LL-L "Language competency" 2005.07.06 (04) [E]

Wed Jul 6 17:41:43 UTC 2005

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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West)Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: "Language competency" [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Language competency
>
> And therein lies the predicament.  On the one hand you are happy if people
> make the effort to use the language at all, and you don't really want to
> discourage them by nit-picking, but on the other hand you are concerned
> about grossly distorted, non-authentic lexicon and grammar being spread
> (and thus the language losing much of the "charm" that lies in its
> idiomatic wealth).  It seems to me that the best possible solution may be
> more publication of literature in authentic idiom as well as good
> reference material, and at the same time dissemination of the knowledge
> that Low Saxon is not like German and cannot be translated literally from
> German, that it is necessary to look up or ask about a word or expression
> rather than make it up on the basis of German.

We have this problem is Scots too, as has often been discussed in the past.

The problem of having more literature in authentic idiom published isn't
an easy one to solve, though. We have two major literary magazines
publishing Scots, Lallans and Chapman, which take different approaches to
what authentic Scots is.

Lallans publishes Scots as Scots writers want to write it, but alas, it
turns out that an awful lot of Scots writers want to write inauthentic
Scots, either too anglified or too Scottified and it's not easy to know
which submissions can be trusted to be authentic.

On the other hand, Chapman publishes only authentic Scots, in the sense
that the editors like to be convinced that someone somewhere actually
speaks the sort of language they're publishing. This is tricky too,
though, since it results in a tendency to publish the heavily anglicised
Scots of writers who speak heavily anglicised Scots: both more studied
Scots and Scots with unusual dialectical turns of phrase seem to me to be
viewed with suspicion.

Either way, it's difficult to draw attention to the idiomatic wealth of
the language itself.

There is another approach more outside of literature and more inside the
world of language-learning, which is to embrace the whole spectrum of
dialect or creole from Scots through inauthentic Scots/English mixtures to
authentic Scots (substitute Low Saxon & German as required) BUT to apply
pressure to move as far as possible towards the "desirable" end of the
spectrum.

This principle works to the full in the world of British Sign Language
versus English, so it might be worth taking a look at the practice here
before going back to Lowland Scots/Saxon. There are some major differences
in the two situations, but I think examining these differences might be
enlightening as to what we need for Scots/Saxon.

To explain the language spectrum here, there's:

British Sign Language (BSL): this is a natural language as used by people
(not necessarily deaf) brought up in a "Deaf" environment. It has all the
expressiveness, idiom and cultural background that you'd associate with a
natural language.

Signed English: this is in fact English, but coded as signs instead of
sounds. The signs are mostly borrowed from BSL, or where these don't have
an acceptable gloss, fingerspelled. A few words with no equivalent in BSL
are executed as made-up signs, sometimes incorrectly structured as far as
the rules of BSL grammar go. Almost no-one uses this for conversation -
it's far too clumsy. It's used for teaching deaf children English.

Sign-Supported English (SSE): Signed English with signs that don't much
support the meaning dropped in favour of context. This brings Signed
English up to a more practical speed for conversational purposes. An
example of how this works is:

English: "I went to the shops yesterday and bought a pair of red shoes."

SSE: "me go shop yesterday. buy red shoes."

BSL: "yesterday shop go, shoes red bought." ("me" is usually indicated
simultaneously in a separate channel).

As you see, all three languages express the meaning well, but SSE is not a
natural language and comes with no clear way of showing precise meanings.
For example, the users need to depend heavily on context and common sense
to understand that "yesterday" applies to the whole sentence, whereas in
English the verbs sustain the past tense while in BSL adverbs of time are
stated first and everything up until the next time adverb is understood to
take place in that time period. Although it doesn't seem so from the
example, SSE also lacks the ease and conciseness of the other two
languages: the users not only sign but also usually have to mouth words -
including some missing English words - in order to keep the meaning clear,
and the continual lipreading can get to be a strain.

Lack of clarity, ease, conciseness and expressiveness means that SSE will
never replace either of the other languages as forms of communication, but
just as Signed English is an important tool in teaching the deaf English,
SSE is an important tool in teaching the hearing BSL.

It's as if you went to a French class and the teacher decided that French
is too difficult for beginners and taught Franglais instead, introducing
more and more French words into English, and then eventually even starting
to introduce French grammar!

It's perhaps not the best way of teaching a language (or is it?), but it's
the usual way of teaching BSL (where English words that students haven't
learned the sign for yet are just fingerspelled).

Usually the curriculum for night-school students goes like this:

Year 1: SSE plus some BSL grammar and a few important BSL classifiers.
Students can communicate perfectly with each other and with Deaf people
who have good English skills.

Year 2: SSE plus BSL corrective grammar. Students can go to Deaf Clubs and
communicate with fast signers who know English, but not with BSL users.

Year 3: SSE is banned. Students begin to be able to communicate with BSL
users.

I think the lesson here is that you _can_ start of with an easy, though
rubbish, language compromise and move towards speaking the natural
language properly. Fears about never being able to defeat all the bad
language habits you learned seem unfounded. So you could probably start
with rubbish Scots like many write and move towards natural idomatic Scots
like we wish many would write. But there are differences in the BSL
practice that make it successful where Scots practice fails:

1. BSL learners actually speak the language, a lot. A feature of sign
language classes is that right from the start the keenest students arrange
to meet in pubs and houses just to chat to one another in their rubbish
SSE and learn whatever new language features they can from each other.
Many Scots writers simply never speak the language at all.

2. BSL learners know that the language they're speaking is rubbish and
that they have years of continuous improvement efforts ahead of them. Many
Scots writers think their rubbish Scots is _better_ than any Scots being
spoken today or even written since before Burns.

3. BSL learners meet with the Deaf with the specific aim of identifying
good role models and speaking with them as much as possible. To many Scots
writers, Scots is just something they've seen in books, of no use to
anyone other than as a political lever.

I think that these three points might be useful to consider in terms of
what can be done to educate those who are stuck in the middle of a
language spectrum such as English-Scots or Low Saxon-German.

 Sandy http://scotstext.org/

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