Gaelic hasnt been lost. It’s never died or been brought back. There’s an unbroken line of native speakers going back to the beginning of the language. That doesn’t seem like a ‘lost’ language to me. Furthermore I’m not sure what ‘artificial life-support’ means in this context. Gaelic is given funding for schools because there’s still native speakers of the language. It’s no more artificial than money being given to schools for English language lessons.
If anything is ‘artificial’ its the imposition of a foreign language
(English) into a Gaelic majority zone and native speakers having to
fight for decades to be able to be taught in their own language. Native speakers being forced to learn English to exist within their own regions because a central government would not allow services to be given in a people’s own language.
But then the clock only goes back so far with people who wish that minority languages would just die. There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?
“There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?” — THIS RIGHT HERE
Also just gonna point out here:
In the UK, the languages Gaelige, Gaelic, Cymraeg and Kernewek (that’s Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish respectively) didn’t just “die out.” There was a concerted effort by the English to kill them off.
For example, in Wales, if a child was heard speaking Welsh in a classroom, they’d be given a “Welsh Not”, a wooden plaque engraved with “WN” to hang around their neck. They’d pass it onto the next child heard speaking Welsh, and whoever had the Welsh Not at the end of the day was punished - usually with a beating.
Kernewek was revived after a long hard struggle by the Cornish folk, and is now being taught again, but a lot about it has been lost because everyone who grew up speaking it has died.
And languages are never revived “just because.” The language of a place can offer so much insight into its history, so if you’re content to let a language die then you’re content to let history die.
People talk about “dead” languages as if they dwindle away gradually, naturally coming to an end and evolving into something else, but that’s rarely the case. Languages like Cymraeg and Gaelige and especially Kernewek didn’t have the chance to die with dignity, they were literally beaten out of my parents and grandparents.
Is it any wonder every other country hate the English? We invade their country, steal their history, claim pieces of their history as ours or flat out re-write it, and kill every part of their culture that we can.
It’s a miracle that any of the Celtic languages survived, so even if you don’t see the point in keeping them alive, the actual natives of each country we’ve fucked over are clinging onto what heritage they have left through the only thing they can: their language.
Hey OP, póg mo thóin!
*snerk* xD
I would like to point all of these “just let it die” assholes directly at Hebrew.
The language was effectively dead. It had been murdered and forced-assimilated away.
But there was this dude named Ben Yehuda.
And he said “no.”
“The language of my people for four thousand years or more,” he said, “should not stop existing because of a bunch of assholes.” (Okay, this is a dramatic retelling. He probably didn’t actually say assholes.)
So he started an official movement to recreate Hebrew as closely as possible to how it had been spoken about a thousand years prior.
Today, ancient Hebrew is spoken by millions of Jews around the world weekly in our prayers and Torah readings, and modern Hebrew is the official language of eight and a half million people–many of them having been born speaking it as a first language. Many people in the first group also speak at least some modern Hebrew–and it’s possible you do, too! A lot of loan words from Hebrew and Yiddish have made their way into English (like klutz, mensch, and kibitz).
That’s hardly “on life support.” Hebrew is growing, living, and thriving because of the Enlightenment efforts of the 1800s. The same COULD be done for languages like Welsh, Navajo, and Basque if the larger powers that be said “this is important” rather than forcing a giant bastion of culture–the language in which a people lived, loved, thought, told stories, and explained their world–to die.
0 languages die “naturally”. A whole river of Romani languages in central europe died because the people were all slaughtered in WW2. Very “natural”. Every tribe that was forcefully ripped from their culture and pushed into english language and white culture in americas, in africa, in south asia, none of them lost their language “naturally” pass me with this.
I never thought about the etymology of the verb “gypped” until the end of college, when my friend, lamenting his stolen iPod, said the word and immediately retracted it. “Isn’t that offensive?” he wondered. Until that moment, I had never thought about it either. What sparked our unease was the sudden realization that “gypped” was somehow tied to “gypsy.”
“Gypsy” is commonly used to describe the Romani people. But the term carries many negative connotations, and its derivative carries even more: when somebody is “gypped,” they are, according to Merriam-Webster, “defrauded, swindled, cheated.”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known recorded definition of the term “gypped” dates back to the 1899 Century Dictionary, which says that it is “probably an abbreviation of gypsy, gipsy, as applied to a sly unscrupulous fellow.”
It also appears in 1914, in Louis Jackson & C. R. Hellyer’s Vocabulary of Criminal Slang. The noun “gyp” was described at the time as “current in polite circles,” and “derived from the popular experience with thieving Gypsies.” As a verb, the term is defined as “to flim-flam” and to “cheat by means of guile and manual dexterity.” Proper usage? “Gyp this boob with a deuce.” I’m not exactly sure what gyp this boob with a deuce means, but it sounds like something stuck between ribald and ridiculous.
