone to school in England. I asked him last year how much Welsh he knew. "None" he said. OK, but you must know the Welsh for "slow" or "school" or "weak bridge". No, he shrugged. He must have gone past signs with that in both languages almost every day of his life. I've been past them only when I've visited my sister, but I still know them. It depends how curious you are.

My sister spent three years at Aberystwyth University in the 90s and helped with a Brownie pack in which many of the girls spoke Welsh as a first language. As far as I can tell, she learnt no Welsh, and certainly didn't take any Welsh lessons, although they would have been easily enough available. Given that she was reading Maths and French -so one might expect some interest in languages- I still find that incredible.

Posted by Jane R (# 331) on :

Chamois:

quote:
My father came from County Cork in the far west of Ireland, and his family were native Irish speakers. He was utterly opposed to the Irish Republic's making learning Irish compulsory in schools. He told me that the language didn't have a modern vocabulary, so practically all you could talk about was farming, fishing and fighting, unless you were prepared to use a lot of loan words from another language. "What's the point of that?" he used to ask...

Living languages borrow from each other all the time. English, which is probably the least endangered language in the world, has a huge number of loan words (cue the old joke about English luring other languages down an alley and mugging them for any spare vocabulary). But this is one of the problems with minority and endangered languages; if all interactions with the government, public discourse, shopping, talking to your neighbours, schooling, etc. etc. are carried out in the dominant language there's no reason to develop a vocabulary for these activities in the endangered language (that was what I was getting at in my comment about language domains in my earlier post, Morlander, which you may have missed). And speakers of the endangered language (like Chamois' dad) resist borrowing words from the dominant language because it feels like giving in to The Enemy... so the number of things you can talk about in the endangered language shrinks, and so it goes on. This can happen even if the speakers of the dominant language aren't actively trying to suppress the minority language.

The other problem with reviving Celtic languages such as Welsh, Irish and Cornish is that they aren't very closely related to English - behind the false beard of all those loanwords lurks a West Germanic language. So a native speaker of English learning Welsh will find it more difficult than learning French (huge amount of shared vocabulary) or German (also a West Germanic language, with similarities in grammar and a lot of shared vocabulary). It's not because the language itself is inherently more difficult than English; it's because you can't use much of what you know about English to work out The Rules for Welsh (Cornish, Irish...)

[ 30. September 2013, 09:30: Message edited by: Jane R ]

Posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider (# 76) on :

Fi hefyd/me too.

Should I put my hand up? I'm learning (and have been for some time; it's very hard in the middle of Derbyshire) the aforementioned minority language.

But I am quite strange. When people ask me why on earth I'd learn such a useless language (everyone over the age of 5 who speaks it outside of Patagonia also speaks English, the answer is simply that it seems an obvious choice, since it's a native language of the islands I live in. Clearly that's not a normal way of thinking, seeing as it's not sufficient for 3/4 of the Welsh population, let alone anyone else, but it's always seemed a very good reason to me.

Posted by Alaric the Goth (# 511) on :

I have always found the Celtic languages intersting, as Karl has said, because of them having been spoken in this part of the world for a long time.

I tried to learn some Irish when at university (the student Irish Society did a series of classes, but it was my final year and I didn't really have the time to learn it 'properly'*).

Since then I've dabbled with Scots Gaelic and Welsh.

(* Karl first started learning Welsh at this time: if I'd tried also we could have practised our Cymraeg and both improved! And it is a bit easier to learn it (IMHO) than the Goidelic languages!)

I should learn Cornish as I have some Cornish ancestry.

Bring back Visigothic! (Atta unsar, thu in himinam, weichnai namo thein...!)

Posted by ArachnidinElmet (# 17346) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
Fi hefyd/me too.

Should I put my hand up? I'm learning (and have been for some time; it's very hard in the middle of Derbyshire) the aforementioned minority language...

I tried to learn Welsh in my teens (off the back of wholesale consumption of Celtic fantasy books: Susan Cooper anybody?). I let it drop (although I can just about remember how to say "I'm an English Women and am learning Welsh", despite no longer being true) but have always remained interested in all things Cymric. As posted above, learning a language is often inextricably linked to its culture.

Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on :

You do appear to live in the most Welsh part of Yorkshire.

