Josie Giles has written what rozele, who sent me the link, calls “a nice punchy piece… among other things giving a critical counterpoint to the enthusiasm about the Scottish Languages”; it’s called Twenty Ways to Minoritise a National Language:
Yesterday, St Andrew’s Day – a date carefully chosen to signal national pride – the Scottish Languages Act came into force, enshrining Gaelic and Scots alongside each other as official national languages. It is a chiefly symbolic act, with remarkably few concrete measures to ensure that these national languages recover and thrive, and even less financial commitment. Despite consistent and well-researched campaigning from groups like Misneachd, communities where Gaelic is actually still the vernacular continue to lack strong statutory support, and there’s no consideration of language heartland policy for Scots at all. Without integrating language planning into socioeconomic policy – that is, without considering how the rural housing crisis or the lack of jobs within language communities shapes whether or not languages survive – I don’t really see a future for Scotland’s new national languages except their slow withering into national symbols.
Here in Edinburgh, in an urban cultural centre, it’s remarkable how little Gaelic and Scots I encounter. Gaelic exists as a small subculture, unheard unless you deliberately seek it out, which needs constant effort and forging of personal connections. Scots exists mostly as the occasional word dropped into well-spoken conversation. At arts festivals and centres, which are my main employers, they’re almost never spoken, and when they’re on the stage there’s only one or two special events, rarely well-attended. The places where these languages are still used fluidly and (for the most part) unselfconsciously are all distant geographically and economically from the cultural core: Shetland, Niddrie, Uist, Ayr.
And yet everyone I speak to in Scottish culture is enthusiastic about the survival of minority languages. “I’d love to learn Gaelic,” I hear once a week from someone who has had their whole life to start. When the sea-fog rolls in over Arthur’s Seat, we rush to name it haar. The era of deliberate and legislated language extermination as a matter of national policy in these islands has passed – we’ve now entered an era of managed decline, where everyone thinks that minority languages are important and fewer and fewer people use them. As I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been collecting contemporary strategies of minoritisation, the ways we work to ensure that the languages are symbols rather than tools, ideas rather than communities. Here are twenty of them.
The first is Put your language in italics (“We don’t think in italics”); the section closest to my heart is:
2. Don’t hire a proofreader
3. Don’t check your translations with a fluent speakerI recently read an othertwise very good anthology of Scottish nature writing in which many contributors were proud to talk about (italicised) Gaelic words and for which no-one had hired a Gaelic proofreader. Many words were misspelled, and more were mistranslated. Here, in a nature writing context, Gaelic stood in for ecological authenticity, for a connection to land, but the lack of care with which the language was treated belied the project. It was sufficient for the project of the book that Gaelic be present but not necessary that it be Gaelic.
I also liked the end:
19. Call any thorough use of the language fake, unnecessary or purist
Once a review complained about the way I spelled arkaeolojist. But in English we don’t spell it archéologue, arqueóloga or αρχαιολόγος.
20. Be a purist
The only thing more dispiriting than your language being ignored by everyone else is arguing amongst ourselves about whether or not we’re using our language right. What matters is using it.
It’s well worth reading the whole thing; rozele says “a lot of it’s very familiar to me from yidishland; it’s all connected to many Hattic conversations,” which it certainly is.
Welsh is in a better state, though hardly one that inspires solid hope for the future, alas. I think that a lot of the threat comes down to economics. (The maps at the top of the article resonate with me.) Young people don’t stay in areas where the language is still widely spoken: there are no jobs for them, and they can’t afford to buy houses there in competitition with English holiday-home buyers. (Or, to be fair, anywhere else …)
In the cities, the ratchet is one-way. Welsh is a minority language and there is no purely practical need to learn it. For all but a small minority, ethnic pride is just not a sufficiently powerful motivator in itself for people to persevere in the hard work of learning (and regularly using) a language which, after all, is more different from English in most respects than French or German is.
There is also a surprising amount of actual hostility to the Welsh language, by no means all of it from far-right farts like that fellow we encountered as a “biographer” of Anthony Burgess the other day. English incomers can feel threatened by it, and the (understandable) politicisation of language preservation by Plaid Cymru makes not a few di-Gymraeg* Welsh people uneasy that they might end up as second-class citizens one day. Also understandably (though wrongly, I am sure.)
* I don’t think italicisation is, in fact, a major threat to minority languages …
I’m a bit confused by the verso/recto peeve. I think of the standard approach to “facing page” translations as giving the original text on the left and the translation on the right, presumably because we (in our culture) read from left to right. It is true that the right side is more “prominent” in some contexts – i.e. some books are set up to have new chapters always begin with a recto page even if that requires a blank page after the previous chapter – but that seems a slightly different issue. (And when you eventually turn the page, you look at the left of the new spread first.) But if you are presenting a Gaelic translation of an English original, sure put the Gaelic on the right.
Are there other conventions for facing-page translations that put the original on the right? This doesn’t seem like the sort of thing where US and UK publishers would diverge, but what do I know?
As to the complaint about people with the attitude that “Scots is basically just English with funny spelling,” why not hit back with the attitude that “English is basically just Scots with funny spelling”?
Maybe italicization doesn’t go far enough. You want all of your own language’s words typeset in something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_type to underscore their different-ness. That’s how you tell the major languages apart in India, innit?
This is the motivation behind some more recently invented scripts for African languages, like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vai_syllabary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%27Ko_script
While this adds to the gaiety of nations, I’m not convinced it does a lot to promote actual language use. I would (as often in such cases) be happy to be proved wrong.
The best bets (I’d have thought) would be those that really are traditional, like the Arabic ajami Hausa script. Still around, despite concerted deliberate Brit colonial attempts to kill it off.
It’s true that the Arabic script is not ideal for writing – well, any language – but there are ways round the most obvious problems, and in any case, this is just a matter of degree. The unmodified Latin alphabet is not brilliant for many languages either (including Latin.) Even Swahili has phonemic distinctions not noted in the standard orthography.
