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October 22, 2007
War as We Babble On
In the "The exodus from the Tower of Babel," Marco Visscher writes in Ode magazine that it's probably a good thing for world peace that 50 percent of the world's 7,000 languages are threatened with extinction. Contrary to the alarm sounded by the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute, Visscher's brief commentary suggests that, "just as extinction of several European currencies ultimately yielded economic and practical advantages, the same applies--to an extent--to the extinction of languages."
Parents in Lausitz, on the border of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, would rather teach their kids German than traditional Sorbic simply because German will help them get on in the world. A forgotten language should be seen as signalling rather than causing the loss of cultural identity.
Language was conceived so people could understand one another. In a world in which people are increasingly connected and work in close co-operation, it is only logical that the need for local languages would fade.
More to the point, less confusion in our Tower of Babel is conducive to world peace. How different might things be if Israelis and Palestinians could--literally--understand each other?
Well, just ask the Catholic and Protestants in Northern Ireland. What's the optimum number of languages we need to go extinct? 6,999?
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Comments
A contrasting view from Douglas Adams:
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers between communications, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in existence."
Posted by: Ethan C. | Oct 22, 2007 4:26:55 PM
>>>"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers between communications, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in existence."<<<
Didn't I point that one out first?
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 22, 2007 4:51:11 PM
Having been a member for the last decade of a Church centered on an ethnic group known as the Carpatho-Rusyns, I can safely say that not only will the world be a better place for the extinction of many of these obscure languages (most of which are actually dialects), but that the only people who will be upset by this development are people who are "professionals" at being members of downtrodden ethnic minorities.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 22, 2007 4:53:34 PM
>>>More to the point, less confusion in our Tower of Babel is conducive to world peace. How different might things be if Israelis and Palestinians could--literally--understand each other?<<<
Whoever wrote this is an ignoramus. The Israelis and the Palestinians understand each other perfectly. Almost every Israeli speaks Arabic; almost every Palestinian can at least understand Hebrew. It is precisely BECAUSE they understand and know each other perfectly that they are constantly at each others' throats.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 22, 2007 4:55:40 PM
I've always been baffled at the antipathy by quite a few "progressives" to minority languages. What is so offensive about someone speaking in a language you don't happen to understand? Seems as though heaven on earth is imagined to be achieved through enforced homogeneity, and God help those minorities who aren't quite looking forward to Tomorrow-morrow Land (as the history of the 19th and 20th centuries can attest, progressive leftism is perfectly compatible with antipathy towards minority cultures and programs designed to annihilate those troublesome minorities)...
Posted by: PM | Oct 22, 2007 5:58:54 PM
>>>I've always been baffled at the antipathy by quite a few "progressives" to minority languages. What is so offensive about someone speaking in a language you don't happen to understand? Seems as though heaven on earth is imagined to be achieved through enforced homogeneity, and God help those minorities who aren't quite looking forward to Tomorrow-morrow Land (as the history of the 19th and 20th centuries can attest, progressive leftism is perfectly compatible with antipathy towards minority cultures and programs designed to annihilate those troublesome minorities)...<<<
Look, languages come and go, that's just the way of the world. Linguists break the world down into mosaic zones and convergence zones. Mosaic zones are areas in which there are many small linguistic enclaves. The archetype for mosaic zones is the New Guinea hinterlands, where hundreds of tribes all speak distinctive (and for the most part, unrelated) languages, even though they live in close proximity to each other. Mosaic zones exist only under two conditions: first, long-term population stability; second, endemic hostility between ethnic groups. As a result, each group keeps to itself, marries in, and uses its distinctive languge as a shibboleth to distinguish insiders from outsiders.
Convergence zones exist where there is population mobility, trade, cultural exchange and above all, peace.
If tribalism and its discontents are your thing, by all means try to protect the mosaic zones. If, on the other hand, you think that people should try to work together in peace and harmony, then convergence zones are the place for you.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 22, 2007 6:08:02 PM
All that history, all that art. Lost for the sake of the almighty Euro.
