Re: Promote Esperanto at Obama's Change.org

garabik-news-2005-05@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx skreiv:

Trond Engen <trondnet@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I don't know, but I suppose it could have. Traditionally, Swedish is more accepted in Norway than Norwegian in Sweden. Thus, my surprise was to how the translator managed to make Swedish sound rural in a Norwegian context. The other way around would seem easier. But perhaps not. Swedish knowledge of Norwegian may be too slim for readers to unconsciously percieve subtleties.

Does this sound similar to Czech and Slovak?

Yes, more or less. The situation is complicated by two versions
of Czech (literary and colloquial), a distinction that is almost completely lost[1] on a Slovak reader (reading books in Czech is very common in Slovakia) - the colloquial language IN WRITING is usually used to demonstrate (much) lower social status, whereas in reality colloquial Czech is normal and (spoken) literary Czech indicates very formal situations.

This, I think, could be said of many languages. Norwegian Bokmål, in its most accepted form, is leaning towards Danified grammar and ortography. Written Swedish is maintaining archaic grammar common with Nynorsk. Colloquial Swedish and Eastern Norwegian share features that are between, and different from, the written languages, and when used in writing they indicate lower class or criminals.

If a Czech fiction wants to indicate rural setting, they use Moravian
dialects - because there is not much else to use. Slovak fiction does not use dialect, because that would display very sharp regionalism -
perfectly standard literary language with an archaic twist would be
probably used in the 20th century literature.

Would that be because there's no standard pronunciation, the Nynorsk way, or because variation is a betrayal of the national project, the French way?

Slovak language books are almost completely ignored in the Czech Republic, even the best Slovak writers have been traditionally translated into Czech, if the publishing houses wanted to sell more than several tens of books.

How about songs and films? A one-way relationship?

A recent exception was one one of the Harry Potter books, which was
delayed in the Czech translation, so Czech children did indeed read
the Slovak translation (I do not remember the exact numbers of books
sold - again, [1])

[1] My colleague did exactly this kind of research

Thinking of it, as a world wide, instant, phenomenon, the Harry Potter translations would provide a synchronic, comparable picture of a large number of languages.

--
Trond Engen
- wide but not instant
.

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