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.
there is a distinct difference between language that has died because it stopped meeting the needs of the people using it and language that has been deliberately killed by oppressors
I remember reading a linguist’s thoughts on this a while back. They noted that languages are not only an important cultural heritage, but also an important historical artifact that offers a look into the unique perspective of a culture. The things that we name and how we name them reflect our values and priorities. For example, Inuktitut is said to have several different words for snow that categorize them by various metrics. This reflects a need for communication regarding what the snow was like, which naturally would be important to a people who deal with snow on a near constant basis. There are nine different ways to say “you’re welcome” in Native Hawaiian, each responding to a different level of gratitude. You don’t respond the same way to “thanks for giving me a donut” as you do to “thanks for saving my life.” This reflects a culture of accountability and honor.
The study and preservation of indigenous languages worldwide is vital to the enrichment of our global culture. You don’t have to be fluent in multiple languages to be able to understand the perspective that is offered by nurturing this tradition. Our ability to communicate is one of our greatest gifts – what a waste it would be to throw that away simply because providing institutions of cultural heritage is too inconvenient.
My step sister is among the first generations of non-Cree as primary language speakers from her Nation.
A hundred years of residential schools, four hundred years of genocide, and Cree is not a dead language. It survives and it will thrive, as long as our society places value on it.
I can go most places in my city and hear Indigenous languages, because they live. They aren’t dead.
Also, I wonder if OP feels this way about Latin, which is used, for example, in naming scientific specimens. Why use a dead language for that?
old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive
Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.
I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?
“Ha… right.”
Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.
Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.
So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:
“Yay! That sounds great – where are we meeting?”
My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:
‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”
And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.
On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master.
So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’
the linguistics of written languages in quick conversational format will never not be interesting to me like it’s fascinating how we’ve all just silently learned what an ellipsis or exclamation mark implies and it’s totally different in different communities or generations or whatever