I'm afraid I side with preserving languages and cultures, apart from sin.
And, as Europeans could tell us, it is possible to also know a universal language, as well as your own local language.
Posted by: labrialumn | Oct 22, 2007 8:57:27 PM
All that history, all that art. Lost for the sake of the almighty Euro.
I'm afraid I side with preserving languages and cultures, apart from sin.
And, as Europeans could tell us, it is possible to also know a universal language, as well as your own local language.
Posted by: labrialumn | Oct 22, 2007 8:57:49 PM
>>>All that history, all that art. Lost for the sake of the almighty Euro.<<<
It has nothing to do with the Euro. It is just an inevitable fact of life. Languages live, languages change, languages die. They do so because languages are organic entities, and when peoples mix, they exchange words, concepts, grammar and syntax. In this hurly-burly, some languages win, others lose. Small, isolated languages and language families inevitably die out when they come into contact with larger and more dynamic ones. Might as well try to stop the tide as to stop languages from becoming extinct.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 22, 2007 9:18:04 PM
Given that Babel was a curse I have a hard time finding Stuart' logical argument controversial. Would diversity of art and culture disappear with one language? Ameriphobes aside, it certainly hasn't happened in the US.
Posted by: Nick | Oct 22, 2007 10:35:00 PM
Oh yeah america home of art and culture, mickey mouse, ronald mc donald and hyper-obesity. Poor bastard, doesn't even realise.
Posted by: Seán | Oct 22, 2007 11:23:41 PM
>>>Given that Babel was a curse I have a hard time finding Stuart' logical argument controversial. Would diversity of art and culture disappear with one language? Ameriphobes aside, it certainly hasn't happened in the US.<<<
it appers, though, that the "Babel" phenomenon is essentially true: there actually was a single protolanguage spoken by first humans who came out of Africa (it probably sounded like the "click" languages of the Hottentots and Bushmen). There is a strong correlation between the various ethnic groups identified by genetic analysis and the different language families. Moreover, the oldest language families correlate directly with the oldest ethnic groups. In other words, in the beginning we all spoke one language, then as we dispersed across the globe, that language fragmented into thousands of different languages. In areas where the populations were stable, those languages further fragmented into myriad dialects. Where populations moved and blended, languages converged forming new ones. There has been a general "neck down" in the number of languages spoken since at least the late Bronze Age. As I said, nothing one can do to stop it other than to stop people from communicating with people from other parts of the world.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 23, 2007 5:07:37 AM
"Oh yeah america home of art and culture, mickey mouse, ronald mc donald and hyper-obesity. Poor bastard, doesn't even realise."
Modern pop culture and fast-food restaurants is not all there is of art and culture in the U.S.
Posted by: Beth | Oct 23, 2007 6:37:30 AM
So then, Stuart, if it's just a fact of life, why do you seem so happy about it? Seriously - you seem to have a personal stake in this. I'm just curious to know what it is.
Also, you're right that languages change, but it's not just the "unfit" being weeded out. Languages are born all the time, too. That's a natural process as well. It's funny, though, that a lot of the advocates of minority languages succumbing to Almighty Progress don't seem nearly as happy about the emergence of new languages as they do about the death of old ones.
Funny how that works.
Posted by: PM | Oct 23, 2007 7:08:09 AM
>>>So then, Stuart, if it's just a fact of life, why do you seem so happy about it? Seriously - you seem to have a personal stake in this. I'm just curious to know what it is.<<<
Well, it might have something to do with my long-seated animus against the whole "noble savage", man-was-better-in-a-state-of-nature, the past-was-perfect, modernity-is-a-plague, it's-all-America's/capitalism's/globalization's/George Bush's-fault thing.
