Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie

Should we let old cultures and langauges die out?

Options
24567…15

Comments

  • Options
    #32
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 0 ✭ [Deleted User]


    Eugene Norman wrote: »
    A fair amount of well poisoning there. Impressive.

    It is a regrettable fact that some people have a very narrow and parochial view of the world. Thus, a debate about language becomes an excuse for people to make lazy generalisations about English and Irish, or a debate about dominant religious ethos gives people a chance to attack or defend Catholicism.

    My point was that there's a whole big world out there - a point that will almost certainly be missed by most contributors to the thread.

    Eugene Norman wrote: »
    In the end however your argument seems to be languages (like the one you are writing in) change over time so why preserve indigenous or minority languages

    It may seem that way to you, but that's not my argument.


  • Options
    #33
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 0 ✭ [Deleted User]


    Martial9 wrote: »
    But if you made a mistake with your recitals, a whack of the cane your pasty arse got.

    We are making the same mistakes, via the modern age, with our teaching of Irish.

    I'm pretty sure corporal punishment has been banned in schools here.

    Just saying.


  • Options
    #34
    Mountainsandh
    Registered Users Posts: 6,700 ✭✭✭Mountainsandh


    kowloon wrote: »
    Never said we should forget it, but rigid adherence to it causes cultures to stagnate. There's a balance.

    I agree. Language and cultures are not frozen entities you can preserve as they present at a particular moment in time, so it is utterly paradoxical to try and enforce one or the other. Some aspects are easier to preserve, in that they can be recorded and their memory upheld in a population's psyche.
    The current Irish lobby (for want of a better word) imo are reaching a point where the campaign is antagonizing the very people they wish to convince to speak and use the language.
    I agree we should try and preserve languages and cultures, but not forcibly.
    We should also know when to let go, and let languages and cultures evolve, with the losses this might imply.


  • Options
    #35
    Martial9
    Registered Users Posts: 655 ✭✭✭Martial9


    Deleted User wrote: »
    I'm pretty sure corporal punishment has been banned in schools here.

    Just saying.

    Hence why I said via the modern age. My point still stands.


  • Options
    #36
    Martial9
    Registered Users Posts: 655 ✭✭✭Martial9


    Billy86 wrote: »

    That said, if the world meshes into one sole 'primary' language over the coming decades or centuries that could also be a good thing. The two are not exactly mutually exclusive.

    Would it be a good thing, though? Our different lingos, mannerisms, cultures and what not makes global diversity beautiful.

    It would be boring if we all spoke English and all followed similar culture.


  • Advertisement
  • Options
    #37
    Junkyard Tom
    Registered Users Posts: 10,117 ✭✭✭✭Junkyard Tom


    It would make a pleasant change from trying to destroy them.


  • Options
    #38
    FloatingVoter
    Registered Users Posts: 6,133 ✭✭✭FloatingVoter


    The two dominant languages worldwide today are English and Chinese. Throw in Spanish for the bronze and you can pretty much travel the globe and find someone who'll know a little of one of the above.
    But that isn't enough.
    Portuguese isn't going anywhere soon. Neither is French or German. Farsi and all the other middle eastern languages and dialects will get you a shedload of literature and a lot of current affairs.
    As for the one we're conversing in, English is constantly evolving. Evolving to the point where I have to look up the urban dictionary to discover wtf the youds of today are twittering on about.
    And that is as it should be for a living language, the words of a younger generation as alien to the older fogie as the words of Shakespeare are to any of us born after about 1700. Just takes a little work in both cases to figure it out.
    The ossified languages have no younger generations inventing words while collecting ASBOs- they have parliamentary committees discussing expense accounts and action plans.


  • Options
    #39
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 0 ✭ [Deleted User]


    Martial9 wrote: »
    Hence why I said via the modern age. My point still stands.

    But it doesn't really.


