Link roundup: 28 January 2013

Just a few links today.

--- Welsh, Gaelic, Irish and Cornish are making a comeback. I mention this frequently because it's a popular myth that small languages naturally just get swallowed up and destroyed by large languages like water sucked into a sponge, but it's simply not true: in any well-developed country with free speech and minority rights there's no reason for a small language to disappear.

--- The Pope's tweeting in Latin now. I follow that account as of yesterday, as I do any account written entirely in Latin.

--- Last night's dream had a mixture of languages again:

Knew bomber was Romanian in dream upon hearing him use the word dešimț, meaning 12.Dream was wrong, it's Lithuanian for 10 with incorrect t!
— Dave MacLeod (@mithridates) 29. Januar 2013

We knew the bomb was going to go off at 12 o'clock because the "Romanian" bomber had used the word that in the dream meant 12, but was just Lithuanian 10 with a ț and putting a ț on the end doesn't make a word Romanian (douăsprezece is Romanian for twelve). The bomber, by the way, intended to place the bomb in a fridge he claimed he had come to fix in order to keep us trapped in the 19th century.

--- Plans for Spanish to move into Asia. Another one of those woo Spanish is going to take over the world articles but also with some numbers to note:

In 2000, there were only 1,500 university students studying Spanish in the 90 universities that teach the language but now, there are 25,000. Seventy percent of requests to study Spanish are currently rejected because there are not enough Spanish teachers there to teach them. China “exports” students to 34 Latin American and 22 Spanish universities.

--- Comment dit-on hashtag en français? Mot-dièse. Ce mot me convient tout à fait car je ne sais pas exactement ce que le mot hash en hashtag veut dire... # = un hash peut-être?

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Alpha Centauri has at least one planet, Cornish signs

Two quick things to note as tonight is another debate night. Gut prediction of how the media fallout will be for the remaining two debates: tonight's debate will declare Obama the slight winner (lower expectations and stronger focus this time but Romney is never truly off his game), and the last one will be an outright tie.

And now to the big news: Alpha Centauri (B, the smaller one) has a planet. We knew already that planets are likely to exist there, but until now the only thing we knew for sure was that Proxima Centauri does not have a Neptune-sized or larger planet orbiting it at a distance equal to or less than the orbit of the Earth.

As to the planet that has been discovered: it is the size of Earth...and extremely close to its parent star, so uninhabitable (as far as we know). The planet orbits the star in just 3+ days - compare this to Mercury at 88 days. Alpha Centauri B is 500 degrees cooler than our sun (5200K vs. 5700K) and has 90% the mass, but that doesn't help our planet at that distance.

This planet has much of the ingredients needed for a truly exciting piece of news: distance (no planet could be closer), and size. With life as we know it probably inconceivable it is not the holy grail of exoplanetology, but Alpha Centauri is the closest and nearly most well-known star system out there, and that alone makes this a huge piece of news. In fact, the information might even have to be incorporated into the upcoming sequels of Avatar.

If a gas giant in the habitable zone is discovered around Alpha Centauri A, the name will certainly be Polyphemus. Thanks to Avatar a discovery of the sort may turn out to be as exciting as direct confirmation of an Earth-sized planet in the same area.



One other piece of unrelated yet interesting news: a community college in Cornwall (Fowey Community College) now has Cornish signs on the doors. Signage is just about the cheapest way one can promote and protect a minority language, making the difference between never ever encountering a language in one's daily life and rarely to sometimes encountering it. Signage is just about the opposite of intense immersion programs: signage creates a wide and shallow knowledge, while intense immersion creates a depth of knowledge in the few that opt to undergo it.

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January 2010: first nursery in the Cornish language begins operation

It took me three months to notice this, but better late than never. It's good news for the Cornish language, which has been on a bit of a roll since 2008 when the Standard Written Form was finally agreed upon, as before then it was at a double advantage through being not only so small but also with many conflicting written standards.

What will be interesting to see if Cornish is successfully revived as a native tongue for a large number of people is whether it will turn out to be easier to learn than other Celtic languages, as spending a long period of time without native speakers tends to prune out a lot of the idiosyncrasies languages have, ones that native speakers would feel attached to but simply fluent L2 speakers not quite as much.