>>>Languages are born all the time, too. That's a natural process as well. It's funny, though, that a lot of the advocates of minority languages succumbing to Almighty Progress don't seem nearly as happy about the emergence of new languages as they do about the death of old ones.<<<
It entirely depends on the language that emerges. Does it enrich the culture? Can it express new or more nuanced ideas? Does it add depth and color? Are there more or fewer words, particularly nouns and adjectives? Or is the new language merely a dumbed-down pidgin form of some older language, or a fusion of several languages that manages not quite to add up to the sum of its parts (Spanglish would be a good example)? In that case, change is not progress, its actually devolution. We can be discriminating about language changes without being either immobilists or indifferent to the nature of the change. Finally, you have to recognize that a language cannot be preserved by top-down fiat. Been tried in all sorts of places. Obscure languages survive only when the people who speak it WANT to speak it. Efforts to resurrect Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Breton, Galician and other Celtic dialects failed because there was no organic culture or national identity to support them. Irish, on the other hand, did survive and flourish because the language was an integral part of the national identity, and a way of emphasizing that they were not English. Basque (a language related to no other--except possibly Georgian--and likely the remains of the original European language) survives because of geographic isolation and ethnic oppression. Nationalism, isolation, persecution--these seem to be the things needed for obscure languages to survive. But ask yourself if you would be willing to live under those conditions for the sake of preserving a language that has no utility outside of a very small in-group.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 23, 2007 7:43:06 AM
>>>"Oh yeah america home of art and culture, mickey mouse, ronald mc donald and hyper-obesity. Poor bastard, doesn't even realise."<<<
I've been to Ireland. Sean shouldn't throw stones.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 23, 2007 7:43:41 AM
I thought Basque and Finnish were related, no?
Posted by: W.E.D. Godbold | Oct 23, 2007 7:50:54 AM
Sean, I love it when non-Americans are such experts on America.
The most successful (not very) movement toward a universal language has been Esperanto. Interestingly, George Soros's parents were passionate advocates of Esperanto; it seemed to have replaced religion for them. And George Soros is one of the world's most passionate advotes of world government.
Posted by: Judy Warner | Oct 23, 2007 8:10:16 AM
>>>I thought Basque and Finnish were related, no?<<<
No, Finnish is Ugro-Turkic, meaning it is related to Hungarian and Turkish. My wife speaks Finnish. The Basques are a real anomaly because they do not fall into any of the major language groups, but there are enough resemblances to Georgian that there may be an ancestral relationship. Given that both languages persist in remote mountainous regions, one can see how they would survive millennia of war and migration. My wife also speaks Georgian, so she's looked into this.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 23, 2007 8:17:00 AM
>>> And George Soros is one of the world's most passionate advotes of world government.<<<
One run by and for expatriot Hungarian billionares, of course.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 23, 2007 8:17:44 AM
Finnish: the last language you'll ever need
Posted by: W.E.D. Godbold | Oct 23, 2007 8:23:48 AM
>>Efforts to resurrect Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Breton, Galician and other Celtic dialects failed<<
I'm not sure how you would qualify the resurrection of Welsh as a failure, Stuart. It is, after all, an official language of Wales and appears on all the signage of that country. And I have personally met people who speak Welsh primarily in their home and taught it to their kids as their first language. And they did so because it is supported by an "organic culture [and] national identity," particularly in the form of poetry and song.
And the Welsh have much the same attitude toward the English as the Irish have, though of course a bit less strongly. One Welsh literature professor who spoke to us during my college trip to England told the story of taking a group of her students to see Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. The mean but overly-abused steward Malvolio was protrayed in a thick Welsh accent. When he spoke his concluding line, "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you," she and her students stood up and cheered.
Posted by: Ethan C. | Oct 23, 2007 9:15:25 AM
>>>"Oh yeah america home of art and culture, mickey mouse, ronald mc donald and hyper-obesity. Poor bastard, doesn't even realise."<<<
This coming from an Irishman, from the land of drunken wifebeaters and sectarian terrorism. Poor bastard, doesn't even realize. :-)
Care for another go-round?
Posted by: Ethan C. | Oct 23, 2007 9:19:59 AM
>>>Well, it might have something to do with my long-seated animus against the whole "noble savage", man-was-better-in-a-state-of-nature, the past-was-perfect, modernity-is-a-plague, it's-all-America's/capitalism's/globalization's/George Bush's-fault thing.<<<
Now THERE'S a list that cries out for parsing...
