LL-L "Grammar" 2008.08.23 (01) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 23 August 2008 - Volume 02
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Language use" 2008.08.22 (01) [E]

> From: clarkedavid8 at aol.com
> Subject: LL-L "Language use" 2008.08.21 (02) [E
>
> From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
> Subject: LL-L "Art" 2008.08.19 (01) [E]
>
> I've often wondered what language(s) Holbein spoke when he first came
> to England. Certainly no English; nobody outside the Anglo-Scots area
> of Britain did.  Would he have used Latin, or some form of Court
> French? or maybe a Continental lowlands language would have been
> similar enough until he learned English?

I wonder if attitudes to languages and dialects have changed over the
centuries to the point where they're much more compartmentalised now,
and the perceived communication difficulties worse than they really are?

What about people like Komensky (Comenius) who travelled Europe trying
to get support from various courts for political causes? A Czech scholar
could turn up in London only to discover that the king spoke Scots and
his Latin was kind of theoretical, or in Sweden to discover that the
queen was only comfortable in Russian and bad Swedish. Of course such
journeys were long and many dialects were heard, and sometimes had to be
used, on the way. Was a continuous language learning process more taken
for granted by travellers in those days? Were they used to listening
harder and more desperately trying to understand? Were they hungrier in
the evening some of us are now?

These days I think we tend to say "I know French, Swedish, Japanese and,
er... Scots and English if those count. And I know a very little Russian
but don't quote me on that." But in reading Byron's journals and
letters, I sometimes wonder about his approach to languages. He had his
school Greek and Latin, but he seems to approach living languages as
dialects. There's a strong impression that, at least outside of England,
he tried to speak to people the way they spoke to him, and didn't worry
about what it actually was.

In the Deaf community even now, many people are keen on swapping signs
and having several signs for a thing but choosing the one that they know
their listener prefers. Of course you get the other sort of person who
fears his brain will reach capacity and tries to keep himself down to
one sign per thing, but bits and bobs of "foreign" dialects and
languages are generally valued knowledge, whereas in Hearing communities
there's more of a tendency to want all of a language or nothing.

On top of this I think you have to remember the invisible people of
history, for example the interpreters, or even just friends,
acquaintances and even strangers who happened to have some proficiency
in both languages.

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

•

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