Agallamh le Ciarán Bairbre as Inis Oirr.

by RobbieS Wed Jan 18, 2006 02:48

Non-Verbal Languages

I notice Google use the capital 'G' in that image, something quite unusual to non-American Braille. Someone to the West just decided that if print has a capital letter, why shouldn't braille be just as equal.

Braille may be on the way to becoming an historical curio as it advances, but sign language is under threat from Cocchleal implants. Irish sign language is as different to English as Gaelic is, but up until the 1970s I think, males and females had different sign-language in Ireland (probably dialect legacies of the Victorian Church of Rome.

Leftist Core-Periphery Model

There are many versions of Chomsky's relating disappearance of language to violence at home and abroad - or, maybe, I'm just extrapolating a bit.

Some Socialist thinkers compare the treatment of "peripheries by cores" in Europe, to the "core-periphery" exploitation worldwide. Weber and Elias speak of the monopolisation of the legitemate use of violence, and this has homogenising effect on culture (one we see globaly today). Who really takes sovereignty seriously any more? The contestation for the monopoly on violence is now global, as is news, hip-hop, tsunami, English, Burger King (don't see why McDonald's should get all the stick).

Vertical-Horizontal ideas of language.

Gellner made the distinction between vertical and horizontal languages: in Medieval times, the peasants could speak what they liked, the aristocrats had a more refined version or spoke French, along with Latin. Professions had their own mystifying spiel. Nowhere was this more obvious in hindishgt, than in the Church, but the printing press accelarated the Reformation, Machiavelli's republicanism and all that.

The vertical language structures survived until 1918 and the disollution of the Habsburg Empire (official language Latin, business language German, and peasant langauges legion, C19 German philologists notwithstanding). The Sorbs and Ruthenes never got a look in, and Morravian and Bohemian could have been as different as Slovak or Ukranian (Slavic dialects all).

In Englsih, heavy dialects can still be seen in written songs like 'The Twa Corbies' from Northumbria C17, but before printing, there was a continuum within every language group e.g., so that a Galway person might understand Kerry and Donegal, but Donegal, only Galway and Scottish Isles. Kerry would understand Wexford and probably Highland Gallic, as well as Galway. This state of affairs is dyin' out in Ireland today because of Raidió na Gaeltachta.

Dictionaries

Dictionaries aimed to fix the new High languages of 'nations', and banished foreign influences where possible (obviously this proved pointless with English). Johann Gottfried von Herder got rid of Latin/Romantic words from the German language in the C18, and the Academie Francaise only recently tried to ban words like le weekend and 'corner kick' from French.

Adrian Hastings reckons the Europeans exported this high dictionary model of language to the African colonies and perhaps elsewhere. He writes that missionaries gathered various langaguages from a wide hinterland, cobbled them together, and then printed the new Bible in the amalgum - which has now become the print stnadard in Kiswahili, Tschilluba, Tshona, and many more languages in the south of the continent.

Education and Media.

It was said that there were 200 languages in France when Napoleon came to power, but his centralised education system imposed the language of Ille de France on every child within the new border of citizenry. Similar things happened elsewhere with the teaching of High German, High (King's/Queen's) English. And yet, it wasn't until the advent of radio, that the low languages or dialects really came under attack.

The English of Alexander Palace gave anyone who so wished, a marker by which they could aim to increase their station in life, or at least, aappear to be better with the posh parlour cups and the gentile way of speaking.

Stephen Mennell (a fan of Norbert Elias) claims that in 60s Britain, the rich kids thought it 'cool' to immitate the accents of the poor, and Mick Jagger got a cockney accent, and Estuary English was the amalgum.

In Ireland, the teaching of getting a High Gaelic for teaching wasn't an issue till 1922, but, I think Joe Lee the historian blamed the promotion of a new brand of Munstter Irish on a Civil Servant from kerry who'd much influence at the time.

Gaelic had died out from Kilkenny in the 1850s at least, Louth/Armagh and Clare in the 1940s, Tyrone and Rathlin in the 1960s, each dialect different, and a victim of neglect.

Today, German, Dutch and French dialects are evanescent because of mass media and it in the High Lnaguage, and English in the workplace quite often in Holland anyway.

Welsh seems to have kept its verbal accents. I thought one lad on BBC Cymru had a Cork accent recently, and the 'Scotti' did come from Cork and Waterford (Déisí) to settle there for 800 years. My knowledge of Welsh is so poor though, that this might only be fanciful.

