LL-L "Language survival" 2002.10.01 (05) [E]

Tue Oct 1 22:06:28 UTC 2002

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 A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
 L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic
               V=(West)Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
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From: Friedrich-Wilhelm Neumann <Friedrich-Wilhelm.Neumann at epost.de>
Subject: LL-L "Language survival" 2002.09.30 (06) [E]

Ron,

You answered me (following George Gibault):

> I think what you are talking about are the Germanic dialect groups of
> "Prussia" ("Western Prussia" and "Eastern Prussia"): Lowlands Saxon (Low
> German): "West Prussian 'Platt'" (to which Mennonite Plautdietsch belongs)
> and "East Prussian 'Platt' (with which your father and my paternal
> grandmother grew up), and German: _Ostpreußisch_ (a sub-group of
> _Ostmitteldeutsch_).
>
> The language George was talking about was the *real* Prussian, the
language
> of the original Prussians who in German came to be called by their Old or
> Middle German name _Pruzzen_ to distinguish them from the _Preußen_, the
> German power that had usurped their name. >
> > He did never mention anything like that "Triglav" (UG: "Dreiglaube???").
>
> That does not surprise me terribly if his field of interest was Germanic
> culture and history.>

Of course- I had been on the wrong track! A little bit outside of
Lowland-Languages, as I find *s*.

But- let's go on, if You do allow!

On my mother's side of my ancestry there are people from the area "Wendland"
(sorry- I don't know it in English), near the western side of the river
Elbe, about 100 kilometres south-east of Hamburg,  also former and still
today partly Slavic.

>By the time the area came to be well and truly settled (i.e., overrun and
>occupied) by Germanic-speakers, the original religions ("paganism") of that
>and other eastern regions, as well as those in the west, had become
>outlawed.  I do not need to elaborate on what the church did to people who
>kept practicing their beliefs openly.

Yes- and I do remember my mother talking about some very heathen customs
even there, in the border region of the "Lueneburger Heide", near the town
of Dannenberg. There were some very strange things still in use up to the
early years of the 20th century. She told me, that pastors did  whip them at
their Sunday's sermons.

(But- they were really barbarically, I have to confess).

(Friedrich W. Neumann)

-----
"SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES..."
("Iced Earth")

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language survival

Fiete, Lowlanders,

> Of course- I had been on the wrong track! A little bit outside of
> Lowland-Languages, as I find *s*.

Not really, considering that these are people, cultures and languages that
came to be overlayed and absorbed by later Germanic-speaking settlers.
Thus, along much of the southern Baltic Sea coast you have the succession
Baltic (Prussian) > Slavonic (Pomeranian-Polabian) > Germanic (Saxon,
German), not to speak of earlier East Germanic and pre-Indo-European
peoples.  All of the above are parts of your and my heritage and no doubt of
other people's on this list (and on my maternal grandmother's side there is
Germanized Sorbian heritage).  This is not atypical of people in Germany,
only that most of them don't know and don't care.

> On my mother's side of my ancestry there are people from the area
"Wendland"
> (sorry- I don't know it in English), near the western side of the river
> Elbe, about 100 kilometres south-east of Hamburg,  also former and still
> today partly Slavic.

It is the area known as "Hannoversch(es) Wendland."  _Wende_ (from "Vandal,"
originally a Germanic tribe that at one time settled in Central and Eastern
Europe) is an old and now pretty much non-PC word for "Slav" (like _Welsch_
for "(Gallo-)Romance").

Bear in mind that at one time the Germanic-Slavonic borderline (with some
overlap) ran from Holstein (even parts of Denmark), just east of Hamburg
through parts of Bavaria all the way down to just west of Triest.  The
_Wendland_, like Lusatia (Sorb. _L/uz^ica_, Ger. _Lausitz_), were/are tiny
Slavonic remnant enclaves.  These were/are areas in which on German soil
Slavonic is/was still spoken.  However, these languages and cultures once
occupied large tracts around these enclaves and have come to be embedded in
the now "German" language and culture varieties of the areas.

The Slavonic language of _Hannoversch Wendland_ was Polabian (< _po_ 'on',
'by', _L/aba_ 'Elbe'), specifically Draveno-Polabian (Ger.
_Drawä(h)no-Polabisch_, from the area called _Drawähn_). The last speaker
died in 1799 or thereabouts, I believe.  There are some written records of
the language and of local customs.  Already at that time, the language was
rather strongly influenced by Lowlands Saxon (Low German), and apparently
all or most people that spoke Draveno-Polabian could also speak LS.  Here is
the Lord's Prayer:

     Nos fader, tå tåi jis vå ne^bis'ai,

     sjôta^ vårda^ tüji jaima^.

     Tüja^ rik koma^. Tüja^ vil'a^ s^inót,

     kok vå ne^bis'ai, tok ka^k no zime^.

     Nose*j ve*se^danesna^ st'aibe^ doj-na^m dans.

     Un vite^doj-na^m nos grex,

     ka^k moi vite^dojime^ nose^m gresna^rüm.

