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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">L O W L A N D S - L - 02 October 2009 - Volume 01</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#999999"><a href="mailto:lowlands@lowlands-l.net">lowlands@lowlands-l.net</a> - <a href="http://lowlands-l.net/">http://lowlands-l.net/</a></font></div><font color="#999999">
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Â </font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">From: Paul Tatum <</font><a href="mailto:ptatum@blueyonder.co.uk"><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">ptatum@blueyonder.co.uk</font></a><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">></font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.09.29 (04) [DE-EN-NDS]<br></font></div>
<div dir="ltr"><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Sandy Fleming wrote:</font></div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">Â > So what you are saying then is that liturgical languages that are used</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">Â > only out of specific motivation are in a certain sense dead. This</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">What I'm saying is that saying that Hebrew &c was "never really dead"</font>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">doesn't mean that much because the idea of "dead" when applied to</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">languages isn't that well defined.</font></div></div></blockquote>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Hi Sandy, I agree very much with this. Some of the more recently 'dead' language seem rather to have entered a state of suspended animation. I am thinking of Manx in particular, where the 'revivalists' were taught by native speakers, and we have recordings of Manx native speakers, so there is a direct line from the last of the native speakers to the present day. This seems different from the situation of Cornish, which seems to have had more of break between death and revival. (Additionally, the main revivalists settled on medieval Cornish as the standard, rather than the later (morphologically simpler) Cornish, which was (and often still is - plus ca change) regarded as being 'impoverished' and 'debased'.</font></div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">Normally I would consider a language living or dead in terms of language</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">learners' attitudes and methodology.<br></font></div></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">Do learners in general aspire to achieve the pronunciation of people who</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">have spoken the language from infancy and never had to learn it</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">consciously? Then the language is living.</font></div></blockquote>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">I think that the main characteristic of a dead language is that it is defined by a reference to a past corpus, rather than by reference to the usages of its speakers. A dead language is rather static, I mean that the phonology, morphology and syntax do not change, except by investigation of old texts or by discovery of new ones. The main area of innovation in a dead language is in the vocabulary and the creation of neologisms. For me Hebrew became a living language once it started evolving in the mouths of young Israeli speakers. I think that implies that a language must have native born speakers to be considered alive.</font></div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">Or do learners in general not worry too much about pronunciation because</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">they consider their own guess to be as good as anybody's? Then the</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">language is dead. At least, they're studying it as a dead language.</font></div></div></blockquote>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">The Cornish revivalists have had a 'very warm' discussion about pronunciation and orthography for the last decade or so (warm enough to power a small town or ten), but you could argue that they're not studying it as a dead language.</font></div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">But the important thing here is that if you want to describe how things</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">are and were with the status of Hebrew and so on you need a better</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">taxonomy than just "dead or not". I was questioning the usefulness of</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">the opinion that Hebrew was "never dead". Cornish speakers often say the</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">same thing about Cornish, because the term "dead" isn't well defined for</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">languages.</font></div></div></blockquote>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Yes, there is a whole range of being dead. I can't remember where I read this (probably one of Bernard Comrie's books), in a discussion about numbers of native speakers of languages in the former Soviet Union, about an old woman who was the last speaker of a language, which she used in her prayers. It is difficult to say that that language was not vital ('alive') or unimportant to her. In some ways it's easier to define when a language is alive than when it's dead.</font></div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Paul Tatum.</font></div></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Â </font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Â </font></div>
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