LL-L: "Language maintenance" LOWLANDS-L, 21.JUL.2000 (04) [E]

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 L O W L A N D S - L * 21.JUL.2000 (04) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: john feather [johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk]
Subject: Mutual comprehension

Criostoir recently said:

>I pointed out that scholars often subsume Dutch and German into
"Netherlandic-German" because of the intimate similarities between the two.<

Since he has made the same observation before, may I ask who these scholars
are and in what context they do this?

His description of the reaction of the down-trodden native Cornish to the
imperialist aggressors who come and force money on them every summer rang a
bell with me. In London we have barbarian invasions all the time, from
French schoolchildren to working-class football fans (aka "hooligans") from
other parts of England and the United Kingdom. We, too, sell them ephemera -
plastic policeman's helmets and replicas of "Carnaby Street" street-signs.
Of course, the Romanis do things entirely differently. They invade settled
populations and force ephemera (aka "sprigs of lucky white heather") on to
them.

John Feather johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

----------

From: john feather [johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk]
Subject: Language maintenance

Ron wrote:

>_Schiet_, unlike German _Scheiße_, is totally acceptable in polite company,
also meaning simply 'dirt', and preposed 'unpleasant ...'  I, who is not
prone to using offensive language, have used it on LL-L on more than one
occasion.<

In Swedish there is a further use of "skit- " as an intensifier, eg
"skitbillig" (very cheap), "skitbra" (very good). I don't know the register
of this, though I believe the usage is very widespread.

The pronunciation is something like "fwit", or at least mine is.

John Feather johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

----------

From: Roger Thijs [Roger.Thijs at village.uunet.be]
Subject: Language politics

In the news it was announced Paris made a provisional agreement (with a 2
year test period) with Corsican regionalists for giving the island some
legislative autonomy. The latter would include competence about vehicular
languages in schools.
Reactions on the "Antenne 2" TV-teletekst pages are divided: some French
constitutionalists are strongly against; Basque people state this may be a
step that could be copied for their case.
I think for the French Flanders, whatever will come, it will be too late.
Regards,
Roger

----------

From: Criostoir O Ciardha [paada_please at yahoo.co.uk]
Subject: LL-L: "Language maintenance"

Dear all,

Sandy wrote:

> I hope I'm not being too contumacious, but although
> I agree with much of Criostoir's explanation of UK
> law (and also don't know enough about it to attempt
> to expand on or detract from it) I'm not actually
> personally frustrated with the situation.

Well, I apologise for making the generalisation on
your behalf, Sandy. I too was referring to a general
sense of frustration on the part of many of us here in
Britain, not just yourself. Of course this is a
frustration that is more acutely felt in Scotland,
which has elected a Labour government there for the
last eighty years but has had nought but Conservative
right-wing policies enforced since 1979, an
enforcement that has not slackened since 1997.

> There are enough Scots speakers in Scotland to
> terrify any of the vote-cherishing political parties

> into bending to their will, but they don't
> particularly see their language as anything worth
> making a stand for.

This is of course all too often the common experience
for minority cultures worldwide. It's a self-defeat
based on years of colonisation which marginalised and
ultimately aimed to extirpate everything that was at
variance with the culture of the conqueror. Its
success has been varied, and most acutely felt in
Scotland where it is easy for the London government to
"dialectise" Lallans out of existence as it is a
Germanic language; Franco tried the same with
Galician, Asturianu, Aranes, Valenciano and Catalan,
where he claimed they were all "dialects" rather than
languages in their own right. Welsh, Scots Gaelic,
Manx and Basque are not so easily "dialectised"
because they are clearly not immediately (or in the
case of Basque even distantly) related to the imperial
language.

Lallans has suffered a double attack: it has been
"dialectised" and Scotland itself has been chronically
hobbled by policies aimed to destroy Scottish national
identity in favour of a British one. It is of course
perfectly acceptable for an "English" national
identity to exist alongside a "British" one - witness
the recent Scotland/England football friendly where
Tony Blair flashed his credentials to middle England
in giving England his support rather than staying
neutral (which would have been the diplomatic and
professional thing to do), or in any competitive
competition where the rule develops that if an
inhabitant of the United Kingdom is competing and they
are Scottish, Welsh, Irish, black or Asian and they
win they are "British" but if they do something wrong
they revert to being Scottish, Welsh etc. In contrast,
however, whenever an English person is competing they
remain "English" - it's then called "A great day for
England" - except when they do something wrong in
which case they become instantly "British".

