<span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;"> </span><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">L O W L A N D S - L - 22 March 2007 - Volume 04</span><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">=========================================================================</span><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">From: </span><span id="_user_sandy@scotstext.org" style="color: rgb(121, 6, 25); font-family: arial,sans-serif;">Sandy Fleming</span><span style="font-weight: normal; font-family: arial,sans-serif;" class="lg">
<<a href="mailto:sandy@scotstext.org">sandy@scotstext.org</a>></span><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;">Subject: LL-L "Language maintenance" 2007.03.22
(01) [E]</span><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><br style="font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><div style="direction: ltr; font-family: arial,sans-serif;">Regarding particularly Jonny's sadness at the passing away of an older
<br>kind of Low Saxon, this is something writers on and in Scots have said<br>in every generation for hundreds of years. And yet, people still speak<br>Scots.<br><br>Dialects and manners of speaking may come and go (and occasionally come
<br>back again!) but it seems that the language, in one form or another,<br>continues.<br><br>Although the idea is often put forward that Scots is in trouble because<br>of its similarity with English, I wonder if the staying power of Scots
<br>isn't in part due to its similarity with English?<br><br>When you think of really distinct languages such as Cornish being<br>threatened by English, a person is either speaking Cornish or English,<br>and if fewer and fewer people speak Cornish, and nothing is done to
<br>reverse the trend, then the language is going to die.<br><br>But when you think of Scottish children being taught English at school<br>and hearing Scots elsewhere, isn't it perhaps true that the situation<br>isn't so simple? Someone who knows English can soon learn Scots - maybe
<br>not a very natural Scots, but Scots nevertheless, and can keep improving<br>fairly easily. Could it be that this is why Scots and languages in<br>similar situations are seen to be dying in every generation and yet<br>
never die, because there are always writers, enthusiasts, nationalists<br>and even pockets of native speakers who, with their foundation of<br>English, can always easily look back at Scots literature, older people<br>and modern native speakers to build a foundation of a form of Scots that
<br>may not be quite like what past generations spoke but nevertheless is<br>immediately recognisable as a form of Scots? Then the next generation<br>who has heard this Scots rather than the older forms takes this as Scots
<br>and starts lamenting the fact that the previous generation's new Scots<br>is dying?<br><br>But if you're Cornish and the people around you have stopped speaking it<br>and you didn't get it in school, the ambient English isn't going to help
<br>you out, and unless you can organise a whole new education and revival<br>policy, it stays dead.<br><br>Of course a person feels a twinge about languages that seem to be<br>passing away, and the fact that many people visited Dolly Pentraeth to
<br>hear her Cornish yet no-one wrote down a word of it is rather annoying.<br>Or the way the once-mighty Gothic was systematically scrubbed out - and<br>again how hardly a word of Crimean Gothic was noted down despite<br>
awareness of the value of it, it all seems quite tragic.<br><br>But then again, the romance is in the ruin, not in the thing itself. If<br>Gothic and Cornish had fared better we'd probably be frantically trying<br>to preserve the dying embers of Ingwaeonic instead. It's all just swings
<br>and roundabouts!<br></div><div style="direction: ltr; font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span class="sg"><br>Sandy Fleming<br><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://scotstext.org/" target="_blank">
http://scotstext.org/</a><br><br>----------<br><br></span>From: R. F. Hahn <<a href="mailto:sassisch@yahoo.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">sassisch@yahoo.com</a>><br>
Subject: Language maintenance<br><br>He's no half-wice, oor Sandy.<br><br>Yes, mention of speakers of Low Saxon complaining that the language is being perverted and is facing imminent extinction goes back at least to the late 17th century.
<br><br style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">> But if you're Cornish and the people around you have stopped speaking it</span><br style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">
> and you didn't get it in school, the ambient English isn't going to help</span><br style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">> you out, and unless you can organise a whole new education and revival
</span><br style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">> policy, it stays dead.</span><br><br>This is what happened in the case of Polabian (a West Slavonic language). Specifically, this was the last enclave of it on the Lunenburg Heath where it was surrounded by Low Saxon and came into contact with German as well. The last native speaker, also a woman, is said to have died in in 1756. As in the case of Cornish, some people may still have been able to string a few words of it together after that. However, there seems to have been no revival effort. Recorded material is too scanty and put together amateurishly, albeit it lovingly, by the Polabian farmer Johann Parum Schultze.*
<br><br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">* <i>Wenn mit mir und denn noch drey Personen es vorbey ist in unserem
Dorf, alsdann wird wohl niemand recht wissen, wie ein Hund auf Wendisch
genannt wirdt.</i><br></div><i><br></i><div style="margin-left: 40px;">"When it is over and done with me and another three persons in our village then no one will quite know what a dog is called in Wendish."<br>
</div><br style="font-style: italic;"></div><font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial,sans-serif;" color="#0000ff" face="Times New Roman CE,serif" size="-1"><span style="font-style: italic;">Drais Büg!</span><br>
Reinhard/Ron<br><br></font>