Language Revival

[sa wulfs]

I think Gothic is pretty close to Modern High German...

Gotische und Neuhochdeutsch? Gutiska jah niujaháuhaþiudiska?

[Quetzalcoatl]

Tu puedes aprender el Latín muy rápidamente y yo el Gótico, pero también podrías hablar el Gótico, porque ya sabes alemán.

Tengo la impresión que hablaba Espanol mejor antes de mi pausa.
Quizás debería continuar en el próximo ano...

[Quetzalcoatl]

I think Gothic is pretty close to Modern High German...

Gotische und Neuhochdeutsch? Gutiska jah niujaháuhaþiudiska?

oops, is this the same language as this?!

http://www.gotisch.de/?p=rom1

(because this reminded me very much of modern German)

[sa wulfs]

Yeah, that's it. Well, it's Germanic, so of course it'll remind you of German, but it's not particularly close.

[KingHarvest]

Hey KingHarvest, I noticed that you have a good knowledge of Sanskrit! Perhaps you can make a few lessons and help revive it on Unilang

You overrate my knowledge of Sanskrit, but I'm flattered nonetheless that you think I've given off the impression that I know it much better than I do.

[Sol Invictus]

There are people who speak Latin fluently and if we forced them to live in one village and to talk only Latin with their children, we would have not only fluent Latin speakers, but Latin native speakers soon

They allready have a country, dosen't seem to work

[loqu]

They allready have a country, dosen't seem to work

oh yes, but that country is only populated by antediluvian fossils who don't have children and talk as if they knew what a family is. Not to mention the horribleness of Eclesiastical Latin. Anyway.

[KingHarvest]

Actually, I could do some introductory lessons at least, but someone would have to show me how to use the forum software and type in devanagari.

[ILuvEire]

Actually, I could do some introductory lessons at least, but someone would have to show me how to use the forum software and type in devanagari.

You should! I would be very grateful (and follow them). Nothing big either, just 10 lessons to show us what exactly we're in for with Sanskrit. You can change your keyboard to a devanagari layout I think (or just ask the Hindi forum )

EDIT: Something else I just thought of: you could just use the romanisation. I've read that the romanization is used by academics all over the world, and Devanagari only in India.

[Formiko]

They allready have a country, dosen't seem to work

oh yes, but that country is only populated by antediluvian fossils who don't have children and talk as if they knew what a family is. Not to mention the horribleness of Eclesiastical Latin. Anyway.

Won't they all die soon anyway, with nobody to replace them?

[Sol Invictus]

They allready have a country, dosen't seem to work

oh yes, but that country is only populated by antediluvian fossils who don't have children and talk as if they knew what a family is. Not to mention the horribleness of Eclesiastical Latin. Anyway.

Acctualy I once read about kidnapped teenage girl who happened to be citizen of Vatican Forcing a bit of secularism on them would work better than an experimetal village

[KingHarvest]

Actually, I could do some introductory lessons at least, but someone would have to show me how to use the forum software and type in devanagari.

You should! I would be very grateful (and follow them). Nothing big either, just 10 lessons to show us what exactly we're in for with Sanskrit. You can change your keyboard to a devanagari layout I think (or just ask the Hindi forum )

EDIT: Something else I just thought of: you could just use the romanisation. I've read that the romanization is used by academics all over the world, and Devanagari only in India.

I would prefer to use both the standard Romanization and devanagari as both are used by the academic community.

[JackFrost]

Czech was revived too. So was Hawai'ian, and Welsh to different levels of success.

However those languages never truely died out at first compared to Prussian and Hebrew. They were simply seen as taboo to be spoken outside homes.

English could be considered a revived language to some degree as well. It was almost never used in the public sphere (nobles, kings, knights, educated and rich folks, church, etc.) for a few centuries after the Norman invasion. When the Hundred Year War broke out between England and France, there was an anti-French sentiment and English was brought back as a language of higher and educated classes and churches. The language survived very well as a language of the common people. Even children of French nobles ended up having some knowledge of Old/Middle English because they were often raised by servants (usually English-speaking).

French in Montreal could somewhat be considered as a revived language. Back in the 1950s, the downtown shops, factories, and other commerical businesses were mostly done in English and owned by English-speaking bosses from Westmount and the Golden Mile. The managers would give intructions to the workers in English. The shops would often serve you in English. It wasn't until the nationalist movement took hold and the government passed a French language Charter guaranteeing the right to have services and work in French. It was odd to see that just fourty years ago, the famous shopping street, Ste-Catherine, where signs were all in English. French was just the language of the common people, which are very often French-Canadians.

I see a difference between the two types of language revitalisation (resurrecting from the deadand resuscitating from unconciousness) because the former has no native speakers to model itself off while the latter has native speakers to model language acquisition.

That's how I see it too.


It would be cool to see Old English coming back, so I can hear what it's really like.

[Rémy LeBeau]

Actually, I could do some introductory lessons at least, but someone would have to show me how to use the forum software and type in devanagari.

You should! I would be very grateful (and follow them). Nothing big either, just 10 lessons to show us what exactly we're in for with Sanskrit. You can change your keyboard to a devanagari layout I think (or just ask the Hindi forum )

EDIT: Something else I just thought of: you could just use the romanisation. I've read that the romanization is used by academics all over the world, and Devanagari only in India.

I would prefer to use both the standard Romanization and devanagari as both are used by the academic community.

If you are running OS X there is a brilliant Devanagari QWERTY keyboard you can select from the International settings panel. If you are on Windows this site (http://salrc.uchicago.edu/resources/fon ... ling.shtml) will show you how to get it all up and running and there are even some cool Sanskrit specific fonts available! I don't think that you have to do anything specific with the forum, I always just type in whatever and press the "dev" button to change the fonts and size, eg: नमस्ते

Also I have made a Sanskrit forum: viewtopic.php?f=99&t=25469

Do you think that knowledge of two of the modern languages descended from Sanskrit (Hindi and Punjabi) will help as much as say, knowledge of French and Italian would help for Latin?

[KingHarvest]

I know almost nothing about the modern day Indic languages, so I'm not entirely sure. The most useful thing about them would be vocabulary I would assume. I will be providing information on cognate grammar with Latin and Greek as potentially many people interested in Sanskrit will know them already. I'll try to get something worked out for a lesson in the next couple days.

[Formiko]

A good Sanskrit grammar is here:
http://freeinfosociety.com/media.php?id=4575

[KingHarvest]

For those of you who are interested, I posted the first lesson in the Sanskrit forum.

[darkina]

OT

Acctualy I once read about kidnapped teenage girl who happened to be citizen of Vatican

Well I think her parents worked there, I guess in administration or stuff. Anyway to this day no one really know what happened to her (although I think it's 100% sure that she's dead), rumours have it that the kidnapping was ordered by someone in the Vatican and last news last summer were that she might be buried with a terrorist of the time (that was 1980). Oh and it's also linked to the attempt murder of the Pope.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuela_Orlandi

Italian recent history is fascinating and disturbing. And sorry but a little Vatican-bashing is too tempting for me to avoid it...

END OT

[alkeides]

Sanskrit never really died out; there is still a village in India where it is used in quotidian activities by everyone including the Muslims. Link

[NulNuk]

Hebrew never really died, it was just not used for every day stuff, but it was always used.
and Aramaic never died at all, or even was stopped to be used, it is still used in some communities of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Israel.