LL-L "Language education" 2008.01.12 (01) [E]

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 A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
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L O W L A N D S - L  -  12 January 2008 - Volume 01
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Language education" 2008.01.10 (11) [E]

> From: heatherrendall at tiscali.co.uk <heatherrendall at tiscali.co.uk>
> Subject: LL-L "Language education" 2008.01.10 (06) [E]
>
> I witnessed a Welsh speaking friend up sticks and and move to
> Liverpool ( i.e. out of Wales) rather than tolerate ever again having
> her children coming home from school and saying " Teacher says you
> mustn't say it like that / use that word. Correct Welsh is .....". She
> was a native born speaker, Welsh was her main language and she was
> made to feel illiterate/ ill taught/ badly spoken  by those very
> people who were trying to encourage Welsh.

Surely that wasn't the _only_ reason she moved to Liverpool?!

If so, I expect a further anecdote concerning how she was sorely
disappointed to find that things are just as bad in England!

Do you remember a TV series based in Dudley (near Birmingham) called The
Grimleys? The hero's father spoke with an unschooled Midland accent
which, amongst other things, involved using "am" for every part of the
verb "to be" (I'm, you'm, he/she/it am, we'm, they'm). This is a lot
more sensible and consistent than the mish-mash his son has learned in
school, but no-one seems in any doubt that the local school English is
somehow superior. Just how it helps people living most of their lives on
an estate in Dudley to be able to communicate with people on a estate in
Newcastle, I'm not sure. English dialect barriers would probably be less
insurmountable if everybody used their own dialects more so that people
had a passive understanding of more dialects.

Now that Stokoe has demonstrated that signed languages are real
languages so that hearing people are beginning to learn them, a similar
power struggle is occurring in BSL as post-examination students choose
either to abandon their teaching and start learning from the natives, or
else vie with them for language supremacy.

I think there's a good analogy in Physics for the state of affairs in
Linguistics. Physicists talk about "a perfect sphere", "a line of zero
thickness" and so on. Every physics student is taught the importance of
not making the mistake of thinking that such things actually exist.

The idea of an perfect circle or line of zero thickness in physics might
be analogous to the idea of a "standard language" in linguistics. It's
convenient to work with and even to study, but it's important to
understand that such a thing doesn't exist. To suggest that anybody
actually speaks a standard form of language, or that unschooled language
is somehow vulgar or inferior, would be like saying Hilary and Tensing
were vulgar, inferior people because they climbed a mountain with an
ignorant disregard for the fact that the Earth is a perfect sphere  :)

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

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