Prescriptive linguistics gone berserk - are there other examples?

Factual Questions
1

Several countries have government appointed linguistic bodies that work (or attempt to work) to preserve the national language more or less “pure”. Iceland tries to invent Icelandic words before new imports get widespread use, France hates anything that sounds English, and Norway… well, here the protectors of the language pretty much suffer from multiple personality disorder.

What I actually wonder is if any other nation has done anything as radical as the Norwegian “new method of counting”?

Background:
Before 1951 all Norwegians spoke numbers the way they do in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands (among others), with ones before tens (e.g. nineteen, twenty, one and twenty, two and twenty). Even though neighbouring Sweden, like English, uses the more common form, with tens before ones, no Norwegian dialects had this form.

Then in 1949 Norwegian Telecommunications Board suggested to the Ministry of Communication that a new (in Norwegian) form of counting should be introduced. Research showed that the new form gave less room for misunderstanding… when transmitting phone numbers by voice. Oslo had just gone from five to six digit phone numbers, and the Telephone Company wanted fewer instances of miscommunication between subscriber and operator.

Politicians and linguists were enthusiastic, and even among the general public there was a slim majority for this reform. So from July 1st 1951 all government bodies, including broadcasting and schools, were to use the new counting, including new versions of twenty, thirty, fourty and seventy, to more precisely reflect their basis in two-tens, three-tens etc.

Funnily enough, even though the reform has had nothing but increasing public support, and usage in elementary school, broadcasting and business is almost uniformly “new counting”, “old counting” still survives, more than fifty years after the reform. Little research has been done, but what has been shown is that people think they use the new forms more than they really do, and that hardly anyone use “new counting” exclusively.

Has any other country tried such a radical language stunt? (I’ll be surprised if none has. :D)

2

Norwegian is a little special; they pretty much speak two languages there now, New-Norwegian and Book-Norwegian. I give Norway a couple of generations or so before they completely lose their language at this rate. I doubt many languages go throuh changes like this these days–I know that Iceland will never, ever do anything similar, at least.

3

Not sure how comparable it is to your example, but there are several acts of law in place to try to preserve the Welsh language, covering its inclusion in the school curriculum and on road markings and official publications etc. There is also a movement to do a similar thing in Cornwall, but it has not been very successful.

4

I had thought Cornish was dead. Actually, it probably is, but there seems to be a revivalist movement trying to bring it back.

5

Without wanting to offend those that love it (if any such are present), yes, it probably qualifies as ‘dead’ by any rational standard. The only tangible evidence I’ve seen for a revival movement is graffiti “Save Cornish language and traditions!” sprayed on motorway bridges and the occasional newspaper article (and probably more than half of these articles are just about someone being prosecuted for spraying “Save Cornish language and traditions!” on a motorway bridge)

6

One could perhaps argue that bilingual education in the US might be an example. Admittedly it has been a long time since I was around any bilingual education programs, but when I was in elementary school I definitely formed the impression that one goal of the program was to preserve fluency in the students’ native or “at-home” language (in that case Spanish). An ex of mine from Argentina had a sister in middle school and as near as I could make out from talking with him (he wasn’t exactly what you’d call fluent in English) a large part of her day was taught in Spanish. IIRC Madison has opened an all-Spanish elementary school. I don’t know how much of a goal maintaining fluency or “home culture” is there.

7

The Warlinen folks say that there are a thousand reasonably fluent speakers. I’d bet there are almost a thousand reasonably fluent Latin speakers just on this board.

8

It’s not a language stunt, but the US’s half-hearted attempt to “go metric” strikes me as somewhat similar.

9

For the record, the customary definition of “living language” is that it’s the language spoken in the home, learned as the (or a) primary language in childhood. There are probably well over a million Esperanto speakers, but that doesn’t make it a “living language” by this standard, because they all learned it as a second language.

Kernow (Cornish) is considered a dead language because the last “native” speaker to have it as his primary tongue, learned in childhood before English, died in 1799. There are still speakers, but they’re by way of being cultural preservationists (as is also the case with Manx).

Welsh, on the other hand, is the primary language of the home for well over a million speakers, most of whom are also fluent in English. Statistics from 25 years ago said there were about 50,000 monoglot Welsh speakers, who were not fluent in English, in Wales (and elsewhere in the UK), and a small surviving colony of Welsh-speakers in Argentina as well.

10

Nitpick: there are a small number of native Esperanto speakers, perhaps a thousand, who learned it in childhood from parents whose only common language is Esperanto.

These people often grow up at least trilingual: Esperanto, the mother’s language, the father’s language, and (if different from these), the language of the street where they grew up.

I know of several in Quebec, born to a Quebecois/Croatian couple.

As far as I know, there is no-one who speaks only Esperanto.

11

UselessGit, I always enjoy reading your contributions on the North Germanic languages. BTW I took a linguistics course back in the days of Eric the Red where we learned very rudimentary Old Norse. I got to where I could struggle through the story of Authun and the polar bear from Greenland.

Anyhow, if the Norwegians lose their language as you predict, what would they be speaking instead? Swedish?