Misneachd = bravery
If you have the collection Scothscéalta by Padraic Ó Conaire, there is a story “Beirt Bhan Misniúl” (two brave women), which I remember as very affecting. I could not find the text online.
“A maiden of great appetite with an intensely white, dense spade went through my good little porker’s hat.”
Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
I’ve tried everything.
To be fair to Edinburgh, wasn’t it always an “English” city? It was certainly never a Gaelic speaking town, and the burghs were one of the institutions by which Inglis displaced Gaelic. I would no more expect to find a thriving Gaelic community in Edinburgh than I would Welsh speakers in London.
Maybe italicization doesn’t go far enough.
Just so we’re on the same page, I trust you realize the author is objecting to italicization.
wasn’t it always an “English” city?
Ahem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidyn
Welsh speakers in London
Curiously enough, (a portion of) the London Welsh Male Voice Choir sang (in Welsh, naturally) at my less-Hispanic son’s wedding in that fine Welsh city. (Llundain, as it is called in English.)
Of course, the true North British nationalist will favor Pictish-revivalism, since both Gaelic and Scots are residues of earlier waves of settler colonialism. (And maybe Pictish was as well but we don’t know much about whoever it was that the first P-Celtic speakers that far north subdued or supplanted.)
To Vanya’s point I imagine that Edinburgh as a metropole has over time attracted many residents who descend from the former inhabitants of now depopulated rural areas, including up into the Highlands. But that said, the migration to the big city may have coincided with assimilation and exogamy. I don’t know how many people in Edinburgh would, for example, have had at least 5 out of their 8 great-grandparents be L1 Gaelic-speakers. Probably significantly more would have a single Gaelic-speaking great-great-grandparent, as I do. (Also I suppose one L1 Scots-speaker, but I expect the process by which that great-great-grandfather transitioned from being a Scots-speaking teenager in Inverness to an English-speaking adult with a Scottish accent in Manhattan was sufficiently smooth that it doesn’t obviously look like language shift as opposed to code-switching. Or would you think that a teenager in Inverness in the 1840’s would already have been code-switching between Scots and English and it was just a question in the U.S. of sticking to one of those settings?)
From the article:
That’s insane. Subtitles I don’t need are distracting; I do switch them off when I can.
In Wales there are no longer really any Welsh-language monolinguals, though there are still old people whose Welsh is better than their English. (My great-aunt forgot the English she had learned as a teenager in her old age, but I don’t think the subtitling issue was very salient for her back then.)
Mostly, this is gesture politics, of course. The minority language must be treated exactly like English, to maintain the prestige of the language. Not a pointless objective, but terrible if it’s prioritised over measures that are actually directly helpful. Worse yet, if it is actually impossible, as that gives aid and comfort to your enemies, who think your whole aim of preserving your language is foolish and quite probably unpatriotic, if not actually racist.
Plaid Cymru, also prone to linguist gesture politics (though happily not exclusively so) came up with a classic of this genre a few years ago, and pushed it into actual legislation. All hospital correspondence had to be in Welsh on demand (so far, so good) on exactly the same basis as English (not so good.)
Specifically, no additional delay (so translation was assumed to be instantaneous) and (my favourite touch) signed by the correspondent in exactly the same way as the English version.
This meant that non-Welsh speaking medical staff (the great majority) were required by law to sign communications about vital (and possibly confidential) medical information that they could not read, understand, or check for errors; there was to be no record of who had performed the actual (presumably instantaneous) translation or what their qualifications as a technical medical translator* might be.
[Technical: hell, I don’t know how to say “polypoidal choroidopathy” in Welsh. Does anybody?]
As I pointed out in vain at the time, for a doctor to sign a potentially critically important document in such circumstances is completely unethical (as in, grounds for referral to the GMC.)
As far as I can make out, this law is a dead letter, but remains around as a sort of unexploded ethics bomb: a testimony to the stupidity of not bothering to consider the simplest actual practical objections to your obviously virtuous proposals.
* I’ve come across perfectly competent professional translators who have refused to translate for patients in clinical settings where they were already physically present, because they had been told it might expose them to legal jeopardy in cases of misunderstanding.
And the only broadcast content in which English subtitles aren’t hard-coded is the children’s television
I get that there may be older AV recordings where subtitles are burned into the video, and sometimes a broadcaster must use that version because there is not yet any version with configurable subtitles. But that should not be an issue with new content.
Perhaps public-service broadcasters are worried about some viewers who lack either the equipment or the knowledge to call up optional subtitles? Less bad to foist superfluous subtitles on others than to deny needed subtitles to the backward.
I’ve come across perfectly competent professional translators who have refused to translate for patients in clinical settings where they were already physically present, because they had been told it might expose them to legal jeopardy in cases of misunderstanding.
How does that work? In the US at least, hospitals employ professional medical translators, for the benefit of patients who do not share a language with the physician (as far as I can tell, they mostly work over the telephone, for both more common and less common languages.) How does that work in the UK?
Some years ago I saw a call for translators between English and various Mexican Indian languages, because there were and probably are Mexican immigrants who speak little English or Spanish.
professional medical translators, for the benefit of patients who do not share a language with the physician (as far as I can tell, they mostly work over the telephone
Same here, including the telephone bit (it’s a highly unsatisfactory system, but is, of course, relatively cheap, when it works.)
But patients occasionally come with professional translators who’ve been helping them on the journey to hospital. It seems to be a common thing for them to have been warned off helping with the actual consultation. Maybe there’s some specific disastrous episode that got their employers so defensive, but I don’t know.
(That’s all it takes. If you go in for a cataract operation in the UK, you’ll be spontaneously told there’s a risk of losing the other eye. This is true, though you’re probably more likely to be run over by an ambulance on your way in. It’s because of one specific lost negligence lawsuit in Australia: the surgeon in fact did nothing negligent in any meaningful sense*, but had been asked by the patient pre-operatively if his other eye was in any danger from the surgery, and had told him no, as indeed any eye surgeon in his shoes might well have done at that time.)
