LL-L "Language politics" 2007.10.11 (02) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L  -  11 October 2007 - Volume 02
Song Contest: lowlands-l.net/contest/ (- 31 Dec. 2007)
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From: Luc Hellinckx <luc.hellinckx at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language politics"

Beste Paul,

You wrote:
> The thriving and expansion of English has nothing to do with any
> feature of the language itself, including its spelling.

Don't you think that the age of an orthography can play a perpetuating
role?

Systems that have been around for centuries automatically _seem_ to
represent a culture that _looks_ more stable and solid (from a
distance!) than those that have been recently created. No matter how
interesting some modern spelling systems in Scandinavia for instance may
be, I consider it unlikely that any of them will ever become popular in
a much broader region. Mainly, because at any point in time (or space),
very few people are eagerly waiting for spelling reforms. When people
finally have the choice between on the one hand a system that has been
around for centuries (like Middle Low German, in Ron's tweaked version
of course ;-) ) and on the other hand a completely new revolutionary
system, created from scratch by 17 professors in roughly half a year;
well, I really think that the old (but revamped) system will win.
Spelling ìs very important, but in the end it's a set of rules and most
people just don't like the rules of the game to change drastically or
very often. Especially because: a) there's only a weak link to
better/higher productivity b) many people have quite a hard time
mastering the spelling of one language during their lifetime, let alone
of more languages.

Take French. Not exactly a very transparent orthography, and yet it
managed to spread across a big part of Northern Africa. Sure, this has
more to do with politics than anything else, but what I think is, that
if French spelling would have frequently (or profoundly)
changed/simplified during the 19th and the 20th century, it would have
damaged the authority of the French in Africa. This connects well with
Ron's remark about the use of Dutch in our former African colonies.
Indeed, I don't think any Dutch has ever been taught in Africa, only
French, even though the missionaries were predominantly Northern Belgians.
Surely Dutch would have been too big a blot on the escutcheon of that
powerful Francophile culture/elite :-D .
Again, continuity, continuity, continuity.

Kind greetings,

Luc Hellinckx

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

Luc,

Good points, I think.

There are the promoted and perpetuated perceptions of languages, of course,
and the old glorious European specter of the Kultursprache concept.

Among those, Germanic (and Slavonic) languages have always been seen as
inferior to those more reminiscent of the "classical" language Latin. This
is how Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian have been "selling"
themselves, and political expansionism of the former three enhanced that
image.

Of course, had history taken a different twist, they might have been forever
condemned as degenerate offspring of Latin.

English has the "saving grace" of being full of French loans, which led many
to believe it was some sort of far-off French descendant. Political power
enhanced this halfway positive image.

German has long been seen as having few, if any, redeeming qualities other
than the usual Latin and French loans. Germania was the Romans' hardest nut
to crack, and the Romans portrayed her people as uncultured, brutal
barbarians.  And its people speak this "ugly" language on top of it, you
see?

And Dutch, often seen as a rural subcategory of German? Oh, boy! And then
trying to compete with French? Why, even "classically educated" Dutch
speakers have traditionally had this negative image in their heads and have
been happy to switch to a Kultursprache to demonstrate their learning. Why
would Northern Belgians have promoted Dutch in Africa at the time there were
there?

I think image (i.e., public perceptions and associations) is very important,
as is its relative ease of manipulation. And images can be very long-lived.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
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