LL-L "Language maintenance" 2007.03.22 (04) [E]

[Lowlands-L List]

L O W L A N D S - L - 22 March 2007 - Volume 04

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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Language maintenance" 2007.03.22 (01) [E]

Regarding particularly Jonny's sadness at the passing away of an older
kind of Low Saxon, this is something writers on and in Scots have said
in every generation for hundreds of years. And yet, people still speak
Scots.

Dialects and manners of speaking may come and go (and occasionally come
back again!) but it seems that the language, in one form or another,
continues.

Although the idea is often put forward that Scots is in trouble because
of its similarity with English, I wonder if the staying power of Scots
isn't in part due to its similarity with English?

When you think of really distinct languages such as Cornish being
threatened by English, a person is either speaking Cornish or English,
and if fewer and fewer people speak Cornish, and nothing is done to
reverse the trend, then the language is going to die.

But when you think of Scottish children being taught English at school
and hearing Scots elsewhere, isn't it perhaps true that the situation
isn't so simple? Someone who knows English can soon learn Scots - maybe
not a very natural Scots, but Scots nevertheless, and can keep improving
fairly easily. Could it be that this is why Scots and languages in
similar situations are seen to be dying in every generation and yet
never die, because there are always writers, enthusiasts, nationalists
and even pockets of native speakers who, with their foundation of
English, can always easily look back at Scots literature, older people
and modern native speakers to build a foundation of a form of Scots that
may not be quite like what past generations spoke but nevertheless is
immediately recognisable as a form of Scots? Then the next generation
who has heard this Scots rather than the older forms takes this as Scots
and starts lamenting the fact that the previous generation's new Scots
is dying?

But if you're Cornish and the people around you have stopped speaking it
and you didn't get it in school, the ambient English isn't going to help
you out, and unless you can organise a whole new education and revival
policy, it stays dead.

Of course a person feels a twinge about languages that seem to be
passing away, and the fact that many people visited Dolly Pentraeth to
hear her Cornish yet no-one wrote down a word of it is rather annoying.
Or the way the once-mighty Gothic was systematically scrubbed out - and
again how hardly a word of Crimean Gothic was noted down despite
awareness of the value of it, it all seems quite tragic.

But then again, the romance is in the ruin, not in the thing itself. If
Gothic and Cornish had fared better we'd probably be frantically trying
to preserve the dying embers of Ingwaeonic instead. It's all just swings
and roundabouts!

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

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

He's no half-wice, oor Sandy.

Yes, mention of speakers of Low Saxon complaining that the language is being
perverted and is facing imminent extinction goes back at least to the late
17th century.

> But if you're Cornish and the people around you have stopped speaking it
> and you didn't get it in school, the ambient English isn't going to help
> you out, and unless you can organise a whole new education and revival
> policy, it stays dead.

This is what happened in the case of Polabian (a West Slavonic language).
Specifically, this was the last enclave of it on the Lunenburg Heath where
it was surrounded by Low Saxon and came into contact with German as well.
The last native speaker, also a woman, is said to have died in in 1756. As
in the case of Cornish, some people may still have been able to string a few
words of it together after that.  However, there seems to have been no
revival effort.  Recorded material is too scanty and put together
amateurishly, albeit it lovingly, by the Polabian farmer Johann Parum
Schultze.*

* *Wenn mit mir und denn noch drey Personen es vorbey ist in unserem Dorf,
alsdann wird wohl niemand recht wissen, wie ein Hund auf Wendisch genannt
wirdt.*
*
*"When it is over and done with me and another three persons in our village
then no one will quite know what a dog is called in Wendish."

Drais Büg!
Reinhard/Ron
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