Posted by: Rob G. | Oct 23, 2007 9:20:38 AM
Stuart, some of your thoughts are linguistics are, well, in need of correction. For one, Finnish is not "Ugro-Turkic". Finnish is part of the Finno-Ugrian side of the Uralic language family, which has no relationship with Turkic besides some vague typological similarities. The only people who try connect the Uralic languages with Turkic languages are Hungarian nationalists who would rather relate themselves to noble conquerors of the steppes than the simple forest and meadow people that make up most of their Uralic brethren. Unfortunately, due to inadequate education in linguistics many laymen go along. I'm a graduate student at the Department of Finno-Ugrian Linguistics at the University of Helsinki, debunking the idea that the Uralic languages are related to Turkish is something everyone here is tired of having to do.
Second, the idea of a Proto-World spoken by African tribes with click consonants is highly controversial. Not a few scholars would suggest that language evolved among separate groups after the beginning of human migrations. Also, that the click consonants are found in Bantu substrate languages only means they go back to before the Bantu migrations, not that they can be pushed back to the very dawn of human language.
Posted by: Christopher Culver | Oct 23, 2007 9:24:24 AM
>>>Finnish is not "Ugro-Turkic". <<<
I knew that. I stand corrected.
>>>Second, the idea of a Proto-World spoken by African tribes with click consonants is highly controversial.<<<
All theories are controversial. In this case, however, the existence of a correlation between these languages and the position of their speakers in both the Y-chromosome and mitochondral DNA trees close to the break-off point from the African diaspora tends to substantiate it. That is to say, the oldest peoples would naturally have the oldest languages. In addition, the palate is lazy, and fully-developed click languages do not emerge out of non-click languages, but rather clicks tend to disappear over time, so that languages with fully developed click systems must have remained unchanged for an extremely long time. Why clicks developed in the first place is something that I find puzzling. Perhaps they were onomatopeoic, or perhaps they were useful for signaling during cooperative hunting. In any case, clicks are difficult to learn and to form, and when an alternative appears, clicks disappear quckly.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 23, 2007 9:32:42 AM
Click consonants apparently were easy enough to learn for the Bantu peoples that came to click territory, since they took them from the substrate and happy use them.
Posted by: Christopher Culver | Oct 23, 2007 9:37:20 AM
Christopher, do you know much about the linguistic history of the Sami people? Does their language show any signs of connection to other far-flung tongues?
Posted by: Ethan C. | Oct 23, 2007 9:37:36 AM
Ethan, the Sami languages are Uralic languages as well, most closely related to the Baltic Finnic languages (Finnish, Estonian, Veps, Vote, Livonian, etc.) but forming their own branch. The phonological changes which set Proto-Baltic-Finnic and Proto-Saamic apart are not very hard to chart.
Posted by: Christopher Culver | Oct 23, 2007 9:41:34 AM
>>>I'm not sure how you would qualify the resurrection of Welsh as a failure, Stuart. It is, after all, an official language of Wales and appears on all the signage of that country. <<<
It certainly does. I think during my time there, I learned one useful phrase in Welsh: Dym o Gwbl, which means "At Any Time"--it was written on every "No Parking" sign we saw. But within Wales, most of the newspapers were in English, most of the television and radio was in English, too (we were driving through the Black Mountains listening to the Welsh station and not understanding a word--or almost none: "Gwbll fwllym bugglym bullffyn Radio Zagreb mfflem pyllem gwubbllyym submarine. . . ." It was interesting. Sitting in the pubs, most of the locals seemed to speak to each other in English, not Welsh, and every shopkeeper, of course, knew Welsh. I would have to conclude then, that Welsh remains a cultural artifact and not a living language, a project invented by Welsh nationalists whose fortunes are therefore tied to Welsh separatist aspirations.