  • Options
    #40
    Mountainsandh
    Registered Users Posts: 6,700 ✭✭✭Mountainsandh


    [Deleted User] wrote: »
    It is a regrettable fact that some people have a very narrow and parochial view of the world. Thus, a debate about language becomes an excuse for people to make lazy generalisations about English and Irish, or a debate about dominant religious ethos gives people a chance to attack or defend Catholicism.

    My point was that there's a whole big world out there - a point that will almost certainly be missed by most contributors to the thread.

    It may seem that way to you, but that's not my argument.

    Your pompous post does not really address the question though.
    Did you mean that people's perspectives should be broadened before language and culture issues can be addressed ?
    If so, I agree it would be a better way to tackle the lack of enthusiasm than to force feed the above.
    I'm just guessing since it wasn't quite clear.

    Cultural studies are slowly being introduced in schools. Maybe as the world opens up at neck breaking speed, the best way to encourage people to embrace and preserve their "local" culture and language is to enable them to define it against the rest of the world.

    Put simply I think the "you know you're Irish when..." approach works better than "you're Irish, do the Irish thing".


  • Options
    #41
    Shep_Dog
    Closed Accounts Posts: 499 ✭✭Shep_Dog


    Deleted User wrote: »
    I'm pretty sure corporal punishment has been banned in schools here.
    While that's true, nobody has ever apologised for what happened in the past and the legacy of the brute-force teaching of Irish is the massive hidden resistance to the language concealed under a defensive veneer of expressing 'support' for Irish whenever the Irish lobby conducts a poll.

    More to the point, is the role laws and coercion have in supporting minority languages and cultures. It's one thing protecting minority cultures from discrimination, quite another matter when the state tries to force the minority culture onto the majority population.

    It is the main objective of the unregistered political lobby group, 'Conradh na Gaeilge' to reinstate Irish as 'the common tongue' of Ireland. This goal goes way beyond that of preserving a minority language or culture.

    This agenda is not about preserving culture, it's about power.


  • Advertisement
  • Options
    #42
    Mother Brain
    Closed Accounts Posts: 255 ✭✭Mother Brain


    To my mind clinging on to the past is counter productive and only helps to foster cultural stagnation.

    If anything at this stage we should be actively trying to evolve our society in new directions rather than trying to preserve the culture and traditions of a bygone era.


  • Options
    #43
    Eugene Norman
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,191 ✭✭✭Eugene Norman


    Shep_Dog wrote: »
    While that's true, nobody has ever apologised for what happened in the past and the legacy of the brute-force teaching of Irish is the massive hidden resistance to the language concealed under a defensive veneer of expressing 'support' for Irish whenever the Irish lobby conducts a poll.

    More to the point, is the role laws and coercion have in supporting minority languages and cultures. It's one thing protecting minority cultures from discrimination, quite another matter when the state tries to force the minority culture onto the majority population.

    It is the main objective of the unregistered political lobby group, 'Conradh na Gaeilge' to reinstate Irish as 'the common tongue' of Ireland. This goal goes way beyond that of preserving a minority language or culture.

    This agenda is not about preserving culture, it's about power.

    The problem with this argument is that Irish is in fact an official language. Of equal status. That needs to change before either the language is non-obligatory in schools and before we can condemn conradh for wishing one official language rather than the other is the most widely spoken. There doesn't seem to be much desire for such a change. Not seeing a power play either.

    With respect to other minority languages worldwide the arguments against Irish by "English language nationalists" (to coin a term) in Ireland is not too different to an English speaking chauvinist in the UK, Canada,Australia or New Zealand bemoaning any expenditure on minority languages, including signage, government document translations, whatever.


  • Options
    #44
    Eugene Norman
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,191 ✭✭✭Eugene Norman


    Mother Brain wrote: »
    To my mind clinging on to the past is counter productive and only helps to foster cultural stagnation.

    If anything at this stage we should be actively trying to evolve our society in new directions rather than trying to preserve the culture and traditions of a bygone era.