In what has turned out to be a stream of tired consciousness, I was meaning to account for Catalan and the other Latin dialects like Spanish, Italian and Romanian, More in my estimation than vulgar Latin however (and that is indeed high), is the tenacity of Basque. Perhaps, the struggle for the monopoly over the legitemate use of violence was never a foregone conclusion.

by Duine Thu Jan 05, 2006 14:08

D'éirigh liom éisteacht a thabhairt le http://radio.indymedia.org/uploads/rjsglgivm04-01-02-ciar__nbairbre.mp3 anois beag.

Is maith é. Comhghairdeas, cé nach dtuigim cad chuige a ndearna tú an taifeadh, nó é a chur ar an suíomh seo.

Dála an scéil, cé hé an fear? B'fhearride dhuit roinnt eolais a thabhairt ina thaobh agus an chúis a chuir tú faoi agallamh é.

Ach fiontar maith!

by redjade Wed Jan 04, 2006 21:05

♣‡ Nice to hear it - more importantly its nice to see it being done.

Congrats to all involved, hope there's more of it in the future.

Tonight I was listening to it in the background - just because I was hoping to pick up a word or two from my month and a half of classes at Conradh na Gaeilge ( http://www.cnag.ie ) a long time back (nope didn't pick up anything, sadly). Today I'm trying to adjust myself to Europeanised central-asian Magyar suffixes and non-latin based root words in sentences that often seem backwords.

While listening and googling I bumped into a recent Chomsky interview in a Jungian synchronistic sort of way...

Chomsky connects destruction of European 'minority' languages internally to European imperialism externally and the violence necessary to 'bind' various cultures within Europe into the Nation-State system to the violence necessary to maintain European Empire outside.

Might be obvious to some, but, as always with Chomsky, he makes it crystal clear.

Or is Chomsky just being simplistic?

I'd like to hear from Robbie and Iosaf (and others) about the following interview....

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Noam Chomsky interviewed by Charngchi Way
[December 27, 2005]
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=9403

• Charngchi Way: Can you talk a little bit about imposing the nation-state system with violence and war?

• Noam Chomsky: Murderous savagery. I mean, the European history is an example. Take a look at the populations of Europe, very diverse. There are a lot of concerns now about what are called endangered languages, indigenous languages disappearing. And it's serious. But probably the greatest loss of languages in the last century is right inside Europe. I mean, what we call Italian, most Italians didn't speak, had to learn a second language if you learned the real one. Same with Germany, same with France, a little bit further back. And that's a reflection of the diversity of cultures and so on, which you find almost everywhere in the world. I mean, you don't find it in the United States, but there's a simple reason for that. The English colonist just wiped everybody out. Okay, you don't get diversity. You have what amounts to genocide, okay: no diversity. But in societies where you didn't have mass extermination, there are complex regional, local identities and associations which you just can't draw lines around it. So to impose that nation-state system did lead to centuries of murderous violence.

In fact, it was that murderous violence that gave Europe it's comparative advantage. [....]

Actually Europe itself is beginning to recognize this, and it's moving towards a kind of devolution. So in Spain, for example, Catalonia, a vast country, and pretty soon others are going to have a fair degree of autonomy, with their own languages and some degree of local control. In Wales and Scotland there's a degree of devolution in the languages. Not in Scotland, but in Wales the language is pretty much recovered. It's a very unnatural system.

In fact the natural system, though nobody likes to hear, is the Ottoman Empire. I mean, the Ottoman Empire was corrupt and brutal, and nobody wants to restore that, but they more or less left people alone.

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On a related note, Google celebrated the birthday of Louis Braille today and put this image their front page.

Louis Braille - Date of Birth: 4 January 1809
http://www.google.com/search?q=louis+braille+birthdate

Google's Happy B-Day... Louis Braille - Date of Birth: 4 January 1809

by Duine Wed Jan 04, 2006 15:26

Is mithid dom bheith os cionn ríomhaire le callaire nó cluasán!!!!!

by RobbieS Wed Jan 04, 2006 12:54

sorry 'bout that puzzled. radio.indymedia has gone down again. It has been a bit unpredictable and frustrating. Hopefully, it will be up again soon.

Gabh'm leithscéil 'chuile dhuine, tá óst-suíomh as an aer arís. Ní bhíonn sé chomh buanseasmhach, agus táim i mo bhambairne aige. Le cúnamh na nDéithe beidh sé ar siúl arís go gairid.

by ?!?!?!?!?! Wed Jan 04, 2006 11:25

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