LL-L "Language varieties" 2010.03.18 (05) [EN]

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*L O W L A N D S - L - 18 March 2010 - Volume 05*
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From: Leslie Decker <leslie at familydecker.org>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2010.03.17 (08) [EN-NL]

I love that poem!  Here is a picture of it as it's painted on the wall in
Leiden: http://www.muurgedichten.nl/min.html

Leslie Decker

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From: M.-L. Lessing <marless at gmx.de>
 Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2010.03.17 (01) [EN]

Dear John,

it is painful to read about the ignorance and stupidity of most Shetland
people, but what is that to you?! If these people are so lost as to cut
their own tongue out of their mouthes, why in the world should *you* take
your website offline?! It is painful to see the state of the language, but
it is another pain to see how these fools seem to hurt you. There is no
reason they should! They scarcely deserve your pity. To me a language lives
in itself, even without an audience. If you love it, that's enough. It lives
in you. And in nature, which has heard the sounds of this language for ages.
It understands you, it answers in your tongue. So you speak it. And if there
be just four or five others on the Shetland islands that think alike, why
not keep your website up for them? And if there aren't, who cares? I for one
honour your stand, and I am sure so do all LL-L members. We have a saying in
german, "Was schert es die Eiche, wenn sich die Sau an ihr scheuert", that
is "The oak doesn't care if the pig scrapes itself against it." (Alternative
form: "Was schert es den Mond, wenn die Hunde ihn anbellen", meaning "The
moon doesn't bother if the dogs bark at it.") You are the oak. Hey, didn't
you know that? You are the oak, not the pig. Anything else is ridiculous.
These people matter not a whit. I would ignore their comments by hundreds
quite easily, and if they forced them on me that would make me ever so much
more stubborn, and relishing it. John, you *are* not alone. With a beautiful
language nobody is ever alone. And then there are so many people in the
world who back your issue. Seeing your fight makes me even more waterproof
against all adversities about *my* language. That's thanks to you.

So, bear up! I really can't say how proud you should be of yourself!

Hartlich!

Marlou

P.S. Thinking of more sayings in that direction, there is of course the old
pirate motto "Viel Feind, viel Ehr" or, as Oliver Kahn once put it: "Alle
sind gegen uns. Es kann nichts Schöneres geben." ("Everybody hates us.
Nothing can be finer.") (That was when his club Bayern München had an away
match and was booed at, I think. But of course everybody is against Bayern
München always :-))

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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>
 Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2010.03.17 (01) [EN]

> From: jmtait <jmtait at wirhoose.co.uk>
 > Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2010.03.16 (07) [AF-EN]

> I don't know if anyone picked up on the sarcasm. However, as you will
> appreciate, it's not easy to say or write "The Shetland Dialect" every
> time you refer to something, so it tends to be reduced to 'dialect.'
> So referring to it as Shetland Dialect on Lowlands-L would be OK,
> although use of it to translate expository text in the introduction to
> Lowlands-L would not, this being outside of the acceptable pericope of
> dialect
>
Here in the deep south (Somerset, England), I usually _start_ by
referring to Scots as "Scots dialect", which is the only way of making
it clear to the English that I don't mean Gaelic. Once a person knows
what I'm talking about, I can drop the "dialect" and just say "Scots".

Of course, the English have no problem with the idea of Scots as a
language if you want to say that it is. It's only in Scotland that you'd
have to argue the point.

I guess if "Shetlandic" is causing problems, you can always just stick
with "Shetlandic dialect" until the New Shetlandic Enlightenment.

Is it possible that the loss of the "th" sounds in Shetlandic cause
non-linguists to see it as degenerate speech, the "th" being difficult
for most non-English speakers to pronounce, and therefore seemingly more
"sophisticated"? Hence people being easily persuaded that it's "only" a
dialect?