    The future of course will be more of the language and culture you are familiar with and less of the "bygone" cultures and languages you are not comfortable with. How lucky you were born in a dominant culture ( in terms of language anyway).

    That sentiment, btw, would be easily transportable to a 19th C imperialist. Let the lesser cultures die.


  • Options
    #45
    steddyeddy
    Registered Users Posts: 27,564 ✭✭✭✭steddyeddy


    Candie wrote: »
    It is now though Eddie. It can't be compared with Samskrit, which hasn't been really spoken for centuries. Not that I think you were comparing it.

    Good point Candie. Do you speak any other languages do you mind me asking?


  • Options
    #46
    Caoimhgh1n
    Closed Accounts Posts: 34,499 ✭✭✭✭Caoimhgh1n


    I don't think we should let any language die out if we have the choice, which we do. Even if everybody learned 3 languages, think of how many we could keep living...


  • Options
    #47
    Mother Brain
    Closed Accounts Posts: 255 ✭✭Mother Brain


    Eugene Norman wrote: »
    The future of course will be more of the language and culture you are familiar with and less of the "bygone" cultures and languages you are not comfortable with. How lucky you were born in a dominant culture ( in terms of language anyway).

    That sentiment, btw, would be easily transportable to a 19th C imperialist. Let the lesser cultures die.

    I must say, I find that a very strange way of framing my comments.

    I'm not talking about cultural imperialism whereby one culture is 'superior' to another, what I mean is that change happens. There are new realities to be faced. Traditional attitudes rarely have a vested interest in adapting to shifting social changes and in my mind end up holding up social progress because of a misguided attempt to preserve that which cannot be preserved.

    A few recent examples include traditional attitudes to abortion and education by church run institutions who require prospective students to be baptised etc. These are primarily religious hangovers, but are representative of ways in which social progress is stymied by attitudes and ideals that are increasingly anachronistic.

    Surely we should be trying our best to create a culture that is the best it can be rather than clinging on to the past?


  • Options
    #48
    bnt
    Registered Users Posts: 12,961 ✭✭✭✭bnt


    Dying doesn't mean being forgotten. These days we have the ability to keep comprehensive records on something before it disappears, which means we can safely retire it to the archives. Just as there are scholars with an interest in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, who can read and even speak the language and talk about the culture; by the year 2112 the Irish language may have disappeared from common usage, but still alive among scholars in universities, not forgotten.

    From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch’.

    — Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut



  • Options
    #49
    Ave Sodalis
    Registered Users Posts: 7,548 ✭✭✭Ave Sodalis


    Irish sounds very much like Tolkien Elvish in my mind, and that for that reason (along with more sensible reasons) it should be kept and encouraged.


  • Options
    #50
    asherbassad
    Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 1,869 ✭✭✭asherbassad


    steddyeddy wrote: »
    So should the whole world speak one language? If so which one?

    The world soon will......it will be a combination of poorly formed phonetics bearing some resemblance to what used to be English coupled with infusions of emoticons. You will transmit this sh1t to the person sitting opposite you via your headmounted communicator. Sensors in your mouth will transcribe gibberish that you utter like "like, lulz, whatevz, ledge, totes-scrotes, etc, combined with emoticons that your eyes settle on from the display on your visor. This crap will be digitised and wifi-d to the cretin who you are talking to.

    He will understand it perfectly.


  • Options
    #51
    Tarzana2
    Closed Accounts Posts: 3,553 ✭✭✭Tarzana2


    People are welcome to try and keep Irish going as a language. I won't be joining them though. :)


  • Advertisement
  • Options
    #52
    Tarzana2
    Closed Accounts Posts: 3,553 ✭✭✭Tarzana2


    Candie wrote: »
    There are more than 390 African-Asiatic languages. Have you heard them all?

    Yes.