Posted by pererin (# 16956) on :

Probably the hardest thing about Welsh is word order. It's a very different mindset that in a non-emphatic sentence the verb goes first. Unless people know Hebrew (yeah, right...), it's going to seem very strange to them, and they're going to have to fight the urge to construct sentences "John brynodd lyfr" ("It-was-John-and-not-someone-else-who bought a book") rather than "prynodd John lyfr" ("John bought a book").

Posted by Sighthound (# 15185) on :

I think Welsh is very important indeed to the people who speak it, as it's tied up with their culture and history.

However, it's of very little practical use to anyone else. Unless (like me) you are interested in Welsh history and culture. I'd like to learn it, but only because of that.

Posted by Bob Two-Owls (# 9680) on :

Dwi ddim yn siarad Cymraeg ond dwi'n trio dysgu. I like Welsh as a language even if I am abysmal learning it. Being ex-Scottish I love my adopted county and the pre-saxon place names that have survived such as Crich, Pentrich and Mam Tor. I also love Anglo-Saxon but never got very far with the tortuous grammar that I was presented with at university.

Posted by Gwai (# 11076) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Bob Two-Owls:
Dwi ddim yn siarad Cymraeg ond dwi'n trio dysgu.

Translation please!

Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Albertus:
You do appear to live in the most Welsh part of Yorkshire.

I'm not totally convinced by the traditional version of English history, that somewhere around 450 two people called Hengist and Horsa acquired territory in Kent. Then the Anglo Saxons came over the sea in huge numbers and drove everyone who was there before into Wales and Cornwall.

If you read between the lines, it's fairly clear that they didn't really begin to get much control over anywhere west of a line from Southampton to Newcastle, including the plain of York until about 600.

Posted by Arethosemyfeet (# 17047) on :

The latest census, while still showing a drop in the number of Gaelic speakers in Scotland, is showing positive signs - the proportion of children with some Gaelic is picking up - and this is a reflection of the huge growth in Gaelic Medium Education. This is happening not just in traditionally Gaelic areas but in the big cities too. So much so that it is increasingly difficult to recruit suitably qualified staff at Gaelic Medium schools. Gaelic has a bright future, I think.

Posted by crunt (# 1321) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Gwai:

quote:
Originally posted by Bob Two-Owls:
Dwi ddim yn siarad Cymraeg ond dwi'n trio dysgu.
Translation please!

I don't speak Welsh, but I am trying to learn (it).

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

Rydw i'n siarad tipyn bach Cymraeg. (I speak a little bit Welsh.) I made an effort to learn a bit when I was living in Swansea. At least I still remember how to say 'Slow'.

Posted by cheesymarzipan (# 9442) on :

I didn't see the census form, so just wondering... was the 'do you understand welsh' question only asked of people who live in wales or also the rest of the country?
Quite a few of the people who learn welsh in school would move to other parts of the UK for university/jobs, that doesn't mean they don't speak welsh it just means they're not counted.
Ten years ago I would have counted myself fluent, now I'm trying to learn irish off street signs... the spelling is so illogical compared to welsh!

Posted by Arethosemyfeet (# 17047) on :

Hah! Irish Gaelic is simplified compared with Scottish Gaelic...

Posted by cheesymarzipan (# 9442) on :

Whereas welsh is phonetic (most of the time)
I would progress better in my learning of Irish if I made friends with people who actually bother to speak it. Most people here seem to have learnt it in school and abandoned it as soon as exams were over...

Posted by Metapelagius (# 9453) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:

quote:
Originally posted by Albertus:
You do appear to live in the most Welsh part of Yorkshire.
I'm not totally convinced by the traditional version of English history, that somewhere around 450 two people called Hengist and Horsa acquired territory in Kent. Then the Anglo Saxons came over the sea in huge numbers and drove everyone who was there before into Wales and Cornwall.

If you read between the lines, it's fairly clear that they didn't really begin to get much control over anywhere west of a line from Southampton to Newcastle, including the plain of York until about 600.

I quite agree - Devon a century and more later, and Cumberland even later than that. A plausible if unorthodox alternative suggested a while back by the scholar cleric Arthur Wade-Evans is that the earliest Germanic settlers in Britain were Roman soldiers recruited in 'Germania' and given land as retired veterans. These then invited relations from 'back home' to cross over and join them. The Saxon domination of what was to become England was therefore gradual rather than fire and sword and terrified ancient Britons rushing off the moment 'Hengist and Horsa' (i.e. Stallion and Horse, rather bizarre names) appeared, to hide in the Welsh mountains, if they hadn't been hacked to death in the meantime.