It's a bit different from, say, the situation of Yiddish in America. Yiddish was a living language when it arrived on our shores, and since the Jewish community was both insular and cohesive, it served as a lingua franca among them. There were Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish theater, Yiddish music, Yiddish radio. As long as Jews remained essentially separated from the rest of America, Yiddish flourished. As soon as Jews assimilated, Yiddish died. Of course, it did not help that several million Yiddish speakers were wiped out by the Nazis, or that Israel turned its back on Yiddish as being a "Ghetto language" (which of course, it was). But with Yiddish, we had a living language that went dead, and with Welsh we have a language that was dead for ages, attempting to be resurrected.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 23, 2007 9:42:34 AM
>>>Click consonants apparently were easy enough to learn for the Bantu peoples that came to click territory, since they took them from the substrate and happy use them.<<<
I had read that the Bantu employ a very limited repertoire of clicks, and then only for a narrow range of subjects.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 23, 2007 9:44:13 AM
Sean, I love it when non-Americans are such experts on America.
Non-Americans *are* experts on the subject of American exports.
Posted by: Juli | Oct 23, 2007 10:24:08 AM
Stuart,
How Darwinian of you. Shall we also burn all the books? At least those which haven't been checked out for a while?
Correlation between genetics and languages. No, not really. There are numerous cases, such as England and Iceland, where this is simply not the case. The indigenous population adopted (usually by force) the language of their oppressors. So languages disappear. By conquest.
My inner philologist doesn't much agree with your philistine attitude.
My attitude has much more to do with J. R. R. Tolkien and G. K. Chesterton, than those 'progressives' who you say favor preserving languages, and others in this thread say are the ones seeking their elimination.
Welsh, Scots Gallic and Breton in fact survive. All they need(ed) was permission to do so, rather than being pressed out of existence by the occupying powers.
Godbold, Euskadi is one of those always-questions. What is it related to? The most recent -that I've seen- is that it might be related to Dineh-Caucasian, hence to Chinese and Navajo as well as Georgian. I suspect that is a super-group encompassing more change than Nostratic.
Judy, I suspect these days that more people (well, young people) speak Quenya or Sindarin, than speak Esperanto.
Funny thing, the "African Diaspora" is timed to close to the genetic bottleneck when no more than a couple thousand humans were alive, or as we know from divine revelation, eight in all. We are looking, therefore, at Babel, not an African diaspora.
Cymraeg -is- a living language, in both its Gwynedd and Dyfed dialects. It was actively suppressed by the Norman-English for several hundred years (though my Norman-English ancestors were happy to intermarry and go half-native), and many English settled in the Welsh magistracies (directly descended from the Roman magistracies), so of course many people speak English, for the same reasons that many American indigenes speak English. But now that Cymraeg is permitted, I suspect that it is growing.
Kernau, that did go dead, or nearly so. Were you thinking of it instead of Cymraeg?
And Scots Gallic always survived in the outer islands.
I know you are very sure of yourself, but it really is possible for you to be mistaken from time to time.
Juli, We still make things that we export? I thought everything came from the slave factories of the Mao Dynasty these days.
Posted by: labrialumn | Oct 23, 2007 10:46:46 AM
All you ethnophiles, does it ever occur to you that Adam conversed with God in the Garden with a language? CS Lewis talks about that language in "That Hideous Strength" as words like castles. George Orwell in 1984 points out that words are needed to explain abstract thoughts, so that controlling the language, controlled the mind. I would suggest that it works backwards even better, that transforming the mind transforms language. If the Babelfish caused wars by translating between human languages, then speaking Edenic will cause peace to break out. JRR Tolkien, the linguist, captured some of this in his LOTR trilogy, when the elves had to refer to Mordor-spawn. Euck came out Orc. The word was itself a feeling, a clearing of the throat, an expectoration. Now reverse the process and ask, how do we speak of God? There is a word, and the word is a unique word, and when we speak the word, then there will be peace.
Posted by: rob | Oct 23, 2007 10:58:12 AM
"Non-Americans *are* experts on the subject of American exports."
Don't know if I'd go this far, but we do seem to be glad to deliver Happy Meals and Mickey Mouse along with liberty and justice, don't we?