* the problem was
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_ophthalmia
Its incidence after cataract surgery is minuscule. But it has happened.
Beside the cases (not after cataract surgery, but after serious injury) mentioned in the WP article, there’s also the Conquest of Mexico historian William Prescott. (I didn’t know about Thurber: I thought his trouble was myopic degeneration, but I see that he did indeed lose an eye to injury when he was seven. I could have stopped him going blind, nowadays …)
At one medical practice I go to, I have quite often seen patients accompanied by translators. Who provides them I don’t know. But I assume they go into the consultation with the patient, because how else could the patient know what the doctor is telling them? The languages are most often Vietnamese and Chinese, I believe, and the patients are generally elderly.
The phone method is not necessarily cheaper, but it is more efficient. You might have a hospital in one place which at a given moment needs five Cantonese translators, while one a hundred miles away might not need any at the moment but might need them tomorrow. With rarer languages this becomes even more of an issue.
To further Vanya’s point, even a majority of the rural hinterlands of Edinburgh have been Germanic-speaking for half a millennium, nearly as long as that area had the Gaelic. Gaelic in those regions seems to date to, or more likely after, the engulfment of the Fortriu lands by the Kingdom of Alba in the ninth century. While scholars say the inhabitants of Fortriu spoke a Pictish language, I like to think their language was Fortran.
While the article’s author (or editor?) chose to accompany the map of percent Gaelic/Scots speakers with a map of 2nd home percentages (so low that it’s hard to believe it’s pricing people out in a vast, lightly populated region, maybe they still entail estates?), they could as profitably have set a map of altitude alongside it, or arable land.
The match between that map and the map of Gaelic v Germanic speaking regions in the 15th century is instructive. Arable land is the best proxy we can have for population density, so the comparison shows just how demographically embattled Gaelic already was as the Wars of the Roses ended 20-25 generations ago.
Are there other regions of Europe where a language has endured for five centuries without even a proper trading town to sustain it? The surprise to me is not that it’s faltering but that it made it this far.
@Ryan
The stipulation about trading towns is a bit unfair. I would say in many places, the trading towns were set up and sometimes originally populated by foreigners, before being taken over by locals. Places without trading towns would be places with no agricultural surplus and no (exploitation of) natural resources. Lappland?
Sami languages survived without being the language of a trading town, but Lappland certainly had “(exploitation of) natural resources”. The Sami were thoroughly integrated in international trade as specialized extractors of those resources. What preserved the languages was rather a threshold of specialization that was difficult to cross from outside.
Are there other regions of Europe where a language has endured for five centuries without even a proper trading town to sustain it?
Certainly in Africa; in the Oti-Volta area, towns are characteristically populated by outsiders. I’ve told the story before of how when I walked the couple of miles into town from where I lived in Ghana, the shouts of small boys helpfully informing me that I was European changed from “Nasaara! Nasaara!” to “Bature! Bature!”
Re italics, Giles both peeves about italics and endorses the weird peeve about facing-page translations in which one of the specific objections is to using the same typeface for both languages. “Gaelic type” would certainly fix that last one, the same way using Fraktur for the German side of an English-German facing-page translation would, although admittedly in both instances it might also come off as precious or exoticizing.
I think italics (or some other typographical identification) are in many contexts useful for a “foreign” word that you don’t expect your reader to know but distracting for a “foreign” word that you do expect your reader to know. Or, as it may be in either case that you posture as if your reader will know or not know regardless of how empirically likely it is in either case. But it depends on the context and the genre – that rule of thumb is what I’d recommend for journalistic or expository writing, not for dialogue in fiction and not for a first-person essay that presents itself in a more colloquial or confessional or otherwise individualized voice.
And thank goodness I’ve never had local children trying to inform me (inaccurately) that I am a European! When I was a boy in Tokyo I would sometimes be addressed by local children with ハロー! ハロー! Which seems like a pretty analogous phenomenon, although it embodied a stereotype that all white-skinned people were Anglophones.
from the yiddish side of things, giles’ points about italicization and page-placement ring very true. not because of anything inherent in those design decisions, but because of how they are institutionalized and deployed.
i can pretty accurately predict a publication’s level of respect for yiddish based on its layout, which signals whether the yiddish text is actually intended to be read, or is there out of some combination of empty aesthetics, a sense of obligation, or/and because someone who didn’t get to be part of later decision-making insisted that it needed to be. this isn’t exactly a new point: ari davidow (a major figure in u.s. hebrew typography and the klezmer world) was writing about “anti-reader typography” in hebrew/english bilingual contexts more than 20 years ago.
and, similarly, when i see transliterated yiddish words italicized in a mainly-english text, i can quite reliably expect that there will be little to no actual engagement with the language*. if what’s italicized is YIVO transliteration, there will be more engagement than if it’s fake-german-style, but that’s a matter of degree. this isn’t ironclad, largely because many publications force italicization on writers who wouldn’t themselves use it (i’ve run into this myself), but that’s merely an indication of the site of the disrespect: those publications aren’t gonna have the competence to catch errors or otherwise edit the yiddish that appears in pieces they print. but again, this isn’t anything like a new critique: abe cahan was making a very precise point about the typography of marginalization when he used italicization and “dialect” spelling for the english words embedded in his characters’ yiddish in his Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, which appeared in 1896.
.
* a similar tell is when words that (non-soviet) yiddish spells with their traditional hebrew/aramaic spellings are transliterated according to ivrit standards. this is shockingly common, even among specialists who know how badly it misrepresents their subjects – including, for instance, the authors of the recent massive Hasidism: A New History, where it accurately signals several layers of refusal to critically examine the material they present.
I appreciated rozele’s links to the posts by Ari Davidow, and was intrigued by his point that the standard convention in Hebrew/English siddurs (siddurim? not gonna invest the time in figuring out the Hebrew plural …) to have Hebrew on the recto and English on the verso flows naturally from privileging the reading-right-to-left conventions of Hebrew. Obviously a facing-page edition where one of the languages is right-to-left and the other left-to-right will present some sort of struggle for supremacy, but saying the Hebrew-on-the-right approach is the deferential-to-Hebrew approach is consistent with my sense that it’s standard in e.g. Greek/English bilingual editions (including the one of St. John of Damascus I currently have in my bag because I keep intending to read it on the train while commuting but don’t follow through …) to have Greek original on the left and English translation on the right.
