LL-L: "Language survival" LOWLANDS-L, 18.FEB.2001 (01) [E/Z]

[Lowlands-L]

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  L O W L A N D S - L * 18.FEB.2001 (01) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: Colin Wilson [lcwilson at starmail.com]
Subject: LL-L: "Language survival" LOWLANDS-L, 17.FEB.2001 (01) [E]

At 16:58 17/02/01 +0000, Ian James Parsley wrote:

>Some people seem content to teach a
>'watered down' version, and even to base the 'standard' on it, and I
>have been told even by Foras na Gaeilige Board members that this is
>deliberate to simplify the language and therefore entice more people
>to learn it.
>I cannot describe a lot of the Scots you see even in
>official publications in Ireland as anything other than barbaric, with
>a complete disregard for the intricacies of grammar and idiom but far
>too much attention paid to 'maximally differentiating' from English,

The irony here is that the Irish nationalists want to create
a language that's *more* like English, whereas the British nationalists
want to create one that's *less*, all of which is exactly the opposite of
what common sense would suggest.

Basically, I agree with every word that Ian James Parsely wrote and,
in my view, these anecdotes serve to illustrate the pitfalls in front
of anyone who seeks to revive a language into spoken usage. It's
especially unfortunate given that, with these two languages, there
are still speakers who do know these languages as living forms of
expression. Unfortunately, some people's eagerness to make
A Statement far exceeds their willingess or ability to stay quiet,
pay attention, and learn from others, or even just to look up the
dictionary. I suspect that this tendency is the greatest obstacle
to language revival, rather than anything inherent in the task.

As far as Scots in Scotland is concerned, we see the same tendency
here as in Ireland: "screive" used as if it meant "write", "leet"
used as if it meant "list", "norie" used as if it meant "idea",
"gar" used as if it meant "make", "rax" used as if it meant "reach",
and more. Alasdair Allan, who wrote a Ph.D thesis in Scots a few years ago,

invented the word "hyperlallanism" as a convenient derogatory term for
this tendency. Ian James Parsley might care to adopt it in the form
"hyperullanism".

*********************************************************************
  Colin Wilson                  the graip wis tint, the besom wis duin
                                the barra wadna row its lane
  writin fae Aiberdein,         an sicna soss it nivver wis seen
  the ile capital o Europe      lik the muckin o Geordie's byre
*********************************************************************

----------

From: Criostoir O Ciardha [paada_please at yahoo.co.uk]
Subject: LL-L: "Language survival" LOWLANDS-L, 17.FEB.2001 (01) [E]

A chairde,

Ian makes some astute observations about Irish which
are of great relevance to the situation of language
survival not just in a Celtic but also a Lowland
context. Further, we must bear in mind that the terms
of reference for most endangered or minority (insert
qualifying "negative" adjective as desired, a mindset
that all of us within our language communities have to
avoid) languages are the same, whether it be because
of a colonised/coloniser, suppressed/suppressor or
decimated/decimator relationship to the "killer"
language. Nonetheless I thank Ron for permitting the
digression into specifically Irish parameters.

I would like to know how far the dominant language in
a Lowland situation affects the languages we discuss
here: for example, has there ever been a specifically
Frisian colour spectrum that has now been imbalanced
toward Dutch? Or are the two languages too close
genetically to engender different colour schemes?

> In what I call 'Learners' Irish', i.e. that often
> taught at courses in Belfast, colours are assigned
> directly to their English equivalents.

This is only partly true, and implies a blanket
standard applied to Irish in the Six Counties. The
situation with regards to the Gaelic in Belfast is
complex, because of the Shaw's Road Gaeltacht (SRG;
i.e., an enclave of native Irish speakers in west
Belfast) who are a source of great local pride and who
exert some influence on how the language is taught in
the local vicinity.

