Support for Rusyn language

[E Wayles Browne]

Robert Orr's second suggested criterion (can you charter a bank in the
language?) suggests that he puts an excessive amount of trust in whatever
authorities happen to be administering a given locality. The Faeroes
are a self-governing overseas administrative division of Denmark
with its own executive and legislature, so presumably there is a
governmental body to whom you can go with your Faeroese-language
bank charter and get it approved; Shetland is under Scotland, which
is in turn under the U.K. but I believe has a powerful enough Parliament
to charter banks; you could try going to the Scottish Parliament with
your proposed charter written in English (they'd accept it), or in
Scots (perhaps they would), or in Scots Gaelic (perhaps), but they
would most probably not accept your charter if written in Shetland
vernacular because they (the parliamentarians, not the Shetlanders)
wouldn't take it seriously enough.
Think of some other countries. There has been a literary standard
Basque (Euskara Batua) for some decades, but probably the government
in Paris would not let you found your bank in France with a Basque-language
charter. English has been a literary language for some centuries, but Paris
would quite possibly not accept founding documents for a bank that
were written exclusively in English. Ukrainian has been standardized
for over a century, but I'm not sure if the governing authorities of
any province of Canada would let us start up a bank with a charter
we'd written in Ukrainian; shall we make the experiment?

As for Rusyn, one can publish serious magazines and newspapers in
it, they find a responsive readership, and that seems a better criterion
to me than whether the already-existing government of Slovakia will
accept a Rusyn-language charter.
--
Wayles Browne, Assoc. Prof. of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics
Morrill Hall 220, Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A.

tel. 607-255-0712 (o), 607-273-3009 (h)
fax 607-255-2044 (write FOR W. BROWNE)
e-mail ewb2 at cornell.edu

> I hope I'm not the only one to suggest that a literary language needs an
> army, a navy, and an ATTITUDE
> (the example that spring to mind here is Afrikaans)
>
> part of the determination of distance must include the range of uses of
> the
> given language/dialect.  I first became aware of this issue while reading
> a
> contrastive study between Shetland dialect and Faroese - you can write
> folk
> poetry in the former, but can you charter a bank in it (to take one
> boring,
> but necessary function of a literary language in the modern world)?  The
> Ebonics controversy might have been partly  resolved by asking: can you
> charter a bank in it?
>
> If Rusyn has developed a similar full range of uses (however artificially
> in
> the initial stages), and cna be used for such purposes, then one would
> have
> to at least partially concede the point ....
>
> Robert Orr
>
>

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