OTOH, I just opened a bilingual prayer book I have lying around and was slightly surprised to find the Church Slavonic text (the “original” or close enough in context) on the right and the English on the left rather than vice versa. This is an older book (1975 3d edition of an original from the 1950’s first published by the humble-but-honest-sounding “‘Russian Day’ Committee of Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties, Pennsylvania”) and I don’t know what motivated that choice.
a similar tell is when words that (non-soviet) yiddish spells with their traditional hebrew/aramaic spellings are transliterated according to ivrit standards.
In English-language books on North Africa, French transcriptions of names tend to signal that the author felt there was no need to even learn Arabic; transliteration from Standard Arabic, that they know no Darja, and are seeing the place exclusively through the lens of written sources; and, well, honestly that’s almost exhaustive.
siddurim? not gonna invest the time in figuring out the Hebrew plural …
Ṣḍaḍǝṛ. (Ok, that wasn’t Hebrew – but that is the plural I found once working on a Jewish Algerian Arabic variety.)
Are there other regions of Europe where a language has endured for five centuries without even a proper trading town to sustain it?
Czech survived at least three centuries in an environment where all the trading towns were German speaking. And the survival of Czech was supposedly a near thing, the literary language was close to extinction before the 19th century nationalist revival (although I can readily believe nationalists in retrospect have exaggerated the danger). It’s not hard to imagine an alternative future where Czech eventually dwindled to the status of Sorbian in our timeline, particularly if Bohemia had fallen under Prussian rule in the 18th century.
Davidow uses “siddurim” in the first line of his post (in a link, to be sure).
Of course the nationalist revival of the Czech language occurred in parallel with the nearby nationalist revival of the Slovak language, with efforts to promote a single compromise standard language failing to attract sufficient support. Given the differing political contexts I suppose there’s a potential timeline in which one of those efforts succeeded but the other failed, with the question then being how the similar ethnic group right across a (perhaps fairly nominal) border whose own revival had failed did or didn’t make use of the successful revival.
I wonder whether separate Bohemian and Moravian standards could have developed. I suppose it was unlikely, since development of standard Czech occurred after a relatively unified Czech identity had developed. More likely would perhaps no vital Slovak standard emerging, and the Slovak ethnic identity being subsumed into Czech. Across the border, the Silesian identity has been fading into Polish for a long time.
One difference for Slovaks was that some of them were Protestant which meant they had “vernacular” books of a religious nature going back centuries whereas Protestantism in the Czech lands had not survived the 30 Years War. OTOH, Slovak Lutherans apparently used some early version of Standard Czech well into the 19th century, when linguistic nationalism emerged among Catholic Slovaks. The difference between Czech and Slovak identities in our timeline seems, if not purely an artifact of the different experiences of Austrian rule v. Hungarian rule, at least heavily shaped by those different experiences, but I guess a different set of different experiences would have resulted in a different result!
Because it also fits here, let me cut-and-paste below a comment I made yesterday in another place:
I just happened to learn that about a decade ago Oxford University Press put out a thick and expensive book that may be relevant to these matters with the intriguing title “Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity: The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts (Volume 2).” I can’t actually speak to the quality of the contents, which I have not read, but it’s one of the best subtitles I’ve seen for a linguistics-related book since the classic “The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success.”
…other regions of Europe where a language has endured for five centuries without even a proper trading town to sustain it?
Czech… where all the trading towns were German speaking
there are similar examples elsewhere in eastern europe: lithuanian comes quickest to mind.
how many others there are depends, i think, on where you draw the line of trade. the situation of ukrainian/ruthenian is probably a decent one for thinking about the messiness – different dominant commercial languages, with different degrees of dominance and different social positions, in different places; likely different degrees of village- and small-town-scale trade happening in the tillers’ cradle-tongue as well.
and to some extent the current situation of belarusian (for lack of a better word for what tutejshi speak between kyiv and vilna) could be seen as another version of this same dynamic.
Impressive. The plural-breaking mountains of Algeria…
That part I can believe. Literary Low German was entirely gone at least two centuries before the spoken dialects became seriously endangered; Scots seems an even more extreme example.
How different was Literary Low German from Dutch? Was there never a time when Plattdeutsch speakers felt more cultural kinship with the Germanic speakers in the low lands than the Germanic speakers to the South?
I once read somewhere that in the early 16th century (when Luther’s translation of the bible became popular) there were plans for a Low German (even in written form a group of dialects, not a unified language in any way).translation of the bible that ideally could be understood by anyone between Antwerp and Königsberg. Instead, Instead, the Luther translation also spread in the Low German area and its language became the language used in church and school. By Goethe’s time, he thought North Germans actors had the best pronunciation of Standard German. His near-contemporary Johanna Schopenhauer (the mother of the philosopher) wrote that the dialect of the Cologne working class was simply incomprehensible to her – a far cry from the “Kölsch” used by the popular Millowitsch theatre productions (Volkstheater) broadcast nationwide on German TV in the 1960s and 1970s (they explicitly denied using Cologne dialect).
For a long time, there was essentially a dialect continuum from Flanders to Holstein. However, when the Prussians controlled Ostfriesland (I’m not so sure about the Hannoverians), they made a concerted effort to Germanize the population, which had been under Dutch control during the golden age of the Netherlands.
There was not a fully “official” Bible translation into Dutch until 1637, over a century after the Reformation had gotten underway and after the Dutch Reformed folks had already established their first toehold in North America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statenvertaling There were other Low-German versions floating around without dominant market share but many Protestants in the Netherlands had managed to scrape by in the interim with Luther’s High German version as close enough.
