Comments on: Language (or learning) — what’s it for?

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:36:11 +0000

Fanagalo is new to me, Karyn, but not surprising. I remember hearing years ago about Republican prisoners in Northern Ireland seeking to rediscover their Irish roots. Reportedly they'd teach each other bits of Irish (Gaeilge). The resulting mixture, with varying pronunciations and expressions, was sometimes called Jailtacht (a humorous reference to the main Irish-speaking areas of Ireland, the Gaeltacht).

By: Karyn Romeis

Karyn Romeis — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:48:27 +0000

I confess that I have not read the book, but have you heard of Fanagalo? It is a language invented (yes, invented) in South Africa on the mines. Because the miners were migrant labourers drawn from the many tribal groups in southern Africa, each of which has its own language and culture (modern South Africa has eleven official languages and many others are spoken in the country), communication within teams became a problem. Fanagalo is a pidgin based on English, Afrikaans and Zulu. The name means 'like this' in Zulu. There are variants in other African countries.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 04:24:29 +0000

I'm not sure how "spoken dialect" differs from "spoken language," in the sense that all human language once existed only in spoken form. (The terms bring to mind Max Weinreich's observation that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.) It's no doubt true that since the invention of writing, and even more so with the identification of education with class and thus status, that various groups have tried to influence the development of a language. Despite the lip service they give to the Academy, however, French people talks about weekend and top model and any number of other nonstandard terms. In the opposite direction, despite support from semi-official planners like l'Academie Française, le Conseil supérieur de la langue française, and the French government, an effort in the 1990s to simplify French spelling (eliminating, for example, most circumflexes) went essentially nowhere. As Nadeau and Barlow pointed out in The Story of French, after a lifetime of having the ph of nénuphar banged into their heads, maybe nobody wanted to be the first to spell it nénufar. To me, one of the key themes of Okrent's book is that human languages emerged in a messy, inefficient fashion. The native speakers of those languages communicate with them and adapt them over time, sometimes more deliberately, sometimes less. I've cited language learning elsewhere on this blog as a goal for which people can have wildly different meanings. Some people are language hobbyists, taking pleasure from mastering the basics of many languages. Others want to succeed in business, or learn more about a culture they've glimpsed through subtitled film or translations. While I do see Esperanto as inherently different from English, or from the almost-surely-dying Gaidhlig, that does not mean I think it's not worth learning. it's just something I myself am not going to learn, any more than I'm going to learn Czech. And although I'm not aware than anyone I know speaks Esperanto, it's clear that at least two presumed speakers search fairly widely for mention of Zamenhof's linguistic brainchild. I'm glad you both took time to comment.

By: Gunnar Gällmo

Gunnar Gällmo — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:54:40 +0000

“that nobody invented human languages” may be true for spoken dialects, but not quite for written and normalized languages; there is always a certain degree of language planning in them (especially for spelling, I suppose, but also for grammar and vocabulary). I have reviewed Okrent’s book at http://hubpages.com/hub/Land-of-Invented-Languages.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:24:26 +0000

I’d go further, Bill, and say that any language offers the possibility of fun and joy. Practicality seems to me more a judgment that an individual makes for himself.

Bill provided a link to lernu.net, a site to help people learn Esperanto. In the meanwhile, partly in memory of Jack D., my grandfather, a few lines of Gaelic:

O mo dhùthaich ‘s tu th’air m’aire
Uibhist chubhraidh ùr nan gallan…
Nam biodh agam fhin de stòras
Dà dheis aodaich, paidhear bhrògan
Agus m’ fharadh bhith ‘nam phòca
‘S ann air Uibhist dhèanainn seòladh

Oh my country is on my mind
Fresh, fragrant Uist of the saplings…
If I had riches
A change of clothes, a pair of shoes
A prayer in my pocket
It is to Uist I would be sailing