A small town in Sweden fights to preserve Elfdalian, a dying forest language
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For instance, in France, 39% of the population spoke Occitan in 1860. In 1993 the Occitan-speaking population was 7%, and that number is surely fewer now. This was the result of a concerted effort to create a French nation, enforced through the public education system by abusing schoolchildren until they hated their native tongue.[0]
Language is a crucial aspect of identity (but by no means the only one), and 19th century nationalists understood this. The first generation become ashamed to speak their language, the second generation never learn it, and the third become full-fledged assimilated members of the nation. If there is a different group of people in your country who resemble you but have a different identity, destroy their language and their religion, and now you are the same.
It's my personal opinion, but the reason the educational program of the French Republic was successful is because it gave an outlet to a need people had. They wanted to move up, they wanted to speak French. Don't deny them agency.
This is a manipulation. What you are saying is that in order to move up in French society, they are required to speak French, and therefore they learned French in order not to be suppressed. But you're disguising it in weird wokeness language.
You could use the same phrasing about skin-bleaching to make it sound like people who were against it were the actual oppressors, denying brown people their agency, speaking for brown people, saying that brown people are making bad decisions for themselves, and actively trying to keep brown people from enjoying the success that skin-bleaching would bring them. It's pretty reprehensible framing, but common. It's even used against brown people themselves, like in this case it's being used against Occitan speakers.
I want to note that this framing is reprehensible, regardless of the facts on the ground, or the particular subject. You could just as well be arguing for women to get breast implants, or for orthodox Jews to make themselves available on Saturdays.
As a native speaker of one of the languages that France is successfully removing, I find your words deeply offensive. The suppression of languages of France has not been a peaceful or voluntary process, but a very violent one. Shit; school kids were ridiculed and reprimanded by speaking other non-french languages at the recreation yards! How evil is that?
We have agency. Problem is that we are overwhelmed by a much powerful opponent that is actively trying to eliminate us. Now I'm living in Paris, and I'm sad and dismayed at the incomprehension of most native french speakers to the plight of the people of their own country.
On a side note, I find the whole victim mentality attached to that subject deplorable, in particular coming from young people who've never been through any sort of actual oppression. People have all the tools nowadays to perpetuate their language, but there's a lot more whining than actually putting the work into teaching it to their kids and actively speaking it.
There might have been a State across the lines of Old Gascony, and one across the lines of the lands of the Counts of Barcelona and Provence. But an "Occitan nation" is pure fantasy. There's never been much of a unifying cultural force (even at the peek of the Troubadour age), even less of a political one (save for France itself). That word "occitania" wasn't even used before the 70s and it's still far from widespread use outside of Languedoc, and for some reason Italy.
People have way too many daydreams about that stuff. But having one major Gallo-Romance nation is a natural outcome, even if the way the French State was re-factored around the turn of the 19th c. looks forced.
They speak of "the village", but it's in fact many major cities in the country (Marselha, Tolosa, Perpinyà, Strossburi, Brest, Naoned) that were not French-speaking less than a couple of centuries ago. For some people, anything out of Paris is a tiny country village without importance.
Also, nobody in Marseille writes "Marselha", If you want to do some out of place indigenous rights dog whistling, the proper orthography in Provencal is Marsiho. Normalized Occitan is of ill repute in Provence, and so is the associated Occitanism.
I'm at a loss. Honestly cannot reply to such bullshit without strong words.
I hope some day you will understand that what you are saying is not alright, but I won't be able to help you in that. Have a good day.
Which neighboring countries, exactly? Minority languages in Spain were suppressed for decades under the Franco government, and intermittently under assorted Spanish monarchies and republics before that. Germany had a diglossia between Hochdeutsch and assorted local tongues, and some of those local tongues still exist because the state saw them as legitimate regional dialects of the standard language. Italy never put nearly as much of a premium on suppressing the regional languages whose literature had contributed to Standard Italian, and those dialects have survived much better than e.g. Sardinian or Franco-Provencal.
Dear god this is such a great statement. So many people working in international development fetishize life out in the village. Its like they want people to live in some kind of frozen time bubble as museum Fremen.
In France, the project of creating a French nation and a French people required taking a diversity of cultures and languages that already existed in the territory, and trying to standardize and unify them. This is what modern nationalism did in many parts of Europe.
The USA is a different kind of project, wherein people from Europe came to take over the continent from it's previous inhabitants, stamping out the various cultures and languages that were on this continent by displacing whole peoples, not by assimilating them. Initially there were different European groups that were also kind of fighting each other for power. Obviously the ones from England were the dominant power in creating the United States of America, but other European cultures existed on the continent for a while too, the Lone Star State in Texas actually had three official state langauges -- English, Spanish, and German (yup).
So, yeah, these were very different things. I'd start from the actual history in comparing them.
I guess the commonality is the end result of homogenizing culture and suppressing cultural diversity for the purposes of political power.
Which in almost all cases are the result of top-down processes. You're arguing that individual adjustments to change are the agents of change.
English gives opportunity because of the colonial foundation created by English invasion being transferred to the US, due to their long-term Western military hegemony resulting from their distance from a destructive pair of European wars.
Of course, a lingua franca is good, but the cultural and professional domination is too much in my opinion. US culture is awful, but is heavily marketed and sold (and ironically is almost all of foreign manufacture due to the continuing trade deficit/strong dollar policy. US professional dominance is due to its corruption, lack of regulation and labor rights, military aggression providing and preserving new markets, and diplomatic aggression making it the gatekeeper to those markets.
The dominance of English is a result of that, just like the domination of Latin, Spanish, and French (or Arabic for that matter) were. It's something that's happening, not something to be supported.
edit:
> But the national government of Sweden is a different story. They currently consider Elfdalian a dialect of Swedish, not its own language.
> Speaking in Elfdalian, Swedish MP Peter Helander recently asked Parliament why that’s the case. But before Culture Minister Amanda Lind could answer the question, the parliamentary speaker interrupted them both to say that only Swedish may be spoken in the chamber. Helander said the "only Swedish" remark proves his point, that Elfdalian should be considered its own language.
I don't know how much more official a condemnation of a minority language can be.
I think saying "US culture is awful" weakens your point. US culture is extremely diverse, from The Rock to Jeff Koons. It's also central to the twentieth century. Dismissing it all as awful doesn't make much sense.
It's a pity that Gresham's Law ended up making English almost ubiquitous, to the detriment of the many languages from all around the world. (I don't think I need to mention the many advantages that counterbalance this.)
So the native population was obviously suppressed in a bid for political power, but were any other cultures oppressed into homogenizing for the purpose of solidifying someone’s political power? Did someone oppress the Germans to cause them to speak English, or did they assimilate for the obvious economic and social efficiencies? Homogenized culture is the result, but it’s not clear to me that it was nefarious in these cases.
Fighting Everything German in Texas, 1917–1919 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24449071
"…World War I not only intensified fears that the "melting pot" was failing, but also broadened this concern to include German Americans as a suspect ethnic group. Before the war, German Americans were one of the most respected immigrant groups in America, having achieved success in many spheres. Brewery magnate Adolf Busch, intellectual and U.S. Senator Carl Schulz, and financier John D. Rockefeller were among the German Americans who had risen to prominence in the United States. Significantly, German Americans acquired their favorable reputation despite being the ethnic group most resistant to assimilation…"
"…Furthermore, Texans’ historic distrust of German Texans helped inspire anti-German activities. During the antebellum period, slaveholders had viewed German Texans with suspicion, especially after an 1854 convention of German Texans adopted an anti-slavery resolution. In fact, only a minority of German Texans supported this resolution, but most Texans did not understand that subtlety. They were preoccupied with German Texans’ common culture which prevented them from discerning political, religious, and social differences among Germans…"
"…Claiming that German Texans’ ethnicity was equivalent to disloyalty, many council of defense members in Texas were determined to purge all traces of German culture from their state…"
(DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6563.1994.tb00925.x for your sci-hub needs...)
