Moderator:kevin
An Lon Dubh wrote:Which pronunciation do you use Declan? Munster, Connacht, Ulster?
Declan wrote:I know you strongly support native dialects only linguoboy, but how do you think that could work practically in school for example? Would you end up with the dialect favoured by your teacher/school, subject to changes etc.?
Declan wrote:(with the added bonus that the standard is a real dialect rather than an artificial construct in the case of German)
For exam purposes, any dialect is acceptable as long as you are consistent and as someone mentioned earlier, probably preferred by any competent examiner. Regardless, for the level of school exams, the standard isn't particularly divorced from the dialects, I think that applies to the German situation as well
kevin wrote:They say the "best" Hochdeutsch is spoken in Hannover, but there they have some non-standard grammar in their colloquial language.
kevin wrote:In the South, Standard German only even started to exist as a spoken language in the past ~50 years (probably related to the rise of TV).
linguoboy wrote:kevin wrote:They say the "best" Hochdeutsch is spoken in Hannover, but there they have some non-standard grammar in their colloquial language.
Plus I have it on good authority that they "stolpern über den spitzen Stein".
kevin wrote:Not sure what "particularly divorced" is for but - but are you sure you had to deal with German dialects, rather than just Standard German with the accent of some dialect? Because dialects can be relatively far from the standard and in tests, the use of dialectal words counts as an error. I've had my share of them when I guessed wrong how the standard would say it.
linguoboy wrote:I'd wager it has much more to do with the fact that about 20% of the German-speaking population was uprooted during the War and resettled, often in strikingly different dialect areas.
Declan wrote:I then meant to compare that to the situation of English in Germany, I believe either major dialect is acceptable?
In also meant that the Irish standard isn't hugely different in written form from the major dialects (pretty much by design) given the sorts of things you talk about in exams.
Declan wrote:I hadn't known that Hochdeutsch replaced a native Hannoverian dialect, I assumed it just happened to be based on speech in that area based on prestige, then again, I've never really spoken much with someone from there, but when I have, the have spoken almost exactly like I would have learned at school.
kevin wrote:[Edit: Whoops, you're not talking about English in England or German in Germany, but English in Germany. I think both British and American English are accepted, even though British is generally what is taught.]
Welsh Language Commissioner Meri Huws said the findings came as a shock.
"Perhaps there has been a danger for everyone to be lulled into a false sense of security 10 years ago, believing everything would be alright, and that the growth in some areas would make up for the decrease in other areas," she said.
Ciarán12 wrote:Saim wrote:- in this case the English influence on Cornish is much deeper than the Yiddish influence on Hebrew.
I don't see how that is relevant. Are you suggesting that Cornish is necessarily more influenced in all areas by English than Hebrew is by Yiddish? Can you back that up in anyway?
Saim wrote:That said, there is something irretrievably lost in the death of every language, that simply cannot be revived. Perhaps the use of the term "relexified English" was hyperbolic of me, but this break in continuity does indeed create pretty deep changes in a language.
Saim wrote:Just look at all the strong substrate influences you can identify on dominant "national" languages (Berber on Maghrebi Arabic, Galician on Galician Spanish, Occitan on Midi French, etc.) and you'll see part of why this influence would be so difficult to avoid in any language revival effort.
Saim wrote:Furthermore, even in the final phases of language shift, before the language is even dead, the influence of the invasive language is palpable - lexical distinctions that are not present in the dominant language are lost, the number of styles and registers are limited, structures and idioms are massively calqued, and phonemes are lost as several sounds appear in free variation. You don't need to go to Cornwall to know this, this is covered in scholarship on language death.
Saim wrote:Despite that, I need to emphasis the fact that that doesn't mean I don't think that Cornish revival is worthwhile. I just want to point out that a lot more is lost in language death that most people think, that even if a language is recorded when we revive it it can only ever be an approximation. We should be very alarmed indeed if the current trends regarding most of the world's remaining languages, because they all indicate the total devestation of language diversity throughout the world.
Saim wrote:Now this brings me to another point that Ciarán made, that I'm a pessimist. I'd like to challenge that label - I'm quite hopeful in that I think that a lot of the language shift we've been experiencing in the last couple of generations especially can be reversed. But we have to actively reverse it, we have to actually change our language ideologies and language politics to be able to achieve this. In that case ringing the alarm and pointing out to people who much is on the verge of being lost is part of this kind of consciousness-raising, it helps bring an international perspective on language shift that is unfortunately usually missing in the mostly localized discussions on minoritized or endangered languages.
Saim wrote:To bring this back to the discussion on Celtic languages, it's the kind of attitude expressed in this quotation that bothers me:Welsh Language Commissioner Meri Huws said the findings came as a shock.
"Perhaps there has been a danger for everyone to be lulled into a false sense of security 10 years ago, believing everything would be alright, and that the growth in some areas would make up for the decrease in other areas," she said.
From that it becomes pretty apparent to me that any new policy would need to make Welsh compulsory and English not as important in those areas where Welsh is still used as a daily language.
Saim wrote:It cannot be retained if it's just some young people learning it but not using it in Cardiff and Newport - but do the Welsh have the will to break from this dependence on English? That's my main worry.
That's a different matter. I think at the moment, if reviving the Celtic languages means eschewing English/French entirely, it's not going to happen. I have to believe it's possible to revive it without giving up the dominant language.Saim wrote:Ciarán12 wrote:Saim wrote:- in this case the English influence on Cornish is much deeper than the Yiddish influence on Hebrew.
I don't see how that is relevant. Are you suggesting that Cornish is necessarily more influenced in all areas by English than Hebrew is by Yiddish? Can you back that up in anyway?
Israeli Hebrew has also been adopted by a whole bunch of speakers of Ladino, Amharic, Russian, Arabic, Aramaic, Hungarian, French, English, Spanish and Persian, among others, but the level of the earliest adopters who were mostly (but not exclusively) Yiddish-speaking was unaivoidable. In the case of Cornish practically all of the new adopters are native English-speakers, it is impossible in that sort of environment for there not to be a lot of crossover from English.
Chekhov wrote:I don't know about naive worldviews, but Jurgen Wullenwhatever pisses me off to no end because of his extreme pessimism and cynicism. You'd think the world was going to end imminently when talking to that guy.
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