Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh
| Message 9 of 14 04 March 2009 at 6:53pm | IP Logged |
TheElvenLord wrote:
I know Cornish was reconstructed entirely (well, about 99%) from old texts written by native speakers. New words have been introduced. But - Welsh has far more English loanwords than Cornish - but Welsh is still its own. |
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But most of those loanwords were assimilated over time by native bilingual speakers, and that has formed Modern Welsh.
Others were introduced by the rapid expansion of Welsh language education into non-native areas, of course, and the people of North Wales will often decry the language of South Wales as lamentably anglicised. (The North don't have a word for "evening", which is a very Germanic word to have -- Southern Welsh does.... I think.)
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William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6272 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French
| Message 10 of 14 04 March 2009 at 7:36pm | IP Logged |
There is supposed to be a significant difference between written Welsh and Scottish Gaelic, and what people actually speak, with there being several dialects.
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Stephen Groupie Australia Joined 6411 days ago 61 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin, Ancient Greek
| Message 11 of 14 05 March 2009 at 12:08am | IP Logged |
William Camden wrote:
There is supposed to be a significant difference between written Welsh and Scottish Gaelic, and what people actually speak, with there being several dialects. |
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Yes there is a huge difference and I suppose being from different branches on the Celtic language tree, underlines this.
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icing_death Senior Member United States Joined 5861 days ago 296 posts - 302 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 12 of 14 05 March 2009 at 3:58pm | IP Logged |
They still exist. Only their tails have disappeared
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Ashiro Groupie United Kingdom learnxlanguage.com/ Joined 5802 days ago 89 posts - 101 votes Studies: Spanish
| Message 13 of 14 31 May 2009 at 3:55pm | IP Logged |
I'll be taking up Manx as one of my 'languages to learn' in life. It annoys me when people insist a language is extinct. When people fire back that its still spoken they hit back with - no thats neo-Manx (or neo-something or other). Its not the real language.
Considering how fluid language is I think its a bit silly to suggest that a language still spoken is extinct. The fact the last 'native speaker' died is largeley irrelevent. The language was still spoken as a second language by many, it was recorded, written and used (however rarely). It was a dormant part of the culture of Mann perhaps but it certainly didn't extinguish and turn into some ugly neo-zombie dialect.
I find it mildly offensive and very unfair to the thousands of people actively learning it and re-invigorating this part of their culture.
The same goes for other languages labelled 'extinct' such as Cornish.
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Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6034 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds
| Message 14 of 14 31 May 2009 at 4:15pm | IP Logged |
icing_death wrote:
They still exist. Only their tails have disappeared |
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Astonishing...
There is a town in Bulgaria, called Gabrovo, where cats suffer the same misfortune. The difference is Manx cats are born this way, whereas Gabrovo cats have their tails cut... with an axe.
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