But my main point is that these are very different situations -- national projects in Europe unifying/homogenizing various long-existed local geographically-specific cultures (I'm not sure 'assimilation' is even the right word here). Vs America, where various European populations came, only in the last few hundred years, displaced local geographically-specific cultures, and then competed with each other for political power or cultural hegemony as they expanded to take land the previous occupants were displaced from, also sometimes forming communities together (in which they were all newcomers to the land). Just two very different situations; although i tried to say there were some commonalities in the way cultures are homogenized/unified, I am sympathetic to the idea that "why are you even looking for commonalities these are such different situations".
I think we often over-simplify the diversity of historical paths with this stuff, assuming that the way we now look at "culture" or "nationality" or "race" has always been the way people did, and/or was inevitable. But these things were built, in the not too recent past, and didn't work the same way they work now even in recent history, and worked differently in different places.
I’m not trying to “gotcha” you, but “pressure to assimilate in order to grow someone’s political power” doesn’t sound like an accurate characterization of American history as I understand it.
As I understand it, the history is more diverse and complicated than you understand it. I shared one source to that end, you dismissed it because it didn't match your preferred narrative.
But again, my main point was not that one sentance.
> In 1927, Wood was commissioned to create a stained glass window in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Unhappy with the quality of domestic glass sources, he used glass made in Germany. The local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) complained about the use of a German source for a World War I memorial, as Germany had been an enemy of the US in that war. They expressed a lingering anti-German sentiment in society, and other people in Cedar Rapids also protested the German source. As a result, the window was not dedicated until 1955.[2]
> Wood was said to have described the DAR as "those Tory gals" and "people who are trying to set up an aristocracy of birth in a Republic."[3] Five years later Wood painted Daughters of Revolution, which he described as his only satire. He emphasized the contrast of three aged women in faded dresses framed against the heroic painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware, which, ironically, was painted in Germany by the German-American artist Emanuel Leutze.[1] Wood depicted his mother's clothing on the models, including a lace collar and amber pin he bought for her in Germany.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughters_of_Revolution
German names became anglicised, German newspapers disappeared, and German stopped being taught in schools.
Whether German would have survived without this sort of persecution is not really knowable, but it did happen.
As for how widespread this was, some examples at the time included a lynching of a German seeking naturalisation:
> One such death of note was that of Robert Prager, a German seeking naturalization in St. Louis, Missouri who was accused on the night of April 14, 1914, of being a German spy by a mob of 300 "men and boys" after he had allegedly shared words at a socialist meeting earlier that evening. The jail where he had taken refuge from the crowds was quickly overrun and being stripped of his clothes, he was led down Main Street with a rope tied around his neck, and was forced to walk the route, and with shattered glass bottles being thrown down in his walking path, he was forced to sing patriotic songs. He was forced during this walk to kiss an American flag which had been wrapped around him. He was walked to a hanging tree at the edge of town where he was lynched. In an article from The St. Louis Global-Democrat, it was reported that there had been multiple incidences of mobs tarring and feathering individuals.
Note that this was prior to US entry into World War I.
Language bans:
> Language use had also been the primary focus of legislation at state and local levels. Some of these regulations included the publication of charters banning speaking German within city limits. A total ban on the teaching of German in both public and private education could be found in at minimum 14 states including ome states would extend this to ban the teaching of all languages except for english, although the majority who would ban non-english languages typically only banned German. A total ban on teaching German in both public and private schools was imposed for a time in at least 14 states, including California, Indiana,[11] Wisconsin,[12] Ohio, Iowa and Nebraska. California's ban lasted into the mid-1920s. The Supreme Court case in Meyer v. Nebraska ruled in 1923 that these laws were unconstitutional.[13]In October 1918, a bill intended to restrict federal funds towards states that enforced English-only education was created. On April 9, 1919, Nebraska enacted a statute called "An act relating to the teaching of foreign languages in the state of Nebraska," commonly known as the Siman Act. It provided that "No person, individually or as a teacher, shall, in any private, denominational, parochial or public school, teach any subject to any person in any language other than the English language." It forbade foreign instruction to children who had not completed the eighth grade.I n Montana, speaking German was banned in public for two years during World War I.[14] Pennsylvania's legislature passed a German-language ban, but it was vetoed by the governor. Churches during this period such as the Lutheran Church became internally divided over services and religious instruction in German and English.[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language_in_the_United_...
In Iowa in particular:
> Harding's proclamation codified four rules for the state. First, Iowa schools - public, parochial and private - could only teach in English. Second, public conversations, including on trains and over the telephone, must be in English. Third, speeches or public addresses could only be given in English. Fourth, churches cannot conduct public worship services in any language other than English. We know this proclamation today as the Babel Proclamation.
https://www.thegazette.com/guest-columnists/a-century-ago-io...
What about cultural imperialism? A language shapes your identity because it literally gives the grammar to your thoughts. But other cultural goods like music, netflix, youtube, tv, you name it, do shape our cultural grammar just as much. This is a point I don't expect anyone already embedded in the dominant culture to find salient, because the culture we are in is as transparent as sea is to fish.
> People are begging to come to wealthy countries
If people had comparable prospects at home, so few would actually leave. If you look at the non-asylum-seeking immigration reasons (i.e. the "beggars" in your words), it is primarily about economic hardship, with persecution, violence, war, human rights added on top. Guess what, in an interconnected international arena, wealthy countries have more culpability about those conditions than we care to admit.
That has been talked about ad nauseam for the past 10 years. Maybe it's time to remember that non-wealthy countries have more culpability for their own conditions than anyone dares to mention?
Imperialism goes way more back than 10 years. It probably has been nauseating for some for at least a century.
> Maybe it's time to remember that non-wealthy countries have more culpability for their own conditions than anyone dares to mention?
Sounds like you've made the exact calculus to rank order culpability. I'm very interested to hear how we all can objectively arrive at this conclusion.
Alternatively, you could tell us a state that haven't been at the receiving end of a war, coup, resource exploitation, economic warfare etc. and still managed to screw up their quest for self-determination.
Argentina was already out of the rich-countries-club by the time the 70's had come around, and the bloody military coup you reference is likely the inevitable political instability that comes surely after sustained economic instability.
And as for Zimbabwe, the "civil-war" was hardly a destabilising event for the country, and the international isolation was easily evaded, this is well documented. I think Zimbabwe, once the bread basket of Africa as Rhodesia, is a great example of how self-determination might undermine an improperly equipped nation.
So what happens when you learn a second, or third, or fourth language fluently? [Like, say me?]
Do you suddenly have multiple-personalities?
Complete bollocks.
So does your 'identity' (whatever that is) change half way through the sentence. In you head?
Are you literally a different person at either end of your sentence?
SMH.
Thanks for your sophisticated analysis.[1]
Psycho-activeness of language has an incredible depth of account from philosophy to semiotics. But a simple enough paper I found for you that exemplifies (not exhaustively proves) my claim is Holtgraves & Kashima, 2008. It is freely accessible.
Additionally equivocating personality, identity and pathologies like dissociative personality is going to mislead us, because they are strawman arguments.
Think of yourself growing up. Turning to an adult was a change in identity. Do you remember the day you switched from being a child to being an adult? Was it a psychopathology to become an adult? Are you completely dissociated from childhood memories, and seemingly, your childhood ego-states?
Finally I will pull another comment of yours in this thread;
> No here is the thing: none of this has affected my identify at all, not even in the slightest.
The thing with identity is that it is not entirely transparent to us. You don't know who you are as much as you think you do. Not only that, if language is the ground on which our identities form, by definition you wouldn't realize a change in identity due to change in grounding. By these accounts you wouldn't be the most reliable witness to assess your identity change.
[1] I know sarcasm is frowned up in this forum but I wanted to give an example of how we use language to emotionally regulate ourselves. We can sublimate our anger by creating a contradictory perspective to salience the unfairness of the opposing perspective. It gives us a strategy out of merely attacking back in kind. Collect thousands of tools like this together and you bet it significantly contributes to your identity.
Neither then would anyone else, including the OP.
Learning new languages does add different layers to your personality.
I am native-level fluent in three languages, and have some level of fluency in three more.
Learning a new language opens a complete new door to a new culture, and way of thoughts through books, movies, songs, and so much more.
