Rusyn

[colkitto]

Some more thoughts:

Am I alone in insisting that "attitude" should be added as an essential
component to the Baudouin/Weinreich definition of "language"?  I told
graduate classes that for years.  I should have thought it was a no-brainer,
otherwise perhaps the Americans on this list might enlighten us as to why
the US, which is one of the very few empires in history to have maintained
both military
and naval supremacy simultaneously, has not officially renamed its language
"American" and demanded that those of us speaking it, or variants thereof,
outside the US follow suit?

The example of chartering banks is not original with me (OK, it's going to
take me a while to find the reference).  I merely mentioned it as one of the
often-forgotten, but essential part of a "full range of uses" in defining
language.

Pace Wayles Browne, drafting documents and actually getting them approved
are two different processes.  One thinks of the ongoing constitutional
practice up here.....

If a gvien/language dialect doesn't actually have the necessary resources,
whether lexical or stylistic, government approval would be a secondary
consideration.

And at least one Scottish bank predates the Act of Union of 1707

Banks can be run bilingually, my local one does quite a good job.  Maybe
there are already Paris banks with their documents in English.

The exchange between Genevra Gerhart and Bob Rothstein recalls a ongoing
problem in preserving the richness of linguistic diversity.:

I will take the liberty of quoting from my upcoming review  (General
Linguistics) of Nettle and Romaine Vanishing Voices 2000 (references
available)

"One issue that constantly surfaces in such discourse is the pressure
exerted by spreading, "metropolitan", languages such as English, and the
concomitant access to a wider, superficially more glamorous culture that is
gained by switching to such languages. Again, N&R's treatment of this issue
(173, 190, passim) provides a great deal of food for thought: there does not
have to be a conflict between bi- or multilingualism and economic
imperatives ..... It is a brutal fact that members of small, isolated
communities are often all too eager to shed their original cultures and
attempt to join in the larger ones, which usually includes the loss of their
languages. This tension between the centre and peripheries has been noted
for some time; N&R cite the example of Cornish (127-128); Maclean 1972: 65
cites disparaging Victorian comments on the eagerness of the St. Kildans to
take up the latest fashions from London once they became aware of them."

Robert Orr

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