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"Cynthiae Figuras Aemulatur Mater Amorum" |
Say that three times fast.
My Gaelic professor for her summer fieldwork documented the death of a particular Scottish Gaelic dialect.
The Scottish Gaelic that is taught in school is standardized from Skye Gaelic. She was documenting the substantially different dialect spoken by isolated fishing villages on the east coast of Scotland. Those folks had been forcibly moved there at the time of the Highland Clearances to develop a fishing industry instead of tending sheep on the land from which they were removed . . .
It's very interesting, and it's sort of sad that a distinctive dialect is being lost, but on the other hand these people are no longer uprooted and isolated from the rest of the country. So on balance it's not something to decry.
OTOH, Scottish Gaelic as a whole is dying as an actual spoken language. The census shows more people speaking it (due to its being taught in school) but fewer and fewer of those are native speakers. They simply have a smattering (as I do myself). What my prof said was that if a language isn't spoken at the breakfast table, it dies.
With all these languages dying out, it's a good thing God wrote the Bible in English
Wonder how many languages were (inadvertently) destroyed by anthropologists traveling to "study" far-flung tribes.
He was making me nervous, so I handed him a beer and moved to another car.
Just dying.
Ref: Futurama where they find the universal translator that understands all the universes languages but only translates them into a 'useless dead language' (French).
I used to want very badly to become fluent in several languages. After living in Europe, however, I finally came to the realization that the effort involved would only be worth it if I was doing it for the sheer joy of learning.
There was really no need to learn any language beyond English. The whole world was learning English and it is even more true today as people use the internet, get American tv and radio (increasinly over the net), and so on.
As English incorporates other vocabulary from other languages at an increasing pace, this will make it even more interesting and dynamic. But the effort to learn, for example, German would just be for art's sake; there's really no practical value as most Germans speak English.
I have to wonder if I am the only Esperanto supporter here...a structure where anyone can have a "home language" but there would also be the single common language.
They'll be replaced by Arabic.
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"Cynthiae Figuras Aemulatur Mater Amorum" |
I'm not sure where the author got this claim...it may just have been an assumption on his part, as many of the Eastern Algonquian languages died out long ago...not Lenape though. There were still a handful of native speakers left last I heard in the mid-90s--Lucy Parks Blalock "Touching Leaves Woman" was fluent in the Unami dialect, and she only passed away in 2000:
http://members.tripod.com/~lenapelady/lucy.html
As the obituary mentions, she had started classes in the language. I have a set of Lenape language lessons she made.
3,450 languages face extinction worldwideLanguage is primarily about communication. Languages that facilitate interaction between societies survive, the rest die. That is the inescapable logic of history. As societies and communities shed their isolation, languages are forced to change and adapt to new situations. The result is not always predictable. When two societies that speak two different languages engage with each other, it is possible for one of them to dominate the other. This leads to the decline, and eventual disappearance, of the other language. In some cases, a new language itself emerges from the interaction of various speeches and dialects. A third possibility is of both the languages enriching each other... Languages evolve, and sometimes transform, by interacting with other tongues. Those which refuse to socialise are fated to oblivion or fall into disuse. The smart languages are those that frequently borrow from other tongues, and thus maintain an ever-expanding vocabulary. Such languages dominate the world. English is the finest example of a language that has expanded beyond its area of origin by being open to change.
Times of India Editorial
There's a tendency towards greater simplicity over time. So pidgin and creole languages are examples of how new languages are formed out of older, more grammatically developed languages.
You can see such an evolution in the formation of English out of ancestor languages that were grammatically more complex.
related oldie:
'Status' drives extinction of languages
Australian Broadcasting Corp Online | Thursday, 21 August 2003 | Bob Beale
Posted on 10/17/2004 3:45:37 PM EDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1248057/posts
In the same vein as McWhorter's point, regional accents are dying out in America. Children everywhere sound virtually like neighbors. Their parents may still have hometown or rural accents, but regular travel and TV seem to have wiped them away from anyone under about 25 years old.
Great article and it echoes exactly my thoughts on this subject.