Lingua Frankie

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Re: Lingua Frankie

Postby Mick Harper » 2:43 pm

Michael Goormachtigh has a fairly major website here http://proto-english.org/who.html which is well worth a peruse (and gets a lot more airplay than THOBR does). I have been in friendly contact with him quite a time ago and got the impression -- but only an impression -- that he got the idea from me.
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Re: Lingua Frankie

Postby Boreades » 1:32 pm

Interesting times for the linguistic liberal intelligentsia. They are having a hissy fit over the suggestions of Eoin Butler (and others.) He suggests that (a) teaching Gaelic languages is a waste of time and (b) most of the Irish have always spoken English. This is clearly wrong, especially as it's undermining their chosen right to tell people what they should do and how they should behave & speak.

"Eoin Butler feels that we need to face up to the realities of where Irish is today. Irish language policy, in his opinion, has been the single biggest policy failure in the history of the state, and in this film he pulls apart some of the myths and clichés that exist about Irish, in an attempt to try to better understand the situation we are in. "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrg_xuJZsDQ

There is some comedy in this. The EU is busy creating laws, which are officially translated into Irish, the official language of the land, before being send to Dublin. This is creating a significant number of brand new Irish words that never existed before. Then, because most of the Irish MPs can't or don't speak Irish, the new laws have to be translated into English before they can read them (if they can or do).

He does make some interesting points though. Like, despite decades of Irish being the official language in Eire, and millions of IR £/euro being spent on compulsory education of the language, the proportion of the population that actually do speak Irish (as their primary language) is still declining.

Sadly, this does chime with some basic psychology. The easiest way to piss-off youngsters is to make something compulsory. It just encourages an aversion to the subject. It would be far more psycho-tactically effective to ban it; then let them be subversives in a secret guerilla war to keep their heritage alive. See Basque etc.

What's the TME relevance? It's a great example of what happens when you try to impose a language on a population. Like perhaps (for example) "Anglo-Saxon" on the olde-worlde Brits?
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Re: Lingua Frankie

Postby Mick Harper » 2:12 pm

I think you mean the THOBR relevance where all this is covered. Given the hotness of the English/Irish debate I am surprised my argument that English and not Irish is the native language of Ireland didn't get more traction. The book was enthusiastically reviewed by one fairly popular website but went otherwise unnoticed.

Eion Butler of course is not even aware of the notion and would be horrified at the very thought -- though he does cite the example I use in THOBR of the single country that successfully adopted an artificial written language as its official mother-tongue: Israel and Hebrew. Actually I myself later realised there was another one: Iceland and Old Norse.
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Re: Lingua Frankie

Postby TisILeclerc » 2:33 pm

And Norway and Bokmal the other ones. And didn't Finland reinvent its Finnish language? And then there's Mandarin which is the esperanto of China. But then the cunning things have a written language understandable by everyone whatever language they speak.
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Re: Lingua Frankie

Postby Mick Harper » 2:46 pm

A noble attempt, Tissie, but none of these apply. Norwegian is just Swedish with some minor knobs. Hardly the same as Hebrew as against German, Polish, Russian, English and the various languages Israeli immigrants speak. Mandarin is the literary version of Han and as I point out frequently all spoken languages start evolving towards their literary form over time. Though I would be doubtful if Mandarin will ever actually be that final form.

For instance modern Italian is a completely phonetic version mapped almost totally to the Latin alphabet though itself nothing like Latin. It was originally one of the infinitely-flexed Italianate languages of the peninsula which can still be heard, albeit imperfectly since they too have evolved, in Corse, Sicilian, Umbrian and so forth.
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Re: Lingua Frankie

Postby TisILeclerc » 3:05 pm

I thought Norwegian was Danish with knobs on?

The thing about Mandarin is that it is not alphabetic. So if the Chinese were starting to speak it because of its literary value they'd have a job.

That's why they've kept the Chinese characters. A Cantonese speaker can understand written Chinese because of the symbolic value of the characters rather than the phonetic value. Even the Japanese adopted the script even though Japanese is certainly not Chinese.
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Re: Lingua Frankie

Postby Boreades » 3:16 pm

Mick Harper wrote: Norwegian is just Swedish with some minor knobs.


As Mick is an urbane urban sort of person, it's entirely understandable and forgivable that he's overlooked one fact. "Modern" Norwegian is the Swedish/Danish-with-knobs-on (SD-Norwegian) spoken by the urban Norwegians darn sarf around Oslo, Stavanger and Bergen.

It's true that by volume of modern Norwegian population, the official SD-Norwegian is spoken by the majority of the population. But what they speak in northern and very-rural Norway is still not the same language. In places way oop north in Norway (and we're talking about three times the distance of London to Edinburgh, places so far north they go shopping in Finland) some still hold to the olde-Norwegian language. When folk from there go to places like Oslo, the city folk do not understand what they are saying. It's not dialect, it is a different language. Growing up in Northern Norway, my children's godmother had to learn four separate languages : Old Norwegian, Finnish, Modern Norwegian and English.

No doubt Mick will have no problem suggesting a good reason why Modern Norwegian has succeeded in Norway while Modern Gaelic is still struggling in Ireland.
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Re: Lingua Frankie

Postby TisILeclerc » 3:20 pm

As an afterthought I thought that languages didn't change? I'm sure I read it somewhere.
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Re: Lingua Frankie

Postby Mick Harper » 3:34 pm

As per usual, the two of you miss the overall point in pursuit of obscure points.
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Re: Lingua Frankie

Postby Boreades » 3:39 pm

Mick Harper wrote:As per usual, the two of you miss the overall point in pursuit of obscure points.


Which is : that folks sitting in glass houses in Metropolitan Bubbles have a different view of the world.

Just don't start throwing stones.
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