  • Options
    #53
    speedboatchase
    Registered Users Posts: 5,777 ✭✭✭speedboatchase


    steddyeddy wrote: »
    So should the whole world speak one language? If so which one?

    Emoji. If anything, we're steadily moving back to the time of hieroglyphics.


  • Options
    #54
    Princess Consuela Bananahammock
    Registered Users Posts: 33,048 ✭✭✭✭Princess Consuela Bananahammock


    eternal wrote: »
    We are our past. Do not forget what moulded us.

    I find myself more moulded by my present. People live so much in the past sometimes, it hinders their ability to move forward.

    As for the lanaguges idea - no problem them surviving: as long as their are people willing to learn and speak them. But don't force people to endure something against their will.

    Everything I don't like is either woke or fascist - possibly both - pick one.



  • Options
    #55
    FloatingVoter
    Registered Users Posts: 6,133 ✭✭✭FloatingVoter


    sup_dude wrote: »
    Irish sounds very much like Tolkien Elvish in my mind, and that for that reason (along with more sensible reasons) it should be kept and encouraged.

    Tolkien was a professor who specialised in Old English (Beowolf and all the lads) . He was also highly read on Irish, old Norse and German and other languages with mythic heroes. He'd have stumbled across the Gaeltacht back in the 40s and 50s when working as an external examiner for NUIG.
    When it came to inventing languages he certainly borrowed heavily from the Irish strain of that - in a way JRR Tolkien did more to keep Irish subconsciously alive than generations of sadistic "teachers" ever did.


  • Options
    #56
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 0 ✭ [Deleted User]


    kowloon wrote: »
    Culture changes, that's why we aren't running around the place naked smeared in our own $hite.

    Speak for your fcukin' self, mate! :p:p


  • Options
    #57
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 0 ✭ [Deleted User]


    Shep_Dog wrote: »
    While that's true, nobody has ever apologised for what happened in the past and the legacy of the brute-force teaching of Irish is the massive hidden resistance to the language concealed under a defensive veneer of expressing 'support' for Irish whenever the Irish lobby conducts a poll.

    I didn't realise you were old enough to have been at school when corporal punishment was on the go.

    I was.


  • Options
    #58
    4zn76tysfajdxp
    Closed Accounts Posts: 27,944 ✭✭✭✭4zn76tysfajdxp


    Deleted User wrote: »
    I didn't realise you were old enough to have been at school when corporal punishment was on the go.

    I was.

    Wait a minute, are you actually one hundred and forty one years of age?


  • Options
    #59
    Princess Consuela Bananahammock
    Registered Users Posts: 33,048 ✭✭✭✭Princess Consuela Bananahammock


    Deleted User wrote: »
    I didn't realise you were old enough to have been at school when corporal punishment was on the go.

    I was.

    I am and I remember it. At least on a personal level.

    Everything I don't like is either woke or fascist - possibly both - pick one.



  • Options
    #60
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 0 ✭ [Deleted User]


    Eugene Norman wrote: »
    The future of course will be more of the language and culture you are familiar with and less of the "bygone" cultures and languages you are not comfortable with. How lucky you were born in a dominant culture ( in terms of language anyway).

    That sentiment, btw, would be easily transportable to a 19th C imperialist. Let the lesser cultures die.

    I'd half agree with that. Logic suggests that the poster is assuming that the future will mean more of the familiar and dominant language and culture.

    But is that a safe assumption? The modern world isn't dominated by "English". It's dominated by "American", and that domination is coming to an end. The last two great world empires were both English-speaking; the next is unlikely to be.


  • Advertisement
  • Options
    #61
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 0 ✭ [Deleted User]


    Ansley Puny Airplane wrote: »
    Wait a minute, are you actually one hundred and forty one years of age?

    Very droll, and indeed almost as funny as the time a mate of mine said that it was a mistake to outlaw capital punishment in schools. Oh, how we chuckled at that one.


Advertisement