Similarly, the past experience with English football
hooligans has been to refer to them as "British
football hooligans" - especially when they stab
somebody, riot or smash up the continent. This ignores
the hard fact that Scottish football supporters are
reknowned for their good behaviour and their ability
to get a poor game going by joining in singing with
their opponents. I recall the wonderful sight in the
1994 World Cup where at every game the Scottish
supporters were integrated and mixing with their
foreign counterparts, laughing and cheering with them.
English fans, on the other hand, have to be segregated
from their foreign counterparts unless somebody is
kicked to death, stabbed, etc. But Scottish football
supporters strangely always become "British football
supporters" when they're setting a good example...

Scottish national identity has always been a drag to
England and the English Empire, except when a
stereotype to demonstrate supposed English superiority
to everyone else is required. Hence the drunken,
truculent Glaswegian or the token Scot to add a little
"Britishness" to an English landscape. And Lallans has
suffered as a result. It has been classified along
with any other language spoken in the islands outside
RP as a "peasant dialect" and accordingly stifled,
hobbled and harrassed.

The language of "Britain" (wherever that is) is, we
are told each night by the news, each morning by the
daily paper and in each session of the London
government not Lallans, nor Cornish, Welsh, Irish or
Scots Gaelic, Panjabi, Polish etc.; it is RP English
and, if you don't speak that, you don't count
politically. It's really very horrific, and far too
much of a common occurence over the whole of Europe.

> Meanwhile, many of the people who do make a stand
> for Scots don't actually speak it but are in it for
> ulterior motives - ie nationalism. However much the
> existence of the language may act as a weapon for
> these people, they do seem to be exposing the
> language to ridicule and destroying it as a
> recognisable entity in attempting to achieve their
> aims.

Whilst I agree with the jist of your assertion here,
one should not attempt to expound notions of a
'language aristocracy' with native speakers at the top
and those cannot speak the language but exhibit the
sentiment as the detrita at the bottom. In my
experience, far more "native speakers" of minority
languages are indifferent to the deplorable state of
their rights than those who have lost their ancestral
language. One should not knock anyone who supports a
minority language. One may knock their reasons and
their motives, but not their effort.

In addition, the idea of those who don't speak the
language being somehow unqualified to speak on it will
doom the minority language communities of Europe to
death if it is taken to its logical extreme. The sad
fact is that so many languages have been lost to
cultural imperialism that there are far more "aspirant
speakers" than "native speakers" of almost every
minority language in Europe. Therefore one should not
denigrate them for developments and extinctions beyond
their control.

> Although things seem to be improving in some
> quarters in this respect, as far as I, as a native
> Scots speaker, am concerned, the government's
> educational policies and the activities of such
> nationalists form a two-pronged attack in alienating

> Scots speakers from
> their heritage.

I completely agree with the educational angle: Britain
(I'm not too certain about other Lowlanders'
educational experiences) has always had an
Anglocentric education system which attempts to warp
young minds into believing that London is the centre
of the planet, English is the language of everybody on
said planet and that "the peripherary" is about as
important to Britain (i.e., England) as the Welsh
language - i.e., not at all.

Add to this the idea of a "national curriculum" - a
wee bit of indoctrination there, eh? - and one leaves
school either monumentally right-wing and collaboratve
or, in the case of myself and most people who live
outside Berkshire, monumentally fucked up and fucked
off. As I have articulated previously, the sole effort
I remember that was taken over my schooling was that I
not use my local language. This is the same as a Scots
speaker, or a Welsh speaker, or a Geordie speaker,
etc. I resolved then to combat this aggressive
centralisation, so much so that I had my own chair in
detention etc. But of course politics in
schoolchildren and principles contrary to sucking up
to authority are "disruptive". Indeed, whenever I hear
about the latest increase in exclusion at school, I'm
certain 90% is down to a reaction to the all-out
attack working-class students face on their esteem,
their politics, their desire not to follow orders
blindly etc. Education education education?
Indoctrination, eradication and neutralisation, more
like.

> perhaps the real driving force here is something in
> human psychology that attracts people to the
> progressive, the respectable and the powerful
> aspects of available cultures. The government will
> get away with this as long as we lap it up. The fact

> is that Cornish and Norns wanted their children to
> learn more prestigious languages than the ones they
> themselves spoke, that's why their languages died
> out.

I'm sorry, Sandy, but this is a grevious error at
least on the part of Cornish becoming dormant. Cornish
began to retreat not out of it being an inefficient
language or because parents wished their children to
learn English - although I do understand your
assertion - but rather because the English enforced
linguistic apartheid and cultural hegemony. Clearly
linguistic apartheid leads to the inferiorisation of
the local language by the imperial one; but one should
never make the mistake of assuming this transition is
wilful on the part of Cornish parents or even
welcomed. Indeed the Cornish language was quite
tenacious; it survived for over two hundred years
after it had become the minority language in its own
land and ist speakers today continue to increase (no
thanks to the interference of one Dr Ken George).