Luther actually made two versions of a Low German Bible translation himself (alongside dozens of High German ones). They don’t seem to have caught on…
In Low-German-speaking East Frisia there was a time when Lutherans wrote in Luther’s High German while Calvinists wrote in Dutch. But at that time, knowing High German was already useful enough in the region that Calvinists ended up putting their children in Lutheran schools and writing in Dutch faded out.
I bet they were mutually comprehensible, but they weren’t hard to tell apart.
BTW, the dialect of the Dutch province of Groningen – between East and West Frisia – is Low “German” (Low Saxon), not Dutch (Low Franconian).
The reason a language might be worth saving is to preserve its semiotic repertoire. Efforts to revive half-dead languages usually end up losing their semiotic repertoire and adopting that of more prominent languages.
Cross-linguistically we have this general trend worldwide: centripetal change in the same direction in order to conform to one single global semiotic repertoire.
The insidious peril of semantic assimilation through the globalisation of categories of meaning was a central theme in the writings of David Hubert Greene, alias Dáithní ó Huaithne (1913-2008). In the context of the Irish language, Greene explained what is meant by such semantic assimilation and convergence.
‘Unfortunately, many people are under the impression that such modern terms as development, influence, interesting, represent essential concepts of human thought, and that no language can afford to be without them; yet, although they are all of Latin origin, not one of them occurs in Latin in anything resembling its modern meaning . . . But most European languages, from Welsh to Russian, have accepted them either as loanwords, or calques, as these equivalents of influence indicate: German Ein-fluß, Russian v-liyaniye, Welsh dy-lanwad, where the second element in each case means ‘flowing’.’
Greene further illustrated this with a random but well-chosen Irish example.
”An example is English development, for which Irish has no one equivalent. Rather than say ‘await further developments’, the fitting Irish expression in a similar situation might be fanacht le cor nua sa scéal ‘waiting for a new turn in the matter’. In other contexts where the English meaning development would be appropriate, various different Irish categories of meaning have to be found in Irish: forleathnú (smaoininmh) ‘widening out (of an idea)’, imeachtaí ‘proceedings’, saothrú (na haigne) ‘cultivation (of the mind)’, tabhairt chun cinn (ceantair) ‘advancing (of a district)’, tarlú ‘happening’, toradh ‘result’. Yet even Irish is not immune to the effects of globalised categories of meaning. In recent times, the Irish word forbairt ‘growing, increasing’ has been used increasingly as an equivalent for English ‘development’ in all contexts in which English ‘development’ could appropriately be used, even though Irish forbairt has never meant ‘development’ at any stage of its history.’
The observations made by Greene alert us to the danger of the loss of linguistic diversity without actual language death. Semantic assimilation of one language to another will reduce overall linguistic diversity. In fact, this insidious phenomenon exerts a far greater impact on diversity, yet remains less amenable to observation by the semantically unsophisticated, the monoglot and the linguistically naive observer.
So the advice ‘don’t be a purist’ is profoundly misguided and reminds me of those who try to save their stressed marriages by allowing their partner to have lovers. Being a hardcore purist is the only way for the good people of Britain to save their endangered Gaulish tongues from semantic assimilation into English. And this is why I hate those silly Netflix-inspired attempts to revive spoken Latin. They tend to ignore Latin semiotics and their output sounds like it’s been translated directly from modern European languages, creating a counterfeit Latin that would have sent Cicero laughing his ass off.
@ CJ
I think Dáithi Ó hUaithne (1915-1981) may have been someone with a low tolerance for what he probably (and justifiably) perceived as cultural “cringe” on the part of Irish people. I would suggest you read other scholars, there is a collection of essays by Declan Kiberd called “Idir Dhá Chultúr”. Re Ó hUaithne, his father died of ‘flu while serving with the British army in WWI.
“Cé gur náisiúnaí ba ea Dáithí faoin am a bhí sé ina mhac léinn ollscoile, ní dhearmadadh sé an poipín a chaitheamh ar 11 Samhain.”
My translation: “Although Dáithi was a nationalist during the time he was a student, he never failed to wear the poppy on 11 November.”
https://www.ainm.ie/Bio.aspx?ID=257&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
A typographically snarky commentary on the politics of italics, from one Māori’s point of view: Alice Te Punga Somerville’s Writing while colonised.
Heh. (Or should I write, “Heh”?)
I have to say that this is gesture politics. On the other hand, some gestures are at least satisfying to make.
I’m reminded of a Welsh girl I knew at university (yn Lloegr), who consistently refused to speak English if even one other person was present who spoke Welsh. I admired this on some abstract plane, but still don’t think that it actually helped in any way to improve the actual tynged yr iaith.
https://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tynged_yr_Iaith
If an Indigenous person from NZ travelled across the globe to BC, obviously only because a common colonial language unites these two places, wouldn’t she become a settler-colonialist herself? I am sure there is a gold-standard intersectional answer to this conundrum.
from one Māori’s point of view:
I’m surprised to see such performative language politics in 2022. All the words in non-italics are familiar to all NZers — they’re even in wiktionary as being English. (With the exception of Mutuwhenua, which is a book title so ordinarily might well be in italics.)
The well-meaning woman with NZ poetry on her business card sounds positively antediluvian. When exactly was this advice handed down?
@CJ The reason a language might be worth saving is to preserve its semiotic repertoire.
Te Reo is counter-colonising NZ English by injecting words for which there’s no accurate equivalent.
(At risk of sounding imperialist, how would Te Punga Somerville have published those poems before the colonists arrived? She could recite them at a hui, of course. That’d be unlikely to reach many ears.)
@D.O. wouldn’t she become a settler-colonialist herself?
Depends on how many indigenes she killed and/or stole their land.
However, when the Prussians controlled Ostfriesland (I’m not so sure about the Hannoverians), they made a concerted effort to Germanize the population, which had been under Dutch control during the golden age of the Netherlands
Not under political control, just strong cultural and religious influence, and that was mostly limited to the Western part of Ostfriesland. Even these days, there is a line running South-North through Ostfriesland a couple of kilometers East of the river Ems, East of which people are predominantly Lutheran and West of which they are predominantly Calvinists (as far as they still identify with organized religion).
