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Re: World English (was: Fictional auxlangs as artlangs)

From:R A Brown <ray@...>
Date:Friday, December 26, 2008, 9:02
<deinx nxtxr> wrote:
>> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of R A Brown > >> <deinx nxtxr> wrote: >> [snip] >>> Yes, English as a world standard will erode away even the bigger of >>> the local languages over time as the local languages become less >>> useful. It's just a matter of how long it will take. >> Welsh is still going well enough after some one and half >> millennia of coexistence with English on this small island. >> If Welsh can manage it, I don't see why others cannot (If I >> thought you & I would live long enough I was hazard a sizable >> wager that there will still be Welsh speakers about at the >> end of the current millennium). > > Welsh is still alive, but only with political backing.
No. There is currently political backing, and that does help. But it is simply not true that it survives *only* because of political backing because .......
> Politics are fickle, > and someday these feel-good ethnic policies that support minority languages > are likely to disappear.
Politics are indeed fickle. But Welsh survived into the 20th century through periods when it was politically discouraged or, indeed, actively suppressed (as in schools in the 19th century with the notorious 'Welsh knot'). It was only during the second half of the 20th century that political backing became positive. You may be right in your cynical assessment that it is merely "feel-good ethnic policies,'; but some of us see - at least in the instance of Welsh - it as an example of enlightenment and _respect_ for the cultural of other people. Welsh has survived because, as Jörg, observed: "When it comes to chances of survival of minor languages, a key issue is how much the language is considered worth preserving by its own speakers, and AFAIK in Wales there indeed is a strong awareness that the Welsh language is worth preserving." An even better example, of course, is Basque which, against all odds, has survived the encroachment of Romance for an even longer time that Welsh has survived the encroachment of English (and Basque on the French side of the Pyrenees does not have the political support that is currently enjoyed by Welsh).
>>> I'm betting on Spanish to have the >>> longest staying power. >> I see - altho there are far more speakers of Chinese and of >> Hindi than there are of Spanish? Do you really think these >> people with their long history will supinely give way to >> English? Also I find it very difficult to imagine that the >> Arabic speaking world will simply keep Arabic for reciting >> the Qur'an and use English among themselves as their daily language. > > Mainly because Latin America has a lot of monoglots and seems to be the > slowest in accepting English. Nations like India and China are already on > the English bandwagon.
English is being used as a matter of convenience, but I see no evidence at all that either Hindi or Chinese is on the decline.
> I would expect the liturgical languages to remain "alive" but only the > academic context, something like Ancient Hebrew is today. I wouldn't expect > it to survive as an L1.
Qur'anic Arabic may be considered a liturgical language (and related Classical Arabic is the literary auxlang of the Arabophones countries), but spoken Arabic, in its several varieties, from Morocco through to Iraq shows no signs of decline. The only change that may happen is that with more traveling and modern means of communications, regional differences may well level out and the spoken variety become closer to the standard literary norm. I think it most unlikely that these peoples will cease to use Arabic in normal speech and reserve it only for worship & reading the Qur'an, unless Islam itself declines in these countries.
>> No - I suspect the world will remain multilingual, tho the >> number of languages will probably decline. > > It's already declining, it's just a matter of how long it will take to get > down to 1.
Never, I guess. Nor is there any reason why it should. Switzerland seems to hold together as a political unit, despite its having four official languages. ================================================= Paul Kershaw wrote: > ----- Original Message ---- > From: "<deinx nxtxr>" <deinx.nxtxr@...> > Those were different times... > > I hold that it's nothing but naive (and ultimately dangerous) ethnocentrism to think that 21st United States society is so special in such a way that it will persist for so long that it will eradicate all the other languages in the world AMEN! AMEN! [snip] >Cultures come and go. I find it arrogant to assume that we will be any different. Quite so - who knows what effect the emergence of China and/or Indian as global economic powers might have. If, indeed, the Chinese did come to exert global economic influence it is not beyond imagination, surely, that Chinese might come to have a similar dominance on the world stage, especially if Pinyin (or something similar) were adopted as the 'international' way of writing the language. > Besides, native languages survive within empires. British influence in its heyday was very significant in India, for instance, and yet while English remains a powerful language in India today, the native languages survived, enough to drive a successful push to rename Bombay back to Mumbai. Exactly - and Madras is now _Chenai_ etc. > Even though the Middle East was firmly ensconced within the Roman Empire, the Semitic languages survived, with the New Testament being written largely in Aramaic. Greek, actually (tho there is a tradition that the 'original Matthew' was written in Aramaic) - but it wasn't written in Latin. The idea that under the Romans Latin supplanted native languages is erroneous. It happened only in certain areas. >The Soviets even made a concentrated effort to stamp out everything but Russian, with no success. Yep. > I think you're assuming that the only real purpose of language is communication. Were that so, we'd have settled on a global language years ago. Latin, possibly, if not Greek (or Egyptian, or Sumerian). A lingua franca of the past would have taken hold. English certainly isn't the first language to have a go at that. But language has several other purposes that are at odds with linguistic globalization. For one thing, people have a great deal of pride in their native languages ...... EXACTLY!!! [snip] > > We will never get to the point on this planet where there is but a single language spoken, not until we get to the point where there is but a single being capable of communication. Or - heaven forbid - a single monoglot community that has disposed of all dissidents far more thoroughly than Hitler managed to do in his 3rd Reich. But as no one on this list is likely to live long enough to see if the world becomes depressingly monoglot or not, I'm not sure how useful continuing this thread will be. It seems to me that participants have made their positions quite clear. -- Ray ================================== http://www.carolandray.plus.com ================================== CENEDL HEB IAITH, CENEDL HEB GALON. (A nation without a language is a nation without a heart) [Welsh proverb]

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