Posted by pererin (# 16956) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Gwai:

quote:
Originally posted by Bob Two-Owls:
Dwi ddim yn siarad Cymraeg ond dwi'n trio dysgu.
Translation please!

Gall Gwgl gyfieithu brawddegau syml yn weddol dda.

Posted by Carys (# 78) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Anglican't:
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Morlader:
[qb]
Is there such a problem in having one language for administration and another for cultural stuff? I've never been able to understand, for example, why it's such a triumph for a Welshman to be able to claim the dole in Welsh. What's achieved by this?

The problem is that the administrative language tends to have prestige which weakens the 'cultural' language further. I claimed the dole in Welsh when I was unemployed because it is the historic language of this land and its lack of official status since 1536/42 is a major reason for its current parlous state. I learnt Welsh as an adult but for many of my friends it is very much their first language & although they can speak English, they are translating from Welsh to do so. I also took my driving test on Welsh.

Carys

Posted by Russ (# 120) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Chamois:
Originally posted by Morlader:

quote:
On Irish, I was told that when Ireland joined the EU she was offered Irish as her language for communications, but said she would use English. Dunno if she could've had both, but I got that impression at the time. Not exactly a blow for Celtic language preservation, was it?
My father came from County Cork in the far west of Ireland, and his family were native Irish speakers. He was utterly opposed to the Irish Republic's making learning Irish compulsory in schools. He told me that the language didn't have a modern vocabulary, so practically all you could talk about was farming, fishing and fighting, unless you were prepared to use a lot of loan words from another language. "What's the point of that?" he used to ask, "The kids would be much better off spending the time learning Spanish or Japanese which will be some use to them in their careers and help the Irish economy."

He refused to teach me or my sister any Irish. "Concentrate on your French" he said (my school didn't teach Spanish or Japanese).

I suspect the Irish government shared his views on what was best, language-wise, for their economy.

The way I heard it, after the economic downturn, they had Irish Gaelic declared an official EU language, thereby creating jobs for Gaelic-speakers in the Brussels bureaucracy, translating all EU documents into Gaelic versions that no-one will ever read.

We get mixed signals as to whether Gaelic is declining or increasing in popularity. There are a number of small rural areas designated "Gaeltacht" - sort of Gaelic-language reservations. Censuses and surveys consistently show a declone in the proportion of residents of these areas who speak Gaelic in the home on an everyday basis. But the number of children sent to Gaelic-language schools is increasing, and there are more such schools in existence across the country

It's like the Irish have bilingualism as an ideal that they want for their children but can't be bothered with themselves.

Best wishes,

Russ

For those

Posted by Bob Two-Owls (# 9680) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Gwai:

quote:
Originally posted by Bob Two-Owls:
Dwi ddim yn siarad Cymraeg ond dwi'n trio dysgu.
Translation please!

Sorry, been away a while and forgot the language rules...

It might say "I don't speak Welsh but I am trying to learn", apologies for the lack of translation.

Posted by Bob Two-Owls (# 9680) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Gwai:

quote:
Originally posted by Bob Two-Owls:
Dwi ddim yn siarad Cymraeg ond dwi'n trio dysgu.
Translation please!

Sorry, been away a while and forgot the language rules...

It might say "I don't speak Welsh but I am trying to learn", apologies for the lack of translation.

Posted by pererin (# 16956) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Carys:
The problem is that the administrative language tends to have prestige which weakens the 'cultural' language further. I claimed the dole in Welsh when I was unemployed because it is the historic language of this land and its lack of official status since 1536/42 is a major reason for its current parlous state.

The problem I've encountered with administrative Welsh is that some of it is simply not very good. Direct.gov.uk even has instances of "y Lywodraeth" — if they can't even say "the Government" correctly, I hate to think what horrors would await if I clicked the "log ar" ("log upon") button. Of course, there is a funny aspect to roadsigns that say "nid wyf yn y swyddfa", "ffordd ar gân", "dim parcio ar y min" and the like, but when it's a bad translation of a poorly-drafted official document where the response actually matters, I'd rather not be playing Chinese whispers.

Posted by Jane R (# 331) on :

Russ:

quote:
It's like the Irish have bilingualism as an ideal that they want for their children but can't be bothered with themselves.

I can see where they're coming from. If you want your child to grow up as a balanced bilingual (equally fluent in both languages) you have to speak both languages at home. For that to happen at least one parent needs to be fluent enough in Irish to be able to switch into it when half-asleep and trying to do sixteen other things at the same time.

