Apr. 20th, 2008 09:08 pm
Bum-Ghaeilge
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muckefuckLast night at dinner, I was filling Nuphy in on my compensatory spending (now up to the $100 mark with the ordering of The Irish of West Muskerry) and asked me, "What book did you lose?" Turns out, the hardcover edition I (overpaid) to have delivered? He already owns it! He told me once that he wanted to learn Irish, but I was never able to teach him more than póg mo thóin! I certainly didn't remember that he ever done anything as concrete as buy a book. The upshot is, if my replacement copy hasn't arrived by the time I see him for dinner at Mercat a la Plantxa on St. George's (i.e. this Wednesday), he'll bring his to lend me.
In the meantime, I'm doing my best to get good use out of Bun-Ghaeilge, although I'm continuing to have doubts about the variety it teaches. Namely, I'm beginning to suspect that it might be an artificial koiné similar to Cymraeg Byw. (If the word "koiné" doesn't make you go "Aroo?" and/or ask yourself, "Why's he bringing up Greek?", feel free to skip this next bit.)
A "koiné" is a speech variety used for intercommunication by speakers of closely-related varieties. The name comes from Greek and originally designated a compromise form of Greek based mostly on Attic that developed in Alexander's armies and subsequently became the chief variety spoken in the Classical World and the basis for both Byzantine and Modern Greek. General American, the variety of American English spoken by people who claim to speak "without an accent" in an example of a modern koiné.
Koinés naturally arise when people of slightly different linguistic origins mingle, as when settlers from various parts of a country come to a new area. (General American took shape in the Midwest as a compromise between the language spoken by Southerners, New Englanders, Appalachians, and others.) Often, one variety predominates in the mix (as Attic in the case of koiné Greek or Mid-Atlantic dialects in the case of General American) due to a combination of prestige and perceived neutrality. The more marked features of individual varieties (e.g. non-rhoticity in American English dialects) tend not to end up in the koiné.
However, not every mixed language is a koiné. For instance, in Italy, I witnessed Spanish-speakers communicate with Italian-speakers, each in their native variety. Doubtless, both parties were modifying their speech at least a little in the direction of the other, avoiding colloquialisms, idioms, unusual constructions--anything they thought might cause their interlocutor(s) difficulty. But the resulting varieties were ad hoc and didn't outlive the Spanish-speakers' holiday. Koinés, by contrast, tend to be so stable over time that they often become the first language of a population (as has happened in most European countries).
In the case of the Celtic languages, there were obstacles to this natural process of koiné formation. At the time that technology was vastly improving intercommunication between European peasants and modern koinés were forming (and being promoted and stabilised by the emergence of universal public education), languages like Breton, Gaelic, and Welsh were not the prestige varieties in the places they were spoken.
Generations earlier, two farmers from, say, the Isle of Anglesey and the Vale of Glamorgan meeting for the first time would have had little choice to but to hammer out some kind of mutual comprehension through trial and error (perhaps injecting a certain amount of Literary Welsh if they happened to be literate). But, increasingly, subjects of the British Crown had English to fall back on if communication became difficult. As my friend![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zompist had observed, people favour efficiency in communication and the default choice is also the variety which allows the greatest understanding for the least effort.
Cymraeg Byw was a solution to the lack of a widely-accepted Welsh koiné at a time when activists were trying to push usage of Welsh in to more and more domains and the number of learners was increasing rapidly. If you've ever tried to learn a language, you know that there's nothing more frustrating than not having people understand what you've struggled so hard to learn. So Welsh language planners began constructing a variety that offered a compromise between various dialects. To help new speakers, they often chose the feature or construction that appeared the simplest of the accepted variants. This, of course, led to amalgamations that sounded strange to everyone who had grown up speaking the language.
Imagine for a moment that a similar variety of English were being created. In order to have the smallest inventory of phonemes possible, the designers drop /ɔ/ (since this is merged with /ɑ/ by many North Americans in what's called the "cot-caught merger"), but also /h/ (which is dropped in many English dialects). They also adopt pure vowels (such as are found in many Scottish, Caribbean, and African varieties) rather than the unusual diphthongs of mainstream American and British varieties.