12

Sheesh. Way to hijack my thread with nonsense. :smiley:
No one speaks nynorsk or bokmål, they’re writing norms. Of course they influence spoken Norwegian, but they are also changed to reflect the actual spoken language. They are also more than 100 years old and without them we would have had to keep writing Danish, so the fact that we have two writing norms (or three if you count the conservative, prissy west-ender speak, “riksmål”) is hardly relevant to the continued survival of Norwegian as a language, and neither is what the OP referenced, “the new counting”. If you have something else to base your idea of “this rate” on, UselessGit your prediction might have some value, if you don’t, you’re shooting blind with a possibly unloaded gun. :wink:

If Norwegian is threatened it’s not by having these two writing norms, it’s by having only 4 million speakers, existing in a global economy and by not having a language policy as rigid as Iceland’s. And if Norwegian ever gets relegated to the historybooks it will be by future English. That’s more than a couple generations away though. Norwegian may be borrowing more words, and changing in various ways, but that’s what languages do if they’re not artificially preserved, and I’m fairly certain people 100 years from now will speak a language as easily understandable to me as mine would be to someone living 100 years ago.

13

Teeny tiny nitpick:

Kernow is the Cornish name for Cornwall. Kernewek is the name for Cornish (following the same pattern as Cymru – Cymraig for Welsh, and Breizh – Brezhoneg for Breton; there’s no country called “Gael” but the languages still end with a “g” or “k” sound – Gaeilge, Gaelg, and Gàidhlig).

14

Why can’t you Norwegians and Swedes and Danes all get together and stop pretending to speak different languages? Wouldn’t that make everything a bit simpler?

15

It’ll happen as soon as the Chinese stop pretending they only speak one language.

16

Bilingual education is not done with the goal of preserving native language - it’s done to prevent non-english speakers from falling behind in their studies. The goal of bilingual programs - though I’m sure it’s not always achieved - is to eventually shift students into English-speaking classrooms.

17

And this is often done by teaching the students to read and write in their native language because that knowledge makes it easier for them to do the same in English.

18

In Germany, many schools now teach certain subjects exclusively in English. This is usually sciences (biology, in particular) as English is considered to be sine qua non for a successful career in science / engineering in modern Europe.

Some UK schools have started making the first steps towards teaching lessons just in French - the problems we have are:

  1. we all hate the french (and the germans, and most other foreigners) so it doesn’t play well in the right-wing press

  2. no-one can decide which language to teach - french is traditional but less useful for european business needs. Chinese or hindi would make more sense, but see 1) for reasons why that won’t float.

19

The children’s book? Very good! You’ve probably noticed that the language has changed a tad from Old Norse, mostly additions of vowels with Maðr becoming Maður, Auðigr becoming Auðugur and such. That’s more an aesthetic evolution than anything else, in our defense.

Nah, not as such; Swedish is being destroyed like Norwegian and Danish, with foreign slang becoming “normal” words eerily fast. They’ll all change, get simpler and become more like English with time, methinks.

Thanks to our fervent attempts at saving the Icelandic language (which would probably be dead already had it not been for Danish linguist Rasmus Kristian Rask, God rest his soul), this is not happening here as much, but sentence structures and such are becoming skewed due to the influx of English. For example, “Vakna” means “waking up” in Icelandic but saying “Vakna Upp” is pretty widespread now, despite it not making any sense gramatically… you don’t wake “up” in Icelandic any more than you sleep down. I have tons more but I think you get my point. The words are Icelandic but the structure is tainted (no offense meant) with English. This worries language puritans (like this humble doper) terribly, and is going to be very difficult to fix. Perhaps what went around is slowly coming around… Icelandic/Old Norse really did a number on English back when, after all.

Sorry, naita, I was aware that bokmål was not “spoken” as such; I meant that there were two official versions of the language in existence. But why wait until Norwegian burns up and a new language rises from its ashes? I’ll personally teach you guys Icelandic again (so forgetful, you Scandinavians) if you give us Smutthulet. Pretty please? If you don’t play nice we’ll buy all your businesses, you know… just ask Denmark, or “Crapflatland” as we intend to rename it soon.

Regarding Norwegian/Old Norse/Icelandic, I’m curious whether you can understand some of the older text, like the 12th century Hávamál:

deyja frændr,
deyr sjalfr it sama,
en orðstírr
deyr aldregi
hveim er sér góðan getr.

Deyr fé,
deyja frændr,
deyr sjalfr it sama,
ek veit einn
at aldrei deyr:
dómr um dauðan hvern.

Incidentally: Hávamál, from Odin’s mouth, apparently, are a wonderul set of “life guides” that I sincerely recommend reading and following. I only wish Asatru had conquered Europe rather than Christianity. What a wonderful, peaceful world we’d be living in now…

20

No worries. I just don’t see how having two official written forms threaten the survival of the language. And I can’t give you Smutthullet, since everyone but us Norwegians are irresponsible fish thieves, we have to patrol even in international waters and arrest Spaniards, Russians and the odd Icelander when we can catch them. Neither am I afraid of the attempts of Icelandic banks to buy up stuff. The software they run all (well for almost all the banks anyway) comes from the company where my dad is head of R&D, if they get too pushy we’ll just log in through a back door and delete all your money. Denmark consists mainly of sand from when the glaciers were grinding down Norway, and thus rightfully belongs to us. And if I thought I’d get any use for it I’d learn Icelandic, but it’s likely to go the way of the German I took for five years. That language is now just a tiny remnant in a dusty part of my brain.

Can’t read it. I recognise quite a few words, but I can’t tell what tenses they’re in, which makes it hard to even try to guess at the remaining words. And that’s in spite of having read it in Norse and Norwegian before. I’m currently reading a new scholarly work on Norse religion, which talks about both the available sources, the history of research into Norse religion, the cosmology, gods and other beings, the rites, and its place in culture and society at the time. Kind of nice to get a sober and comprehensive look at it, since most treatments completely ignore that all the major sources are from Christian scholars decades and centuries after the practices were banned.