LL-L "Language politics" 2004.09.14 (07) [D/E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: Henry Pijffers <henry.pijffers at saxnot.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.09.15 (02) [E]

Mark Dreyer <mrdreyer at lantic.net> wrote:
>
  > Dear John,
>
> Subject: Language varieties
>
>
>>On a different point, Mark wrote:
>>
>>"Well, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Fries were recruited to man King
>>Alfred's Navy, since they were, unlike the English of that time, seamen.
>
>
>>>From here on it's me, swinging from the shoulder. However I stand by my
> thesis. According to the sagas, the Norse didn't often raid in Friesia.
> Reputedly they didn't like honest seamen (read 'thieves'), & they didn't
> mind fighting over water. Also, I imagine, there was precious little to
> steal from them.
>
> They were warriors of note & they spoke a dialect mutually intelligable to
>
>>the English. Their only problem was unfamiliarity with keels..."
>
>
>>Where is this from? Is "they spoke a dialect mutually intelligable to the
>>English" a contemporary observation? I can only find a reference in 897 to
>>the fact that Alfred designed ships unlike Frisian and Danish ones.
>
> The same passage (in the AS Chronicle) goes on to describe their
> introduction to keel-ships & ebbing tide.
>
It still however doesn't mention the level of intelligibility of the
languages mentioned.

Furthermore, it's roughly 400 years after the first arrival of Angles,
Saxons and Jutes in Britain. So this still doesn't prove that Frisians
were among the settlers, nor that at that time there was any people
named Frisians. It only proves that 400 years later there was one and
that some of them set foot in England.

Henry

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From: Global Moose Translations <globalmoose at t-online.de>
Subject: LL-L "Language politics" 2004.09.14 (06) [D/E/Esperanto]

Ron wrote:
> I hear especially Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin and Korean spoken on a daily
> basis.  Add to this a gezillion other languages, especially on cell phones
> while riding public transport.  Yet, I have *never* heard *anyone* say
> anything of the sort to any speakers of other languages here in the
Seattle
> area.  Again, it's not a specific American thing.  It's a global thing,
and
> it depends on the attitudes (some would say "level of tolerance and
> sophistication") of specific communities and individuals.
>
> Like the icecream vendor in Travemünde (Germany) that barked at me when I
> pronounced the written flavor choice "maple walnut" in English, _Was?! So
> redet man hiä nich!_ ("What?! You don't talk like that around here!") ...

I didn't mean to imply that this was an exclusively American thing, but
that's the only foreign country where I have lived for a long time, and it
also happened to be the one we were discussing.

I had a very similar encounter when I lived in Bavaria, and travelled up to

Lower Saxony to see my parents for Christmas. I entered a grocery store and
automatically said "Grüß Gott", the common greeting in Bavaria. The woman
ogled me from head to toe and hissed: "Guoden Tach haaißt das!". Oops!

In Germany, I often find that Turkish children will speak German to each
other in public, on buses etc., even if they are recent immigrants and their
German is still poor, either to be polite or to fit in better.

Gabriele Kahn

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From: Tom <jmaguire at pie.xtec.es>
Subject: LL-L "Language politics" 2004.09.14 (06) [D/E/Esperanto]

Lowlands-L wrote:

>From: 1handclapping <1handclapping at myway.com>
>Subject: LL-L Politics
>
>"World English" / Wouldn't it be simpler if people would realize that
>English in fact is a very confuzing language and instead of creating
another
>variety of this language they would do the in fact small effort of learning
>Esperanto. A very precise universal idiom.
>
Hello All,

 From a humanistic point of view it is interesting that the very
precision of Esperanto hasn't led it into universal domination.
Possibly it is because we humans are just so culture-stuck that we
prefer to stick with a foggy universal language that has a cultural
background.

Everyone knows that the precise universal language is mathematics, and
also that we humans are not precise enough to speak it.
I think we should question the criterion of "precision" as a yardstick
for language and accept diversity as our fate. We are not machines - yet!

Regards,

Tom

--
Carpe Diem.
-Visit Nlp in Education  http://www.xtec.es/~jmaguire
-Join Nlp-Education  mailto:nlp-education-subscribe at yahoogroups.com

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From: Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder at worldonline.nl>
Subject: LL-L "Language politics" 2004.09.14 (06) [D/E/Esperanto]

Roger, Esperanto is absoluut niet zo eenvoudig te leren als men altijd zegt,
bovendien doet het zeer onnatuurlijk en onesthetisch aan.
En het is niet eenvoudig af te leiden uit bestaande talen maar er
willekeurig uit samengeraapt. Sorry...
Dan zou ik eerder de voorkeur geven aan Interlingua (IALA), of aan
Middelsprake natuurlijk (dit is tenslotte een (Neder)Germaanse groep)!

Roger, Esperanto isn't absolutely as simple to learn as is always stated,
furthermore it looks very unnatural and unaestethic.
And it is not simply derived from existing languages but merely a hotchpotch
of them. I'm sorry...
I'd rather prefer Interlingua (IALA), or Middelsprake of course (I mean this
is a (Low)Germanic group) !