But the designers of Cymraeg Byw went even further. In order to remove inconsistencies that could trouble learners, they created new analogical forms which were not found in the natural speech of anyone. Again, imagine if designers of "Living English" decided to drop -s in the third-person singular of verbs (which, as the only personal suffix in our verb conjugation, is a protruding nail just begging to be hammered down). And then, to make the past tense easier, they promoted the use of "did" in all cases--not just "Did you see it?" and "I didn't see it" but also "I did see it" in place of "I saw it". This way, learners wouldn't be so bothered by irregular verbs.
It's only a rough analogy, of course, and some would say a little unfair. (Gareth King, author of the most usable grammar of modern Welsh, thinks the promoters of Cymraeg Byw have gotten something of a bum rap, for instance.) But it gives you an idea of what kind of Frankensteinian construct I'm talking about and why I think it's something to be avoided.
Examples? Two things stick out to be so far. The progressive construction (which isn't introduced until Chapter 13, which is odd in itself) is presented with Ulster forms. So instead of (modern standard) Tá sé do mo bhualadh "He is beating me" and Tá sé dár bhualadh "He is beating us" we have Tá sé mo bhualadh and Tá sé ár bhualadh. On the other hand, the interrogative pronouns (which differ greatly from dialect to dialect) are straight Munster: cé, cad, cathain, conas, and cá. (Compare Ulster goidé for cad, goidé mar or cad chuige for conas, etc.)
Fortunately--as you can see--I've got access to other sources so I can double-check anything that looks fishy. Nevertheless, I fear I'm going to come out of using this book with even more quirks to my Irish that I'll have to spend quite a few years eliminating entirely--just as I had to do with Cymraeg Byw. Even if TY Irish will end up teaching me to speak "like a 100-year old man from the bog" (infainic_thu_fein's words), that's still got to be better than speaking a variety that was never used by any living person anywhere!
In the meantime, I'm doing my best to get good use out of Bun-Ghaeilge, although I'm continuing to have doubts about the variety it teaches. Namely, I'm beginning to suspect that it might be an artificial koiné similar to Cymraeg Byw. (If the word "koiné" doesn't make you go "Aroo?" and/or ask yourself, "Why's he bringing up Greek?", feel free to skip this next bit.)
A "koiné" is a speech variety used for intercommunication by speakers of closely-related varieties. The name comes from Greek and originally designated a compromise form of Greek based mostly on Attic that developed in Alexander's armies and subsequently became the chief variety spoken in the Classical World and the basis for both Byzantine and Modern Greek. General American, the variety of American English spoken by people who claim to speak "without an accent" in an example of a modern koiné.
Koinés naturally arise when people of slightly different linguistic origins mingle, as when settlers from various parts of a country come to a new area. (General American took shape in the Midwest as a compromise between the language spoken by Southerners, New Englanders, Appalachians, and others.) Often, one variety predominates in the mix (as Attic in the case of koiné Greek or Mid-Atlantic dialects in the case of General American) due to a combination of prestige and perceived neutrality. The more marked features of individual varieties (e.g. non-rhoticity in American English dialects) tend not to end up in the koiné.
However, not every mixed language is a koiné. For instance, in Italy, I witnessed Spanish-speakers communicate with Italian-speakers, each in their native variety. Doubtless, both parties were modifying their speech at least a little in the direction of the other, avoiding colloquialisms, idioms, unusual constructions--anything they thought might cause their interlocutor(s) difficulty. But the resulting varieties were ad hoc and didn't outlive the Spanish-speakers' holiday. Koinés, by contrast, tend to be so stable over time that they often become the first language of a population (as has happened in most European countries).
In the case of the Celtic languages, there were obstacles to this natural process of koiné formation. At the time that technology was vastly improving intercommunication between European peasants and modern koinés were forming (and being promoted and stabilised by the emergence of universal public education), languages like Breton, Gaelic, and Welsh were not the prestige varieties in the places they were spoken.