     Un ni brind'oj nos kå farsükkon'e^,

     tåi lözoj nos vit ve*soka^g x'auda^g.

     Amen

e^ = e-breve

a^ = a-breve

e* = e-dot

n' = n-acute

s' = s-acute

Note the LS loans:

brind'... < bring... 'bring'

fader < fader ~ vader 'father'

farsükon... < varsükung(e) 'temptation'

koma^ < kame ~ kome '(shall) come'

löz... < lösen 'release'

rik < rîk 'realm'

vårda^ < word(e) ~ ward(e) '(shall) be(come)'

vil'a^ < will(e) 'will'

Also, note the fronted (umlauted) vowels!

I do not know of any study that points out Draveno-Polabian influences on
the local Germanic varieties.  Does anyone else?

> Yes- and I do remember my mother talking about some very heathen customs
> even there, in the border region of the "Lueneburger Heide", near the town
> of Dannenberg. There were some very strange things still in use up to the
> early years of the 20th century. She told me, that pastors did  whip them
at
> their Sunday's sermons.
>
> (But- they were really barbarically, I have to confess).

That was not anything ethnically specific but was part and parcel of living
in another time, when what we now consider "abuse" was considered
"education."  I have heard many such stories from elders of several
different ethnic backgrounds.  During confirmation lessons, the pastor would
slap my grandmother incessantly on the hands with a cane or ruler because
she did not hold her book or pen straight.  Her hands were crippled with
rheumatoid arthritis from childhood (and she was in pain all her life), of
which he was aware, but it was more important to him to set an example.
Those were the days ...

Cheers!

Reinhard/Ron

----------

From: Mike-club <botas at club-internet.fr>
Subject: LL-L "Language survival" 2002.09.29 (02) [D/E]

Hi Lowlanders,
I feel that considering Ole Stig Andersen´s message (I leave it in this mail
in its entirety, so there are no mistakes) we can put to rest any
speculations that our LLlgs might survive or even stay largely intact during
this century.
It´s true Klaus Groth´s prediction that L-Saxon would not survive HIS
century WAS pessimistic. But how the world has changed since then,
generalised schooling for children, spread of newspapers, then radio, then
television, then internet, only a homoeopathic minority of children learning
the language(s) - if the patient has lost his will to live (nothwithstanding
a handful of Lowlanders that we are, 0.001% of the Lowlands` population) you
might as well forget him. Unless some revolutionising event such as the
advent of television will happen, going in the opposite direction, our LL
activities as laudable as they are, will remain largely an academic
delight.
Now if you think I´m pessimistic, read on!
Mike Wintzer

