Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

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sirdanilot
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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by sirdanilot »

I could live with the usage of that mixture of present and past tense, yes.
Do try not to sound so sneering about the whole topic, there's a good chap. It makes you sound like a cunt with all the social skills of an intestinal parasite.
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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

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The sarcasm doesn't improve this image.

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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by sasasha »

Off topic, but since the original question has been answered...
The following media are produced in the Manx language:

Radio programmes

Traa dy Liooar ('Time Enough') is on Manx Radio every Monday from 5:05pm to 6.00pm. Traa dy Liooar is a magazine programme, and is hosted by Bob Carswell.
Jamys Jeheiney ('Jamys on Friday') is on Manx Radio every Friday from 5:05pm to 6.00pm. Jamys Jeheiney is a Gaelic language world music programme alternately hosted by Jamys O'Meara and Jamys Kinree.
Claare ny Gael ('Gaelic Programme') is on Manx Radio every Sunday from 8.00pm to 9.00pm.
Shiaght Laa ('Seven Days') programme every Wednesday from 6.00pm to 6.30pm.

Print publications

Manx language columns occasionally appear in the Isle of Man Examiner, including Brian Stowell's serialised novel, The Vampire Murders.
The Family Manx magazine (a free publication) regularly carry Manx language articles, including a receipe in each edition.
The Learn Manx website also publishes Gaelg Vio, a Manx language affairs publication, and also Bun as Bree, an occasional publication concerning issues debating Manx language grammar, written by Chris Lewin.

Visual presentations

Adrian Cain has prepared a series of interviews and even cartoons in Manx Gaelic which are available on YouTube.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ce ... media#Manx, 29/2/15

How is that a dead language? It certainly doesn't deserve the past tense. The people making all that media daily use and define what is Manx, not what was Manx.
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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by Dewrad »

sasasha wrote:How is that a dead language? It certainly doesn't deserve the past tense. The people making all that media daily use and define what is Manx, not what was Manx.
Sirdanilot is not the kind of person to let actual facts on the ground get in the way once he's made up his mind.
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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by Qwynegold »

sirdanilot wrote:In fact I am writing a paper on Allentiac, a long-dead language of Chili of which only a couple of word lists exist.
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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by sirdanilot »

Its spelled chili in Dutch, remember that I am not a native speaker of English. By the way Allentiac was spoken in Argentina not Chile , sory for that .

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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by jal »

sirdanilot wrote:Its spelled chili in Dutch, remember that I am not a native speaker of English
The fact you're not a native speaker doens't mean you're above scrutiny, dear lad.


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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by sirdanilot »

jal wrote:
sirdanilot wrote:Its spelled chili in Dutch, remember that I am not a native speaker of English
The fact you're not a native speaker doens't mean you're above scrutiny, dear lad.


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Meh. I am very happy that I was priviliged enough to get education and exposure to a second language (English) to such a degree that I can type like I am doing here, for example. Many people in the world cannot say that they had this privilidge and struggle to learn the language at a later point in life. Moreover, this is only the internet and not an academic paper or something, so I am not going to proofread every single word. For example I spelled 'privilige' in several different ways in this post, and I don't really care at all. As long as it's not leet-speak and it at least approximates grammatical English I am completely fine.
Also, you misspelled 'doesn't' in your post. Nobody is perfect guy !

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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by sirdanilot »

sasasha wrote:Off topic, but since the original question has been answered...


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ce ... media#Manx, 29/2/15

How is that a dead language? It certainly doesn't deserve the past tense. The people making all that media daily use and define what is Manx, not what was Manx.
People do not use Manx in day-to-day conversations. If there are people that do so, then it's only a small subset, probably the hard-core pro-Manx people who caused the revive (not even revitalization, because it was revived after it was a dead language) in the first place.
The fact that literature is produced in the language helps towards making it living, but is not sufficient. Literature is also produced in Latin for example. And I bet there are even radio broadcasts in Latin for latin-learners. Look here for example : http://ohjelmaopas.yle.fi/1-1931339

Even Hebrew is a dead language. No, not Modern Hebrew. But biblical/mishna/classical hebrew, all that is gone. We have a new language called 'Hebrew', but it differs significantly from the original language. I bet literature (mostly religious in nature) is still produced in Biblical Hebrew but that doesn't make it living.

And what about liturgical languages like Ge'ez? Their use is no longer productive, so they cannot be considered living, even though many people utter Ge'ez words every day.