Generations earlier, two farmers from, say, the Isle of Anglesey and the Vale of Glamorgan meeting for the first time would have had little choice to but to hammer out some kind of mutual comprehension through trial and error (perhaps injecting a certain amount of Literary Welsh if they happened to be literate). But, increasingly, subjects of the British Crown had English to fall back on if communication became difficult. As my friend
zompist had observed, people favour efficiency in communication and the default choice is also the variety which allows the greatest understanding for the least effort.Cymraeg Byw was a solution to the lack of a widely-accepted Welsh koiné at a time when activists were trying to push usage of Welsh in to more and more domains and the number of learners was increasing rapidly. If you've ever tried to learn a language, you know that there's nothing more frustrating than not having people understand what you've struggled so hard to learn. So Welsh language planners began constructing a variety that offered a compromise between various dialects. To help new speakers, they often chose the feature or construction that appeared the simplest of the accepted variants. This, of course, led to amalgamations that sounded strange to everyone who had grown up speaking the language.
Imagine for a moment that a similar variety of English were being created. In order to have the smallest inventory of phonemes possible, the designers drop /ɔ/ (since this is merged with /ɑ/ by many North Americans in what's called the "cot-caught merger"), but also /h/ (which is dropped in many English dialects). They also adopt pure vowels (such as are found in many Scottish, Caribbean, and African varieties) rather than the unusual diphthongs of mainstream American and British varieties.
But the designers of Cymraeg Byw went even further. In order to remove inconsistencies that could trouble learners, they created new analogical forms which were not found in the natural speech of anyone. Again, imagine if designers of "Living English" decided to drop -s in the third-person singular of verbs (which, as the only personal suffix in our verb conjugation, is a protruding nail just begging to be hammered down). And then, to make the past tense easier, they promoted the use of "did" in all cases--not just "Did you see it?" and "I didn't see it" but also "I did see it" in place of "I saw it". This way, learners wouldn't be so bothered by irregular verbs.
It's only a rough analogy, of course, and some would say a little unfair. (Gareth King, author of the most usable grammar of modern Welsh, thinks the promoters of Cymraeg Byw have gotten something of a bum rap, for instance.) But it gives you an idea of what kind of Frankensteinian construct I'm talking about and why I think it's something to be avoided.
Examples? Two things stick out to be so far. The progressive construction (which isn't introduced until Chapter 13, which is odd in itself) is presented with Ulster forms. So instead of (modern standard) Tá sé do mo bhualadh "He is beating me" and Tá sé dár bhualadh "He is beating us" we have Tá sé mo bhualadh and Tá sé ár bhualadh. On the other hand, the interrogative pronouns (which differ greatly from dialect to dialect) are straight Munster: cé, cad, cathain, conas, and cá. (Compare Ulster goidé for cad, goidé mar or cad chuige for conas, etc.)
Fortunately--as you can see--I've got access to other sources so I can double-check anything that looks fishy. Nevertheless, I fear I'm going to come out of using this book with even more quirks to my Irish that I'll have to spend quite a few years eliminating entirely--just as I had to do with Cymraeg Byw. Even if TY Irish will end up teaching me to speak "like a 100-year old man from the bog" (in
fainic_thu_fein's words), that's still got to be better than speaking a variety that was never used by any living person anywhere!![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
As a non-linguist, this confuses me - I hope you don't mind my thinking out loud a little.
It seems like you'd have to posit pure or highly homogeneous linguistic groups either to (a) deny this statement (claiming that national languages are ancient and eternal and conform to the proper boundaries of the nation, or some such) or (b) support the statement, positing 'non-koinés' as the raw ingredients for the koinés that end up as the universally adopted languages... unless... Should I be thinking about koinés being made out of koinés in some sort of linguistic gene pool, with terms like "Germanic" designating, not some supposed "root" language with modern descendents, but rather a collection of localised tendencies - a subset of the total set of 'genes' that find more common expression within a particular area/group of people?
That seems like it would lead to a situation of very fuzzy linguistic boundaries, but I can see there are practical reasons for language standardization and homogeneity: so should I be looking for some kind of theory of homogenization, or am I barking up th wrong tree entirely?