As an aside, I believe there are some traditional English dialects with
this feature. Doesn't the traditional dialect of Sheffield have "d" and
"t" in place of the "th" sounds? And of course you could imagine many
people seeing this as a reason to avoid it, since the stuff they speak
in school seems inherently better.

Then again, the "th" is being lost all over England in a different way
("th" > "v"/"f"), though not outside of England, and there's a reverse
process where many English people see the new forms as inferior and
attempt to resist them.

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

----------

From: jmtait <jmtait at wirhoose.co.uk>
 Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2010.03.17 (01) [EN]

Michael Wrote (I've put your comments and those from my previous post in
italics, Michael, because I'm having difficulty excluding truant codes from
my posts.)

From: Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com>
 Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2010.03.15 (06) [EN]

The speech variety exists whether or not it has a name. And like all speech
varieties it has its own grammar, which may be the same or differ from other
related languages.

Yes - it exists in actuality. But that isn't the same as saying that it
exists in public perception - as the comments of the well-known Scottish
broadcaster illustrate. I would say that Shetlanders feel viscerally that it
exists, but their social heritage prevents them from giving shape to it
either in their minds or in nomenclature. Also, in spite of there having
been a 'Grammar and Usage of the Shetland Dialect' since the 1950s, even
active dialect promoters may write it with straight English grammar, which
implies that it is not perceived as having any grammar of its own.

To put it less dramatically, my comment that it 'does not exist' is a form
of hyperbole, referring to the fact that, under the present social situation
and nomenclature, it can be treated by Shetland society as a whole almost as
if it didn't exist.

Seems to me that the apprehension of Shetlanders on this matter may be
something that a bit of education could expand.

Where from and by whom? ShetlandForWirds - the ones who are interested in
'dialect' in Shetland - is already promoting 'dialect' per se. That is
presumably education, but it doesn't address any of these issues.

The well-known Sottish broadcaster obviously knows little about linguistics.
He could do worse even than looking at this stub:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shetlandic

Well, as we all know, Wikipedia is an amateur effort - probably the writer
was a politically inspired purist or prescriptionist who can be safely
ignored! :) (It wasn't me, BTW! - actually the phonetic section is not very
accurate - or, should I say, the phoneme inventory is different from mine -
and I've often wondered who did write it.) Certainly if my 'Shetlandic'
introduction to the UHI course can be cited by the county Archivist as an
'abortion' (as I keep repeating ad nauseam) Wikipedia isn't going to cut any
ice!

In any case linguistics wouldn't necessarily be perceived as being relevant
to 'dialect' - another of the subtle tricks that use of the term can
generate - and knowledge in general would be contra-indicated, being an
example of the attempt to force the varying forms into a set form - etc,
etc. By definition, anyone who writes down, in phonetic script the
pronunciation of a varying form of speech which has no consistent
pronunciation must be doing so for political motives. (And, in case anyone
thinks these are my opinions - like the public figures who quote Robert
Frost's comment that 'fences make good neighbours' as if he meant it - yes,
I am being sarcastic!)

I went to Shetlink, though, and I find
http://www.shetlink.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=31 this forum which doesn't
suggest to me that the myth is completely widespread.

Are you sure that you aren't reading my own comments?! (My username is
DePooperit.)

> Because of comments such as these - and in case it was my website which
misled the flatmate in question - I have not only stopped using the term,
but have removed my website with this - and all its other - offensive
content.

I'm horrified. I've spent so many years working to help smaller linguistic
communities, that to hear you say that you're ... capitulating to ignorance
makes me want to weep.

As I say, I don't see any point in persisting. SFW, which grew out of the
dialect conference, went more or less the opposite way to my views.. They
would still like me to keep up my website - but it was months after it came
down before one of them noticed, and in any case, that would just make me
the token purist and ready-made bad example in a situation dominated by
anti-purist Edinburgh proponents of Scots. In its nomenclature, approach to
spelling and grammar, expository use of the medium, etc, the website
represented a failed experiment. Almost all the queries I received were from
overseas - usually Scandinavia (I can recollect receiving only one or two
from Shetland) and I got tired of giving a lengthy explanation to each
inquirer of why they should ignore most of the things I said, particularly
if they intended to visit Shetland. If I have to make constant apologies for
the material on the website, it's better not there.