Even if you don't spend time to learn a culture well, i.e. don't listen to music or read literature, learning a new grammar, and very importantly, new words, do reshape you, and gives you new perspectives and ways of thoughts.
Some of these a polysynthetic languages, others are agglutinative. Two are tonal, and one doesn't have an alphabet.
No here is the thing: none of this has affected my identify at all, not even in the slightest. Same person: just different sounds for things.
Presumably my testimony counts as well.
It's happening in india today. It's very sad.
That is exactly how it happens today. The process your parent describes is a currently ongoing one in France.
In the case of Sweden, which is already a small population, it must be difficult to keep having used for a very minority language in a modern world. In order for a language to survive, nowadays, you need the language to also be very present on the internet. That means having a big community of native speakers and creators, media, literature, art, cinema, education, work... That's expensive and makes little sense for populations that are quite small I would reckon.
If this is the pathway we choose/are forced down, will the term ‘culture’ be needed? We will all be the same.
I bring up these counterpoints only to say that while language is a major factor in culture, there are still many other factors.
For example, Catholics are the largest religious group in Ireland and France. Oklahoma is only 4.9% Catholics with Baptist being it’s largest religious group.
Take your comment as an example. HN has people worldwide interacting with each other in this forum BECAUSE we are all speaking a known common language (English).
If worldwide schools didn’t commonly teach English (or whatever the next dominant language might be) we wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other in this thread if we all spoke 100+ different languages.
Slightly tangential, but Sweden has decided to call the Westrobothnian dialect of Swedish “Bondska” the direct translation of which is basically “Farmerish”.
Now I don’t support the stigmatization of farmers, but it’s hard to deny that “bondig”/“farmerish” has been used as a derogative to separate them from “city people” or whatever they’re trying to suggest.
As I understand it, Elfdalian is further removed from Swedish, but has been similarly classified as a rural dialect instead of its own language. Further complicated by the fact that the are other dialects in the area called Dalmål (direct translation “valleyspeak” maybe?), and as far as I can tell are related to both Swedish and Elfdalian..
(I just an interested amateur, so I’m absolutely open to corrections from people with first hand experience of speaking Elfdalian or Westrobothnian)
I can, after spending some time there, understand some "moramål" (the variation spoken in and around Mora) but I have a much harder time understanding "orsamål" (same but around Orsa). Elfdalian is much less intelligible.
There are all sorts of reasons to keep minority language communities thriving, I won't get into them here. But hell, tourism alone is a good one. It's part of the local flavour of a place.
We engage, enhance and preserve our culture through language: spoken and written. Each language is shaped via its environment and is different as a result from all others.
English is often called French (lingua Franca - the language of the Franks). It is routinely used as an intermediary language because it is very simply structured and can take quite a lot of abuse and still remain intelligible.
* No diacritics (accents etc)
* Vowels can be mispronounced but the meaning remains
* Word order can be fluid: Nominally: subject object verb but not enforced and can be broken for effect
* Borrow words are actively encouraged
* English *can* sound beautiful, if you put your back into it
Let's go Scottish (no, not Pictish) and consider Mr Burns: and we should start here - https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/mouse/
Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
"Oh what a panic is in your heart" is genius.
This is so obviously a bloke who is looking at a mouse. So few words and yet so much meaning - that's genius.
English is a lasting lingua franca because two world-dominating powers in a row - the United Kingdom and the United States - were English-speaking, producing a run of more than a century with an important trading partner and diplomatic contact speaking that language.
It's gotten deeply enough embedded that it will probably survive fading US (relative) power, but inserting theories about the nature of the language itself doesn't add any explanatory power over just looking at the history
I'd say that it's mostly the US that counted. At least in Europe, before US dominance became clear (say before 1930), the French language was lingua franca and hardly anyone spoke English.
But yes, AFAIU English has only really become the Big One in the EU in the last 50 years or so.
When I grew up (Sweden) I remember that Anglo-Saxon as a term was much more commonly used in daily press and books than today.
Reading the Wikipedia entry it seems like the my use of the term Anglo-Saxon is more common in the non-Anglophonic world.
Languages are tools for communication. In a world where everyone can easily talk to anyone else, that tool can't be 6000 separate languages.
Old people don't like it, but languages are always changing. Latin became ~20 different languages after Rome fell. If someone had enforced a "no language left behind" policy, French or Spanish would never have been spoken.
What's important is that we can talk to each other, not what vocabulary and grammar we happen to use.
[I wrote this in my second language]
Umbrian, Oscan, Picene, Etruscan. Then Ligurian, Venedic, Liburnian, Illyiric, then Gaulish, Aquitanian.
The list goes on. They did live a trace in the romance languages that then spawned after latin dominance was over, but it's hard to quantify as in many (not all) of these languages shared a common ancestry with latin.
The main forces that drove the creation of romance languages out of latin however do not lie in this substrate, but to a combination of natural language drift and the admixture of the languages of the new rulers and immigrants (e.g. Germanic tribes like the Franks, Longobards, Vandals, Visigoths, ...).
In most cases their influence was not strong enough (or lasted enough) to fully displace the latin culture present throughout southern Europe.
But had latin been left to just naturally diverge into many dialects without foreign rulers, the character of the romance languages we have today would have been likely quite difference. They could have perhaps ended up being a more similar between each other, but the lack of a unified central power and cultural attractor means they would probably have diverged anyway.
Keep in mind that Latin was still used (written and spoken) as a culture language for a long time after the fall of the Roman empire. This relieved the local languages from the pressure of being mutually intelligible with people from other parts of Europe the elites, merchants, clergy etc had to interact with.
What I'm strongly against is forcing kids to learn an impractical language because old people can't let go of the past and/or want to win political battles.
This is the Catalan case. Grey-ish as life I guess.
You are basically "strongly against" new generations inheriting most of their parents' identity. That is not OK, however you spin it.
You've misunderstood.
What people actually spoke in daily life was... different.
First there is the huge influence of Greek and the languages of the peoples the Romans conquered.
Then, one has to consider that the immigrants coming to Rome (forced or otherwise) had to learn Vulgar Latin as well, which always contributes tendencies to simplify.
Ultimately, people were probably fine talking to each other in a mix of languages, both each using a separate language, or by forming creoles, as long as they got to understand each other. Records and contracts then got written down in Latin.
My mum was a Devon girl, born in 1942 on a farm, near Dartmouth. She experienced things like German PoWs working on the land and then married a soldier, oh and she was a soldier herself - I still have her commissioning certificate on the wall. My parents were both Captains.
Most of what she had to say was just the usual stuff with a few changes (and an accent that was gorgeous to listen to but nearly unintelligible if she wanted it to be) but sometimes she would trot out a word that painted a vivid picture that English didn't cater for properly without some help or a borrow word.
You only have to go back one or two generations when things get sticky.
"What's important is that we can talk to each other" - I totally agree but I'd like to see some richness in the discussion. "lol stuff" and "awks" etc are not very usefull.
Furthermore, English is our current lingua franca not because of its grammar or linguistic quirks, but rather because it has been the primary language of two consecutive world superpowers starting in the 18th century.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
The two names indicate different cultures, languages, and ethnic origins. The OP's comment is misleading.
Moreover the Germanicity of the so-called barbarian tribes, including Pre-Merovingian Franks, has to be reassessed now with what we know about identity politics in the Late Roman and Post-Roman World. People might have played at being barbarians a lot more than actually being it, in a very comparable way you see Americans pretending to be this or that.
this sentence wrote fact from, think then, English truly different language studied experience exist no, my guess correct?
word order English grammar among absolute nightmare is!
(In plain English: Considering what you wrote, I guess that you never studied a language truly different from English, am I right?)
이런("like this") 문장을(sentence) 쓰신(wrote) 걸로(thing + with/from) 볼(see) 때(time/when), 영어와(English + with) 정말로(truly) 다른(different) 언어를(language) 공부해(study) 보신("see" or try) 적이(time) 없는(not exist) 것(thing) 같네요(similar), 맞습니까(correct + question marker)?
Of course it's more or less gibberish, unless you already know, e.g., verb "see" also means "try" and "similar" means "that's my guess".