Ian describes "Learner's Irish" and it seems to me he
is in fact describing the Irish of the SRG (a minority
variety of Irish of Belfast with a few hundred
speakers), which is massively contaminated by a heavy
English/Ulster-Scots substrate, to the point that the
syntax of the language is severely affected and
divergent from other varieties of Irish. Indeed, SRG
Irish speakers also freely mix English reflexives into
their speech ("Tá sé ocras air, like, you know?") and
use "aye" ("An mbeidh cupán tae agat?" "Aye, beidh mé,
go raibh maith agat"). This enrichment of the language
is a source of great pride to the SRG community and to
west Belfast.

However, the consequence has been an undeniable
"Germanicisation" of the more difficult sections of
Irish, at least to English-speaking ears. This is of
course the Anglicisation that Ian is referring to.
(Although I have to say it seems to me to be more of
an Ulster-Scotsisation given that the English of the
Six Counties tends to be heavily affected by Ulster
Scots.) Therefore the Gaelic colour spectrum has been
discarded in Shaw Road's Gaelic in favour of a
one-to-one with English but I'm unsure whether this
will last considering that most Irish speakers shun
the English spectrum. We may see the Irish of the SRG
become gradually regaelicised over time as the network
grows and evolves and is reintegrated into Donegal
Irish.

> These courses also have a tendency towards
> 'Anglicized simplification' [...] and pronunciation
> (the /r/ in words such as 'Éire' and 'Doire' is very
> distinct from anything in English, but it is
> pronounced as in English even by teachers at some
> courses in Belfast).

This is entirely true and a good point well made. In
the Irish of the SRG, the entire system of
palatisation and velarisation has been severely
compromised, and indeed even aspiration and
nasalisation (i.e., mutation and eclipsis) is not
always present. Further, most plural pronouns have
been lost so that "agaibh" (at you, plural) is simply
replaced as per English with "agat" (at you,
singular). This is the hallmark of re-learned
languages, where the "old language" (in this case,
Belfast English), which itself involves a substrate
from the dormant language (i.e., Irish) has itself
become a substrate, with attendant interference.
As the Belfast English phonology is idiosyncratic when
compared to the rest of Ireland, we see that
"compromise-sounds" have come to the fore.

As the velarised /r/ of which Ian speaks is difficult
for English speakers to articulate, it is ignored, so
that "Éire" and "Doire" are pronounced amongst
learners as [e:ir@] and [do^r@]. From my own
experience I have noticed that the ghamma sound is
also becoming obsolete in relearnt Irish: it tends to
simply be pronounced as [g]. However there is a
tendency amongst Irish speakers who have spent
considerable time in the Gaeltacht to utilise this
sound, if unevenly. The consequence of using [g] for
ghamma is that it can confuse: /dh/ in Irish is also
the ghamma phoneme. This produces a situation whereby
the poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill has her name variously
pronounced [ni: go:n at lj], [ni: jo:n at lj], [ni:
hjo:n at lj] and even [ni: ho:n at lj]. All of these are
correct insofar as the speakers know who they are
referring to. I would argue that an imperfect relearnt
phonology hardly discredits the fact that someone has
taken the effort to relearn their language.
Nonetheless the point stands that structural and
phonological interference in relearnt Irish is a major
"code-noise" slough, and occassionally difficult.

> However, not all courses do this. Some teach
> 'Donegal Irish' (occasionally played up as 'Ulster
> Gaelic'), and these, I would imagine, retain all the
> structures of the Donegal Gaeltacht...

This is a little inaccurate, again, and clarification
is needed. Donegal Irish enjoys high prestige amongst
learners in the nine counties of Ulster as the native
"Ulster" variant of Irish; consequently, the Gaeltacht
villages are flooded with learners from all over the
nine counties, so that they can learn "their" Gaelic
rather than "RTÉ Irish". Donegal Irish is extremely
idiosyncratic and serves as a transitional variant
between the Irish of Connacht and the Scots Gaelic of
the Inner Hebrides. It employs the heavy palatisation
characteristic of all speech in the nine counties
(i.e., the [j] after initial consonants which also
features in Ulster English and Ulster Scots) and a
distinctive syntax and grammar that appears quite odd
to speakers of other variants of Irish.