We tried teaching our girl baby signing (simplified British Sign Language), but didn't get very far because we only found out about it after she was born and were too exhausted from sleepless nights, etc. to learn the signs properly ourselves.

[ 01. October 2013, 11:32: Message edited by: Jane R ]

Posted by Anglican't (# 15292) on :

quote:
Originally posted by pererin:
The problem I've encountered with administrative Welsh is that some of it is simply not very good. Direct.gov.uk even has instances of "y Lywodraeth" — if they can't even say "the Government" correctly, I hate to think what horrors would await if I clicked the "log ar" ("log upon") button. Of course, there is a funny aspect to roadsigns that say "nid wyf yn y swyddfa", "ffordd ar gân", "dim parcio ar y min" and the like, but when it's a bad translation of a poorly-drafted official document where the response actually matters, I'd rather not be playing Chinese whispers.

I think one of these might be an Out of Office reply, but for the benefit of us Anglo-Saxons, could someone translate these words and, more importantly, explain why they're not quite right?

Posted by pererin (# 16956) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Anglican't:

quote:
Originally posted by pererin:
The problem I've encountered with administrative Welsh is that some of it is simply not very good. Direct.gov.uk even has instances of "y Lywodraeth" — if they can't even say "the Government" correctly, I hate to think what horrors would await if I clicked the "log ar" ("log upon") button. Of course, there is a funny aspect to roadsigns that say "nid wyf yn y swyddfa", "ffordd ar gân", "dim parcio ar y min" and the like, but when it's a bad translation of a poorly-drafted official document where the response actually matters, I'd rather not be playing Chinese whispers.
I think one of these might be an Out of Office reply, but for the benefit of us Anglo-Saxons, could someone translate these words and, more importantly, explain why they're not quite right?

They are:
1) "nid wyf yn y swyddfa" — that was indeed the out of office reply; what made this one particularly stupid and incompetent was not so much that Swansea Council's roads department had no-one who knew enough Welsh to spot the word for "office", but that it was a restriction on HGVs, which should have been a pictogram anyway;
2) "ffordd ar gân" — should have been "ffordd ar gau" (road closed); instead they used the idiom "ar gân", which literally means "on song", but is used in phrases such as "yr Hwyrol Weddi ar Gân" (Choral Evensong); so it became a choral road; and:
3) "dim parcio ar y min" — no parking on the verge; this one is technically right, as min does mean edge, verge; unfortunately, it also means edge, blade, and is therefore generally used to mean erection; apparently, the person answering the phone in Denbighshire Council found this one funny too.

As you can probably tell, collecting examples of inspiredly bad Welsh signage is an all-too-easy game.

Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on :

There was a policy in Canada to exterminate indigenous cultures, of which language is certainly the cornerstone. Loose the language, you loose the culture. Revive the language, you may or may revive the culture. Language is about how we think. In some languages in Canada you have to specify the specific bird, for example, and can't just say bird. The general class of bird is understood, just not spoken of, because it is possible to be much more specific and people tend to be specific. Or seasons, there are more than 4. Or a name for a young tree might be different than an older one. It is about connection to the environment, how we talk to others, e.g., talking and pointing with the lips versus fingers/hands. It all matters.

So the question I have, is whether Welsh culture is distinct in terms of how people relate to the world, or is it a way of talking within the same culture? Can you specify how?

Posted by Pancho (# 13533) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Jane R:
Russ:
quote:
It's like the Irish have bilingualism as an ideal that they want for their children but can't be bothered with themselves.

I can see where they're coming from. If you want your child to grow up as a balanced bilingual (equally fluent in both languages) you have to speak both languages at home. For that to happen at least one parent needs to be fluent enough in Irish to be able to switch into it when half-asleep and trying to do sixteen other things at the same time.

I'm going to disagree slightly with this. I think it's enough that the minority or heritage language is spoken fully or frequently at home to become fully bilingual. In my family growing up only Spanish was spoken at home with my parents and I'm fully bilingual. For mixed language households I've read elsewhere on the internet that as long as one parent always speaks to the child in a given language that child will become bilingual.