• 이런 문장을 쓰신 ‘like.this sentence wrote’ = ‘[you] wrote a sentence like that’, remembering that Korean is generally head-final. IIRC most East Asian languages allow elision of verbal arguments; I’m assuming this clause omits ‘you’.
• 이런 문장을 쓰신 걸로 볼 때 ‘like.this sentence wrote thing-WITH see when’ = ‘since [I] saw [you] wrote a sentence like that…’. I’m assuming here that 이런 문장을 쓰신 is acting as some sort of subordinate clause, and that 때 ‘when’ is not purely temporal but also has some sort of resultative meaning, as with English ‘since’. But I’m not at all sure what role 걸로 ‘thing-WITH’ is playing in this clause.
• 영어와 정말로 다른 언어를 ‘English-WITH truly different language’ = ‘a language truly different from English’. This puzzled me for a while until I remembered that relative clauses in Korean go before the noun. English requires a different adposition here than Korean does, but that’s very normal.
• 영어와 정말로 다른 언어를 공부해 보신 ‘English-WITH truly different language study try’ = ‘try to study a language truly different from English’.
• 영어와 정말로 다른 언어를 공부해 보신 적이 없는 ‘English-WITH truly different language study try time not.exist’ = ‘the time doesn’t exist when [you] tried to study a language truly different from English’.
• 것 같네요, 맞습니까 ‘thing similar, correct-Q’ = ‘[this] thing is my guess, correct?’
Thus, a literal translation would be: ‘Since [I] saw [you] wrote a sentence like that, the time doesn’t exist when [you] tried to study a language truly different from English, [this] thing is my guess, correct?’
Is my analysis at all correct? If so, the only thing I’m still confused about is the purpose of 걸로 in the first clause, and I’d be interested to know if there’s an explanation for that.
(Incidentally, I find it really amazing how many ways different languages have to say the same thing, and how a perfectly grammatical sentence in one language can become complete gibberish in another.)
> But I’m not at all sure what role 걸로 ‘thing-WITH’ is playing in this clause.
It's a bit cheating, because 것 "thing" is kinda special and combines with the preceding verbal clause to create a noun clause. A better translation (if I were to teach Korean) would be "that". So, "이런 문장을 쓰신 것" is "that [you] wrote a sentence like this".
-으로 보다 (literally, "see with X") is an idiom meaning "considering X" - so "... 걸로(=것+으로) 볼 때" means literally "when [I] see that ...", or more naturally, "considering ..."
Also, the auxiliary verb 보다 (try - or "see" when used as a main verb) is a bit harder to explain but less forceful than English "try", which sometimes implies a lot of effort. Korean 보다 is similar to usages like "Please try this cookie!" or "Sure, I'll try walking next time." In our current sentence it's more like "[you] didn't have any experience studying ..."
Final "것 같네요" uses the same "thing/that" which takes the preceding clause, and "-것 같다" is an idiom meaning "I guess ...", i.e., "I guess that you haven't studied ..."
So, I guess you got most of the grammar right from very few clues. :)
And I never thought I’d learn Korean on HN either! But I appreciate anyone willing to talk to me about a topic of interest.
> It's a bit cheating, because 것 "thing" is kinda special and combines with the preceding verbal clause to create a noun clause. A better translation (if I were to teach Korean) would be "that". So, "이런 문장을 쓰신 것" is "that [you] wrote a sentence like this".
Huh, this is interesting! I haven’t come across this particular example of grammaticalisation before, but the World Lexicon of Grammaticalisation informs me that the same development has also occurred in Japanese (and apparently Ik as well), which makes me suspect areal factors.
> So, I guess you got most of the grammar right from very few clues. :)
Good to know! Though I must admit to ‘cheating’ as well… I’m very interested in linguistics, and Korean word order has many similarities to some other languages I’ve looked at. Also, I had to find a Korean reference grammar online before I could understand some parts :) But I’m still a bit surprised I was as successful as I was.
Almost no-one in the world has any significance. Of the 7 billion people alive today, 6,990,000 of them will be utterly forgotten in 200 years time. It will be as if they didn't exist.
Why is one extremely niche language so important compared to those 6,990,000 actual, real life, people? It happened, it had no impact on human history, it was forgotten.
End of story, stop making a big deal about it. History is for the meaningful, not the things that wouldn't even make the minor footnotes.
I was looking at aerial shots of my home the other day for solar installation options, and when I looked at the broader picture, it was a bit soulless. Everything was optimized to be inoffensive and suit the lowest common denominator of taste. The yards and trees and landscaping of each house all are from the same list of plants everyone is familiar with, which are optimized for practicality (hard to kill, and look somewhat okay.)
My anecdote doesn’t fit this situation as an analogy but it shares a common thread in that limiting diversity reduces the humanity of the system, and makes the world more boring as a result. Not everything has to be min maxed and optimized. Some things that humanity has invented are worth dragging with us just so that the world does not slide further into hyper-optimization.
If we all agree about the way we move our mouth parts it'll only serve to increase the diversity of ideas and people we can be exposed to. It's akin to various languages all adopting QWERTY, or the Latin alphabet before it. Nothing is lost due to lack of diversity in protocol.
This also ignores the issue that the majority of the world would have to abandon their language, no matter what language is picked. And how do you pick a language? It’s entirely arbitrary. You can argue for Chinese just as well as you can for English.
The view of language as "the way we move our mouthparts", a protocol for transparently transfering ideas is simplistic. Even if you ignore or discount linguistic relativity, languages have political and aesthetic functions.
Take a rhyme, for example. It can't easily be translated accurately because the language used is itself part of what it expresses. There's no simple onion model with distinct, unleaky layers for natural languages where words are a protocol and thoughts are the content; that's a reductionist misconception on your part.
This seems absurd. Being able to have a conversation is orders of magnitude more effective than the mimicry and hand signals that must be resorted to when you truly don't speak the same language.
> languages have political and aesthetic functions.
Right, but politics and aesthetics are also ideas that are transferred via language. It's really just a protocol. What was lost when most European languages adopted the Latin alphabet? Or when the Chinese empire standardized the writing system?
> Take a rhyme, for example
What additional information is transferred in a rhyme? What meaning?
> a reductionist misconception on your part.
What can you do with language that does not constitute the expression of a thought or an idea?
How does my point contradict that? I am saying that knowing an additional language takes nothing away. I speak English to you because I understand that we both understand it. That hasn't made me forget my mother tongue. That is to say, knowing (and using) an additional language didn't have the effect on me that I couldn't communicate with people that don't understand my mother tongue.
> Right, but politics and aesthetics are also ideas that are transferred via language.
Point is that language itself can constitute a political message or an aesthetic expression.
> What was lost when most European languages adopted the Latin alphabet? Or when the Chinese empire standardized the writing system?
Writing is an expression in itself, hence things like calligraphy and type setting. We perceive it and meaning is derived from our impressions of it. What was lost, insofar that writing systems were actually lost, was probably many lifetimes' worth of calligraphic tradition, especially in China where calligraphy is considered a very important art form, though I'm sure many of these traditions are still maintained by enthusiasts.
> What additional information is transferred in a rhyme? What meaning?
I don't see how this question can come from anything but a position of total philistinism, so I probably misunderstand it. Rhyme and rhythm in general is rhetorically and aesthetically useful so as to make an expression impactful, evocative and memorable, or simply funny and delightful. You may have heard of music and poetry. What happens when you take away the meter and rhythm from song or poetry? Information is definitely lost. If I hear a limerick, and you here an prosaic retelling of the exact same circumstances, I know something which you don't. Whether this information is useful or actionable to you is another question.
Have you heard of puns? They get lost in translation. Perhaps to Siri and Alexa it didn't matter in the first place, but it did to me and (hopefully) you.
> What can you do with language that does not constitute the expression of a thought or an idea?
You misread me. My objection isn't with the notion that language is a tool to express thoughts and ideas, but with the notion that it's a transparent protocol for doing so rather than something that is inherently part of the expression. The thoughts and ideas can be—and frequently are—colored by the language itself. Because there is music and poetry in the English language that is basically inexpressible in other languages without great artistic license, if we forget English, that work is lost.