Donegal Irish is the prestige variant taught in all
Six County schoolrooms except where Shaw's Road Irish
is the immediate native form. Even in the SRG the
Irish community recognises that Donegal Irish is
relatively "uncontaminated" (I use the term
reservedly), unlike their own variety. (Nonetheless
SRG Irish-speakers are proud of their language's
vitality and idiosyncracies which they do not see, and
nor should they, as negative or "impure".)

I would argue that Donegal Irish is in fact the most
"Irish" in its syntax of all Gaelic variants. I learnt
Conmara Irish (i.e., the Irish of the extreme west of
Ireland, Connacht) and I am frequently baffled by my
friends who all use the Donegal Irish variant. Not
only is there much "code noise" from the phonology of
Donegal Irish but the actual grammar at times appears
to make no sense. An example of this is a simple
greeting we use (glossed as "How are you?" in
textbooks):

Donegal Irish: Cad é mar atá tú?
               lit. "What it like is you?"
Conmara Irish: Conas tá tú?
               lit. "How are you?"

We see, then, that Donegal Irish's distinctive
features may be put down to retention of native forms,
or interference from Ulster Scots. To digress to
personal anecdote, I find Donegal Irish fairly
confusing; the words are there but the way they are
arranged is erratic and strikingly odd. This is no
barrier to communication, but I tend to find myself
speaking Irish more often and more easily to my
Munster Irish-speaking friend, avoiding undue mistake.

> Firstly, it shows that there would appear to be a
> divide in terms of purpose with Irish. Some people
> seem content to teach a 'watered down' version, and
> even to base the 'standard' on it, and I have been
> told even by Foras na Gaeilige Board members that
> this is deliberate to simplify the language and
> therefore entice more people to learn it.

This is indeed the case, although I'm not sure that
Foras na Gaeilge should be implicated fully in this.
These attempts to Anglicise (as that is what so-called
"simplification" of Irish really is in this context)
the Gaelic are ignored and derided as "RTÉ Irish" or
"Dublin 04 Irish" - RTÉ (Raidió Teilifíos Éireann)
being the Irish television network and Dublin 04 being
a bourgeois Britain-orientated postal district
renowned for its apathy toward Irish (indeed a
counter-Irish campaign has been waged from Dublin 04
since the 1960s under the title of "the Language
Rights Movement").

Consequences of subverting the language to the learner
are nothing short of catastrophe, I feel. One throws
away the vitality of the language to peg it to the
dominant language. When this occurs, the "minority"
tongue becomes something of an appendage, dependent
and colonial still, and this entirely defeats the
purpose of language survival. I love the Irish
language: I love its modes of expression, its
richness, its vibrancy, its sounds and its words, its
grammar and its vocabulary. I do not want to have a
"half-Irish" language that is in fact a hollowed out
slave to English. I would argue, in fact, that it is
better that a few people learn "factual Irish" in
continuity with the past (that is, native forms such
as Donegal Irish, Conmara Irish etc.) rather than
everyone learn "hypothetical Irish" based on
"simplicity" and "ease of acquisition".

This is precisely the dilemma facing Cornish today,
and seriously undermining its continued revival. Some
rather philanthropic faux-linguists have "recreated
historical Cornish" rather than simply picked up where
the last speakers left off, which would of course be
the most honest and true to the language approach.
Misfortunately, though, this "Unified Cornish" is a
mixture of reconstructed cognates from Welsh and
Breton, neologisms, and literary terms from plays of
c.1500. Even more lethally, a linguist named Ken
George gave himself the moral right to invent a whole
new "Cornic" (as Glanville Price scathingly rejected
it) that is in fact a Cornubisation of Breton and
distinctly Breton-looking. The only Cornish language
that has historical and factual legitimacy is
Curnoack, which, rather ironically, uses the
English-based orthography of the final speakers.
Nonetheless, it is the Cornish spoken in Cornish
mouths in the 18th and 19th Centuries. The
introduction of George's "Kernewek Kemmyn" caused a
schism in the small Cornish-speaking community which
reverberated through Cornish nationalism as a whole.
Thankfully, George's ridiculous "north Breton" is now
thoroughly discredited.