Some other good news for the language from six months back - in November the Cornwall Council voted for signs in the region to be bilingual. It was an easy vote because they will not be taken down at once in order to do so; instead, the bilingual signs will simply be put up when signs wear down and need to be replaced anyway, so it's a gradual process that will not cost any extra money to implement. Setting up bilingual street signs is one of the easiest ways to aid in the revival of a language, as the cost is minimal to nonexistent, the amount of material that needs to be translated is also minimal, and once translated they can be reproduced forever.

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Listen to Cornish being spoken thanks to the BBC

A recording of Cornish has emerged in a bit of an unexpected place today - an article here from the BBC on the death of languages, as well as their revival. Hebrew is given as an example of a very successful revival and Cornish as a language that is currently in the process of doing so, and includes at the bottom of the article a short story read first in English, then in Common Cornish, then in Modern Cornish, two varieties of the language. Note though that since last year there seems to have emerged an agreement on a single form to use - the Standard Written Form or Furv Skrivys Savonek.

As for the subject behind the article itself - it's something often written about here, but here is my view again: languages are not like rivers where smaller ones flow into larger ones and then disappear but rather like settlements. Small settlements are usually based on one industry and can be wiped out quickly, and opportunities in small towns are few. When a city reaches a certain size though it becomes largely self-sustaining, as once a city is capable of providing its people with the ability to study and work in just about any field there is then little reason to move from one city to another, unless one happens to be particularly ambitious and needs a particularly large city in order to thrive. In this way, languages of a certain size are in no danger of being swallowed up by English or any other language, and well-documented languages once spoken by people who are now living in well-developed and peaceful countries can easily be revived/strengthened if so desired, and this can be seen with languages such as Cornish, Basque, Welsh, and so on.

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Some more news from September on Celtic languages: Welsh, Cornish, and Manx

Celtic languages: Scottish Gaelic in blue, Irish / Irish Gaelic in green, Manx in red, Welsh in yellow, Cornish in orange, Breton in purple.

Some more news I've found from the past month on some Celtic languages after this morning's post on a demonstration for unification of Brittany where the Breton language is spoken.



Welsh:

Shoppers at Tesco will now be able to operate automatic tills in Welsh:

Friday, 26 September 2008 06:50 UK

Felix Gummer, the Tesco's corporate affairs manager for Wales said the change allowed the supermarket to "serve communities in the best possible way".

"In response to customer demand and multilingualism in Wales all our new stores signs have been fully bilingual for some time, but today is a further step forward as we have listened to the views of customers for more services to be in Welsh.

"This roll out programme which started this summer is now complete."

The change was also welcomed by Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, the Welsh Language Society.

Dafydd Lewis from the society said: "We've been in discussions with Tesco and large similar companies and this is one of the things we've been asking them to develop. This is a first step towards developing a full language policy.

"What we'd really want is a language act that would mean all companies in the private sector developing a Welsh language policy without having to have any pressure put on them," he added.

Cornish:

Finally they've agreed on a single form for writing the language. I missed that news but it's great to see as all the strife over which form to use was weakening an already nearly-extinct language. You can download a pdf of the Standard Written Form --> here.

Tuesday, 16 September 2008

Is Cornish still spoken?

Increasingly, yes. The Cornish language, or Kernewek (various spellings), was spoken by an estimated 300 people in 2000 and struggled to get official acceptance because there were four different written forms. But this year the Cornish Language Partnership agreed a single form, paving the way for the language to be taught more widely.

Now Cornwall County Council wants the language recognised within the European charter for regional or minority languages. One survey now estimates the number of speakers at 2,000. "In my village they have evening classes that are always popular," says Bird. "And lots of businesses are choosing Cornish names to cash in on the resurgence of the language."

Manx:

Sep 10, 2008

Irish Government Minister Eamon O Cuiv will visit the Isle of Man and follow in the footsteps of his grandfather Eamon de Valera who helped save the native language 60 years ago.

De Valera stopped off on the island in 1947 when he was Taoiseach and was shocked to learn that the tongue was dying out. When he returned to Dublin he despatched Irish folklore experts to record the last native speakers of the Manx Gaelic language. The recordings sparked renewed efforts to preserve the language and it led to its revival from the 1950s onwards.

Gaeltacht Minister Mr O Cuiv has been invited by the Isle of Man government to advise it on the introduction of a new Manx Language Act. "Gaelic and Manx are actually very similar so it makes perfect sense to explore possibilities to share information and expertise with the goal of the preservation of both languages," Mr O Cuiv said. "My grandfather actually conversed with some of the old speakers and they could understand each other very well."

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