I have seen Dutch inscriptions on 18th century houses in that area.
Re Prussia: They controlled Ostfriesland first for a short period in the 18th century, up to the Napoleonic wars, during which the area became Dutch politically for a couple of years. That era of Prussian rule was remembered fondly, as the Prussian kings mostly left the old freedoms and local institutions untouched. Hannover, which obtained Ostfriesland at Vienna, was not so considerate, and I assume that they started on the High-Germanification. When Ostfriesland became Prussian again after Prussia annexed Hannover, there was some disappointment when it was kept inside the province of Hannover and its old freedoms weren’t restored, as many people nostalgic for the previous Prussian rule had expected.
It is still unclear to me exactly why the Dutch/Flemish developed such a clear sense of themselves as not being Germans so early on, when the Swiss, who also had urban centers, a history of revolts, a local identity and a Germanic language that is not mutually intelligible with the Lutheran standard, identify as part of the German Sprachraum and often see their own language as a dialect.
Particularly in the era when the Hansa league had made Niederdeutsch the lingua franca of the Baltic Sea, how did the Dutch, who spoke a mutually intelligible language, manage to resist assimilation? Economic power and close economic and trade ties to France and England?
Or maybe it really makes more sense the other way, why did the Niederdeutsch speakers not throw in with the Dutch rather than the Germans when ethnic identity started becoming important to people? Looked at the question that way, it seems to make more sense. The North German lands didn’t participate in the Flemish uprising and did not develop that Flemish identity and sense of citiizenship which seems to be at the root of “Dutchness” .
Much of Ostfriesland was under Dutch military, but not political control before the first period of Prussian rule. This overlapped with the time in the eighteenth century when the Durch military was also garrisoning the fortresses of the southern Hapsburg Netherlands. The Dutch golden age was waning, but they still probably had the largest economy per capita in Europe, and (as Vanya says) there was by that point a fairly clear Dutch/Flemish ethnic identity, thanks to the Eighty Years War.
Back to my puzzlement about the weird peeve concerning facing-page translations: I just received over the weekend a box with a few hard copies of a long-awaited new book project that has finally come off the presses (to the extent I contributed to the project it was not really in an intellectual or substantive way …), viz. the first complete/unabridged scholarly English translation of one of the 14th century’s most important works of Greek theology. It is of course a facing-page edition, with 357 pages of English translation on the rectos facing 357 pages of Greek text on the versos. I can’t imagine anyone among the work’s potential readership having the reaction that this presentation “minoritizes” the Greek text.
Re italics, precisely because it’s a facing page translation, the English has no untranslated Greek technical lexemes, although there are many such references to Greek technical terms in the lengthy translator’s introduction (which I have not yet read), which may explain some choices — those are typically set up with an English word followed by a parenthetical containing the Greek word in Greek script, a comma, and then a transliteration in italics. That strikes me as fine, although the introduction also uses italics for allegedly “foreign” phrases like raison d’etre and editio princeps, which I would not do, left to my own devices, although I’m sure the academic publishing world is full of peevers who appreciate those italics.
The running English text of the translation does use both quotation marks and italics, neither of which are found across the way in the Greek text. One use of italics is for titles of prior works, which is pretty standard. The other, which is somewhat novel but not-unuseful is to use italics in the English whenever the Greek text is duplicating the words of Scripture (presumably not by accident), with a note in the right margin giving the book/chapter/verses of the Scriptural reference. By contrast, quotations from Patristic sources are put in quotation marks (again, in the English but not in the Greek), with the source indicated in a footnote rather than in the margin. I suppose some stylebooks might quite plausibly object to treating quotes from St. Paul the Apostle systematically differently from quotes from e.g. St. Gregory of Nyssa or St.[?] [Pseudo-]Dionysius the Areopagite, but drawing such a typographical distinction makes defensible sense given the publisher and the audience for the book.
My copy of al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers has English verso and Arabic recto, but of course that also means it has Arabic verso and English recto, so everybody has won, and all must have prizes. Alternatively, nobody has won …
Every bilingual edition of Greek or Latin classics I’ve ever seen has the original verso and the translation recto. If you’re reading a language that is written left-to-right, the left position implies priority, as befits the original. This is really not difficult, nor some sort of linguistic hegemonic conspiracy.
As I read it, the (admittedly perverse) complaint is really about having parallel translations at all, rather than the right/left placement. But the idea that readers are too stupid to work out that the English version is a translation rather than a simultaneous original composition, without being explicitly told as much, does not strike me as particularly … compelling.
[Apologies: verso and recto should, of course, have been in italics passim. Peccavi.]
On further reflection I wonder if some of the original list of peeves are motivated by something akin to the so-called Euphemism Treadmill. The mechanism that drives that treadmill is conscious awareness of the lousy/marginal social status of the referent, such that originally neutral-to-polite ways of talking about the referent somehow take on that baggage and come to seem pejorative.
However much we might decry the marginalization of Latin and Greek texts among Today’s Young People, they retain a secure aura of cultural prestige even if somewhat out-of-date prestige. But if we are very self-conscious (and perhaps rightly so) of the precarious social position of our personally-favored minority-language like Gaelic or Scots, that may create a mindset in which entirely neutral/sensible choices about typography and layout somehow end up evoking the language’s lack of prestige and respect (because that feeling is always lurking near the surface, waiting for a trigger) and are thus taken to somehow reinforce that lack, even if it is difficult to coherently explain why when the same typography and layout seems benign when other languages are involved. Even self-consciously well-meaning efforts, in such a context, can very easily be perceived as condescending. Etc. etc.
You don’t consider it within the bounds of possibility that your ideas of what’s “neutral/sensible” might be influenced by your (I know, I know) privileged position in the scheme of things, and that people from marginalized communities might have very different attitudes that aren’t necessarily the result of some sort of deformed mindset that leads to perfectly fine things being “perceived as condescending”?