The issue of "available cultures" is the most
pertinent here. When I attended secondary school in
Cornwall (1992-1996) I was offered the choice of
French, High German or Spanish as a foreign language.
I was devastated and so were many of my friends: we
wanted to learn Cornish. Indeed, many of my friends
had studied Cornish throughout primary school (i.e.,
ages 5-11) and this abruptly halted when they moved up
a year. I abhorred the idea of having to learn any of
the three; I hated the French language because it was
used to oppress the Bretons, Basques and Corsicans
only a few kilometres away; I abhorred High German out
of sympathy for the Sorbs (I didn't know about
Plautdietsch at the time, to my eternal pity); and
Castillian I hated because of Franco's policy toward
the Basques and Catalans. In the end French was chosen
for me, and I made every attempt to fail, obstruct or
otehrwise frustrate my education in the language.
Repeatedly I attempted to realise Cornish classes:
despite having a motto in Cornish, a Celtic cross as
its emblem and black and white (as in the Cornish
flag)as its uniform colours, I was told Cornish was a
"dead language" and that I should learn a language
that would be "useful": i.e., imperial. I got an F,
thankfully.

Many Cornish parents do want Cornish taught to their
children, and the issue has been raised numerous times
by the parents themselves, by disaffected pupils and
by the Cornish nationalist groups represented in the
colonial Council. There are many teachers able and
willing to teach the language too. Each time the
answer is the same: "No. Don't be so stupid. What
purpose does teaching Cornish achieve?" I would
counter that what does teaching a language that pupils
don't wish to learn and subsequently actively fail in
protest achieve? Who wins then? Out of my French class
of 25, not one went on to continue to study French at
A-Level, and all but two failed the subject
completely, gaining only an E or F.

There will never be an effective renaissance of
minority cultures until the obstructionary
collaborators who form the vast majority of local
government in minority areas stop thinking about
consolidating "national" culture and promote local
culture.

Was anybody here given the opportunity to learn their
language at school? What are your experiences?

> Features in the pronounciation of the Cornish
> dialect of English suggest that the Cornish weren't
> even content with learning the language of their
> Wessexian neighbours - they seem to have imported
> teachers from the east to ensure their children
> learned "the best English".

I'm sorry, Sandy, but this is laughable. Cornish
English is one of the local languages most heavily
indebted to its substrate, and the pronunciation of
Cornish English mirrors that of Cornish exactly; so
much so, in fact, that to pronounce Cornish accurately
one must have access to a native Cornish English
speaker to understand the overwhelming number of
amazing phonetic idiosyncracies in both languages.
Indeed, in the west Penwith and Kerrier areas Cornish
English is in fact interspersed almost unconsciously
with dozens of Cornish expressions, from "Metten da!"
for "Good morning!" to "Mer ras tha why!" in place of
English "Thank you." The lexicon is also heavily in
debt to its Celtic source.

Indeed, where I grew up - Camborne/Camburn - my
neighbours and my Cornish mother would speak to each
other in informal ("broad") Cornish English and I
could not understand a single word of what they were
saying, so impenetrable was their pronunciation,
despite the fact that my mother used the Cornish
English with me. Eventually I mastered this, but I
only use Cornish phonology when I need to speak the
Cornish language.

I'd be interested to hear the basis of your assertion,
and I can only assume it was a mischievous deliberate
attempt to provoke some response from me! *laughs*

> A new question: we know it can be sad when a
> language or some aspect of a culture dies out, and
> it can also be an intellectual loss in the
> linguistic sphere. But is there any _ethical_ reason

> why languages should be kept alive if the native
> speakers no longer bother with it?

Well, I think this is an issue of cultural diversity.
What I always feel sad about when a language "dies"
(an unusual term, and inaccurate as any language can
be learnt) is that a mode of thinking, an approach to
the world, an emotional and intellectual framework is
lost. Further, to me it makes the experience of the
group that spoke that language seem invalid, distant,
ghost-like, extinct. Take for example the often-used
example of the Inuit and her or his one hundred words
for "snow" but only one word for "tree": if an
Indo-European speaker and the Inuit stand side by side
and look out into a snowy forest, they see two
different structural environments. They think
different things. Each thought is as valuable and
valid as any other, and it seems to me that if
languages die out, that unique mode of thought - and
the thoughts propogated therefrom - are also lost.

Language loss is also an example of futility: it
stands as a testimony to a battle that has been lost.
Was the battle, the effort, the passion therefore
futile? Were the people who lived their lives and
loved their loves and died their deaths through that
language also futile? We are sad when someone dies.
It's a natural reaction. And yet a language is so much
more than one person: it's a unique medium of
interaction, an instrument of social intercourse. To
leave a language "die" is the equivalent of condoning
the genocide of a people. Because that is what a
language is: a living organ for people, an expression
of their collective, of their feelings, their hopes
and their fears. To let that die is like letting death
consume a people. Because to them their language is
their life: they cannot exist without it.