> From: Ole Stig Andersen <osa at olestig.dk>
> Subject: Future?  (was: "History")
>
> I wrote
>
> > 90% of the World's around 6.000 languages are moribund and will
disappear
> > within this century, according to the estimates of Michael Krauss. I'm
> > afraid a number of Lowlands languages are among them.
>
> Sandy Fleming [sandy at scotstext.org] replied, among other things
>
> > Like most "futurology" such estimates tend to turn out to be nonsense.
>
> Prediction over prediction, huh?
>
> Though I would love it to have been the case, I'm afraid that a general
> mistrust of "futurology" is not quite up to the task as far as the World
> Wide Language Death that we are currently experiencing is concerned. At
> present humanity is losing lgs to the tune of 1- one - a week
>
> (The latest high-profile case I've come across is Kakadu
(Gagadju/Gagudju),
> a North Australian lg that died May 23rd 2002 together with it's last
> speaker, Big Bill Neidjie. The minutes of the Condolence Motion carried in
> the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly are published here:
> http://www.icomos.org/australia/images/pdf/Big_Bill.pdf )
>
> A lg faces an assortment of challenges on its fall to extinction, among
> which are:
>
> -. Reduction of morphological complexity
> -. Loss of function domains, ending up with only ritual/religious
functions
> -. The mean age of the users/speakers rise over time
> -. The new generation doesn't learn the lg.
> -. The number of speakers dwindle until
> -  the lg is only spoken/remembered by a few elderly people
> And more could be added
>
> I would surmise that a lg that is no longer acquired by children is
> moribund. This is the case for more than a thousand of the world's lgs
> today. Hundreds of lgs TODAY are only spoken by 1-2-5 old people.
>
> Commissioned by UNESCO in 1991 the eskimologist Michael Krauss of
Fairbanks
> Univ, Alaska, did not base his estimate of impending lg mass death on some
> fancy private catastrophism. He based it on the known number of lgs not
> transferred to or used by the new generations.
>
> > The death of Scots within a generation or two has been
> > predicted for almost as long as the language has existed.
>
> Citing Scots as a counterexample to the global trend of Massive Language
> Extinction, is a bit like claiming that New Guinea birds of paradise can't
> be endangered since there are lots of sparrows in my garden.
>
> Some of the Lowlands lgs are among the world's largest, obviously alfa-lgs
> like English, Dutch and Afrikaans, but also Scots, which has an estimated
> (depending on your ideology of what constitutes a lg vs a dialect) more
than
> 1 million speakers, though hardly in all domains.
>
> If we say, for convenience of calculation, that there is 6 bn people and
> 6.000 lgs, then a lg has in average 1 mio speakers, and Scots is above
that
> level. Together with only a few hundred other lgs. The vast majority of
the
> world's lgs have far below the world average of speakers, many hundreds
only
> af few hundred.
>
> The level of endangerment of any lg should primarily be gauged by the age
> distribution of its speakers, secondarily by the absolute size of the
speech
> community and thirdly by the range of domains in which it can be used.
> (Maybe 2 and 3 should change place.)
>
> What do we know about the age distribution of the speakers of beta-lgs
that
> are of this list's interest?:
> Ap=Appalachian
> B=Brabantish
> F=Frisian
> L=Limburgish
> LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German)
> S=Scots
> Sh=Shetlandic
> V=(West)Flemish
> Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
>
> The indigeneous lgs of North America, Australia, the Soviet Union have
been
> effectively eradicated in less than 200 years, mainly through warfare,
> deprivation of livelihood, forced (and voluntary) migrations, missionary
and
> school policies, and kidnapping of children (boarding schools and adoption
> schemes). Such processes are still in full swing.
>
> New Guinea still has an astounding 1100 or so lgs, one sixth of the
Worlds's
> stock, but they are all so small and under such ferocious attack by the
> local versions of international civilisation, that just a handfuld or two
of
> them can be expected to survive this century. In Africa wars and famines
> have had and will have a decastating effect on amultitude of lgs. All over
> the Third World urban centres grow unchecked and draw "weak" lgs into
> uselessnes and oblivion.
> etc Indonesia, etc India, etc Africa, etc Latin America, etc ...
>
> The proces of losing lingustic diversity can possibly be counteracted in
> some pockets, if the speakers "decide" to maintain (i.e. use) their lg,
AND
> if they have the means to do it.
>
> As this list itself bears witness to, the Internet is a marvellous
> instrument for storing and sharing knowledge and bringing otherwise small
> and isolated groups of people and interests together, and it is possible
> that such larger virtual communities will be able to keep this or that
> endangered lg alive against odds. Unfortunately the Internet is not
> accessible where most of the language eradication is taking place. But in
> some pockets it is:
>
> Gaelic might turn out to be such an example, though I doubt it. It is
spoken
> by about 60.000 mainly elderly people at the fringes of Scottish economy.
> Though Gaelic enjoys considerable public respect, funding and promotion,
it
> is not taught much to children and cannot be used much for economic
> purposes. Thus I think that even this nurtured endangered lg has very hard
> times ahead.
>
> And from a diversity point of view I think that the likely loss of Gaelic
is
> a far greater impoverishment than the far less likely loss of, say, Scots,
> would be (no offense ;-), since ALL the Celtic lgs are endangered.
>
> Michael Krauss' prediction was that the next millennium may see as few as
> 600 living lgs left on Earth. Some experts are more pessimistic, others
> less, but no estimate leaves any doubt that we are entering an age of
> massive unprecedented destruction of the most fundamental part of World
> Heritage, the lingustic diversity.
>
> Strangely, the current catastrophe - whatever it's exact extent may be -
has
> not attracted much attention in the linguist community. At least not until
> recently. But now the British Lisbet Rausing Charitable Foundation has
given
> £ 20 million over 10 years creating the Endangered Languages Documentation
> Project (ELDP) at School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
> (http://www.eldp.soas.ac.uk)
>
> The massive donation, which is said to be among the largest in Humanities
> ever, envisages to describe a total of 100 dying lgs, about a third of the
> number of lgs Krauss' predicts will disappear in the same period. Each lg
> will be described at at price of £ 150,000 a piece. But certainly not
saved!
>
> It is characteristic of the shallow public AND professional understanding
of
> the problem that even serious media like Scientific American and The
> Guardian have hailed the Rausing donation as a measure against Langauge
> Death. That it not the case at all, the donation specifies expressly that
> only lgs with a few speakers left are to be studied.
>
> Similarly this year the German Volkswagenstiftung donated 3,5 mio Euro für
> die Dokumentation bedrohter Sprachen, maninly to the establishment of
> Archives on endangered languages at the Max-Planck-Institut für
> Psycholinguistik in Nijmegen.
>
> Also the scholarly literature is growing, e.g.:
>
> R.M.W Dixon: The Rise and Fall of Languages, Cambridge University Press,
> 1997 (especially about the Australian lgs)
>
> David Crystal: Language Death, Cambridge University Press, 2000
>
> Andrew Dalby: Language in Danger. How language loss threatens our future.
> Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2002 (Includes very interesting descriptions
> of lg death in Ancient and Classical Europe, Latins advance etc.)
>
> And there are some places on the WWW, e.g.
>
> Terralingua: Partnerships for Linguistic & Biological Diversity
> http:/www.terralingua.org
>
> Foundation For Endangered Languages, http://www.ogmios.org/
>
> The Endangered Languages Fund, http://sapir.ling.yale.edu/~elf/index.html
>
> Ole Stig Andersen
> http://www.olestig.dk/sprogpolitik

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