About forcing a language on someone

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/3/2000 1:45:45 AM, edsel at glo.be wrote:

>Changing the language of a whole population - not just the upper class that
>can be enticed easily - seems to necessitate hurtful interventions. Maybe we
>should be more aware of that when thinking of the spread of PIE e.g.

I just want to mention again the statistic that I mentioned earlier that says
that most Americans are descended from non-English speakers.  The model in
the US is aspirational and quite different, as it might have been in other
places where the concept of "newness" makes old languages seem old.  The
neolithic hypothesis has the advantage of perhaps offering the concept of
newness as did perhaps Latin through its association with Christianity.  (See
Fletcher's The Barbarian Conversions, where Latin is one of the measures of
the new order of the civitas and centers, versus the old older of the
countryside and pagani)  Even where such oppressive measures as Ed describes
were apparently successful - e.g., the medieval criminal laws in Germany
against the speaking of Wendish dialects - the process seems to leave a
prominent subtrate (e.g., Berlin is from a Slavic word).  And it is also
grindingly slow.  Plus, as in the case mentioned by Ed and in the case of the
19th cent. Russian ban on teaching Polish, the process can also backfire.

The spread of IE, however, seems to have been both fast and extremely
effective, suggesting that both a large neolithic population increase in IE
speakers and the advantage of "newness' favored language expansion and
displacement and created little resistance, except of course among those
admirably stubborn Basques, Finns and Estonians.

Regards,
Steve Long