Re: Promote Esperanto at Obama's Change.org

On Dec 5, 3:51 pm, Craoibhi...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Dec 5, 8:47 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:





On Dec 5, 11:58 am, Craoibhi...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Dec 5, 6:49 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Dec 5, 10:43 am, Craoibhi...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Dec 5, 4:46 pm, António Marques <m...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
You know how that played out in Ireland before it was toned down :(

I don't think you can explain it away that simply. Had the political
élites been serious about reviving the language, the plain people of
Ireland would have followed suit. That is elementary sociolinguistics.

Where did you learn your elementary sociolinguistics? Perhaps in the
country where the English speak a descendant of Norman French? Where
the Finns, Estonians, Lithuanians, and Letts speak Russian?

I learnt it in the country where the Irish speak English. The reason
why the Irish speak English is, that it was the language of politics
and political power.

And not because thousands of non-aristocratic, non-elite monolinguals
were settled there?

Nope. Irish was still the majority language of Ireland in the
beginning of the 19th century. The settlers tended in fact to adopt
the Irish language.

Irish disappeared during the 19th century, very fast, and very
abruptly. The two main reasons were the famine (as you might have
guessed) and the emancipation of Catholics. The effect of the potato
famine is obvious: it destroyed the social structures that had kept
Irish viable, in a very concrete way: to put it bluntly, it killed off
the people who made up those social structures, or if it didn't kill
them off, it drove them away to Amerikay.

The Irish language never established even a toehold over here, even in
cities with huge Irish populations like Boston and New York.
(Chicago's Irish community is very small, despite the fact that it has
provided most of the city's white politicians for generations.)

And that is not because of any official discouragement, but because it
was swamped out by the dominant local language.

The effect of the emancipation was less obvious, but it makes sense
when you think of it. When the anti-Catholic penal laws were still in
force, it was no use trying to get access to the mainstream culture:
as a bloody Papist you were not welcome there, and if you converted to
Protestantism you were a traitor and those who were your friends or
relatives until then disowned you. So, it was relatively pointless to
learn English - the people you could rely on would all speak Irish.
There was a Catholic, Irish-speaking peasant counterculture existing
outside mainstream society. But when Daniel O'Connell the Liberator
succeeded in opening the gates of mainstream society to Catholics, all
that changed, and you could actually join the English-speaking
mainstream as a Catholic. So, it was not important to cling to Irish
anymore, but it became vital to acquire good English instead.

You adopt the rhetoric of the oppressor when you define "mainstream"
as 'non-Catholic'.

Many decades of "liberation theology" have been devoted to changing
that sort of attitude.

Now, what the new Irish Free State did not succeed in, was to make
real, oral fluency in Irish a prerequisite of joining polite society.

What influence does _government_ have on _society_?

And that is above all due to the fact that Dev never insisted on
making Irish the spoken language of political discourse on the highest
level. You needed to have Irish-language credentials to join the new
political élite, but you did not need to actually speak the language.-

And if he or it (no idea what "Dev" means) had done so, it would
simply have anticipated by a few generations the EU's problems with
small national languages. Theoretically they need 27! (or whatever the
number is up to now) interpreters at every meeting.
.

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