LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.02 (01) [EN]

[Lowlands-L List]

=========================================== L O W L A N D S - L - 02 October
2009 - Volume 01
lowlands at lowlands-l.net - http://lowlands-l.net/
Encoding: Unicode (UTF-08)
Language Codes: lowlands-l.net/codes.php
===========================================

From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.09.29 (04) [DE-EN-NDS]
Sandy Fleming wrote:

 > So what you are saying then is that liturgical languages that are used
 > only out of specific motivation are in a certain sense dead. This
What I'm saying is that saying that Hebrew &c was "never really dead" doesn't
mean that much because the idea of "dead" when applied to
languages isn't that well defined.

Hi Sandy, I agree very much with this. Some of the more recently 'dead'
language seem rather to have entered a state of suspended animation. I am
thinking of Manx in particular, where the 'revivalists' were taught by
native speakers, and we have recordings of Manx native speakers, so there is
a direct line from the last of the native speakers to the present day. This
seems different from the situation of Cornish, which seems to have had more
of break between death and revival. (Additionally, the main revivalists
settled on medieval Cornish as the standard, rather than the later
(morphologically simpler) Cornish, which was (and often still is - plus ca
change) regarded as being 'impoverished' and 'debased'.

 Normally I would consider a language living or dead in terms of language
learners' attitudes and methodology.
Do learners in general aspire to achieve the pronunciation of people who
have spoken the language from infancy and never had to learn it
consciously? Then the language is living.

I think that the main characteristic of a dead language is that it is
defined by a reference to a past corpus, rather than by reference to the
usages of its speakers. A dead language is rather static, I mean that the
phonology, morphology and syntax do not change, except by investigation of
old texts or by discovery of new ones. The main area of innovation in a dead
language is in the vocabulary and the creation of neologisms. For me Hebrew
became a living language once it started evolving in the mouths of young
Israeli speakers. I think that implies that a language must have native born
speakers to be considered alive.

 Or do learners in general not worry too much about pronunciation because
they consider their own guess to be as good as anybody's? Then the
language is dead. At least, they're studying it as a dead language.

The Cornish revivalists have had a 'very warm' discussion about
pronunciation and orthography for the last decade or so (warm enough to
power a small town or ten), but you could argue that they're not studying it
as a dead language.

 But the important thing here is that if you want to describe how things
are and were with the status of Hebrew and so on you need a better
taxonomy than just "dead or not". I was questioning the usefulness of
the opinion that Hebrew was "never dead". Cornish speakers often say the
same thing about Cornish, because the term "dead" isn't well defined for
languages.

Yes, there is a whole range of being dead. I can't remember where I read
this (probably one of Bernard Comrie's books), in a discussion about numbers
of native speakers of languages in the former Soviet Union, about an old
woman who was the last speaker of a language, which she used in her prayers.
It is difficult to say that that language was not vital ('alive') or
unimportant to her. In some ways it's easier to define when a language is
alive than when it's dead.
 Paul Tatum.

•

==============================END===================================

 * Please submit postings to lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org.

 * Postings will be displayed unedited in digest form.

 * Please display only the relevant parts of quotes in your replies.

 * Commands for automated functions (including "signoff lowlands-l")

   are to be sent to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org or at

   http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html.

*********************************************************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lowlands-l/attachments/20091002/991cb7b6/attachment.htm>