> The term dialect has also taken over substantially in speech from the
native term Shaetlan. Interestingly, at a dialect conference I attended in
2004, the only speaker I can recollect using the term Shaetlan, apart from
myself, was a young incomer from England who had learned to speak it very
well. She had obviously picked up the term as used by native speakers, and
had not picked up on the fact that it was now (apparently) politically
incorrect to refer to it as anything other than dialect. I have even heard
people say Sh-dialect - ie, starting to say Shaetlan and then altering to
dialect in mid-word.

Education!

Again, where from? At Dialect '04, in addition to the above incomer, there
was myself, and another young Shetlander who had grown up in Africa (notice
that there were no young Shetlanders who had grown up in Shetland), all of
whom recommended a 'bilingual' and more formal approach, and a Faroese
professor who explained carefully how orthography in Faroe could represent
the pronunciations of the various dialects while providing a unified written
form. My own paper - on my former website - was entitled 'Shaetlan is Daed -
Lang Live Dialect,' and tackled exactly the problem I am dealing with
head-on. ShetlandForWirds, which grew out of this conference, paid no
attention to any of these.

> With regard to the general apprehension of dialect as a written medium,
the following comments were made by a well-known public figure (native
dialect speaker and PhD in a literary subject) recently in the Shetland
Times, with regard to why Shetland has never produced a prominent novelist
(Orkney has produced two, and one prominent poet.)
>
> And it is not really suitable for writing, the Shetland dialect....writers
in dialect irritate. X can make it readable, by some magic, but most add
unjustifiable emphasis and archaisms, and in any case, English is our
written tongue, the one we are trained to read.
.....
But surely something can be done to improve the situation. Surely --
something must be done.

I don't think anyone thinks anything must be done. I actually e-mailed a
dialect promoter about this, and her reply was that the writer was just
being provocative, not to take him seriously, and that she hadn't even
thought about replying to him. I said that not taking him seriously was
actually taking him seriously, but I don't think I was understood. Obviously
the intention is to avoid controversy. At one time I might have written in
myself, but I reason that if no-one in Shetland takes issue, there's not any
point in my doing so.

> This illustrates the value of the unqualified term dialect to the
mouthpieces of the prevailing Anglophone hegemony. Because it is dialect and
not language it can be exempted from all the characteristics of language.
Not only does it have no grammar, but if a writer in it is found to be
irritating, this is attributed to the medium rather than the writer, because
dialect is per se unsuitable for writing. And if someone is found who does
not irritate, then, as this cannot be attributed to competence because
written competence in a medium which is not suitable for writing would be a
contradiction in terms, it must be attributed to magic.

Now, I **really** want to ask you if you or someone you know would consider
a version of Alice....

Because of the magic reference? :)

Well, certainly not me. I've actually been protecting my blood pressure for
several years by staying well away from the subject. I've only come out of
the closet in the last week or two after inadvertently reading the article
about whatsitsname being unwriteable in the Shetland Times - which I only
picked up because I was visiting my mother, who lives near me on the
Scottish Mainland. In another week or so I'll have repeated myself about six
- maybe ten - times, here and on Shetlink, and will hopefully go back into
limbo for at least another few years.

> As, then, the terms Shetlandic and Shaetlan are offensive to the
perception of Shetland society, as reflected in the unchallenged comments of
its intelligentsia, I take the view that these terms, and the offensive
concepts they embody, can fairly be said not to exist.

I wouldn't agree. Its intelligentsia need to be challenged.