> Personally I would feel betrayed by
> such a version, and
> many others are determined not only that this
> particular lesser-used
> language should survive, but that it should survive
> 'properly'.

This is entirely the issue at stake. One has to be
true to the language, and not to one's ambitions -
languages are not static, but neither are they
infinitely malleable. Take for example the situation
of neologisms in Israeli Hebrew: Ben-Yehuda created a
whole slew of "suitable" terms, of which perhaps 60-70
percent were accepted. Elsewhere loans are simply
Hebraicised and used in everyday speech. Nonetheless
this is equally "proper Hebrew" because the native
speakers themselves have accepted the loans.

I am reminded of the state of Romanian in the 19th
Century, when the tongue was discovered to have
Romance affliation and a mass "Frenchification"
programme was put into practice, including the switch
from the Cyrillic alphabet, the purging of Slavic and
Magyar loans and their replacement with French, and so
on. I am left to wonder if modern Romanian is "proper
Romanian" given that it was tampered with and abused
by linguists with their own agendas.

Conclusively, then, we have learnt that it is one
thing to revive a language, but quite another to claim
historical legitimacy for our new tongue. And as the
politicos amongst us argue that historical legitimacy
is the sole arbiter of legitimacy in the present, it
seems to me that manufactured languages and variants
enjoy no more legitimacy and right than does Volapuk
or Esperanto.

Go raibh maith agaibh,

Críostóir.

----------

From: Marco Evenhuis [evenhuis at zeelandnet.nl]
Subject: LL-L: "Language survival" LOWLANDS-L, 17.FEB.2001 (01) [E]

Ian wrote:

> I cannot describe a lot of the Scots you see even in
> official publications in Ireland as anything other than barbaric, with
> a complete disregard for the intricacies of grammar and idiom but far
> too much attention paid to 'maximally differentiating' from English,
> while failing to recognize that Scots words that look like English are
> as much a part of the Scots tongue as those that aren't. I personally
> have no time for this 'cheat version' (nor for the 'learners'
> standard' version of Irish) - I hold to the firm belief that if you
> are going to teach it, you teach it properly. But that's maybe because
> I'm not politically motivated?

There are no official publications in Zeeuws/Zeelandic and the language is
not teached at any level, but roughly the same discussion about 'purer' and

less 'purer' forms of the language as Ian describes can be found in Zeeland

as well.
In Noe-magazine, the only magazine in Zeeuws, you'll find articles, short
sories and poetry in Zeeuws. Some authors prefer to 'write as they speak'.
That is, using quite a few 'hollandisms' and thus more or less neglecting
the older, more typically Zeelandic forms. The same goes for expressions,
grammar, etc. Other writers use a more literary form of Zeeuws, using old
words that are still quite commonly known throughout Zeeland, but are only
seldomly heard in every day speech. A third approach is exaggerating things

in very much the same manner as Ian described for Scots and using the older

forms in ways they were never used before...
I find it very hard to 'label' these different approaches: they all have
there advantages and disadvantages and even the last approach sometimes has

its charms in terms of creativity and flexibility.

Within two years, there will be a teaching method for Zeeuws for adults
available. Ian mentions proper teaching of a language. But how do you
define
proper teaching if one can't even define proper use of the language. I
mean,
who determines what is proper Scots, Gaidhlig, Zeeuws, etc.? Is it the
language that is used in every day life in the early 21th century? Is it
the
language as it was used in rural areas before, say, World War II?

Saemenvattienge vo die a gin Iengels wille verstae: bin je noe goed bezig a

je je stuten in een stutemaele stekt of a je je botrammen in een broôddoôze

stopt?