Posted by: Rob G | Oct 23, 2007 11:13:25 AM
>>>"Non-Americans *are* experts on the subject of American exports."<<<
I imagine the disaffected Gauls, Germans, Judeans and Britons said the same thing about the blessings of "Romanitas" back in their day.
See, for example, this meeting of the Judean People's Front from Life of Brian:
REG:
They've bled us white, the bastards. They've taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers' fathers.
LORETTA:
And from our fathers' fathers' fathers.
REG:
Yeah.
LORETTA:
And from our fathers' fathers' fathers' fathers.
REG:
Yeah. All right, Stan. Don't labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?!
XERXES:
The aqueduct?
REG:
What?
XERXES:
The aqueduct.
REG:
Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.
COMMANDO #3:
And the sanitation.
LORETTA:
Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like?
REG:
Yeah. All right. I'll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done.
MATTHIAS:
And the roads.
REG:
Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads--
COMMANDO:
Irrigation.
XERXES:
Medicine.
COMMANDOS:
Huh? Heh? Huh...
COMMANDO #2:
Education.
COMMANDOS:
Ohh...
REG:
Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.
COMMANDO #1:
And the wine.
COMMANDOS:
Oh, yes. Yeah...
FRANCIS:
Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if the Romans left. Huh.
COMMANDO:
Public baths.
LORETTA:
And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.
FRANCIS:
Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this.
COMMANDOS:
Hehh, heh. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.
REG:
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
XERXES:
Brought peace.
REG:
Oh. Peace? Shut up!
[bam bam bam bam bam bam bam]
[bam bam bam bam bam]
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 23, 2007 11:23:45 AM
>>>Judy, I suspect these days that more people (well, young people) speak Quenya or Sindarin, than speak Esperanto.<<<
And more speak Klingon than all three combined.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 23, 2007 11:27:10 AM
>>>And Scots Gallic always survived in the outer islands.<<<
Been to the Hebrides, and yes, they do speak Gaelic--among themselves. To the rest of the world, they speak English (even Scots is disappearing as a dialect, though Geordie seems to be going strong on the other side of the Border). The problem with Gaelic being spoken in the Isles is the depopulation of the Isles. More young people depart for the cities, and nobody takes their place (the Scottish government is offering free crofts to people who will move to Arran and take up knitting). Personally, I love the Isles, and think it would be a great place to settle down, but you have to be a might peculiar in preferring sheep to people, enjoying isolation, and not minding weather than can be gorgeous or atrocious in the space of fifteen minutes.
As far as I can see, the only thing that would really bring back Gaelic is Scottish devolution. If Scotland becomes independent (or at least autonomous), they could make Gaelic the official language, which would then give it sanction of law, in order to serve as a nationalist rallying point. But then Edinburgh would have to confront the problem that Gaelic, at least since the 14th century, was only spoken north of the Highland Line, the Lowlands speaking Scots, which is really just another North English dialect. When they do that, they can confront the fact that most of their national heroes, including William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, weren't Scots at all, but Anglo-Norman noblemen.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 23, 2007 11:34:03 AM
>>>even Scots is disappearing as a dialect<<<
I don't know about that; when we were in Ayrshire, near Robert Burns country, we could hardly understand anything anybody said, their accent was so thick, though we didn't have that problem in the Highlands.
Posted by: Judy Warner | Oct 23, 2007 11:45:35 AM
>>>I don't know about that; when we were in Ayrshire, near Robert Burns country, we could hardly understand anything anybody said, their accent was so thick, though we didn't have that problem in the Highlands.<<<
That's just the accent. Scots was a true dialect, with a unique (indeed, preposterous) vocabulary. If you think that the brogue in Ayr or Aberdeen is difficult to decipher, try Liverpudlian, Glaswegian Keelie or Northumbrian Geordie. I only got by in Yorkshire from watching multiple seasons of "All Creatures Great and Small".
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 23, 2007 11:56:25 AM
I had heard that only the residents of Edinburgh spoke really proper English nowadays. Anything to that?