Manx will only be a living language if people start using it (or New Manx, or whatever you would call it) on a day-to-day basis for daily conversations, if its usage is productive, if the language changes like any other language, and most importantly if children learn it and later pass it on to their children. I am not saying that this will never happen but it is very unlikely. The potential community of speakers is small, there is enormous pressure from the dominant language English, and although there are political and ideological motives behind Manx usage, they are nowhere near as strong as those that inspired the 'resurrection' of Hebrew (or rather, the creation of a language Modern Hebrew on the basis of older Hebrews plus some influence from 'substrate' languages).

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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by sirdanilot »

And of course there are languages that are kind of 'in limbo' between being real living languages and dead languages. A language with restricted use can still be kind of living. Take MSA (modern standard arabic), for example. It is based off Classical Arabic and it is only used in restricted domains (very formal speech, writing) so one might say it is dead, but it is used productively every single day for things like news broadcasts, and there is language change going on influenced by the substrate Spoken Arabic varieties (which also vary per region). Even in formal-but-not-completely-correct writing you see these influences. So I would still consider this a living language, though a bit less living than the Spoken Arabics.

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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by jal »

The thing is, sirdanilot, that you don't get to define what makes a language living or not. And I don't think that anyone here gives a rat's ass about what your opinion is on the subject. Perhaps you should call it a day.


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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by sirdanilot »

jal wrote:The thing is, sirdanilot, that you don't get to define what makes a language living or not. And I don't think that anyone here gives a rat's ass about what your opinion is on the subject. Perhaps you should call it a day.


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Haha this opinion is so incredibly not-bright. Thank you for lightening up my day, JAL :)

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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by marconatrix »

If you speak a minority language then you'll probably know many of the other (few) speakers in your town / workplace etc. and will enjoy keeping up the language with them. This obviously applies to immigrants where the language may be widely spoken elsewhere in the world, but exactly the same dynamic applies to 'dying' 'reviving' or 'revived' languages, where the number of fluent speakers may be small in total.

This was certainly the case for Cornish a few years ago (I'm not really involved at present) and I expect it is true also for Manx. They have the advantage of being a fairly compact island, so even if they have about the same number of speakers they will be more concentrated geographically and so more likely to meet and converse outside of contrived events.

I personally knew of several families that spoke Cornish at home and whose children acquired the language 'naturally'. I'm sure the same is true of Manx. An even better example might be the Belfast gaeltacht. The problem is that kids raised in a minority language in the home or in school will not keep it up unless there is a wider community of use. So the big issue to fully reviving a language is how to create such a 'habitat'. Without it the language is a bit like a rare animal kept going by captive breeding.
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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by jal »

marconatrix wrote:Without it the language is a bit like a rare animal kept going by captive breeding.
Nice comparison, QFT.


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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by R.Rusanov »

Manx may currently be a living language - this being a synchronic label - and will probably continue to be one for as long as there exist people with silly ideas buzzing around in their heads and more leisure time than they know what to do with.

This state of affairs could foreseeably continue for as long as modern civilization does.

That said it is in no way a vibrant language; no one really uses it in real life except for edgy people (who are notoriously infecund). When western society collapses - which I predict will occur sometime before the year 2300 - the only people remnant on the Isle will likely be multiethnic hunter gatherers speaking some form of vulgar british. Very likely they'll have only minimal admixture from the island's original denizens. It's fairly obvious that there is absolutely no chance of Manx surviving in that kind of environment.

Which is why people are rather reluctant to consider Manx a real, living language nowadays - we don't exist in a time vacuum, and even people who disagree with my prognosis can hardly imagine a situation where Manx could approach anything near vibrancy in the future.
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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by linguoboy »

I'm utterly impressed how many of the contributors to this thread know exactly what the sociolinguistic situation is like on the Isle of Man despite never having been there or actually speaking to any Manx people and am on tenterhooks to hear what they have to say about the current state of Sentinelese.

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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

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R.Rusanov wrote:It's fairly obvious that there is absolutely no chance of Manx surviving in that kind of environment.
Are you kidding? After the Great Collapse, the Manxonians want to have nothing to do with the main land, abolish the loathsome language of their former oppressor, and create a nationalistic island state that allows only one language: Manx.


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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by Salmoneus »

jal wrote:
R.Rusanov wrote:It's fairly obvious that there is absolutely no chance of Manx surviving in that kind of environment.
Are you kidding? After the Great Collapse, the Manxonians want to have nothing to do with the main land, abolish the loathsome language of their former oppressor, and create a nationalistic island state that allows only one language: Manx.