Again, by whom? As I have already pointed out, even those who are actually
interested in promoting the tongue either agree with these comments, or at
least are prepared to conform to them to the extent of not using any term
other than 'The Shetland Dialect' reduced in actual use to 'dialect' and not
challenging them when they appear in print. The archivist who cited my
writing as an 'abortion' and the broadcaster who objects to 'Shetlandic'
because it is trying to make a 'set form' of something which is 'varying'
would regard themselves as pro-dialect. This is why they bother even to
write about it. The guy who says it is unwriteable just mentioned it in
passing in an article which was actually about literature. There are others
who are anti, and still more - probably a vast majority - who don't care.

Also,  at least some of the older speakers either would like to see the
dialect die out (the idea that this will help children's education is still
prominent) or at the opposite end have a mythological belief in its Norse
origins (it has Norse origins up to a point, but many of the features that
are thought to be Norse are actually older Scots, identified as Norse by
people who see only that they are not standard English.) Dialect promoters
tend to be literary-minded and susceptible to the anti-purist views of the
Edinburgh literati, while practical people tend not to be interested in the
subject at all.

> However, I made this off the cuff and deliberately have not offered it to
Lowlands-L for the same reason that I have removed my website. As an
expatriate Shetlander, I have no right to misrepresent the views of resident
(or other) Shetlanders by presenting material on the internet which appears
to give dialect written status, and which Shetland society as a whole is
therefore likely to find offensive.

I'm sorry, and hope I do not offend... but I have to criticize this
approach. Ex-patriate or not, if you love the language, haven't you a right
AND duty to help dispel the myth? No "intelligentsia" has the right to tell
people that their dialect/language/speech-form ought not to be written. I'm
going to spend some more time reading that ShetLink forum, but already just
in the thread titles I see the word "Shetlandic" appear alongside other
forms, and

Again - are you sure the word 'Shetlandic' isn't in my posts (DePooperit) or
those of 'ex-isle', an expatriate Shetland writer who no longer posts to
Shetlink (actually I don't either - I've just slipped temporarily off the
wagon...)

I should explain here that the view that dialect should not be written is
not universal. The fact that this writer mentioned it at all shows that
there is enough of it about to irritate him. In fact, the recent 250th
edition of the New Shetlander has many poems (including one by myself, which
is why I have a copy - I stopped subscribing because I found it too
depressing) and several long stories entirely in dialect (I am adopting the
'dialect' nomenclature for the sake of argument here.) By the standards of
many, perhaps any, other part of the UK, this must seem like a very good
record, and I am sure that dialect promoters in Shetland would cite it as
such. I'm sure that if you had been introduced to the situation by one of
the dialect promoters and been shown all the material which they are
diligently working on, rather than via my jaded and jaundiced viewpoint, you
would have come away with the impression that the Shetland situation was
very encouraging.

There are also several dictionary projects - one being an English-Shetland
dictionary compiled by Derrick Herning, at one time the Polyglot of Europe,
one that I don't know anything about, and another that appears to have been
compiled from a wiki-style online dictionary - the idea of which is
apparently to include as many regional variants as possible (I would imagine
without reference and spelt anyhow, although I don't know) in reaction
against the SFW, who are seen as being too rigid in their approach.

However, my argument would be that this apparently healthy situation is
largely an illusion. The dictionary projects show the traditional perception
of dialect as consisting only of vocabulary. The writers are not many, they
are mostly late middle aged as far as I know, spelling is haphazard (again,
only relatively - some would say that it is remarkably uniform, but that
depends on perspective); grammar is also haphazard, tending, in the absence
of any frame of reference other than the vagaries of 'dialect' to approach
closer to standard English (and thus, in my mind, to being stilted -
although as a linguistic abortionist I am obviously not qualified to say)
the further it strays from traditional dialect topics. There is no truck
with dialect as an expository medium in the New Shetlander (co-edited by the
archivist who described my attempts to write it in an expository context as
an 'abortion' - I think that's the second time I've mentioned that in this
paragraph!), and in the Shetland Times it appears only in cartoons, etc.