Posted by: W.E.D. Godbold | Oct 23, 2007 11:58:38 AM
>>>I had heard that only the residents of Edinburgh spoke really proper English nowadays. Anything to that?<<<
The purest English I heard in Britain was actually spoken in the Hebrides, among those who learned it as a foreign language.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 23, 2007 12:02:04 PM
My maternal grandparents were from Ayrshire, and while they had strong accents they weren't difficult to understand and seldom used Scots words.
To get a good taste of Scots, pick up one of George MacDonald's Scottish novels where all the dialogue is written in dialect. Or read some of Rabbie Burns' Scottish poems. I keep a Scots-English dictionary close by for such occasions.
Posted by: Rob G | Oct 23, 2007 12:10:45 PM
Talked with a retired Army Colonel and father of current SEAL Commander about current Iraq; said there's great hope because Petraeus, who he thought was the Army's smartest general ever, got it that he's got to work with what exists in Iraq, namely, a very different culture from the languages on up. This "sensitivity" was virtually non-existent before, during and after the invasion (as was plain to see) and we've seen the consequences when we tried to impose a western management model on a non-western environment. Said Colonel had raised hope cuz Petraeus has spent a lot of time exploring how to address this issue; how to get done what we want to get done using the local resources at hand, i.e., using the cultural realities we have at our disposal. A very different way of going about things, but something of a "duh!" what? Seems this is where McNamara largely placed the failure with Vietnam if I remember; lack of experts who understood the local situation. Is that right Mr. Koehl?
I'm very interested in the whole language discussion; I morphed a 6th and 7th grade Latin course into a two year language and culture course whereby I introduced 16 different languages (along with histories, geography, script writing, music, art .. . whatever I could get my hands on) to the kids (from Bahasa Indonesian, to Kiswahili, to Irish, to Russian, etc.). Was very hard to do (I'm not doing it currently) but the effect on kid's was incredible (did my Master's thesis on it); they knew where places were; in learning a little about other languages, they learned alot about their own (and their own cultural backgrounds) and they were emboldened to embrace and continue foreign language studies (something that's documented as very hard for US kids to do what with most serious language studies starting earliest in middle school and more likely during high school - times where mistake-angst is highest and courage to try, the most important foreign language characteristic, is lowest).
Anyway, from what I've seen reported, small, local language use seems to be on the rise in Europe, at least, not as nationalistic endeavors to supplant the language of an actual nation's language, but as a reaction to the soullessness, if you will, of just being a part of a large, ephemeral culture that offers nothing to hold on to. The communities still master and speak in the languages of the larger political body, but are enjoying speaking the older languages of their lands; languages that evoke not only the land itself, but also the history of those who've lived on it. Course, if they become mobile like US, they'll be less motivation for this development.
Vis-a-vis language loss: I've always kind of looked at it as similar to crop variety loss - it's a good thing to have a variety of seeds of wheat available, for instance, should a disease wipe out particular strains (something were just waking up to now - were down to about a dozen regularly used strains today out of hundreds that were used just a while ago? - fortunately seed collecting is increasing). With language loss we lose, to some degree, a sophisticated frame of reference that evolved over time to describe something - perhaps something particular that "new" languages do not inculcate; hence, to some degree, language loss seems to put us at risk. Of course, languages like our very own English, with the largest vocabulary there is, can act as somewhat of a counter to this; it has, over the centuries, absorbed so much from the languages it's encountered that it has grown to arguably the most expressive language in the world. It seems to have been blessed with a sort of openness* to other languages that has enabled itself to grow; an openness that I might imagine came from a very secure local core language (in this case Angles/Saxon - no one thought these could survive as the dominant "feed" under the Norman and Viking/Danish conquests - but they did!). So, while languages do indeed come and go like all else, it behooves us to not look on it as something to celebrate; I think that can lead to pride amongst the population of the "victorious" language, a pride that can blind people to the need to consider the importance of other means of "being" (see above with Iraq and Vietnam). Language loss happens - is there something in that old language that we might learn from and use? Hence, I'm all for the documenting of disappearing languages.
Thoughts?