Where it becomes difficult is developing advanced skills in the heritage language. I was lucky enough to have bilingual education throughout elementary school and I spent some time in a school in Mexico so I have pretty decent reading and writing skills and my passive vocabulary is pretty good because I've always exposed myself to Spanish television and newspapers. I can follow a university lecture in Spanish with no problem but I know my active skills lag behind my active skills in English because I've had the chance to develop the latter ones a lot more. Other people like me who didn't receive bilingual education or did put stopped consuming Spanish language media have even larger gaps in their skills even if they can still speak fluently (in the narrow sense: natural, flowing speech with ease and little or no hesitation) and use lots of regionalisms and slang.

So, if an Irish household wanted to raise bilingual kids it's enough, maybe even better, that they just speak Irish at home because the kids will be exposed to English outside the home and educated in that language anyways. Even if they stop using it outside the home it will give them a good foundation to return to the language later in life.

The problem is from Russ' message it sounds like a lot of Irish have mixed feelings about the language. They want to but they don't but they do.

Posted by Jane R (# 331) on :

Pancho:

quote:
So, if an Irish household wanted to raise bilingual kids it's enough, maybe even better, that they just speak Irish at home because the kids will be exposed to English outside the home and educated in that language anyways.

That's true - but if the parents want to speak Irish at home they have to know enough Irish themselves to be comfortable using it with their children, which means they need to be fairly fluent themselves. If Irish is not their first language they may struggle.

The point I'm really trying to make is that it's not something you can decide to do on the spur of the moment after the baby's born. You need to put in quite a lot of effort to learn the language yourself if you don't know it already. And for most adults, their own first language is an important part of their identity; the English-speaking parents who speak Irish to their children may have conflicted feelings about it even if they believe (intellectually) that reviving Irish is a good thing to do.

As you say, gaining advanced skills in a language is not likely to happen unless you use it outside the home as well; and you need to keep on using the language or you'll forget it.

Actually, balanced bilinguals are very rare; most bilinguals have a dominant language even if they are fluent in both.

[ 01. October 2013, 20:46: Message edited by: Jane R ]

Posted by pererin (# 16956) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet:
So the question I have, is whether Welsh culture is distinct in terms of how people relate to the world, or is it a way of talking within the same culture? Can you specify how?

I think the annoying reality is that it's somewhere in between.

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Pancho:
In my family growing up only Spanish was spoken at home with my parents and I'm fully bilingual. For mixed language households I've read elsewhere on the internet that as long as one parent always speaks to the child in a given language that child will become bilingual.

Where it becomes difficult is developing advanced skills in the heritage language. I was lucky enough to have bilingual education throughout elementary school and I spent some time in a school in Mexico so I have pretty decent reading and writing skills and my passive vocabulary is pretty good because I've always exposed myself to Spanish television and newspapers. I can follow a university lecture in Spanish with no problem but I know my active skills lag behind my active skills in English because I've had the chance to develop the latter ones a lot more. Other people like me who didn't receive bilingual education or did put stopped consuming Spanish language media have even larger gaps in their skills even if they can still speak fluently (in the narrow sense: natural, flowing speech with ease and little or no hesitation) and use lots of regionalisms and slang.

But Spanish has a full range of infrastructure keeping it going. There is a vast Spanish literature, are Spanish-speaking universities, Spanish-speaking banks, Spanish textbooks, Spanish instructions on flatpack furniture, Spanish-language TV, a whole industry of Spanish pop music and Spanish films. So the start you got at home is enough for you to be able to plug into the Spanish-speaking world whenever you want to.

Welsh barely has all that. It just about does, but its probably one of the smallest languages that does, and only really in some parts of Wales. There isn;t a Welsh-speaking world to be part of elsewhere - not even everywhere in Wales. And Irish and Scottish Gaelic don't really have even that. They have a sort of well-meaning imitation of it that is kept going by government subsidy and some keen enthusiasts. Outside the Gaeltacht in Ireland, and even inside what passes for Gaeltacht in Scotland, you have to try really really hard to live your life in the langauge because although loads of peopel ahve a few words of it there is just all this stuff going on in English.

And for thousands of even smaller languages all over the world that don't have the written history of Gaelic there isn't even that. You might speak them at home, but you won't speak them anywhere else other than at home because there is no-one else to speak to and nothing to say in them. Your mother tongue is exactly that, the language your mother speaks to you. You might never hear it more than a few hundred metres yards from home. Of course in quite large parts of the world that sort of thing is quite normal. There are loads of places where everybody speaks one language at home (not necessarily the same one as their next-door neighbours), another language in the street, a third language at school or work, and maybe even a fourth language to talk to the government, and a fifth to talk to God. (OK, five languages in daily use is pretty rare, but three is common, and two is perhaps normal - us monolinguals might be the minority)

Posted by fletcher christian (# 13919) on :

posted by Quetzalcoatl:

quote:

People in Ireland who spoke fluent Irish used to get grants - maybe they still do. There were all kinds of stories about seeing a guy in a suit, and starting to speak Irish, as he might be checking up from the govt.

