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Car wrote:If even those of us living outside of English-speaking countries have to learn English, is it really realistic to have monolingual Gaelic speakers? Is it desirable?
HoItalosPhilellên wrote:I've stopped getting sentimental about language rise and decline. We're just a bunch of animals who will go extinct at some point in time anyways. All languages are the same in the end: Just a bunch of horrendous cacophony particular to homo sapiens. Our nationalism and flag-waving is artificial. Tectonic plates don't and won't give a shit about our borders, no matter how much, for example, countries like Greece and Albania fight over a mere few square kilometers of useless, craggy land, because borders are NOT set in stone. (Yeah, totally random, I know.)
Oh my. What have I become?
Surely it has a better chance than languages with about the same number of speakers that aren't official anywhere? That doesn't mean it's in good shape either though; I'm leaning towards Scottish Gaelic (but not Irish) dying out within the next hundred years or so. It looks like all that state support has done is to slow the decline, not stop it.linguoboy wrote:Yeah, I'm afraid that Gaelic is fucked at this point. It may last for another couple of generations as a fetish object, but I can't see it continuing much longer as an actual community language.
So you wind up with something like Modern Hebrew. Isn't that better than the language dying out?The Celtic languages which do survive will do so at the cost of being shorn of much of their distinctiveness. Native idiom (including fundamental semantic distinctions) will continue to lose ground to calques from English. That's just inevitable when the entire speaking population consists of functional bilinguals.
It's for symbolic value, I guess. "You can have your wacky little regional dialects, but X is the national language and don't you dare forget".'Luke wrote:And sometimes, why does the majority language have even to be official in the bilingual area? Does it even need protection or what?
No and no.Car wrote:If even those of us living outside of English-speaking countries have to learn English, is it really realistic to have monolingual Gaelic speakers? Is it desirable?
Now you're getting it.Michael wrote:I've stopped getting sentimental about language rise and decline. We're just a bunch of animals who will go extinct at some point in time anyways. All languages are the same in the end: Just a bunch of horrendous cacophony particular to homo sapiens. Our nationalism and flag-waving is artificial. Tectonic plates don't and won't give a shit about our borders, no matter how much, for example, countries like Greece and Albania fight over a mere few square kilometers of useless, craggy land, because borders are NOT set in stone. (Yeah, totally random, I know.)
mōdgethanc wrote:So you wind up with something like Modern Hebrew. Isn't that better than the language dying out?
linguoboy wrote:mōdgethanc wrote:So you wind up with something like Modern Hebrew. Isn't that better than the language dying out?
The focus really needs to be on preventing these varieties from going extinct in the first place and, in tandem with that, documenting their unique characteristics as well we can with current technology before they are lost due to interference or language death.
mōdgethanc wrote:But don't languages lose their distinctive features all the time? That's more or less what a Sprachbund is, isn't it?
Ciarán wrote:I think it's far more important to support non-natives who want to revive the language. They're the ones who give a shit, they're the ones who will be the future community of the language.
linguoboy wrote: I continue to maintain that if the non-natives really "give a shit" about the language, then they'll learn it as it is spoken idiomatically by native speakers. In every other context, that's the gold standard for language learning so I don't see a reason to make an exception here.
Ciarán12 wrote:linguoboy wrote: I continue to maintain that if the non-natives really "give a shit" about the language, then they'll learn it as it is spoken idiomatically by native speakers. In every other context, that's the gold standard for language learning so I don't see a reason to make an exception here.
And how are we supposed to do that if they won't even speak it amongst each other, let alone with people they consider little more than foreigners?
linguoboy wrote:Who is "they"? There are tens of thousands of native speakers of Irish; am I supposed to accept that this sweeping generalisation applies to all of them?
Luke wrote:Car wrote:If even those of us living outside of English-speaking countries have to learn English, is it really realistic to have monolingual Gaelic speakers? Is it desirable?
Is it? Look how it's turning out!
Luke wrote:Yeah, but it's not just that. If the language hadn't been actively persecuted in the first place, modern speakers wouldn't be in the situation of having to be bilingual.
Luke wrote:Ideally, the nice thing would be to have such an infraestructure for the community that they can expand and actually choose.
I admit I sometimes wish language didn't exist. It is a form of communication, yes, but one that has resulted in environmentally detrimental actions on the part of the associated species (you may not all agree but this is actually arguable) and also great suffering caused by the struggles over which language should be used where. (Don't ask me to explain 'suffering' as I've done that ad nauseam already.)HoItalosPhilellên wrote:I've stopped getting sentimental about language rise and decline. We're just a bunch of animals who will go extinct at some point in time anyways. All languages are the same in the end: Just a bunch of horrendous cacophony particular to homo sapiens. Our nationalism and flag-waving is artificial. Tectonic plates don't and won't give a shit about our borders, no matter how much, for example, countries like Greece and Albania fight over a mere few square kilometers of useless, craggy land, because borders are NOT set in stone. (Yeah, totally random, I know.)
Oh my. What have I become?
Huh? What the the hell are you talking about?I admit I sometimes wish language didn't exist. It is a form of communication, yes, but one that has resulted in environmentally detrimental actions on the part of the associated species (you may not all agree but this is actually arguable)
What do you mean by "softening"? Do you happen to know IPA?Levo wrote:Oh yeah,
and our s (sh) is becoming soft :S which sounds awful, and about 20 years ago was still funny, but today many people pronounce it a bit softer than how I remembered in my childhood, and such people who have no pronounciational disorder
Maybe our r is softening too a little bit? i'm not sure (towards standard-Swedish like, but not close to that yet).
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