WTF? What's the attraction of such a place. Cheap rent? No coloured people? Why would one choose to live in such an artificial place?
You: He's a racist.
Not everything is a race issue. If you think it is, get new friends and read more.
I never said anything whatsoever about them. I asked a question.
There are days when it feels like fighting a losing war. Digging up a few old movies to hear the sounds of a dying language and wondering if your kids will care enough to keep this game of broken telephone going into its final rounds, and why you have the right to impose that burden on them in the first place. Maybe it's better if they never know what they lost. I recently found out that my parents could have taught me two other languages that are also dying out, but they decided not to because who in the world would I use them with? Then I shrugged and went on with my day.
That is not how the world works. The fact that most people is not in the history books does not mean that they were not important.
> History is for the meaningful, not the things that wouldn't even make the minor footnotes.
But, minor footnotes have changed the history of empires. A disease that moves to one person to another, and one traveler, can spread it around changing the live of hundreds, millions a few generations later, all humanity after a few centuries.
That we do not have the capacity to understand the complexity of all human interactions does not mean that it is not important. History is presented as the act of a few chosen individuals because history is told to promote national feelings, and because humans relate easily to histories of families and power.
I would compare it to the sad loss of knowledge that results from another animal species going extinct. There are secrets in its genome that we will now never discover.
History is the sum of everything that happened. Not just the few "glory" moments of some dudes, historians liked. (And it seems they mainly liked those with the highest kill count.)
"Almost no-one in the world has any significance"
Everything and everyone has significance to their own time and place. The world would not be complete and working like it is, if one thing is missing.
Now and as to why Elfdalian is specifically important? It is the closest alive language to old norse. Many people are trying to reconnect with their culture roots, after centuries of monocultural imperialism trying to cut them.
So yes, the world would move one without Elfdalian, but personally I like a colorful, vibrant culture. Where not every place looks and sounds the same - only then I would consider it all insignificant, as all is the same shit anyway. But it is not and I support efforts to fight against that and for rich local cultures.
This is neglecting how these developments came to be. We don't know when Einstein was born that he will go on to discover a world changing equation and theorem. If we don't give diversity such as these minority languages to thrive, we may simply be creating an environment that is so sterile and constant that any new innovations have little chance of happening from a lack of stimulation.
I respectfully take exception to this, only because I realized for far too long that I felt under the thumb of this idea. If I do a thing, will it have meaning to enough people?
I mean, this is fine in the long-term when historians record history, but I could care less what the rest of the 7 billion people might think when I decide. for example, if I want to take up a course in the language of my grandparents, then neither the opinions of my grandparents, parents or whether it is useful should stop me. It might not be economically feasible (except in the country of its origin) but talking only about what is "meaningful" can pretty much also exclude most creative human effort, even if that effort only impresses upon a few individuals.
This is not an argument for "diversity", which is a non-goal for most people. Instead, this is simply not being locked down to the whims of a zeitgeist every time you ask whether something you find interesting, which can have some educational value, is actually a meaningful thing to pursue.
Nominal English word order is SVO, not SOV. :-)
You didn't even for a second stop to think why English language uses a Latin term to call a language the language of the Francs?
Latin was the original "lingua franca" of Europe. For historical and traditional reasons.
Then France was the largest, baddest, most powerful country, and everyone wanted to be like France.
But in the past several centuries Britain and then the US were the biggest, baddest, most economically powerful countries, and it's beneficial to know and speak English.
People didn't use Latin or French because they were simpler. People don't use English because it's "simpler than French". If that was the case, everyone would've switched to Turkish, for example, as it's very, very, very simple compared to any European language.
Chinese was the lingua franca of Asia for centuries before English even became a thing in the 19th century. Because it was the biggest baddest empire around. Don't get too surprised if Chinese becomes the lingua franca of the world 20 years from now.
"sleekit" -> slick or sleek
"laith" -> loath
still haven't figured out what "na", "awa" and "sae" are
Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie! Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
"Translation"/update to more standard current English:
Small, sleek, cowering timorous beast
Oh, what a panic in your chest.
You need not start away so quickly.
He’s saying the mouse needn’t leave so quickly.
For a lot of people, investing in their local language is a luxury, if it comes at the expense of deeper engagement with the lingua franca. We see this decision being made across the world, as the population urbanizes and leaves their local culture behind. Few can afford not to.
In this case, it sounds like Elfdalian is up against both Swedish and English.
If people are capable of and willing to learn three or more languages to native fluency, then that is of course their prerogative. But at some point, I believe it becomes unethical to promote investment in a hyper-local language if the effect is to detract from the economic opportunities of lingua francas.
Scandinavia (counting only Sweden, Norway and Denmark) has a population of about 21 million, so it's actually bigger than any German state, and about the same size as Florida (3rd largest US state). If you count Finland too, it's about the size of Texas, so California is the only US state that's meaningfully bigger.
What do you think it means?
The national project required standardizing one language calling it "Italian". It's part of making one "Italian" people too. There are good reasons that decisions of where language boundaries are -- and what language is spoken how -- become so "political".
I stand firmly with preserving language, and with that culture. I hope to do my part by learning more of my family's culture, and learning the language and culture of someone else (maybe more). From some of the other comments I get a sense of a line of thought where the primary goal is the well-being of the lot of individuals in the world. And its hard to argue against that. Yet, I want there to exist a diversity of peoples, and those things that come with it.
When I search Elfdalian, there's the facebook group for learning the language, but that's hardly the platform to teach a language. Imo, it would help much more to copy the structure of existing courses, write a wikibook, or make a homepage to aggregate all the links in one place.
Were I to want to explore the language, I would need to know the alphabet and its sounds, common phrases, the grammar, have flip cards (anki is great for that), have ways to passively consume the language meaning music, videos, articles, subtitles for popular films, etc., ways to practice it with others (forums, subreddit, frequent, physical or virtual meetups, and so on), and, most importantly, it should be available without being physically present.
If you don't make it easy to learn, consume, and practice, then make it at least easy to archive.
The language is intimately tied to the people and the culture. It’s not like they want to push random people around the world to learn it just for a laugh.
Furthermore, where are you taking that I'm advocating forcefully spreading a language?
I'm stating a two very simple facts:
1. If you want a language to stay alive, you need speakers.
2. If you want a language to outlive speakers, you need to archive it well.
Since we live in a world of choice, you'll have to do something in order to let people choose to become a speaker of that language.
Schütt said her parents spoke Swedish with her because that’s what was spoken in schools. Students were even discouraged to speak Elfdalian in the classroom. Now, there’s only about 2,500 speakers left.
This same story has played out in so many different places around the world.
I think having culturally distinct languages is fine on a macro level, but at the scale of this minor language, it's really as useful as arrowhead you find in the ground here in the States. At one time this was useful, but now is no longer that time.
That's a gigantic lift, that takes a ton of effort. Even if you teach a new generation they likely won't keep using it in their day to day.
Why not just catalog it? Get the most experienced speakers to record hundreds of hours of audio of it, if it had a writing system catalog that too.
Problem solved. Language preserved. Otherwise you're fighting a losing battle trying to keep a language actively being used when only a few thousand people know it still.
If you read about this language, it emerged from Old Norse. Do you think there was some kind of "Preserve Old Norse" movement?
I just don't see how an effort like this could possibly succeed. If you make kids learn it, the chances of them retaining fluency in it are pretty low I'd think? They'd have to be using it a lot. And I think most people would probably rather their kids learn English as a second language.
I guess a solution would be to teach the kids English and Elfdalian instead of English and Swedish, and then when they need to talk to people from other regions they just use English as the lingua franca.
The problem is, it probably won’t be 90/10. I worry that it may be more like 50/50 or even 10/90, though to be sure I’d have to ask a linguist who’s actually worked in the field.
> If you read about this language, it emerged from Old Norse. Do you think there was some kind of "Preserve Old Norse" movement?
