Why do some languages survive and others disappear?
Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2023 9:01 pm
We talk languages
http://forum.language-learners.org/
http://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=18888
The Eastern and Western Roman Empire was a military dictatorship, and a slave economy, so very different to Britain. Low-land Scotland was linguistically and culturally anglo-saxon before James VI of Scotland became James I of England.Iversen wrote:
On the other hand the Romans were quite successful in forcing and luring people in Western Europe to adopt the Latin language - though not quite so much in the Eastern part of the empire, where Greek - the language of a conquered, but admired population - went on to become the predominant language. The Romans had the idea that you willy-nilly had to become a (second-class) Roman, voluntarily or by force, and even though the Roman citizenship wasn't extended to the whole population before 212 (by Caracalla) the Romans still liked to impose their kind of society on the subordinates.
The English used similar brutal methods to subdue Ireland and Scotland, but it is worth noticing that there still was a lot of people in Ireland that had Irish as their native language until far into the 19. century - but a combination of famine and Anglophone schools then pushed it to near extinction. So yes, languages can be exterminated by using brute force, but discrimination in administration and schools can be just as efficient..
DaveAgain wrote:An interesting comparison might be between the Republic of Ireland (established 1922), and the State of Israel (established 1948). The Israelis united around an almost dead language, Hebrew, and made it their everyday language, the Irish did not unite around Irish-Gaelic, why was that?
DaveAgain wrote:The Eastern and Western Roman Empire was a military dictatorship, and a slave economy, so very different to Britain.
I don't think that's true. I believe the current theory is that Celtic and Anglo-Saxon commnunities co-existed for a long period of time, rather than being killed off. Welsh was still spoken in parts of England in Elizabeth I's time.Iversen wrote:But speaking about Celtic languages: the Normannic invasion in 1066 did not mean that Anglosaxon was pushed out of existence - instead it changed into Middle English while the new overlords sat on their castles and babbled in French. In contrast the Saxon-Angel-Jutish invasion in the mid 500s (possibly in conjunction with a civilian Frisian influx) meant that the Celtic languages definitely were killed off in what now is England (albeit with some delay in the case of Cornwall). So what was the difference between those two invasions?
The point is it is do-able, so why was the Republic of Ireland unable to revive a living language in the same period?The resurrection of Hebraic in the form of Ivrit is the only case I know where a country decides to revive a stonedead language and succeeds in doing so.
That seems to be the key argument of the Persian documentary for the survival of the Persian language, a well known history of pre-Islamic Persia, poetry, etc.Xenops wrote:Wouldn't having a literary corpus also make a difference about a language's survival rate?
Iversen wrote:The resurrection of Hebraic in the form of Ivrit is the only case I know where a country decides to revive a stonedead language and succeeds in doing so.