LL-L "Language policies" 2002.07.25 (08) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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 L O W L A N D S - L * 25.JUL.2002 (08) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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 A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian L=Limburgish
 LS=Low Saxon (Low German) S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic Z=Zeelandic (Zeeuws)
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From: Colin Wilson <lcwilson at btinternet.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language policies" 2002.07.25 (04) [D/E]

At 16:19 25/07/02, Simon Hoare wrote:

>Scots and Flemish are personal. They are expressions of identity, of
>common belonging. A Flemish politician will speak dialect when he
>canvasses for votes because "Dutch" is what you learn at school, and it
>sounds bookish. Dutch, however much it is the official language of the
>Flemish community, is first and foremost the language of the
>Netherlands.

Interesting. In Scotland, it would be considered desirable for
a candidate to sound bookish! No candidate here would intentionally
use Scots in the kind of context described above, because to do so
would be perceived as uncouth, even by Scots speakers.

>I strongly disagree with Philip Hensher about register. Could you really
>write a 200 page thesis about splitting the atom in Scots that would be
>immediately understood by another Scots-speaking scientist?

The simple answer is that you could, provided that the other
Scots-speaking scientist (a rare sort of person in the first
place) was not only a speaker but an active enthusiast, because
the latter is generally the only sort of person who can read
Scots of *any* sort and immediately understand it.

I think the problem with the question above, though, is that
it involves a confusion between register and lexis. There's
no doubt that Scots has different higher and lower registers,
and here are some examples of higher/lower pairs:

neb/cooter, bairn/geet, dowp/behoocher, wattrie/cludgie,
heilandman/teuchter, traiveller/tink, fu/blootert

It may be true that Scots doesn't have the *lexis* for
certain areas of discourse, bit A'm nae shuir avaw that
ye cudna cantate on spleetin haets/atoms in Scots - efter
aw, maist o the vocabular for the pairticles is taen fae
Greek an cudna be said tae belang mair tae English nor
tae onie ither tongue (forby Greek itsel).

Wi guidwull,

Colin Wilson.

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From: "Randy Elzinga" <frisiancow at hotmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language policies" 2002.07.25 (04) [D/E]

Simon Hoare wrote:

>Philip Hensher has written a thought-provoking article but he fails to
>grasp what a dialect really is.

Would it not be more appropriate to say that he fails to grasp what
really
is a dialect?  As I'm sure you are aware, quite often what are distinct
languages are called dialects, perhaps out of ignorance, perhaps out of
ideology, etc. especially if they are very closely related.  Until you
wrote
what you wrote below, I was not sure whether Walloon was a form of
French or
a distinct language, and where I have seen it talked about, it has
usually
come across as being a dialect.  And I formerly thought of Flemish
merely as
Dutch in Belgium, which I now know is not the whole truth.  And I got
this
half truth from my dictionary, a resource I should be able to trust.
It's
hard for someone, such as myself, who is not part of the speech
communities
in which these distinct but closely related languages exist to sort
through
the data and figure out who is telling the truth and who is ignorant or
politically motivated (or both, or something else altogether).

Furthermore, when an outsider encounters people who do exist in these
speach
communitites, a speaker of both the language incorrectly labeled as
dialect
and the standard language of which this incorectly labeled language is
supposed to be a dialect will most likely swith to the latter.  Thus,
without knowing any better, one assumes that for example Walloon is just
a
dialect of French.  It also seems to me that term 'Walloon' suffers from
the
same ambiguity as Flemish.  As far as I can tell, it refers to the
French
speaking part of Belgium, and by association, the dialect of standard
French, and also to the distinct language spoken by people in the French
speaking part of Belgium.  It can get very confusing, and unless you
know
someone who knows the whole picture, you are likely to get only half of
it.

It doesn't look like the author did his research very well though.  He
writes that Frisian is used in Germany, which it is, but it is also
spoken
in the Netherlands by many more people, and he uses the 'Netherlands
Frisian' forms of the numbers.

>Walloon is not French as it is spoken in Belgian. Particularly, French
>speakers in Brussels, the Belgian capital, consider (correctly from a
>linguistic point of view) that they speak French, i.e. the
>language/dialect of France. Walloon, where it exists (in the south, and
>standard French is far more widespread), does so alongside French.

>Scots and Flemish are personal. They are expressions of identity, of
>common belonging. A Flemish politician will speak dialect when he
>canvasses for votes because "Dutch" is what you learn at school, and it
>sounds bookish. Dutch, however much it is the official language of the
>Flemish community, is first and foremost the language of the
>Netherlands.

Surely you must only be talking about the places in which Scots or
Flemish
are spoken.  For an Englishman, English must be just as personal.

>I strongly disagree with Philip Hensher about register. Could you really
>write a 200 page thesis about splitting the atom in Scots that would be
>immediately understood by another Scots-speaking scientist?>Simon Hoare

I know little about Scots, except what has been written to this list in
the
past year or so, so my opinion my not hold a great deal of weight.  From
what I do know, I doubt that I or anyone could write a 200 page thesis
about
splitting the atom that would be immediately understood by another
Scots-speaking scientist.  But it would have been nearly impossible in
other
languages too before scientists knew about atom splitting.  I'm sure
that if
Scots was to become the language used in writing about atom splitting in
Scotland, Scots speakers would find a way so that they would be able to
understand each other, even if it might come off as artificial at
first.
Speakers of English had to do the same thing, they just did it over a
longer
period of time.  The English terminology was not just sitting on a shelf
waiting for atom splitting to happen so that it could be used.  I've
found
in my research in mathematics that at least mathematical terminology is
not
static.  At the beginning of a new field of research different authors
use
different terms for the same ideas, and eventually the mathematical
community settles on one term, so that at first one mathematician
writing on
a subject may not understand another immediately, but eventually they
do.

But the absence of a scientific register does not mean the total absence
of
register altogether.  I don't think that there is much of a scientific
register, in WFrisian either, except maybe in the area of Frisian
linguistics, yet, as I read about WF I come across things like 'formal
or
literary usage', which to me implies at least two other registers,
formal or
literary, and non formal-or-literary.

That's my two cents.

Randy Elzinga
frisiancow at hotmail.com

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