There’s a difference between evolution into a new language and language death. The former makes no difference to language diversity: the old language is just as interesting as the new one. (Or, in many cases, it increases diversity, because one language can split into multiple daughter languages.) The latter decreases language diversity, as a spoken language is irretrievably lost.
> I just don't see how an effort like this could possibly succeed. If you make kids learn it, the chances of them retaining fluency in it are pretty low I'd think? They'd have to be using it a lot. And I think most people would probably rather their kids learn English as a second language.
I don’t disagree. Language revival rarely if ever succeeds. This is why it’s important to do as much linguistic work on each language as possible while native speakers are still alive — simply making records of the language is not enough.
Maybe for some languages that are at the point of only having 2 speakers left. But at that point, you likely couldn't revive the language anyways. For this language, they absolutely should be able to record it in its current state in an extremely comprehensive way.
>There’s a difference between evolution into a new language and language death.
But Old Norse did die. It happened to sprout several new languages, most of which are not in danger of dying out like Danish and Swedish. The original Old Norse is gone though.
You seem to only be valuing a language based on if it's a net plus or minus to the "Language Diversity" which as you're using it seems to mean the number of distinct languages that are currently spoken natively by currently alive humans. Old Norse dying was -1 but sprouted many new languages so +n. Where Elfdalian dying would just be -1.
I would think a language would be of value based on the content of the language itself, for linguists to study.
>simply making records of the language is not enough.
I would consider doing linguistic work on the language with native speakers to be part of making records of the language. I don't think we're in disagreement here.
The original idea I was pushing against was trying to artificially keep a language alive by trying to keep large population groups speaking it natively. It goes against how language has always worked.
Not at all. Even for languages with many more speakers you can get these sorts of problems.
For a very concrete example, consider this Japhug text [0]. I consider myself fairly knowledgable about phonetics, and I can read the transcribed text out loud. But listening to the accompanying recording, I can barely hear the distinctions between many of the sounds, or figure out where the word boundaries are. Such a recording can only be transcribed by carefully going through it with a native speaker.
Or, for a report by a more experienced linguist, here’s e.g. R.M.W. Dixon (2010) on the subject:
> All texts should be transcribed in the field. In the early stages the linguist should not attempt transcription without a native speaker by their side. As the linguist gets to know the language better they can attempt an initial transcription on their own, but should always then go over it in detail with a consultant. In the case of a language I had been working on for more than thirty years (Dyirbal) I could get a new text 95 per cent right, but there were always a few points that I missed the proper meaning or full significance of, and had to have them pointed out by an expert consultant. One thing one should never do is just record texts in the field and try to transcribe them later on, back at base (whether one is working on phonetics, phonology, grammar, discourse, or whatever); this is a sure recipe for an incompetent analysis.
[0] https://pangloss.cnrs.fr/corpus/show?lang=en&mode=pro&oai_pr...
> But Old Norse did die. It happened to sprout several new languages, most of which are not in danger of dying out like Danish and Swedish. The original Old Norse is gone though.
It did not die. There is a difference between language death and language evolution. In the latter process, there is no one point at which you can say, ‘Old Norse is dead and gone’; it is simply the case that speakers of the language found Old Norse texts less and less intelligible until they could no longer be understood. But the Old Norse language itself is hardly gone: many of its features are preserved in the derived languages, and Old Norse may still be reconstructed by comparison between its daughters.
Perhaps a more illustrative example would be Old English. Is Old English ‘dead’? Possibly, but it never ‘died’: it just gradually evolved into Middle English and then Modern English (and Scots).
> You seem to only be valuing a language based on if it's a net plus or minus to the "Language Diversity" which as you're using it seems to mean the number of distinct languages that are currently spoken natively by currently alive humans.
Not at all. I agree with you that languages are valuable because they give a unique perspective to both their native speakers and linguists at large. A natural consequence of this viewpoint is that one extra language is a net good, but I don’t think a language is valuable only because of this.
> I would consider doing linguistic work on the language with native speakers to be part of making records of the language. I don't think we're in disagreement here.
Ah, in that case we are indeed in agreement. I had assumed that by ‘making records’ you had meant only making audio recordings etc. I should have clarified what you meant exactly.
> The original idea I was pushing against was trying to artificially keep a language alive by trying to keep large population groups speaking it natively. It goes against how language has always worked.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to ‘artificially’ keep languages alive if there’s no reason to do so — but if a linguistic community wants to keep a language alive, then why not?
Edit: an apostrophe
At one point I used to think that language diversity was actually a net bad thing for humanity, because it decreases our ability to communicate and so on. These days language technology and machine translation are solving that communication issue and we may choose to preserve dying languages for the sake of understanding how language itself works, how humans migrated in the past, and so on.
Learn one, and you are partially learning the other.
I'm sure there's some cut-off and a way to do it right and so-forth. But are the surviving native speak of an obscure language in some rural village going to suss that out.
Plus a lot of kids who a language just when they're young go to forget. I remember, growing up, a friend who could understand but not speak Urdu. He wasn't going to perpetuate the language.
With China and India it must be hundreds of millions.
I bring this up because she often references words that only loosely resemble the modern forms. A good example is a number of her childhood figures who she affectionately calls "azi" - this is actually a version of the modern Italian "zio" (uncle). It gets much worse with foods, which really no amount of Googling can ever resolve a recipe, or even a description.
Some of the Low German dialects have been preserved by Anabaptist religious community speakers here in North America ("Plautdietsch" among Mennonites). And others (Amish, Hutterites) speak interesting High German dialects.
Why don't we all just listen to one song, wear the same outfit and live in identical homes?
Regardless of whether they're useful, unique and irreplaceable information will be lost when minority languages are gone, as this information exists only in the minds of the remaining speakers. It isn't possible to back up this kind of information like we do with the Internet Archive or something.
Language isn’t the barrier here.
Not necessarily. Sometimes creativity may flourish better if developed independently without common influences.
>the internet
Websites could be analogous to language in this case. Why use hacker news when you could use twitter or reddit? Independent subgroups can produce more interesting or unique discussion.
Right but the point is that all of these independent subgroups use the same protocols to communicate (i.e. web standards). Anyone who has a client that can understand these is able to interact with the entire internet. As we can see, standardizing protocols does not limit the ideas which can be expressed over those protocols.
Having shared languages is awesome, allowing people to communicate together. But having only one language would be a great tragedy. It'd be like saying all paintings can only use one color.
Some are not phased by the loss of historic culture in that brave new world, but not everyone feels the same way.
But isn't it exactly why in the ideal world everyone would speak the same language? Otherwise, due to the untranslatability, every Shakespeare is lost to the rest of the world that doesn't speak his language.
Ideas and experiences precede words and inform language, not the other way around.
And on whatever lingua franca you choose to adopt, there will be an unbounded number of yet-to-be-written-works-of-shakespeare, that this language would lack the ability to express.
Just?
Given how complex every language is, and the level of mastery that is required to read and appreciate the hypothetical Shakespeare of that language, and the time and effort that is required to achieve this level of mastery, this is highly impractical.
I’m not sure there are any examples which cannot be expressed with a short English sentence, but here’s one from Tariana:
Masitetakakakadekaɾupidanapitaniki.
‘We did not make each other smoke again at all, so I leant from someone else.’
The problem with this translation is that it doesn’t completely get across the ‘feel’ of the original — e.g. the fact that this information was learnt from someone else is an integral part of the original sentence, whereas specifying this in English feels somewhat unnatural.
> I'm sure the same would be true the other way around.
Exactly. A Kalam example:
Bin ak ñapanŋaŋ anup sop ak wki d ap tan d ap yap geb.
‘The woman is soaping her child.’
> And that the differences lie in which ideas can be expressed concisely and which must be expressed verbosely?
This is not something I entirely disagree with. Generally speaking, anything which can be expressed in one language can be expressed in another. The differences go beyond verbosity though: it is often the case that such a complete translation sounds really unnatural. For instance, Kalam sentences make it easy to express motion, so you get a lot of sentences like:
Bin pataj ogok am yg pak dad ap-elgp-al…
woman young the go dig hit carrying come-PST.HAB-3PL…
This is quite true in evolutionary biology (from which you are even borrowing the term ecosystem), where the ever-changing environment puts different evolutionary pressures on a population of organisms, and the more genetically diverse a population is, the higher its chance to adapt to the pressure.
