Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

[nwhyte]

...Norwegians learn Norwegian; the Greeks are taught their Greek.
(See here from 2:17 on.)

An entry in which nhw may be Taking It All Too Seriously

Comments

[mizkit]

Sadly, whether the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plains is also debatable. :)

(This post made me terribly happy. You're awesome. :))

[swisstone]

Interesting. Gives me a bit more of a picture of the development of Modern Greek. I often tell students that Greek is quite a conservative language in terms of its development over the years, that a native speaker of Demotic would more-or-less be able to read Homer or Herodotus, where the same is not true with a native English speaker and Beowulf in the original. I may have to modify such a viewpoint. Would I be right in concluding that a lot of the differences are in the spoken forms (with Katharevousa being polytonal, where demotic isn't)? Was the situation akin to modern Chinese, where the dialects are mutually intelligible in the written form, but not in the spoken

about Greek language forms

[swisstone]

swisstone, there is an anecdote about a classicist who visited Greece, went up the Acropolis and tried to speak in homeric Greek with a local who was selling bottles of water and sodas, only to be met with dismay - shop owners in Athens are more likely to understand English than Homer's Greek. I would guess that any Greek would be able to read the Gospels for the New Testament was written in "koine", the form of Greek spread over the hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman empire, and is the basis for Demotic. But the dialects before that are a different thing. We must also keep in mind that there's been 3000 years since Homer

[inulro]

This is precisely the kind of nerdiness I get all too excited about.

Thanks for the info!

To Go Further,

[mscongeniality]

Arabians learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning
The Hebrews learn it backwards, which is absolutely frightening

Except that there is no one group called 'Arabians' and there's a ridiculous number of languages/dialects for the groups referred to. Not to mention that they also 'learn it backwards'.

I think that Lerner and Lowe were mainly going for cadence and general effect. Not to mention that the character of Higgins was very much a product of his time, with all the inherent biases about the world beyond his sceptred isle. Either way, it's still my favorite musical and, I suspect, I will forever have a small crush on Rex Harrison because of it. ;-)

Re: To Go Further,

[nwhyte]

Indeed; one could add that Arabic and Hebrew both present similar situations of diglossia to Norwegian and Greek!

Confusion = Confuzzled fo' shizzle

[applez]

I'm slightly confused by this diglossian concept. I mean, how to differentiate between a plethora of dialects, the emergences of a new language from those dialects, and this hierarchical value? Or am I conflating two very different axes of linguistics?

Also, I'm curious about this idea of 'code switching' for Swiss German. There definitely seems to be a growing acceptance of what is broadly considered an Umgangssprache vis-a-vis High German, even to the point of phonetic Swiss-German spelling for some business signs and adverts.

Re: Confusion = Confuzzled fo' shizzle

[nwhyte]

As I understand it, the point of diglossia is when the vernacular language is sufficiently coherent to be considered as not just a plethora of dialects, but something different from the official language; but different from bilingualism in that there is a clear hierarchy.