LL-L "Language survival" 2004.03.22 (03) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West)Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
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From: Jan Strunk <strunkjan at hotmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language survival" 2004.03.20 (05) [E]

Hi,

let me throw in my two cents...

> Mike Wintzer wrote:
> "I suspect that this is wishful thinking. In the best of cases what you
can
> reconstruct is the skeleton of a language because that is what you can
> record, but the gist, the flavor, the perfume of a language will be gone
> forever with its last speaker. What you resurrect is something else. It
> shares vocabulary and grammar with its ancestor, but not the soul."

Cristoir wrote:
> It all rather depends on how one goes about reviving a language. My
> background is Cornish and Irish - two languages that have seen strong and
> successful revival movements over the last fifty years and the last twenty
> years especially. There are now more people with capabilities in Cornish
and
> Irish, and more native speakers (all brought to pass through the revival
> movement) than a hundred years ago. I would rather language revival was
> attempted - no matter how imperfect - than denigrated. All language
planning
> is, to some extent, "wishful thinking". Wishes are what provide the
> motivation to speak ancestral languages once again.
>
> Mike implies that revived languages are necessarily inauthentic, lacking
the
> "the gist, the flavour, the perfume". This is unfair and untrue: it
depends
> on how you set about reviving a language. Cornish is a good example of the
> two extremes in doing this. There are, in fact (as I suspect is well known
> here) three (actually, four) variants of Cornish.

I have to agree with Mike although I am not sure what he means with perfume
and flavor.
But the thing is that language revitalization will probably have a hard time
(even if there
is an unbroken line of second language speakers) to revive all the very
important but yet
unconscious facts about language use, such factors as modern linguistics
hardly even begins
to explore and lay persons do not usually think about at all.

Let me give some examples:
Factors that trigger word order variation and the choice between two
alternating construction
like the dative alternation in English: "I give him the book" vs. "I give
the book to him".
These depend on quite complicated factors and are often only statistical
tendencies. Yet,
if you do not use such alternations correctly, I guess that native speakers
will soon notice
that there is something odd about the way you talk.

Phonological phrasing and stress are probably not easy to teach or even
record either.

Something that can be recorded, but still gets eroded first under the
influence of official languages
are the idiomaticity of the language and collocational preferences. With
collocational preferences
I mean things like: you say "red wine" but not "purple wine", etc.
What strikes me most about the erosion of Low Saxon is that the native
idioms and collocations often
get lost and are replaced by German and Dutch calques. I think this really
makes the Low Saxon varieties
on the German and Dutch side of the border quite distinct from each other.

So, I think that if your objective is to authentically revive a language,
you are probably bound to fail.
But if you think (as I do, too) that a revival naturally leaves its mark on
a language and is an important
part of its "future history" than you can acknowledge that and still be
successful in reviving a language if your
objective is to build up a new community of speakers and connect them to the
local linguistic past.

Kumpelmente!

Jan
jstrunk at stanford.edu

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language survival

Folks,

I keep contending that continued or revived languages are never truly
"authentic."  For one thing, all languages keep evolving and changing,
adapting to new places and circumstances.  This tends to be only more
obvious and "dramatic" in cases of resurrected and revived languages, as
well as in cases of transplanted languages.  For example, Yiddish in the
Americas and under Soviet domination has undergone some striking changes
even where folks picked up where their parents and grandparents stopped.  As
far as I am concerned, this is all right, does not make for inferior or
weakened varieties but for varieties that demonstrate the adaptibility of
the language.

Another notable case in point is English.  During the French-dominated
Norman occupation of Britain, English came to be seriously weakened to the
point of being a threatened language.  It came to be massively influenced by
French within a relatively short time, so much so that at the end of the
occupation those who knew English could not or could barely even read
(pre-occupation) Old English texts.  Medieval Norman French was the language
of power, and it came to be adopted as the first or preferred language of ma
ny a Briton, so that the number of English speakers dwindled rapidly.  It
was thanks to the efforts of a relatively small number of activists, notable
among them being Cornish scholars (whose ancestral Celtic language had
already suffered serious blows under English power), that English came to be
reinvigorated after the end of Norman occupation.  However, it was now a
very different creature compared with English of before the Norman Conquest.
Yet, what is important is that it survived and that in the process it was,
though less Germanic, strengthened and enriched in a number of ways, as well
as morphologically and lexically flexible enough to adapt to new
environments as it spread to the "New World."

Kumpelmenten ook vun my.

Reinhard/Ron

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