*best explanation of this openness that I've encountered talks about the openness of capitalists; they don't care who you are and what you believe, speak, etc. If they can figure how to make a buck in cahoots with you, then they'll work with you (and absorb some of your language and culture in the process. - My personal theory about the impetus and success of the English in the building of their empire has always been that they went abroad to get better food. "Take out" drove Brittanica. ;-)
Posted by: Tim | Oct 23, 2007 1:21:27 PM
>>To get a good taste of Scots, pick up one of George MacDonald's Scottish novels where all the dialogue is written in dialect. Or read some of Rabbie Burns' Scottish poems. I keep a Scots-English dictionary close by for such occasions.<<
My preferred method is to listen to traditional musical groups, like the Tannahill Weavers. They's got a lexicon in the back of every album's lyrics sheet. :-)
An interesting tangent, for the linguists here: why is it that so much Scots (and certain other dialects') vocabulary strikes the American listener as not just foreign, but funny-sounding? Are there any theories as to why some foreign words (pawky, schnitzel, burrito) sound hilarious?
Posted by: Ethan C. | Oct 23, 2007 1:23:40 PM
>>>Seems this is where McNamara largely placed the failure with Vietnam if I remember; lack of experts who understood the local situation. Is that right Mr. Koehl?<<<
McNamara was a self-serving git. If there were experts who didn't understand the situation on the ground, the one at the head of the line was named Robert Strange McNamara. In fact, by 1968, the U.S. had pretty much figured out how to wage a successful counterinsurgency in Vietnam. In short, by 1972 we had won the war. The Viet Cong were eradicated, the North Vietnamese army had been pounded into the dirt. The ARVN were more than holding their own, and South Vietnam was on its way to becoming a stable, fairly democratic government. It was only when the United States Congress, interested mainly in embarrassing Richard M. Nixon, decided to cut military aid to South Vietnam and prevented the U.S. from enforcing the 1973 peace treaty by supporting the South Vietnamese with air power and logistics, that the North Vietnamese were able to overrun the country. Put simply, many ARVN units just ran out of ammunition. Makes it hard to defend yourself.
Unfortunately, after Vietnam, the rallying cry was "No More Vietnams". And the main show was always on the North German Plain against Group Soviet Forces-Germany. Between 1975 and 1985, the U.S. military painfully rebuilt itself from top to bottom, but with its focus almost exclusively on waging high-intensity maneuver warfare against the Warsaw Pact. Most of what we knew about counter-insurgency went by the board--there was no institutional memory. And so, we spent the first four years of this war, learning what we had already learned between 1964 and 1968.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 23, 2007 1:30:40 PM
What's your take Mr. Koehl on Petraeus, his leadership and the direction he's taking? Have you heard much about the depth of his counter-insurgency knowledge and his ability to apply it?
Posted by: Tim | Oct 23, 2007 1:36:05 PM
As for resurrecting a language, it can be done, with enough will: only you need the whole populace AND the government desiring it. Look at Hebrew - a liturgical and scholarly language only for well over 2000 years, brought back to life in Israel.
I too think it sad when languages die, just as when species of animal die - and with language, it's generally a whole culture which dies with it. Which is the chicken and which the egg, I don't know - people have argued both ways, and it's probably a vicious circle. But something good goes out of the world.
Posted by: Sue Sims | Oct 23, 2007 1:40:07 PM
"My preferred method is to listen to traditional musical groups, like the Tannahill Weavers. They's got a lexicon in the back of every album's lyrics sheet."
Books of Burns' poetry usually have those glossaries in the back as well. For reading Scottish literature, however, you need something a little more extensive. But listening to the T. Weavers, Silly Wizard, Dougie MacLean, et al certainly helps with pronunciation!
Posted by: Rob G | Oct 23, 2007 1:45:36 PM
>>>I too think it sad when languages die, just as when species of animal die - and with language, it's generally a whole culture which dies with it. Which is the chicken and which the egg, I don't know - people have argued both ways, and it's probably a vicious circle. But something good goes out of the world.<<<
At one level, I'm rather sad the dinosaurs are gone. At another one, I am extremely grateful for it.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Oct 23, 2007 1:46:50 PM