I am not sure that this biological model holds true when applied to social systems. I find it hard to imagine that artificial barriers to information flow in human populations are particularly adaptive (unless, perhaps, an isolation from the frenzied social media due to a natural language barrier is considered adaptive).
Why exactly?
It could just as easily have the opposite effect, of eliminating a wide range of expression and nuance, thus reducing the capacity for clear communication in absolute terms.
Why would that happen?
Expression and nuance is produced by the speakers of a language. Therefore, if different groups of speakers of a hypothetical common language had a need to express different nuances, they would evolve the language in such a way that it would become capable of expressing these nuances.
Consider how dominant modern languages can serve hugely different social groups: scholars, petty criminals, soldiers, scientists, sports fans, social justice warriors, and so on, with each group having different ranges of nuances of expression.
Would they? Or would they need to fork the language away from the common base?
Nuance and expression are produced by the speakers of the language having distinct experiences and finding distinct ways to express them.
Understanding other people doesn’t magically come from having the same language. It requires learning to understand their experiences.
One does not simply fork a language :-) There must be a strong centrifugal (nationalist, separatist) political force for people to do so.
> Nuance and expression are produced by the speakers of the language having distinct experiences and finding distinct ways to express them.
Yes. Take a fisherman, a doctor, a frontend web developer, a fashion model, or a homeless beggar. They all have vastly different experiences. They all, however, can speak the same natural language to talk to each other. That language has the power to encompass the experiences and the nuances of all these different groups of people. I would not understand the professional jargon of a fisherman or a fashion model, while the homeless beggar may not understand the professional jargon of a frontend web developer; but we will all share the same grammar and the same core vocabulary, so that we can communicate what we want when we occasionally bump into each other.
> Understanding other people doesn’t magically come from having the same language. It requires learning to understand their experiences.
I am not sure what this means, and I am not after that kind of understanding anyway. I would be plenty happy if people shared the same native language when speaking at web conferences or writing documentation. Or if I could go to a shop anywhere and buy what I need, without resorting to a ridiculous pantomime; or listen to news, or to stop announcements in the public transport, or chat with a stranger, and lots of other small mundane things that we use our language for. I have no desire to understand the experiences of the most part of the humanity anyway; only some that I am interested in.
Nobody is arguing that a common language wouldn’t make mundane everyday transactions more convenient.
The argument is that a significant range of expression, nuance, culture and even experience would be lost in service of your goal of easier to use public transport, shopping etc.
It’s fine for you not to be interested in the experiences of the most part of humanity. Let’s just not pretend that there is a trade-off that many people do care about.
> Let’s just not pretend that there is a trade-off
There are several assumptions behind this position.
One, that there are human experiences that require a very particular natural language to be expressed. That you need a whole unique system of phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. to be able to express your experience. I am not sure that this is the case.
The other is that the co-existence of a multitude of languages allows us to capture and communicate human experiences better.
Finally, as the life goes on, and the language — any language — evolves, we lose access to the previously expressed experiences anyway. So one language or many, we won't preserve human experiences.
But everyone else that didn't evolve that couldn't understand it even though they speak the same language? Isn't how an evolution for a new language begins?
Consider evolution in biology. A species becomes distinct from another species when their individual members can no longer interbreed to produce fertile offspring. For an ancestor species to split into new ones, its populations have to be separated — either geographically (in the so-called allopatric speciation), or by the difference in reproductive timing (allochronic speciation). The point is, something needs to happen that breaks the free mixture of organisms between populations.
It should be similar with languages — the societies that speak them get separated, and the language they speak evolves separately in different directions to become mutually incomprehensible. Which, with the current state of communication, is only likely to happen if humans become an interplanetary or an intergalactic species. On the same planet, we have plenty of opportunities to mix together and talk to each other, which, were there a hypothetical common language, should prevent it from splitting into multiple languages.
Consider a major modern language. It will contain multiple jargons/slangs/argots that are barely comprehensible to each other (e.g. the medical jargon, or the physics jargon, or Cockney rhyming slang, and so on); and yet they contain a large mutually comprehensible common core that makes television, radio, shopping, conversations between strangers, and so on possible.
That is an assumption. In this day and age of globalism, multiculturalism and fast technology advancement the measurement of geographically distance for creating a split can paradoxically be an inverse.
Two groups of people can live next to each other geographically but have hard time understanding each other and not only that both can be uninterested in changing that.
What this means is that you can live geographically at one point and share nothing with those around you but communicate to galaxies far away far away with people you do.
Isn't this description also an assumption? Do you have an example of this? Groups of people who have the same language, but have hard time understanding each other? The closest I can think of is dialects, e.g. regional dialects of British English or British English as opposed to Australian English or South African English, or Australian English; but again, they are mutually comprehensible, and the more cultural exchange happens between these communities the more comprehensible they should be.
There are two obscure tribes found in a remote part of the North American continent in which this phenomenon can be observed. I believe one calls itself ‘the Democrats’ and the other ‘the Republicans’.
You might think it's a problem you can remedy by borrowing words from other languages until you have all the concepts. But it's not that simple. Languages are a whole ecosystem -- words, idioms, culture, ways of seeing and being, grammars -- they come together into an inimitable whole. The whole system is like those words; if you cannot have it, you lose ways of seeing the world.
Borrowing words still loses things -- it loses connections and connotations. Maybe I don't need the German "handschuh" (hand-shoe) because I have "glove", but I gain something by the perspective even if the literal meaning is the same. A favorite word of mine from ancient Greek is apo-kara-dokia -- it means eager, expectant watchfulness, that feeling the moment the lights go low and the movie is about to start, but sustained and persistent, like watching the tunnel at the airport waiting for someone you love to arrive, waiting and knowing they will. Like "handshoe", it has a literal breakdown -- "watching from the head" -- that captures those wide eyes and forward leaning alertness in the moment. English has "anticipation" or any number of shabby substitutes, but there's no competing with the Greek.
You can't just add onto vocabulary endlessly in one language. English doesn't have 'handshoes' precisely because it does have 'gloves', and it doesn't have 'watching-from-the-head' precisely because it does have anticipation. Words die out if you don't use them, and you lose whole ways of seeing the world.
Another thing you lose is when one word has two meanings, but they're really sort of related. For example, ancient Greek 'pharmacon' means "drugs" (like pharmacy), but it also means "sorcery", and I very much enjoy the connection that those are sort of subjectively similar things. The more expansive concept doesn't have an equivalent in English, and I'm the poorer for it -- but the richer for another language having taught me to see things that way.
It's easy to explain with words. It's harder to explain with grammar. But you encounter the same phenomenon. Some languages have tenses and cases with more precise or less precise or just different meanings that the ones you grew up with -- and like the different words drawing bigger or smaller or just different circles around concepts, they give you another window into thinking about the world.
But it all works together. The breaking-down-and-constructing aspect of German as a language is related to the way Germans are given to engineering, and the way German philosophers approach the world. If you encounter them in something other than their native language, you miss something of the whole. Translators will sometimes borrow words to try to fill the gap, but it's a poor substitute. Likewise, the logical precision and colorful concepts of ancient Greek inform the way its epic poets and ancient philosophers moved through the world -- and again, they are poorer in translation.
Even idioms enrichen. The Chinese "Heaven is high and the emperor is far away" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_is_high_and_the_emperor... -- is so very Chinese in experience, and the fact that the Chinese saying itself is a pithy four words makes it work all the better in the context in which it is apropos. If we lost the Chinese language and its experience and culture, perhaps we could still say literally the same thing, but could not say quite exactly this, not with all its force of experience and history and character. And we would be poorer.
Languages and cultures and philosophies and histories and environments all feed back on each other, and they are this phenomenon of creating ways of seeing things, happening over and over in many contexts, building into a cohesive whole. This is why they are valuable to study and valuable to preserve.
I wonder why it's not spelled that way in English; or, for that matter, why it's not called övdalsk (after Övdaln, which is what the locality is called in that language).