@Vanya
I think you’re making the common modern mistake of confusing regional political identities with ethnic identities. It’s not even true that the Dutch have a clear sense of not being ‘Germans’. They are very well aware of the fact that in terms of traditional ethnic markers they are much the same thing. But they’re also aware and proud of having a unique regional history of their own.
In fact, all regional groups of people in Europe’s continental area which traditionally speak a West Germanic idiom are parts of the same ethnic group: that which in English is conventionally called by the Latin term ‘German’. Who assimilates whom depends on various political and ideological factors. If the wars had turned out differently, the Dutch would have been linguistically and politically-ideologically assimilated to their neighbors.
Hat, I don’t think the guardrails on the Fashbot are working.
You know what guys? I’ll make a linguistics site of my own cause I’m tired of your censorious nonsense. I’ll call it Sprachhelm, from language + helmet (hat is kinda lame).
Maybe the issue can be more properly be called “foreignization”, rather than “minoritization”? I kinda recall eyebrows being raised at indigenous languages being taught in universities under the rubric of “foreign languages”. Greek and Latin are exalted, but they are still foreign, and they are placed on the verso, whither things get translated to the home recto. This may or may not be worth quibbling about, but I think I understand the logic.
Was it my duck joke?
@Y
You wouldn’t call something that’s been part of your religious and cultural tradition for around two thousand years ‘foreign’ would you?
Maybe the issue can be more properly be called “foreignization”, rather than “minoritization”?
Good point. Despite my famously eirenic temperament, I do feel called upon to correct those Saeson who from time to time classify Welsh under “foreign languages.”
Y’s comment is a useful one, but then the question is what’s the alternative. No one is stopping anyone from publishing monolingual editions in Gaelic or for that matter Scots. Is there a feasible way to prepare and typeset English translations that will not inevitably remind people of the brute fact of how outnumbered those languages are by Anglophones? It’s not like an English-translation-only edition doesn’t “minoritize” the original language in its own way by putting it out of sight … People are free (for copyrighted texts they control) to reject the idea of any translation at all, of course.
With Scots texts you can pretty easily present them for a wider audience the way we sometimes do editions of Chaucer etc. – no “translation” but lots of notes explaining lexemes and phrases that aren’t obvious to the modern Anglophone. If you want to. You don’t have to. There are lots of possibilities.
My copy of “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle” is like that. No parallel translation, but lots of footnotes.
My copy of Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi does much the same thing regarding twelfth-century Middle Welsh and modern Literary Welsh. And the original Welsh version of Simon Evans’ grammar of Middle Welsh only translates the Middle Welsh examples in the comparatively few cases where a reader familiar with modern (literary) Welsh would seriously misunderstand them if left to their own devices.
There are actual modern Welsh translations of the “Mabinogion”, though, so evidently some people want them. I don’t see the point myself, but then, I don’t see the point of translations of Chaucer, either, so what do I know?
Putting the translation into English in smaller letters below the Xese original valorizes the Xese, gives it more physical space on the page, and nudges the learner away from lazily turning to the translation.
A number of language instruction books (French for English speakers and such) get around the issue by putting text in the language being taught in bold, not italics. That avoids the foreign associations and highlights rather than backgrounds the language in question.
Some bilingual Xese/English editions are transparently aimed at helping the reader move toward greater fluency in Xese with the ultimate goal of not needing to refer to the English at all. Others aren’t, and will be less useful for a reader without that goal if they are prepared as if the reader has that goal.
The one-language-on-top-of-the-other approach works especially well for that sort of didactic purpose when the text is composed of stand-alone sentences that are never longer than a single line of type. Language instruction books and phrase-guides for tourists are often like that. Other genres aren’t.
One notable feature of the newly-published book I mentioned above is that there’s lots of chunks of white space in the Greek. The nature of Greek-to-English translation at least in this genre means that in the type sizes used the English text will consistently take up more square inches of page than the corresponding Greek text. It was thought desirable to keep the pages in sync, however, and this is one way to do that that was apparently thought superior to printing the Greek in a larger font (not a perfect solution since the ratio of space between languages will not be entirely consistent from page to page) or having more space between each line in Greek rather than more occasional bigger but variably-sized chunks of white space between paragraphs or at the bottom of a page. So it’s slightly visually weird when you first flip through the book, but maybe it’s a useful reminder that all sorts of tradeoffs are inevitable and someone needs to decide for a given project what they are trying to prioritize and what else is tolerable in service of that.
You know what guys? I’ll make a linguistics site of my own cause I’m tired of your censorious nonsense.
You do that; I’m getting very tired of monitoring your endless attempts to push the boundaries.
@JWB:
I’ve often noticed that written Kusaal texts tend to be noticeably shorter than their English translations. I think much of it is due to that many extremely common function words are written with fewer letters in Kusaal than English (ka “and”, ye “that”, la “the”, o “he/she”, ba “they”) but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. English progressive, perfect and modal forms tend to take a lot of letters to write, for example.
Genre comes into it too; and I suspect that Kusaal translations of English texts would be comparatively wordy because of the explanatory material you’d often need to interpolate.
With Welsh, I’m pretty sure it would be much affected by register: literary style is distinctly more compact than colloquial.
I have some vague recollection that we’ve discussed this sort of thing previously, in regard to the differing lengths of book-length translations in European languages.
@DE: I’m sure we have discussed it previously. The project of typesetting a facing-page translation is where the issue becomes of less abstract interest and more immediate practical importance as a difficulty to be managed.
I should perhaps note that there are facing-page bilingual editions where at least in theory it is not the case that one language is the original and the other the translation. A good example would be statute books and other official government texts from officially bilingual regimes. Those will require a decision as to which language is on the right and which on the left, which may involve controversy about which side is, in context, taken to imply greater prestige.