I think it was proscribed at various periods? In N. Ireland wasn't it banned in schools for a period?

Irish speakers have never been the recipients of grant just because they spoke Irish. There is money available (although it has never been a significant sum) to help community events that are about raising the awareness of Irish in art, literature, song, poetry etc, among other things. There are many Gaeltacht area where Irish is spoken fluently and you will hear it all the time in shops, pubs, at church, on the street (with or without a suit from the government). Lots of folk here speak Irish and I know many families who only use Irish at home (there are Irish speaking schools here where English is not used). On the whole, most people have a smattering, some have a lot of Irish and a decent few are fluent. It's partially kept alive through the schools, but the fact that so much of the arts (especially music) makes use of Irish helps it to survive to a greater extent. Much of Irish poetry and some of the best of its literature has also not been translated, which also in a way is good, because it encourages people to read it or hear it in Irish, which has a peculiar beauty.

Posted by lilyswinburne (# 12934) on :

I am trying to learn Irish and am using Byki, provided for free by our local library, and TG4, the Irish tv station, which has many tv programs in Irish. This is much more fun than slogging through grammar.

Posted by Moo (# 107) on :

In the 1960s there was a law in the Irish Republic that anyone seeking a government job had to pass a test in Gaelic. The hiring official was allowed to make up the test. Sometimes they needed to hire a doctor for a certain area, and there was only one applicant. In that case, the hiring official would say in Gaelic, 'Raise your right hand.' while raising his own right hand. The applicant would always catch on and raise his hand.

Moo

Posted by PaulTH* (# 320) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Chamois:
I suspect the Irish government shared his views on what was best, language-wise, for their economy.

Irish is spoken today, as a living language, by fewer than 20,000 people. Many more learn the educational system's standardised version for cultural reasons, but it isn't their every day langauge. This only exists in remote areas on the west coast of Munster, Connaught and Donegal, in the Gaeltacht areas, where encroachment by English speakers grows all the time. Natives of these areas, if they want to go out into the rest of Ireland, let alone the rest of the world, have to know English as well, and leave their native tongue behind them. When numbers get that low, the decline becomes terminal.

I doubt if Welsh is yet in such a dire condition, but since Irish independence in 1922, and in spite of large sums of money being pumped into its preservation, native Irish speakers have declined tenfold. It's a matter of opinion whether this is a tragedy or not. Hiberno-English, which is the modern language of Ireland is, IMO, a very rich and unique expression of English, captured quite well in some of James Joyce's novels. It has inherited much syntax and idiomatic verb tenses from Irish which give it that quaintness which appeals to people all over the world.

Simply passing laws that all schoolchildren must learn this language, and that civil service documents must be in both languages will do nothing to halt the decline. It's taught badly in schools, concentrating often on medieval tales. Most kids resent having to learn it. The population of the country has ne interest in jumping through hoops to preserve a link to a bygone era. Those who do want to learn it are free to do so, and if they visit Gweedore or Connemara, they'll find that they can't understand the very different dialects which survive among that small handful of native speakers.

Posted by fletcher christian (# 13919) on :

Posted by Paul TH:

quote:

This only exists in remote areas ....

Pretty much all of Ireland is a remote area.

quote:

.....since Irish independence in 1922, and in spite of large sums of money being pumped into its preservation, native Irish speakers have declined tenfold

It started long before that really. With Catholic emancipation came the notion among its rising stars that speaking Irish was backward and crude. Even O'Connell felt that Irish language had no place in a new Ireland while all the Protestants went native and culchie, and fiercely nationalist.

quote:

It's taught badly in schools, concentrating often on medieval tales.

I'm not sure exactly what you are referring to here, and although Peig looked old in that textbook and had a whiff of medieval air about her, I'm not sure she was quite that old! I can only assume that you might be referring to the Táin? Not truly medieval either, nor have the actual texts ever been translated into English (at least not directly - there have been many attempts, not least by Thomas Kinsella), although Seamus Heaney was working on it before his death, God rest his soul. But to say this might be out of touch would be a bit peculiar, it being one of the greatest works of epic poetry and literature in Europe.

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