En älva = one “elf” (Not like elves in Anglo fantasy novels)
When conjoining the a can be removed depending on dialect, thus älvdalen could mean elf valley. I don’t know the true history of the word though!
En älv - a river.
En älva - an elf or fairy.
Älvens strand - the side of the river.
Älvans öron - the ears of the elf.
Älvdalen - the valley of the river
Älvans dal - the valley of the elf.
Although they do seem to have similar Latin-Germanic roots, if one can decipher the ancient etymological book here: http://runeberg.org/svetym/1298.html
There are multiple rivers with "älv" as a suffix in Sweden, among them the biggest and most economically/historically significant. This means that any possessive formed by "älv-" automatically would refer to a river.
If you'd set your Swedish language fantasy world where there's a place called "Älvdalen", readers would be confused. It would be like calling Minas Tirith Stockholm.
The umlaut is not a thing for standard English.
Pardon me, but that sounds a bit naïve (sorry, couldn't resist!).
We seem to do it often enough to have a Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical...
When I try to type in French, I can copy-paste from something if I want it written correctly or make my apologies for the deficiencies of my American keyboard.
Edit: Ok, never mind. It's definitely a translation thing: "The English name of the vernacular was introduced in Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2005)."
Very recent too.
We lost Quenya, except for some obscure academic and literary works, now we look like we'll lose Elfdalia.
a stallion battalion
defending the medallion
war crying in Elfdalian
a charging foe rapscallionCan anyone explain in simple words — if something abstract is dying naturally (not by force or someones bad intentions etc.), why we need to waste resorces and energy to saving it?
Don't we people have higher priority issues right now?
Then they can just do what english speakers did and incorporate some greek words into their language as there doesn't seem to be be any good native words for it in english either.
Well that's provably false. Different yes, "nothing like" is an hyperbole.
> But the national government of Sweden is a different story. They currently consider Elfdalian a dialect of Swedish, not its own language.
Okay...
> Speaking in Elfdalian, Swedish MP Peter Helander recently asked Parliament why that’s the case. But before Culture Minister Amanda Lind could answer the question, the parliamentary speaker interrupted them both to say that only Swedish may be spoken in the chamber.
Well, congratulations, you played yourself!
It is obvious that it is not that different, linguists can talk all day about what makes a language vs. a dialect, but it is obvious here that it's much closer to a dialect than a new language.
Same with all the "multiple different latin derived-languages" at some point, if your neighbour speaks something different than you who cares? Are you going to be so petty that you won't understand him? So maybe it's not a whole new language, it's just you that talks in a slight different way?
Too much nationalism sucks, and too much regionalism can be petty in the extreme.
You can hear the 'w' sound here, in a couple uses of the copula. Compare Övdalian 'werið' with Swedish 'varit' and Icelandic/Faroese 'verið', Övdalian 'war' with Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese 'var' (also English 'were', 'was', derives from the same Proto-Germanic root).
There are actually two Old Norses. By AD 1000 or so, proto-Norse had diverged into Old West Norse and Old East Norse (probably still mutually intelligible dialects at this time). The former's descendents would become Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and a couple of dead variants in e.g. the Shetland Isles and Greenland. The latter's descendents would become Swedish, Danish, and Övdalian. We have far more records of OWN than OEN, but one thing we do know is that unlike OWN, OEN preserved the 'w' sound, which was eventually lost in Swedish and Danish.
Övdalian also preserves some grammatical aspects of Old Norse. Modern standard Swedish has no case system, but Övdalian has a three-case system (nom, acc, dat; compare Icelandic and Faroese which have those and gen). Modern standard Swedish has two genders, common and neuter, but Övdalian retains the three gender system that's present in Icelandic, Faroese, and some dialects of Norwegian.
At the same time, it's clearly quite different from Old Norse, unlike Icelandic which is famously conservative (n.b. that Icelandic has had sound changes that are not reflected in the written language, though, so even it isn't the same as Old Norse a thousand years ago). There is some Swedish influence here, the word for boy is 'påyk', cognate with 'pojke' which is not of Norse origin, but Finnish 'poika' (the Old Norse word was 'drengr' which is used in Icelandic, Faroese, and Danish; Norwegian uses 'gutt').
It is not obvious at all since Swedish speakers don't understand it. Two distinct languages might be mutually intelligible, but dialects must have intelligibility otherwise they are not dialects.
It has been very conservative to Old Norse, possibly even more so than modern Icelandic.
> Same with all the "multiple different latin derived-languages" at some point, if your neighbour speaks something different than you who cares? Are you going to be so petty that you won't understand him? So maybe it's not a whole new language, it's just you that talks in a slight different way?
Very strange take. Are you saying that French and Spanish speakers are "petty" for not naturally understanding each other? That we just "talk in a slight different way"? You do realize native Spanish speakers don't magically understand spoken Portuguese or Catalan, right?
> It has been very conservative to Old Norse, possibly even more so than modern Icelandic.
Interesting. Note that mutual intelligibility is not symmetrical. Yes, Icelandic is very similar to ON in writing, but in pronunciation it changed a lot. Not sure how close Elfdalian is to it.
> Are you saying that French and Spanish speakers are "petty" for not naturally understanding each other?
No, no, I'm referring to the more nuanced divisions/dialects. Something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Italy#/media/File...
Or the Langues d'Oil between their geographical neighbours.
> You do realize native Spanish speakers don't magically understand spoken Portuguese or Catalan, right?
But Portuguese speakers do understand Spanish better ;) http://spanishlinguist.us/2013/05/the-lopsided-mutual-intell...
Now is Elfdalic more or less similar than Danish to Swedish? Based on the article video it seems there's some marked difference but probably more understandable than Danish.
I guess that has to do with that Elfdalic has been somewhat frozen in time, they speak closer to what we spoke in the region during the early middle ages.
It is true that how languages sound does not equate to closeness of relationship, Swedish and Norwegian are much closer in sound than Swedish and Danish, but Swedish and Danish both belong to the family of East Nordic languages and Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese to West Nordic.
Here is Tennysons poem Ring out Wild Bells in
Elfdalic https://youtu.be/-3Q9kLgsHIs
Swedish https://youtu.be/TID9osnlsiY
I'm not a linguist so I don't have the expertise to say if Elfdalic should be classified as a separate language or not, scientifically it may very well be a dialect, but if some one spoke to me like in the video I wouldn't recognize it as Swedish or any of the common dialects Swedish.
(I'm guessing exposure to Danish also makes Danish easier to understand for Swedes)
This is a complete non-sequitur. You generally expect any neighboring countries to have ethnic minorities, especially in bordering territories, such as the Murmansk/St Petersburg regions and Finland.
Are you implying that somehow this community of Russian people in Finland exists exclusively because they somehow "scammed" their way into the country by pretending to know a language?
I find it fairly hard to believe that Nokia would hire "swarthy Cossacks with no language skills" and frankly your tone is pretty offensive towards what seems to be benign immigration.
Krimea for example was 'liberated' in 2014 from the yoke of Ukrainian oppression by Russian-ethnic groups, and 'spontaneously attached itself to Russia'. The 'rebels' all had uniforms, no insignias but SIGINT has analysed the names of the people talking over the radio and many were Russian army officers.
Imagine Mexico organizing radio talkshows and political groups for Mexicans to liberate themselves from the Gringo oppression. They demand that the official language be Mexican. That Mexican history be thought in school. More and more the mexicans in California are unhappy. Until one day there is a 'rebellion'. And the Mexican state 'generously comes to the aid of their poor opressed brethern'
Seen in that light, does the POV of GP make more sense?
If everybody spoke the same language wouldn't the world be a better place?
I think everybody agrees on that. But nobody can agree which language should be the chosen one.
But that shouldn't mean that you "have to have our way of life", whatever that means.
Diversity is good I believe, as long as we can understand each other.
I think everybody agrees that you don't mean everybody but most, many, or possibly only the people I associate with.
It takes only one counter example to disprove a statement of universality and I'm fairly sure I am not the only one to disagree with you.
I agree that surely there can be many people who disagree with my statements. But that is trivial and not very interesting. The question is why or how they disagree with it.