F. Scott Fitzgerald used the word in his iconic novel The Great Gatsby: “We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we got gyped out of it all in two days.” Simone de Beauvoir used the word in her 1965 book Force of Circumstance: “Turning an incredulous gaze toward that young and credulous girl, I realize with stupor how much I was gypped.”
Many people have limited knowledge of the term’s origins, and so the word “gypped” isn’t quickly going out of fashion. On April 30, 2013, a publisher released a book in a New York Times bestselling series by Carol Higgins Clark titled Gypped: A Regan Reilly Mystery. The book — the 15th installment of the long-running thriller series — had nothing to do with the Roma people, but instead is a murder mystery full of financial scams and intrigue set in sunny California.
After multiple allegations of racist intent with her choice of title, Clark issued a statement that read: “I am truly sorry for any offense caused by using the word ‘Gypped’ as the title of my book. It was a familiar word since childhood which no one I knew associated with its origin. Since this issue arose, I’ve asked many people who also had no idea of any negative connotation.”
Clark’s experience rings true: many people just don’t know what the word means, or where it comes from.
“I encounter a lot of people who tell me that they never knew the word ‘gypped’ had anything to do with gypsies, or that it’s offensive — especially when the word is heard not read,” says University of Texas at Austin professor Ian Hancock, who was born in Britain to Romani parents. “My response to them is, That’s okay. You didn’t know but now you do. So stop using it. It may mean nothing to you, but when we hear it, it still hurts.”
Hancock tells me the word “gypsy” itself is an “exonym” — a term imposed upon an ethnic group by outsiders. When the Roma people moved westward from India towards the European continent, they were mistaken to be Egyptian because of their features and dark skin. We see the same phenomenon across several languages, not only English. Victor Hugo, in his epic Hunchback of Notre Dame, noted that the Medieval French term for the Roma was egyptiens. In Spanish, the word for gypsy is “gitano,” which comes from the word egipcio, meaning Egyptian — in Romanian: tigan, in Bulgarian: tsiganin, in Turkish: cingene — all of which are variations of slang words for “Egyptian” in those languages.
The Roma people originated thousands of years ago not in Egypt, but in Northern India. They were displaced during a series of 11th-century Muslim invasions during the Ghaznavid Empire. Many were taken as prisoners of war back to what is now modern-day Turkey, during the Ottoman plunder of the Byzantine Empire. A majority of already-displaced Romani people later migrated to Eastern and Southern Europe. The Roma language is derived from ancient Sanskrit and still phonetically, grammatically and linguistically resembles tongues with Sanskrit roots like Hindi or Rajasthani. Romani music is still strikingly similar to Indian folk music, and their spiritual practices — despite conversion to local religions over time — still resemble aspects of Hindu cosmology.
The effort to substitute the word “Roma” for the far better-known term “Gypsy” may strike some as futile, but few other groups carry the burden of such heavy stereotypes with so little reprieve.
“In one case, the police received a tip that a blond, blue-eyed girl was living with a Roma family in a Dublin suburb. The tipster believed that the 7-year-old didn’t look like the Roma family with whom she lived. The police came and removed the child from the home, despite protests from the Roma family that the child was part of their family.”…
biggest joke of depression or any other mental illness is that you need to use your broken brain to fix your broken brain. like what kind of self drag is that.
the thing folks living in Christian dominant cultures gotta realize is that even if you’re not Christian, your basic understanding of religion and spirituality and morality is still being filtered through a Christian lens. your very concept of what religion is and does is filtered through that lens.
This is what I call cultural Christianity, for those who are still confused
And she hasn’t said a word since. Rowling could take some pointers
Yeah but in Collins defense, her book was really good. She perfectly showed PTSD, Katnis trauma from when her mom mentally “abandoned” her when her dad died and the parallel with Katnis depression at the end of the series, perfectly depicted the society and its inherent problems, Finick’s back story, socio-economic disparities based on skin colour, Rue and the 11th district, President Coin and how she was as bad as Snow but in an other angle, distrinct 13 and the capitol trying to use her image for the war even though she did want to, and way more stuff I can’t think of right now.
I mean the following Y/A distopian books were mostly bad knock off who thought that the reason the HG had such success was because of the love triangle, but in reality Collins created such a complexe yet very realistic world that makes a parallel to our society of entretainment and war
The Hunger Games was baby’s first intro to social justice for a lot of kids back in the early 2010s. They were brilliant books that introduced a lot of complicated concepts in a way teens could understand and enjoy - plus, addictive, well-plotted adventure stories with A+ characterization and worldbuilding. But all the general public seems to remember about them is the love triangle, and I will always be salty about that.
The irony of the Hunger Games is that the media in the book and the media in the real world both chose to focus on the love story instead of the rebellion.
