Owain wrote:

Rowland McDonnell wrote:
Too many languages are evaporating. sigh I mean, it's convenient for
*me*, 'cos the language that's taking over is English - but it's not
good.
On the bright side, Welsh had been looking at extinction round about now
if they'd not done something about it back in the 1950s

On the other hand, is spending £18m on Gaelic television for the approx
70,000 Gaelic speakers in Scotland a good use of public money?

£18m is peanuts in the national budget. Loss of linguistic diversity is
one of the biggest cultural plagues of our time. I'd say it would
indeed be money well spent - and this is coming from a 100% Englishman
who only speaks English and isn't likely to learn any other languages.
I'd be happy for the money to come from the UK and not Scottish budget.

(there is the other problem that the language that's taking over is
degraded English. Have you any idea what the apparatus of the EU has
done to English? They have a special dialect of `Euro-English' which is
painful to read, but it's what they use for official everything when
written in English. There are moves afoot to create an `international
English' which has been modified to make it easier for speakers of other
languages. And that's even worse - at least the EU version just uses
awkward syntax and vocabulary designed to suit French people (AFAICT,
anyway) rather than messing it about too much.

I suspect that much EU stuff originates in French and is
machine-translated into English.

Actually, no - although the EU was originally set up pretty much
entirely using the French language and in strictest secrecy with as much
as possible being done under wraps and behind closed doors - even closed
to the delegates to the secret meetings that discussed what the founding
documents were going to contain when they were written!!!! Really.
(they had this programme on R4, y'see. Well, lots of 'em actually).

They discussed what to put in the documents, the minutes were taken, and
then the bloke in charge of the minutes and all documentation went away
and got the documents drawn up according to what his records said they'd
agreed on, and then returned to the delates with completed documents
which had to be agreed on in full with no modification. Yes, that
really is how it was all started.

It was founded in secrecy and obscurity with that influence coming from
one particular Roman Catholic - that should explain a lot. In his
defence, there wasn't any other way he was going to get the paperwork
drawn up and agreed to at all - nothing /sinister/ about it: he just
wanted to get the job done to make future wars in Europe impossible.
And good on him - but...

Anyway, in recent years the French have been getting very sniffy because
English has in fact taken over as the `standard lingo' in the EU,
sidelining French despite all the efforts and possibly perplexing the
Germans 'cos there are more native German speakers than native speakers
of other languages in the EU. Chirac threw a very French sulk one day
and stormed out of a meeting when a French businessman came right out
and said that English was the standard international language and we
were all going to just have to work with it.

Rowland.

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