I'm reminded of those final speakers of native
Americans languages - hundreds of them - the last link
to the living expression of their nations. I see them
there, alone, thinking to themselves in thoughts dumb
to others, wishing for just one person - just ONE - to
make the language a medium of communication once more,
to make it live again.

If that does not convince you of the ethical merits of
language retention and promotion, I don't know what
will.

Until next time,

Criostoir.

----------

From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject: Language maintenance

Dear Lowlanders,

John wrote:

> In Swedish there is a further use of "skit- " as an intensifier, eg
> "skitbillig" (very cheap), "skitbra" (very good). I don't know the > register
> of this, though I believe the usage is very widespread.

It is similar to how it can be used in both Low Saxon (Low German) and German,
i.e., preposing it either to a noun (e.g., LS _Schietkeerl_, G _Scheißkerl_
'despicable guy') or to an adjective or adverb (e.g., LS _schietegaal_, G
_scheißegaal_ 'damn well doesn't matter').  However, unlike in Swedish, it it
*always* a negative intensifier.  In Missingsch (i.e., German varieties on Low
Saxon substrates) you also use _schiet..._ rather than _scheiß..._.  (This is
also true of North German dialects that are Missingsch-based, where the Low
Saxon expressions are used among North Germans only.)  These "mixed" varieties
have the luxury of a choice between two codes.  In this case, _Schiet_ is
non-offensive, while _Scheiß(e)_ is.  The Low-Saxon-derived word is
specialized to mean anything bad, by itself also 'dirt', 'garbage', 'rubbish',
'nonsense', 'shenanigan(s)' (Missingsch _Ich wi' ma' den ganzen Schiet
rausschmeißn_ 'I'm going to toss out all that garbage', _Red' nich so 'n
Schiet!_ 'Don't talk such nonsense!', _Nu hör' ma' auf mid den Schiet!_ 'Now
stop the shenanigans!').

Criostoir wrote:

> I abhorred High German out
> of sympathy for the Sorbs (I didn't know about
> Plautdietsch at the time, to my eternal pity)

Criostoir, allow me to put you on the same page with regard to "autochtonous"
minority languages dominated by German:

Germany:
* Danish (incl. Southern Jutish)
* Frisian (various Mainland and Insular North Frisian varieties as well as
Sater Frisian, the last remainder of Eastern Frisian -- some of these might be
argued to be separate languages)
* Low Saxon (usually referred as "Low German," which lumps together Saxon, Low
Franconian and Limburgish dialects)*
* Lower Sorbian (Lower Lusatian)
* Upper Sorbian (Upper Lusatian)
* Romani (incl. Sinti)
* German Sign Language
(In reality there are many more, some of them much more sizeable than some of
the above, such as Turkish, but they are still considered "foreign," i.e.,
people want to hang on to the illusion that they will go away.  There is also
a long-standing Polish-speaking community that began in industrialized regions
in the early 20th century or even earlier.)

Please note that _Plautdietsch_ is the name of the Mennonite-specific
dialects, namely West Prussian ones (of what is now Northern Poland) that
centuries ago journeyed trough Eastern Europe, later through Inner Asia
(Siberia and Central Asia) and eventually to the Americas, with a growing
number of speakers from the former Soviet Union in Germany lately.  The
dialects used indigenously in Northern Germany are commonly referred to as
_Plattdüütsch_ (German _Plattdeutsch_ "flat German") or _Nedderdüütsch_
(German _Niederdeutsch_ "Nether-German"), those in the Netherlands
collectively as _Nedersaksisch_ in Dutch (with various Low Saxon
equivalents).  _Saksysch_, _(neder-)sassysch_, etc., used to be a common way
of referring to the language in the past also in what is now Germany,
especially in the "glory" days of the Hanseatic Trading League whose
international lingua franca it was.  The use of _...duytsch_, _...düütsch_,
etc., increased with the increase of German domination.

Austria:
Hungarian
Romani (incl. Sinti)
Serbo-Croatian
Slovenian
Austrian Sign Language
(There are also communities of speakers of "foreign" languages, e.g., Farsi
French, Greek, Kurmanji, Polish, Turkish, Czech, Arabic, Chinese, and probably
more.)

(I am not including Switzerland here, where in the Germanic-speaking regions
"High" German is an official language but the native language of very few, and
many Swiss German speakers would like their varieties to gain independent
status and acquire a common orthography independent from the German one.)

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Reinhard/Ron

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