If your language lost, it should die with dignity, not be put on artificial life-support because ‘reasons’
#Sorry but I have no sympathy for that fight#let the dead languages be dead#grumping#controversial opinions#because people always get annoyed with me when I say this#but Gaelic (for example) shouldn’t still exist
———–
Gaelic hasnt been lost. It’s never died or been brought back. There’s an unbroken line of native speakers going back to the beginning of the language. That doesn’t seem like a ‘lost’ language to me. Furthermore I’m not sure what ‘artificial life-support’ means in this context. Gaelic is given funding for schools because there’s still native speakers of the language. It’s no more artificial than money being given to schools for English language lessons.
If anything is ‘artificial’ its the imposition of a foreign language
(English) into a Gaelic majority zone and native speakers having to
fight for decades to be able to be taught in their own language. Native speakers being forced to learn English to exist within their own regions because a central government would not allow services to be given in a people’s own language.But then the clock only goes back so far with people who wish that minority languages would just die. There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?
“There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?” — THIS RIGHT HERE
Also just gonna point out here:
In the UK, the languages Gaelige, Gaelic, Cymraeg and Kernewek (that’s Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish respectively) didn’t just “die out.” There was a concerted effort by the English to kill them off.
For example, in Wales, if a child was heard speaking Welsh in a classroom, they’d be given a “Welsh Not”, a wooden plaque engraved with “WN” to hang around their neck. They’d pass it onto the next child heard speaking Welsh, and whoever had the Welsh Not at the end of the day was punished – usually with a beating.
Kernewek was revived after a long hard struggle by the Cornish folk, and is now being taught again, but a lot about it has been lost because everyone who grew up speaking it has died.
And languages are never revived “just because.” The language of a place can offer so much insight into its history, so if you’re content to let a language die then you’re content to let history die.
People talk about “dead” languages as if they dwindle away gradually, naturally coming to an end and evolving into something else, but that’s rarely the case. Languages like Cymraeg and Gaelige and especially Kernewek didn’t have the chance to die with dignity, they were literally beaten out of my parents and grandparents.
Is it any wonder every other country hate the English? We invade their country, steal their history, claim pieces of their history as ours or flat out re-write it, and kill every part of their culture that we can.
It’s a miracle that any of the Celtic languages survived, so even if you don’t see the point in keeping them alive, the actual natives of each country we’ve fucked over are clinging onto what heritage they have left through the only thing they can: their language.
Hey OP, póg mo thóin!
*snerk* xD
I would like to point all of these “just let it die” assholes directly at Hebrew.
The language was effectively dead. It had been murdered and forced-assimilated away.
But there was this dude named Ben Yehuda.
And he said “no.”
“The language of my people for four thousand years or more,” he said, “should not stop existing because of a bunch of assholes.” (Okay, this is a dramatic retelling. He probably didn’t actually say assholes.)
So he started an official movement to recreate Hebrew as closely as possible to how it had been spoken about a thousand years prior.
Today, ancient Hebrew is spoken by millions of Jews around the world weekly in our prayers and Torah readings, and modern Hebrew is the official language of eight and a half million people–many of them having been born speaking it as a first language. Many people in the first group also speak at least some modern Hebrew–and it’s possible you do, too! A lot of loan words from Hebrew and Yiddish have made their way into English (like klutz, mensch, and kibitz).
That’s hardly “on life support.” Hebrew is growing, living, and thriving because of the Enlightenment efforts of the 1800s. The same COULD be done for languages like Welsh, Navajo, and Basque if the larger powers that be said “this is important” rather than forcing a giant bastion of culture–the language in which a people lived, loved, thought, told stories, and explained their world–to die.
#dead languages#most people who choose to learn or relearn so called are people who would have been native speakers#had they their parents their grandparents and so on not been forcibly assemilated by colonizers#in the us specifially the idea that we should let languages die off is an extention of the idea that we should let indigeous people die off#it is a continuation of the genocide that try to turn this place into the property of europe and erase us from the world#so fuck you#also this is why i want to learn choctaw because at least i can be a part of keeping the culture of my ancestors going
Never trust anyone who wants to diminish the methods in which meaning is conveyed.
A language is only dead, if life transcends its power to remain eloquent.
I mean for fucks sake, we still teach Latin in school. I don’t see why we shouldn’t teach other “dead or dying” languages, in fact there should be more of an emphasis on these languages specifically because many people still speak them and different languages can have great cultural significance from region to region.
Dead languages are the history of modern tongues. Does this mean we should forget all history and ignore everything it teaches us about ourselves? Of course not. Therefore all languages are valid whether or not they are spoken by groups in everyday life. They are teaching you history.
Stop being scornful of your past.
I’m not being scornful. I studied Latin and I absolutely loved it. I’m not arguing that we should stop teaching it. But placing value on languages like Ancient Greek or Latin (both fairly “dead” in their own rights), while simultaneously ignoring “dying languages” (especially if the argument to support this is that they’re not useful anymore, even though people in the region still use it) is hypocritical at best and probably a little racist at worst. That was the point I was trying to make.
I wasn’t talking about you. I was using the figurative “you” for all humanity.
I do that. It’s my “thing”.
Do not go gentle into that dark night.
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light
Dude, there’s nothing “dead” about Ancient Greek. There was never a break in learning Greek as a first/only language, and it’s not entirely separate from Modern Greek: most people who know modern Greek can (with a little struggle, granted) understand Ancient Greek text. It’s changed/evolved a bit, but let me tell you, reading Ancient Greek (if you’re a modern Greek speaker who hasn’t studied ancient Greek) is easier than reading Chaucer-era English (if you’re a modern English speaker who hasn’t studied old English)! [There’s a weird point in the evolution of Greek where it gets very strange in the Byzantine era, which makes listening to religious Greek very difficult, but actually ancient Greek is, as far as I’m concerned, easier!]
I also learned some Latin at school (a one-year basic qualification), don’t conflate it with Greek! A real country who despite being occupied in the centuries since being a cultural hub has retained the same language across millennia! Cool thanks not every ancient language is like Latin
There’s actually a group of people living in Calabria in Italy (yes, Italy) that still speaks Griko, a version of Greek far closer to Ancient Greek than the modern language, through quirks of culture, geography and sheer luck they’ve managed to keep their use of the language unchanged since the first Greeks settled there.
Also, why not revive dying languages ‘because reasons’? It’s biodiversity for linguists. It’s important data on the possibilities of human language. But linguists don’t try to revive languages unless the community is amenable to it. I don’t think there are any interlopers taking extraordinary measures to resuscitate a language that wants to “die with dignity.”
Loki is the Philosopher King 