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Thank you, Jordan~ an Weirdelves, for some enlightening expositions on English (and beyond).
Although somewhat prejudiced, I do agree with you about the wonderful qualities of English. It is both a broad paint brush, and a finely-honed surgical tool, and yet it is made of stuff that changes year by year. With English, we can always select le mot juste to express not just a meaning, but the feeling with which we wish to imbue it. I suppose, to return to Ann's musings somewhat, this makes English a hard language for non-native speakers to comprehend precisely when heard, but is a great advantage when the aim is to compose a sentence to get across a concept or meaning. Even if the vocabulary isn't chosen exactly correctly, the idea can be conveyed.
It's one of my "gripes" with the abominable eu. It insists upon standardisation in everything (you WILL use hectares and litres and mercury-less barometers and straight cucumbers and so much else that we don't really want or need), yet it has at its disposal a language that cannot really be bettered (gerundatives aside) but fails to promote it. And as for the 2012 Olympics ... what an insult that the prime language will be french!!!
A total aside here. I remember reading about how our language assimilated words from elsewhere. After the Norman conquest, high society language was largely French, whereas the peasantry still largely spoke their ancestral Norse and Saxon derived tongue. This is still evident today, in the names of meats and the animals they come from. A peasant's sheep became mutton when served to a lord; pig became pork; etc.
To be fair, I think the EU's language policy is partly dictated by the extremely prescriptive French language policy, and the German one which isn't much better. Milki probably knows more about this but me, but the French government has a long-standing policy of 'purifying' the French language. They frequently devise French-derived terms for modern borrowing ("ordinateur" for computer, for example) and relentlessly promote these, and they take no efforts to preserve the many, many minority languages that exist in France. We in the UK have a policy that's better, in my view, in that we try to keep languages like Manx, Gaelic and Welsh alive and prosperous. While I think it's absurd that Edinburgh - a place in Scotland that for the briefest moment of its history spoke Gaelic, and which for the vast majority of its history has spoken Scots, derived from Middle English - should welcome visitors to its airport in Gaelic, and while I vehemently oppose the notion that Gaelic should be a common language for the historically predominantly Anglo-Frisian speaking population of Scotland, I think that it's admirable to try to keep Gaelic alive rather than letting it die. I have... other gripes about the EU and the Olympics. Most of which can be summed up in the terms "cheese mountains and wine lakes " and "bread and circuses". Linguistic diversity is a wonderful thing - speaking more than one language greatly expands the mind, and though I oppose efforts by nationalists to appropriate a language to serve their national myth, I think if you have a population among which the official language and a regional minority language is spoken, you'd be as well to promote both. The great stength of English is our vast vocabulary, since it gives us the opportunity to speak about the same thing with many different connotations, and that vocabulary is a product of extensive borrowing from other languages. The more languages we have to borrow from, the better. It's always sad when a language dies, because a worldview often dies with it. The ways we have to express ourselves so often dictate the way we see things, and having a broad base of knowledge of how people see things is so constructive in the social sciences. It would be a grave shame if, a few hundred years down the line, we had to reconstruct presently extant languages from their traces in those still spoken then. So much is lost to us in the loss of, say, the Etruscan language - if it were well preserved, we would have some knowledge of where the Etruscans, who contributed so much to Roman and, by extension, western culture, came from; we would have a more complete view of the origins of our entrenched ideas, and what makes us tick. The interesting thing about the sheep -> mutton, pig -> pork change, Steve, is how it reflects class during that period of British history. The Normans became a new elite. The Germanic-speaking Saxons retained their terms for the animals they raised and slaughtered - sheep, cow, pig, etc. - while the Normans, who only ever saw the meat at their banquet tables, and not the animals themselves, used their terms to describe the end product. Which is why today we have different words for the meat of most animals to the animals themselves - a linguistic peculiarity. This is the sort of thing we lose when a language dies - the archaeological evidence it records.
Yeah totally agree about the importance of linguistic diversity. I think from my experience these ideas of the academie in France purifying the language actually has way less impact and importance than the way its portrayed in the rest of Europe though, both because it has little power except for on official documentation and because people just ignore it.
Oh yeah, definitely (about the prescriptivism of the French academie and its real importance). I think the fact that Brythonic languages and Langues d'Oc still survive is testament to that. But I think they do pursue a policy of promoting 'pure French' in the European Union as a lingua franca, despite the fact that, in all likelihood, it reflects the mode of speech of a minority of French speakers.
not really, as it's "forbidden" to write e-mail in an official lettre and you've to use "courriel" it pass in the usual langage, most of us use software exclusively in french, and we don't have so much frenglish words, of course i'm part of the educated society so it's easier for us, for example, last night i wrote an express script for a contest and i use the word "cahute" (cheap beach house) and there was so much people telling me "it's soo oldschool it sounds weird" actually it's absoluetly not oldschool, they're just poorly cultivated. And jordan it's quite false that government don't try to preserve patois, in area like : Alsace (mine), Britain, Corses, Basque, people in school especially in country parts, can have their school course both in french and in patois, most of my friends at least understand alsacian if they not spoke it, it's more and more defended as it's an french hipster thing to speak patois, they're is a famous alsacian theatre, music group totally alsacian speaking http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbJoWOMh5rY hopla!!
Really? That's really very encouraging, because I know that in the past the French government have pursued a policy of almost trying to eradicate minority languages. It's great that they're now trying to preserve them, that's wonderful. I guess there's not a lot of good things you can say about recent French governments, but if the preservation of linguistic diversity is something they've encouraged, then at least there's that. Basque is one of the languages I'd be most concerned about preserving, because it's Pre-Indo-European. It's a language of the original homo sapiens inhabitants of Europe, as far as we know, which makes it a potenital treasure trove of archaeological evidence about the prehistory of our continent. Now that we have satellite technology capable of identifying inconspicuous archaeolgoical sites... ooh, if we could find some Tartessian writings and identify a connection with Basque, or with the language in Linear A and B scripts from the Aegean islands and Crete, it would be enormously exciting.
hum...this policy is on since i was young, i had alsacian course when i was around 8, in britain and corsica there is the strongest minority defence policy
When I was in Iceland on a school trip, our bus had to drive on all these old gravelly roads because they were improving them but they didn't want to upset the elves with all the machines and the digging.
This struck me today: isn't it odd that Joanna titled track 15 on HOOM "Autumn". From this side of the Atlantic, we believe that the season after summer is always called fall in the USA. We also believe that Brits are far more familiar with American spellings than Americans are with ours, because the volume of American output exceeds ours.
Are there any circumstances (or geographical areas) in which Americans use autumn, autumnal, etc (except to make a verse scan better)?
Also, I'm sure when I was young it was regarded as correct form to capitalise the names of the seasons, but now I see they should not be.
I think Americans would know what the word 'Autumn' means, and it has very different nuances to 'Fall' - not to mention the possible ambiguity of naming a track 'Fall' when you're trying to reference the season. Autumn feels more poetic to me, more about leaves turning orange and the nights getting longer, fall strikes me as slightly silly as a seasonal term. I am English, though.
Yeah, autumn and fall are close to interchangeable here, honestly. I mean, maybe we do use fall more, when casually talking about the seasons, but I see no lack of references to autumn and nobody would be confused if someone only ever referred to it as autumn. And it's true that it's much more poetic, so in artsy-type things it's definitely used almost entirely. I don't know, maybe it's regional. I live on the West coast. Don't know if that has anything to do with it.
(Also, I love words like autumn because of how when it becomes autumnal, the 'n' is pronounced, and the stress is different. The same way I love to say superfluous because it's so different from 'super'. Mmmm, language.)