Marco Evenhuis

----------

From: Ian James Parsley [parsleyij at yahoo.com]
Subject: LL-L: "Language survival" LOWLANDS-L, 17.FEB.2001 (01) [E/S]

Marco,

You asked:

> Within two years, there will be a teaching method for Zeeuws for adults
> available. Ian mentions proper teaching of a language. But how do you
define
> proper teaching if one can't even define proper use of the language. I
mean,
> who determines what is proper Scots, Gaidhlig, Zeeuws, etc.? Is it the
> language that is used in every day life in the early 21th century? Is it
the
> language as it was used in rural areas before, say, World War II?

It is easier to begin by defining what it is *not*. To quote from
Purves' Scots Grammar (1997: 4-5):

'Against a background of continuing erosion of colloquial Scots, it is
arguable whether a substantial proportion of recent writing,
purporting to be in Scots, can properly be regarded as Scots at all.
Much contemporary material contains few of the features which
characterize the language, and appears to consist of attempts at back
translation from English into personal notions of what Scots is. What
can we make, for example, of such a sentence as "Ah wudnae of came if
Ah had of knew?" The acceptance of such a sentence as modern Scots
perpetuates the insulting notion that Scots is simply corrupt English.

Some of the so-called Scots currently written and published may be
syntactically and idiomatically English, and attempts to compensate
for its inauthenticity by spelling English words in an unusual way. It
is not possible to write well in Scots without experience of
colloquial speech or without a sound knowledge of Scots idiom and
syntax. In the absence of distinctive features of Scots grammar, as
exemplified in such sayings as "Auld men dees an bairns suin forgets",
the language loses its unique quality. Good Scots certainly cannot be
written by anybody who decides to invent his own orthography and
grammar off the cuff, because it is too much effort to discover the
standards inherent in speech and in the substantial corpus of
literature which already exists. A passage of English cannot be
transformed into Scots simply by substituting Scots words for English
words without reference to structure and idiom.'

With reference to Scots vis-a-vis English (but I'm sure the same
applies to Zeeuws, Low Saxon or whatever), it is undoubtedly difficult
even for the most proficient of speakers to write Scots well simply
because they are not used to doing so. However, some attempt must be
made. It is difficult to define some texts, but there is no dispute
that a large proportion of texts recently published, perhaps most
notably in Ulster, are actually English with strange spellings and odd
words (or common words used oddly) thrown in. You *can* define that.

So, for example, it is questionable whether the so-called 'verbal
concord rule' (illustrated above my 'auld men deeS' and 'bairns
forgetS') is actually necessary in Scots. Many Scots speakers adhere
to it, many (including most poets) don't. However, a phrase such as
'twa yeirS' or 'fowerty-echt mileS' is undoubtedly English to me
despite the Scots numbers - Scots speakers would always say 'twa yeir'
and 'fowerty-echt mile' (i.e. singular noun used after numerals where
relating to time, distance or length) - although I suspect even this
usage is dying under influence from modern English and general
analogical tendencies.

With regard to spelling, it is not good enough to invent a whole new
orthography, particularly one with no apparent system which is bound
to be full of inconsistiencies. What is required is general agreement
of traditional usage, and then general agreement on any moves towards
diverging from it. Few Scots writers would dispute such spellings as
'guid' and 'abuin' (which reflect a vowel pronounced quite differently
across dialect areas), but there remain other debates ('deid' vs.
'deed', 'sheuch' vs. 'sheugh', 'aw' vs. 'aa' etc). What *is* required
is consistency (if you use 'deid' use 'heid', if you use 'sheuch' use
'eneuch', if you use 'aw' use 'haw' and 'baw' etc).

So there may be no such thing, always, as 'correct Scots' (or Zeeuws
or whatever), but there is such a thing as clearly 'wrong Scots'. That
distinction can be built on.

Regards,
--------------------
Ian James Parsley

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