In short, where the dialect promoters are optimistic, I see the speech
confined by society to such a limited, specialised and minority-interest
area that it can only be expected to suffocate. The dialect approach may
appeal to primary school kids up to a point - though very few of those speak
it now, so it would presumably only be a sort of game - but I can't see
teenagers being enthusiastic about speaking something with connotations of
straw growing out of ears and sucking milk directly from cow's udders -
especially considering that many Shetland kids nowadays may never have seen
either straw or a cow.

Another question is whether some of the extant dialect writing may actually
be irritating. I obviously don't want to push this or give examples, but a
medium with little reference for spelling or grammar, which oscillates
between traditional and standard English syntax, and which is not allowed to
stretch its legs into non-abortive areas, is unlikely ever to develop as a
written medium or be easily or fluently written or read.

>As the owner of a former website using the jarringly jargonistic term
Shetlandic, and contained irritating writing in that unwriteable medium
including unworkable translation from Greek and the odd abortion here and
there, I have taken the hint.

(snip)

as a minority language activist for nearly two decades I just have to say
that your current approach is, in my view, not the right one.

Well, I've got to think of my blood pressure and mental health! But my
current approach comes at the end of a long stint - it's not as if I haven't
tried everything else I can think of!

Also, of course, I could be completely wrong. Perhaps my approach was the
wrong one all along. Perhaps the youth of Shetland will be so enthused by
the presentation of dialect at primary level that they will all grow up
speaking it, and thus the oral demise (which is what people are worried
about) will be stemmed without resort to any embarrassing, politically
motivated and objectionable measures such as policy, spelling, protesting
about the non-dialect policy of the commercial radio station, or actually
using it as a written medium outside of traditional dialect areas such as
poetry and short stories.

To get more of the background, on Shetlink, you might be interested in
looking at the recent thread, The Importance of Norn in Shetland Today (or
some such) where I repeat myself several times! The thread Using Dialect on
the Forums (or such) would also be interesting as a gauge of attitudes. That
thread was originally part of a thread about pet hate, room 101 things - the
thread still exists, but the dialect issue was transferred to the specialist
dialect forum.

Ron wrote:

As you alluded to, Michael, it is quite common for people to refer to
minority languages in terms of patois, idioma, Mundart, "dialect", and so
forth. In most cases this requires no qualification when the ethnic and
geographical context is clear. So, for instance, when people that live in or
come from Southern France refer to patois it is usually implied that they
are talking about Occitan and not to, say, Alsatian, Gallo, Norman or
Breton. However, when they talk to outsiders they will specify it at least
in terms of locality, even if they do not use the name Occitan. Similarly,
people in, say, Drenthe, The Netherlands, might refer to Drenthe Low Saxon
as dialect when the context is clear. Outside the context they are likely to
specify by town (e.g. Hoogeveens), if not more general Drents, even if they
do not use the name Nedersaksisch (or don't have any concept of the language
as a whole).

That's exactly the situation in Shetland at the moment. However, I don't
think this is necessarily the traditional situation. Traditionally, as I
say, the native term was 'Shaetlan' - as in 'spaekin Shaetlan' - and it
seems to have been largely replaced by 'dialect', particularly perhaps in
the speech of those who are engaged in its promotion, or more white-collar
people generally.

When I started to write about the subject - perhaps fifteen to twenty years
ago - it seemed to me that 'Shetlandic' was a natural translation of
'Shaetlan' into English, and it was often used not only in the New
Shetlander, but by Scottish linguists and generally by Scots language
activists when they were speaking about the Shetland tongue. I started to
use it first for convenience (other terms being laborious or awkward) and
because I imagined at that time that it was increasing in use.

