Re: South Estonian language/dialect?

In article
<e4a13256-b6c7-4e90-98ce-da2a4c3471c3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, martin
<martintg@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jan 7, 10:32=A0pm, "J. Anderson" <anderso...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
martin wrote:
Thanks for that Eugene, it was most informative. I suspect one would
find a similar continuity of dialects every five kilometres as one
travelled from Friesland down to Flemish Brabant

Or perhaps even from Kirkenes in north-easternmost Norway all the way to
=A0 Dunkerque in France or Bolzano in Italy!


The main reasons for "langauge death" are:

Extralinguistic:
1. linguistic suicide
2. linguistic extermination

Intralinguistic:
3. structural collapse

Linguistic suicide takes place when parents refuse to teach their native
langauge to their children, or their children reject the language that
they learned from their parents. In both cases the older lanauges is
regarded as a hinderance to social mobility and a better future.

Linguistic exterminarion takes place when a man-made or natural
catastrophe makes further intrrgenerational transmission of a language
impossible. A flood, plague, or earthquake might kill or terminally
disperse the entire community that once spoke a language due to the
destruction of their environment or ability to pursue a specific form of
activities guaranteeing them a livelihood. Social phenomena such as
exogamic marriage traditions, slavery, mass migration, or colonialism
accompanied by the forced imposition of a new language and suppression of
existing ones can result in the total replacement of one langauge by
another within the course of a generation.

Structural collapse takes place when the minor changes that accrue over
the years in pronunciation, grammar, and lexicon result in the destruction
of the prerequisites necessary for the language to function according to
traditional patterns. The language reaches a structural crisis, and this
is resolved by a radical restructuring of the system. In the various forms
of colloquial colonial Latin from which the modern Romance languages
arose, for example, gradual phonetic changes coupled with other structural
factors eventually blurred the phonetic distinctions necessary to be able
to differentiate between the five noun cases. Speakers eventually devised
other ways to indicate the information that the cases had indicated, and
this made them even more redundant. Eventually they were completely
replaced (except in Romanian, isolated from the rest of the Romance
dialect continuum, where a few traces survive) by other structures. These
changes were so radical that when they were accepted into the written norm
these restructured norms were regarded as different enough from Latin to
be regarded as distinct languages.

As we see, no language has a guaranteed future, and the reasons for new
languages to arise within older continua can be extralinguistic or
intralinguistic. The extralinguistic factors involve communicative
functions: a) one of two or several co-existing languages is regarded to
have more pretigious functions than its rivals and preferred by potential
speakers, "linguistic clients", b) the natural or social prerequisites for
a language to continue to serve its traditional functions are radically
modified or totally destroyed. Even without these extralinguistic events,
languages, as dynamically evolving systems that maintain their
functionality by consantly adapting themselves to the pysiological and
psychological constraints of their speakers as well to changes in
environment, society, and culture, are inherently unstable. Because
languages are typically used in "noisy" environments, they cannot fucnton
without a considerable degree of redundancy on all levels of structure.
the existence of this redendancy allows changes to accumulate and
alternative startegies for expressing the same idea to emerge. Eventually
a seemingly minor change can precipitate a chain reaction resulting in the
collapse of a complex structure and its replacement by another one based
on different orgaizational principles and resources.

Similar to the continuum from Finland to the Urals, before many were
assimilated/ethnically cleansed from the region.

The exansion of eastern Slavic into the area concerned, a process that is
still ongoing, is a case in point. The speakers pf various dialects of
what are now called Finnish, Karelian, and Vepsian who lived in the
Swedish-ruled Neva River Valley when Slavs moved in and established what
was to become St. Petersburg in the early 18th century were not ethically
cleansed, but conditions were eventually made difficult for them to
continue using their languages in anything but local, informal
communication. Since neither the Russian state or the Russian Orthodox
church actively encouraged the cultivation of these local speech forms,
their array of functions, which even under Swedish rule had been limited,
further decreased. The result was that many of these people regarded
Russian as the lanauge ofthe future and either refused to teach their
language to their children, or at least placed their children in schools
were Russian was the lanauge of instruction to give them a better future.

In today's Russia the central authorities seem to be taking a
laissez-faire attitude towards local lanaguges, leaving decision making to
a local level. The main exception to this has been the rather outlandish
requirement that all local languages are to be written using Cyrillic. In
any case, there are some local languages, such as Komi and Tartar, that
are flourishing, even to the point of being sued to some extent for
university instruction. Udmurt, closely related to Komi, is not being
cultivated by its speakers and seems to be slipping away. In Mari El,
where at least two different normalizations of Mari (aka Cheremis) are
used, activists are denounced as "nationalists" by the local Russian
authorities and harassed, if not perhaps to the point of suppression.

The important thing that we see is that whether or not a language survives
is usually due to a complex of factors, one of the most important ones
being, in normal circumstances (i.e. excluding plagues, genocide, and
other catastrophes), the attitudes that the speech community has about its
own speech and the doors that it opens ­ or shuts ­ compared to any speech
with which it coexists. The fate of the Uralic languages does not differ
much from those of the other pre-Indo-European languages, such as Basque,
of western and northern Eurasia. For the past five thousand years
Indo-European languages have been taking over functions and acquiring
speakers at the expense of their non-Indo-European rivals. We can be
pleased indeed that in the 21st century three Uralic languages are the
official lanuages of modern and prosperous states, with Vepsian, Saami,
and Komi on the ascent, even if all of the Uralic languages, having
successfully survived Russification, are now under threat from English or
severe Anglification.

Regards,
Eugene Holman
.

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