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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by hwhatting »

Salmoneus wrote:The one great upside to the collapse of civilisation may be that it might finally encourage a reform of Manx orthography.
Bah, when civilisation collapses, they will just stop writing. Too civilised. ;-)

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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by KathTheDragon »

But then writing will be invented again somewhere down the line, and English orthography will be reformed!

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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

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KathAveara wrote:But then writing will be invented again somewhere down the line, and English orthography will be reformed!
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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by sirdanilot »

linguoboy wrote:I'm utterly impressed how many of the contributors to this thread know exactly what the sociolinguistic situation is like on the Isle of Man despite never having been there or actually speaking to any Manx people
Why do you have this persistent belief that everyone must have been in place X to say anything about place X? Even if I had been on vacation on the isle of Man some time that would really not help me to learn a lot more about the sociolinguistic situation there. And if people can only talk about places they have lived in then you greatly reduce the amount of things people can talk about.

The potential language community of Manx is too small compared to, say, Welsh, where revitalization (of a once dying language) has actually worked because there were still enough people to produce materials for learning Welsh as well as teaching materials IN welsh about all kinds of things. Because of this Welsh can be used for all kinds of domains where English was once the only option.
The potential community for Manx is too small to produce these things. Not only do you need everyone to actually learn Manx, you also need to provide people with tools to teach Manx, and in order to give the language some domains for usage you need teaching materials IN manx about all kinds of things. There are just not enough resources for that.

You know as someone interested in indiginous south american languages (many of which are dying, and all of which are potentially threatened, yes even the large languages like Quechuan languages, because younger generations are all shifting to Spanish) I have read and thought about these things a lot. Language revitalization of a language that is dead virtually never works. The miraculous exception here is Hebrew, and all sorts of reasons can be thought of why Hebrew did work (I won't expand on that here). If you want to do language revitalization, you have to start earlier. You need to have an adequate speaker base (otherwise you are too late) that can provide tools for potential language users to learn the language and to learn about all sorts of things in the language, and you need to provide enough domains in which the language can be used.

I am not saying that revitalization projects of dying languages are useless. But they will probably not succeed in what they are designed for. What they can do, is 'conserve' a memory of the language for posterity and create some sort of self-identity. Booklets with sentences in the dying language, stories, things about old cultural things (which also often get lost together with the language), local names for flora and fauna, photographs, DVDs of rituals/music etc. That can give the community a sense of belonging and self-identity. But odds of the language magically being spoken again in a situation where you have only a couple of dozen elderly speakers left, are pretty much zero.
and am on tenterhooks to hear what they have to say about the current state of Sentinelese.
http://www.ethnologue.com/language/std
Not that ethnologue is such a reliable source, though. It's kinda hard to see how many people live on Sentinel island if anyone who gets close gets speared to death and if you cannot see it from areal pictures.

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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by linguoboy »

sirdanilot wrote:Even if I had been on vacation on the isle of Man some time that would really not help me to learn a lot more about the sociolinguistic situation there.
Quoted for truth.

You can speculate all you like about communities of which you have no real knowledge, but the end result is nonsense like this:
sirdanilot wrote:People do not use Manx in day-to-day conversations. If there are people that do so, then it's only a small subset[.]
Well, which is it? Do people (even if it's just a "small subset") use Manx in day-to-day conversations or don't they? You don't know. You're just guessing. Reading your remarks on Manx (or Irish or Cornish or any other Celtic language) tells me nothing at all about the language in question and more than I wanted to know about your own personal biases.

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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

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sirdanilot wrote:The potential language community of Manx is too small compared to, say, Welsh, where revitalization (of a once dying language) has actually worked because there were still enough people to produce materials for learning Welsh as well as teaching materials IN welsh about all kinds of things.
1) The potential language community of Manx is way larger than the language communities of most of Earth's 6000 languages.
2) Welsh wasn't "revitalized" the way you use it here (i.e. brought back from the dead, cf. your remark about Hebrew), it was just unstigmatized, but still spoken by 100,000s, I presume, at the time of the start of this "revitalization".


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Re: Where does /tɬ/ in Icelandic come from?

Post by R.Rusanov »

Well, three hundred fecund bushmen in some hill tribe in darkest wherever are much more likely to continue their language and general culture than, you know, the Gaeltacht or Manx or any other endangered european language. Coz they have lots of kids and little contact with the imperial languages. Compare that to Paddy O'Doyle in Connaught with his English cartoons and American schoolbooks and Californian music, who'll almost certainly have ~2 children and have miniscule influence on their upbringing.

And it's really obvious, macroscopically. But you can't admit that til you abandon your sense of "one can only know something by having personally experienced it for hundreds of time units"
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