However, with the retiral of the late John Graham, the editorship of the New
Shetlander fell into other hands - first someone who tried to emphasise it
as a literary magazine and whose principle influence was Tom Leonard, and
now the archivist who described my 'ta lay up a university' as an 'abortion'
(how many times have I mentioned that now?). Both would be uninterested in,
if not opposed to, the use of 'dialect' as an expository medium - the second
one cut short a series by me written in 'dialect' about orthography, which
would be regarded as a no-go area by that school of thought  -  and I would
imagine that decreasing use of the term 'Shetlandic' might go along with
this perception. So since I started to write on the subject I would say that
the tide has turned from the slightly more assertive view of Graham to a
view more in conformity with mainstream Scottish literary and adacemic
thought (and moreover in the relativistic postmodern rather than the
functionalist modernist era.) Whereas if the term 'Shetlandic' had been used
increasingly in print it might have grown more familiar I think it has
probably been used decreasingly, which might be one reason why it has never
gained favour among the general population.

As I haven't been in Shetland for a long time, I'll have to inquire whether
the Dunna Chuck Bruck signs - which at the time I took as a sign of
increasing use of the written form in public - have vanished.

The question is if people in Shetland have thought things through. If they
prefer to call Shetlandic "dialect" within a back-home context, what do they
call it when talking to outsiders outside the Islands? It seems to me that
some sort of specification would be in order, such as "dialect of Shetland"
or "Shetland dialect". If I didn't know someone came from the Shetland
Islands and I asked him, "What do you speak with your family?", then just
"dialect" wouldn't do

'Dialect' might well do. I have heard Patrick Stewart - Star Trek -
commenting that before he went to drama school and became elocuted, he spoke
'not just accent but 'dialect'. I get the impression that 'dialect'  can be
used in a way what doesn't require qualification because it refers to a
sub-language of what you are speaking at the time. In other words, if you
asked someone what they spoke at they said 'dialect' this would mean 'a
dialect of English.'

.  Or is it more likely that he answers "English," considering Shetland
dialect a sub-category of English, and also considering the specifics not my
business?

Well, only because an increasing number of Shetlanders do now speak standard
English.

Which bets the second question: Is Shetlandic being made into some sort of
lingua specialis, a secret type of language?

If I follow you - only insofar as young people may not understand what older
people say, which would be the case for any speech form that is dying out.
It's a long time since grandparents started to complain that their
grandchildren couldn't understand them. However, if I make it into a conlang
with Welsh spelling and copious neologisms, it will be an idiolect,
understood only by me!

I reckon there's a PhD in all this for someone somewhere!

John M. Tait.

----------

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

Subject: Language varieties

John, *


You wrote above:
Yes - it exists in actuality. But that isn't the same as saying that it
exists in public perception
....
To put it less dramatically, my comment that it 'does not exist' is a form
of hyperbole, referring to the fact that, under the present social situation
and nomenclature, it can be treated by Shetland society as a whole almost as
if it didn't exist.


And this is very important in my opinion. "Out of mind, out of sight," so to
speak. I believe that a language without a name is a type of non-entity, and
what doesn't exist in people's minds will cease to exist in actuality.


With regard to education:


Where from and by whom? ShetlandForWirds - the ones who are interested in
'dialect' in Shetland - is already promoting 'dialect' per se. That is
presumably education, but it doesn't address any of these issues.


Add to this the tendency among naysayers toward using personal circumstances
to portrait the opinions and efforts of "movers and shakers" as alien,
aberrant and so forth, all in an effort of invalidating their views. It's
the same in the Low Saxon scene. It's the "He/she ain't one of us (no more)"
approach. Typically, this is directed at "movers and shakers" that have
moved away (which in many cases afforded them a new perspective and thus the
sort of insight that is perceived as threatening back home).

And I misspelled:
Which bets the second question: ...


This was supposed to be "Which be*g*s the second question:".


Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA


*P.S.: I figured out why I want to call you Jim, John. It's your email
address beginning with "jm" (for John Magnus).



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