Parnell

You couldn't be particularly Irish if you use the word 'dude'. Cut out the Americanisms before you start lecturing others about cultural purity.

Iolo

I'm afraid you know nothing whatever about language. Read it up, lad, and stop being a philistine idiot .

Parnell

Here is the 'shame the opposition' method in action. The only philistine here is the person who believes an effectively extinct language should be conserved by extreme measures, for strange reasons of cultural heritage.

As they say, the antiquarian mentality has never died. Language is just a means of communication. The less languages the better.

Ri Fhionngaill

Language is not just a means of communicating words. See the post I made a few pages ago.

And Ireland may get a little tired of the language being rammed down their throats. But it is most certainly worth it. A country that can't translate its own placenames is little better than a colony. It's definitely not a nation, in the traditional meaning of the word. Claiming that a vast majority want to get rid of it is a massive exaggeration - it would be a massive exaggeration even in Scotland, where Gaelic doesn't even care about itself that much. And, even if the majortiy did want to get rid of it, you've had, as I said, a lot of depressed and confused people, halfway between two identities, if it suddenly vanished.

Iolo

The numbers speaking our language are increasing rather fast, and anyone who believes a language spoken by 600,000 people is extinct is a drunken dodo .

nbbourbaki

......... at best, as a second language and mainly for fun.

Iolo

Expert on this, are you?

Fortunately we can now manage these matters ourselves, and the ignorant waffle of outsiders doesn't matter, but I do feel I ought to say something about language here. There are so many monoglot simpletons around who suppose that they can somehow think and then 'put it into language', but this is of course nonsense beyond a very basic 'picture' level: we think in a particular language, and each language codifies reality - and our thought - in all sorts of ways dependent on its history and grammar. The tense system codifies our sense of time, its colour system affects our perceptions and so on (but the ignorant suppose their 'green' or 'red' are everyone's, and will be baffled by this statement). Those who have tried some translating from English into some other particular language will understand that you DO NOT just 'put it into another language' - it can't be done: you have to find some sort of equivalence, and often it doesn't exist. Try dealing with English irony in American English, for instance - and that's 'the same' language: there's a long history behind that, and the majority of Americans just seem to have missed it out altogether.

Particular languages embody the past of their people. To stick with American English again, the whole puritan repressive tradition seems to be embodied in the male American's obsession with 'asses', and the urge to kick those hated homosexual objects suggests not only puritanism but also a tradition of bullying competitiveness and mother's-boy desperation to display maleness. It also suggests frontier yobbishness, like the word 'stomping'. Languages, moreover, are all based on metaphor, and the kinds of metaphor used affect perception of reality: it's argued, for instance, that certain native-American ones are better suited to nuclear physics than English, which, like most west European ones is peculiarly 'thingy' (we are 'in' months, 'on' cruises and the like).

Just as only a fool would destroy the huge wealth of possible medication and so on embodied in rare plants, so every language embodies a hugely-interesting potentially-enriching way of seeing reality. This is why it is worth studying another language even if you can't use it to sell toilet paper, bazookas or whatever: it increases the humane understanding. I don't think that fundamentalism, for instance, could survive a serious study of linguistic history. The fact that the NT authors, for instance, didn't understand the poetic use of parallelism in Hebrew means they have Jesus riding TWO donkeys into Jerusalem. He should have kicked one of those asses, perhaps !

Irish Toaster

Born in Co. Limerick. I'm Irish.
I use words like 'dude' out of cultural diversity. Heck I say the odd German word now and again, it does not make me less Irish.
I am not preaching to you, I am just saying that there are many who do regard the language important. Even among my age group.
That's just my opinion, dude

Ri Fhionngaill

The Irish don't naturally use American words. They're cultural imports. But, then again, they don't naturally speak English. A bit hypocritical, don't you think, to criticise him for using an American word, and then to attack your own country's historical language? And the language that parts of your country still natively speak?

I think Iolo said it best. A language is code for a person's reality. This is expressed through words, of course, and every language has words that are equivalent to those in every other, more often than not. But the meaning of words won't be the same in another language. There is never a literal translation of any word. If you say 'blue' to someone in the far north of the Hebrides, they'll point to something grey, or green, just as quickly as they would point to something that you would consider blue. Those colours are interchangeable. The average Scot would think that's silly - but what is blue? Is there an international definition, or is it defined by the language and the use of the word in that language? It's the latter.

Each language in the world applies its own definitions and the logic of its own culture or nation to each object, word, or idea that it has a word for. And that's often unique to that culture or nation. There's a reason that different cultures have different attitudes to things, and different philosophies, and that's their language. Think about this - in an argument, if someone is using their own definitions, what happens? They don't see things the way you do, they have a different opinion, that seems irrational and perhaps a little confused. But, to them, it makes perfect sense, for a good reason. It's the same in language.

And, with those opinions come ideas. Every language has knowledge that would lose something if it was expressed in any other language. If you read any Irish proverb that was originally in Irish, it won't make much sense to you. It is also seen in art; the seal of Aonghas Og is often quoted as the proof that, by the 1300s, the Hebrides were part of Scotland. But there are nine waves on it, a reference to the Gaelic rule that if you can put nine waves between your own ship and that of your opponent, then they will be unable to chase you. The seal has a message that no-one would know if no-one could speak Irish.

It was Irish that preserved the knowledge of the Romans, and a lot of their own understanding of the world. If no-one could read their language in the 900s, then the world wouldn't have got out of the Dark Ages for some time. If Irish monks hadn't established themselves in every part of Europe, we would probably still be pagan. Without their language, who'd understand a word of what they had to say? As you can see, if a language as unlikely as Irish, now spoken natively by about sixty thousand people, is one of the only reasons that Christianity and writing was introduced to most of Europe, any other language will probably contain similar knowledge that the world will benefit from.

Then there's the practical benefit of the destruction of a language. What is there, exactly? Most of those who natively speak Irish, and many other languages, can also speak English. Yes, it's necessary to have some knowledge of English and other major languages if you want to run a business. But there's no need to destroy other languages. English will never be spoken in the home in Spain, even if it's the only language you hear on the street. In some parts of the country, it is the only language that you hear on the street. Spanish people communicate with large English communities - in English - and vice versa. But the television is still in Spanish, and people in the home still talk in Spanish. You'll never go into a Spanish home and find them watching English soaps. There's also accents and letters that some languages use, that others do not. Try and get someone who only speaks Gaelic and has never heard a word of English to say 'xylophone.' There's no-one who doesn't speak English and Gaelic, of course, but, if there was, then there's a lot of words they wouldn't be able to pronounce.

Irish Toaster

Well said