Once upon a time in my last year of law school (1991-92) I was doing a research project that involved tracing the evolution of a particular bit of copyright law through a century-plus of varying amendments at different points in time in various foreign nations that were all Commonwealth-ish, i.e. their relevant law like ours descended from 18th century English practice whether or not they were technically Commonwealth members. I had access to a good research library that had the old bilingual statute books of e.g. Canada and Ireland. And of South Africa. And the South African statute books had switched at some point during the timeframe relevant to my research from bilingual in English and standard Dutch to bilingual in English and Afrikaans. AND (this is the interesting bit …) IIRC English had switched sides from the older books to the newer ones. I cannot recall with an actual visual image whether from recto to verso or vice versa, but in context presumably from the perceived-as-more-powerful side to the perceived-as-less-powerful one.
In my very limited experience, parallel texts don’t work on e-readers, which tend to be conceptually one page wide and infinite-scroll long. The best approximation is a large landscape screen showing two pages of a PDF-or-whathaveyou replication of hardcopy page layout. Perhaps there are innovative e-reader-specific parallel-text designs I am unaware of, with touchscreen gestures toggling languages palimpsestically.
old bilingual statute books of e.g. Canada and Ireland — Aha, the Oireachtas used to have a Web 1.0 site with the parallel text of acts. It’s vanished,* but parts are semi-working on Internet Archive (example). That kind of clunky setup is OK for reference but not for reading-reading.
the South African statute books had switched at some point — from wikipedia:
* to be replaced by… nothing.
No one is stopping anyone from publishing monolingual editions in Gaelic or for that matter Scots.
i take giles’ point as being, in part, that active prevention isn’t needed, which is an indication of the depth of the problem.
the situation in this regard is different with yiddish, i think, though only to a degree. to illustrate: In Geveb, the online yiddish studies journal, publishes annual roundups of translations out of yiddish and yiddish studies publications in english. it does not publish a similar article on new publications in yiddish – they exist! they are in fact more central to the journal’s subject area! but they go unacknowledged in any systematic way – unlike, for example, the breton translation of man leyb and el lissitsky’s Yingl Tsingl Khvat (which i’m glad now exists!).
one example of another side of the problem:
the recent CYCO edition of bashevis singer’s Mayses Fun Hintern Oyvn (the collection containing Yentl Der Yeshive-bokher, probably his best-known story, thanks to barbra streisand) brought it back into print in yiddish after 40ish years out of print – during which time i’m not certain Yentl has ever been out of print in english (though other stories from Hintern Oyvn have). and even then, the CYCO edition (like many primarily yiddish publications) has an english-language introduction, so can’t be considered fully monolingual.
and Hintern Oyvn is an extreme outlier, simply for being a yiddish classic that is in print*! i have quite a few copies of other reguarly-taught books – slim volumes of poetry as well as chunkier texts – that have never seen an edition past their first, and are read mainly from photocopies or scans.
.
* i’m footnoting: there are a few that are available in current student editions, which is great. but perish forbid you want to read sholem-aleykhem’s Motl Peyse Dem Khazns** without either worrying about crumbling pages or being interrupted by a vocabulary list every chapter (and the student edition is abridged).
** which you should! it’s hilarious and touching. (there are three english translations; i haven’t read any of them, so can’t make a recommendation)
(A couple of recent comments here appear in the RSS but not on the page.)
(Thanks, one of them was presumably rozele’s, which I’ve just rescued from moderation. Don’t know about the other.)
(I thought there were more, but everything’s in sync now.)
read sholem-aleykhem’s Motl Peyse Dem Khazns […] which you should! it’s hilarious and touching
Seconded! I read it when I was a kid, in the translation of I.D. Berkowitz (who was Sholom Aleichem’s son-in-law.) The Hebrew was old fashioned but great. I think I didn’t know at the time that it was a translation. The chapter title “Hurray, I am an orphan” sticks in my mind, as do the characters — Motl above all, Motl’s anxious mother, Motl’s stuffy older brother and his friend Pinye the intellectual dreamer, the miserly doctor and his fruit trees… It’s too bad SA didn’t live to finish it. It stops just as a strange new character shows up.
…I’ll just say I’ve met a few.
Also, there’s a long and rich tradition of misunderstanding the duitsen in the anthem as another word!
…I’ll just say I’ve met a few.
I’ll just say there’s a large Dutch diaspora in NZ (we have a whole Bay and Province/District named for Tasman); they’re not reticent about being Dutch or speaking Dutch in public; neither are they backwards in letting you know they’re not German.
Sadly, I have to call out CJ again: citation needed.
Oh, let him be — hopefully the huff he’s left in won’t waft him back.
That’s not related to a diaspora, is it?
Weeell … If you’re looking to get far away from Europe in the 1940’s/50’s, and New Holland is no longer so called, whereas Nieuw-Zeeland is, close enough, and there’s a Cape Maria van Diemen, Drie Koningen Eyland, and a bunch of places named for Tasman, and they speak a not-too-unfamiliar language, I would think those attractions add up.
putting text in the language being taught in bold, not italics
This is the Journal of African Languages and Linguistics’ policy, and it’s a good idea; apart from anything else, italics wreak havoc on several IPA characters.
If you really want to centre the target language, though, take the approach of the Old Kanembu Quran copyists, and write the translation in much smaller characters between the lines or in the margins. (I have actually seen a Greek-English New Testament that took such an approach too, though it was more glossing than translation.)
The crux of the problem as I see it is in tension between producing a book that a lot of people will read and which therefore has to have a convenient English text and producing a book where one is not supposed to read English text as the main one. I do not think there is any solution to this problem no matter how and in which type the texts will be arranged. But one interesting possibility is making it Talmud-style. One cannot miss what text is at the core, but also one is free to read what they want without interruption.
i do love a talmud-blat layout used for other parallel texts! (especially ones that use very distinct fonts for different languages that share a writing system, the way some hebrew/yiddish texts do)
come to think of it, giles’ Deep Wheel Orcadia layout, with smaller english translation below the scots, is pretty close to how some hebrew/english prayerbooks are laid out.
[Bullshit deleted. Just stop it. –LH]
Test:
a ɑ
– not Pāṇini