[lg policy] Re: The prehistory of language policy

[Dave Sayers]

Aha! King Alfred's literacy and translation policy is described in a recently aired 
BBC documentary:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L2fYvguLL0&t=43m35s

If that link doesn't take you to the right place, then just scroll to 43m 35s. It's 
discussed from there to the end of the programme.

Dave

--
Dr. Dave Sayers
Honorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University, UK
Visiting Lecturer (2013-14), Dept English, University of Turku, Finland
dave.sayers at cantab.net
http://swansea.academia.edu/DaveSayers



On 29/07/2013 12:06, Dave Sayers wrote:
> Thanks all for your responses to this. From your responses and my reading around, I
> now have the following list of historical precursors to what we now refer to as
> language policy:
>
> 1) Tower of Babel (obviously)
>
> 2) An early example of language testing (!), the battle between the Gileadites and
> the Ephraimites c.1370–1070 BC, after which the Gileadites blocked the Ephraimites’
> route home over the Jordan, and tested each person trying to cross:
>
> “Whenever Ephraimite fugitives said, 'Let me cross,' the men of Gilead would ask,
> 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he said, 'No,' they then said, 'Very well, say
> ‘Shibboleth’. If anyone said ‘Sibboleth’ because he could not pronounce it, then they
> would seize him and kill him by the fords of the Jordan."
> Judges 12:5–6
>
> 3) The centuries-old imperative to memorize Vedic hymns etc. in "pure" Sanskrit
>
> 4) The control of biblical translation to protect Latin in the Christian bible, which
> spilled over into secular and semi-secular spheres, resulting in the use of Latin in
> European universities long after the Reformation (Latin was needed for admission to
> Cambridge well into C20)
>
> 5) The Talmud's views for and against use of Greek, and mostly against Aramaic (which
> it nevertheless uses freely!), in favour of Hebrew.
>
> 6) King Alfred of Wessex’s literacy programme of 878-92 AD, setting up schools, and
> translating from Latin to Old English a series of books he deemed “most necessary for
> all men to know”, as he put it in the preface letter. (In C9, English was already
> widely used for administration.)
>
> 7) Swedish King Magnus Erikson’s National Law of 1347, establishing Swedish as the
> language of the Swedish kingdom
>
> 8) France's Ordonnance of Villers-Cotterêts, 1539 (François I). This is the most
> recent one. We're well into the Reformation by this point, and the influence of
> vernacularisation is a factor here.
>
> I also considered mentioning the tale of The Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetichus, and his
> experiment raising children in isolation to see which 'word' they would come out with
> first, as an indication of which was the first language (and therefore the world's
> oldest people). But this doesn't really seem to bear any hallmarks of language policy
> really. Or does it?
>
> After all these examples, I move into the Reformation, the formation of language
> academies around Europe, Herderian linguistic nationalism, the French Revolution and
> the modern era of nation-states, that sort of thing.
>
> Further thoughts are certainly welcome!
>
> Dave
>
> --
> Dr. Dave Sayers
> Honorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University, UK
> Visiting Lecturer (2013-14), Dept English, University of Turku, Finland
> dave.sayers at cantab.net
> http://swansea.academia.edu/DaveSayers
>
>
>
> On 26/07/2013 15:59, Dave Sayers wrote:
>> Hello assembled folks who are not currently on holiday...
>>
>> Can anyone recommend a concise reading covering examples of 'language policy' from
>> ancient times up to the French Revolution? (Or maybe up to the Reformation?) I'm
>> doing an intro lecture for an LPP course I'm designing, with an overview of such
>> historical precursors, and I'm hoping to find a short reading to go with it.
>>
>> There is an excellent historical review of such precursors in France and India
>> provided by our benevolent mailing list overlord Hal Schiffman, in 'Linguistic
>> Culture and Language Policy'  -- http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0415184061/. Similarly,
>> the various contributors to 'Language Policy and National Unity',
>> http://goo.gl/0iZ2mj, give some good historical reviews for their respective
>> countries.
>>
>> However, these aren't really framed as a review of the prehistory of language policy
>> as such, more the prehistory of language policies in these particular polities.
>> They're also not really a concise type of summary.
>>
>> Bernard Spolsky's 'Language Policy' http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0521011752 has some
>> mention of historical precursors in various contexts, mostly in ch.2-3, but these are
>> sort of peppered throughout the chapters -- again, a little too dispersed for what
>> I'm after.
>>
>> There are some pertinent points in Vivien Law's 'The History of Linguistics in
>> Europe: From Plato to 1600', e.g. p.155
>> http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4QOTTpX2NTMC&pg=PA115, but that's more about the
>> study of language, not really language policies.
>>
>> I was hoping for something shorter, ideally a chapter in a textbook about these sorts
>> of historical precursors to what we now call language policy.
>>
>> Any thoughts, folks?
>>
>> Dave
>>
>> --
>> Dr. Dave Sayers
>> Honorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University, UK
>> Visiting Lecturer (2013-14), Dept English, University of Turku, Finland
>> dave.sayers at cantab.net
>> http://swansea.academia.edu/DaveSayers
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