Amikaj salutoj, Ingmar

> "World English" / Wouldn't it be simpler if people would realize that
> English in fact is a very confuzing language and instead of creating
another
> variety of this language they would do the in fact small effort of
learning
> Esperanto. A very precise universal idiom.
>
> "Wereldengels" : zou het niet eenvoudiger zijn indien de mensen zich er
> rekenschap van geven dat het Engels in feite een zeer verwarrende taal is
en
> in plaats van een nieuwe varieteit van die taal te scheppen , de in feite
> kleine moeite te doen om Esperanto te leren. Een nauwkeurig en universeel
> idioom.
>
> "Mondialo Anglan" : cxu gxi ne estas multe facila se la homoj si doni
> kalkulon pri la fakto ke la Anglan estas ligvo tre konfuzita kaj anstataux
> de krei novan varion de ci-tiu ligvon ili farus
> la malgrande klopodo de lerni Esperanton : precise universa lingvon.
>
> Fr iendly greetings, vriendelijke groeten, amikaj salutoj,
>
> Roger Verhiest

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From: john feather <johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Language politics

Before we get into snide references to the UK use of "Continent" (the
capital is important) the French also use "continent" for "mainland", as
you'll find if you go to Corsica, of corse.

Anyway there at least 1.5 continents, one of the biggest dialects being
Sub-Continental English.

I would hate to lose all those little nuances which betray a foreigner's
origin.

John Feather  johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: "Language politics" [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Language politics
>
> Greetings and good luck to you and all other Esperantists, and no offence
to
> the memories of Dr. Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, whose heart was obviously in
the
> right place.  But why introduce yet another language, "precise" or
> otherwise, whose very basis is limited to Indo-European, actually without
> the "Indo" part, and is therefore easily dismissed as fundamentally
> Eurocentric?  The same applies to Interlingua, Occidental and the rest.
If
> you get a chance to create a global lingua franca from scratch, wouldn't
we
> expect you to take into consideration *all* people, cultures and language
> types of the world, not just those of that little spit of land claiming to
> be a "continent"?

How would you envisage a language that takes into consideration all people,
cultures and language types of the world?

Would it have to be a sign language? Or is the fact that many people can't
use oral languages the final nail in the coffin for the whole dream?

Sandy
http://scotstext.org/

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

Gabriele (above):

> I had a very similar encounter when I lived in Bavaria, and travelled up
to
> Lower Saxony to see my parents for Christmas. I entered a grocery store
and
> automatically said "Grüß Gott", the common greeting in Bavaria. The woman
> ogled me from head to toe and hissed: "Guoden Tach haaißt das!". Oops!

Or the dismissive answer _I red ka Deitsch_ (dialectal Bayuvarian for _Ich
spreche kein Deutsch_ 'I speak no German') I got from a lady whom I asked
for directions in Standard German in a small Austrian town.  It still
puzzles me.  I think she was simply one of those anti-"Prussian" zealots,
the type that would giggle, do impressions and carry on as soon as a
"Prussian" opens his or her mouth in a pub or working-class restaurant
(Gasthaus).  (I've *never* thought of myself as a Prussian, but, hey, that's
just weird little me.)  This has happend to me even in metropolitan Munich,
while my Japanese companion was treated with utmost courtesy.  Once I talked
back in "Platt."  That shut them up, because they thought I was a foreign
tourist, and they won't make fun of them in public.  Prejudices are
expressed publically only among Germans, especially once they've got a few
beers under their belts.  This includes folks that swear up and down that
they are not racist or otherwise bigoted.

Sandy (above):

> Would it have to be a sign language? Or is the fact that many people
> can't use oral languages the final nail in the coffin for the whole dream?

Any language -- oral, non-oral, artificial or natural -- that is not
Eurocentric or any other -centric, that does not assume that specific
European linguistic or cultural features are universal or should be made so,
that is flexible enough to accommodate all cultures.

English has come a long way in becoming culturally flexible and, if
necessary, neutral enough to serve as an adequate global lingua franca.
It's orthography is another thing, but let's not open that can of worms
right now.

I could imagine a global sign language to serve well as another auxiliary
medium, which is something that among Native Americans had worked rather
well until not too long ago, and which is still being used by some Native
storytellers along with oral narratives.  In other words, one tells a story
by means of spoken words and simultaneously signs it, an excellent way of
passing on both spoken and signed language at the same time, especially
where itinerant storytellers cross language boundaries.  Johnny Moses, a
storyteller here in Washington State, who speaks several local languages,
belongs to those who continues this tradition.  I love his performances and
ave leaned a lot from them.

About Johnny:
tore.yahoo.com/soundstruestore/mosesj.html
http://www.clippingdale.com/jm/

Among artificial languages, Esperanto does have the great advantage in being
grammatically and even lexicomorphemically rather "logical" and clearly
structured, and new words can relatively easily be created.  However, as I
said, it is basically Eurocentric (never mind that Mainland China and North
Korea are among its champions for ideological reasons).  Similar things can
be said about most other artificial languages, even about Volapük, which
morphologically draws from non-Indo-European (especially Turkish) to some
extent but bases its lexicon primarily on Indo-European.

Sanskrit has been similarly lauded for it great "logic" and ease of
neologism creation, is unique in being nobody's native language and still
being alive and well after millenia, is still astonishingly flexible and
adaptible, allows for creativity, which is why it is still used as a lingua
franca of learning and still serves as a literary language, with numerous
publications each year and even radio and TV broadcasts throughout India and
beyond.  Some have proposed to spread its use as an easy-to-learn lingua
franca elsewhere.  But I guess its association with Hinduism and Buddhism
create serious barriers, especially in religious communities in which even
Buddhism has become synonymous with idolatry (e.g., _butparast_
"Buddha-follower" = 'idol worshipper' in Iranian and Central Asian Turkic
varieties).

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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