Language Revival

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Old Persian is a language that was spoken by the Iranian rulers of the Achaemenid Empire. It is from the Indo-European family of languages and its similarities with many languages that are being spoken today like English, French, German, Hindi and Farsi is undoubtedly clear.
Prior to the initiation of this project intended to revive the language, the only extant sources attesting to the existence of Old Persian had come to us from the inscriptions dating back to 2,500 years ago. These were all written in ancient cuneiform system. Old Persian cuneiform mode of writing was a semi-alphabetal one, in which a single character stood for a consonant or vowel or more than often both.
With that in mind, the creative literature that is produced for this book is the first of its kind, following the downfall of the Achaemenid Empire in 330 BCE. The written work delivers reconstruction and reconfiguration of Old Persian terms and sentences. Some of the new terms are adopted from the Middle Persian spoken by the Parthians and the Sassanids, but some are also from the Avestan...

This study reports on the results of a listening-task experiment in the intelligibility of  Czech, Polish and Slovak to students of the Sorbian-language secondary school in Bautzen/Budyšin, Germany. The analysis focuses on the question of whether the knowledge of Sorbian enables the comprehension of other Slavic languages and to what extent approximately. Thanks to the fact that most of the participants attended Czech or Russian classes, the average intelligibility of the three West Slavic languages was rather high in this group. However, there was some comprehension also on the part of those students who did not learn Czech or Russian. It concerned, in particular, the narratives in Czech and Slovak, as the intelligibility scores for Polish were extremely low. Although the group of our respondents was small (N = 86) and, thus, the possibilities of generalization is very limited, the results rather support the Sorbian activists’ argument that the knowledge of Sorbian helps, at least people of Sorbian-language background, to understand other Slavic languages, at least Czech and Slovak, to some extent. In addition, the results on self-reported language choice show that the idea of receptive bilingual communication of Sorbian-speakers with Czechs, Poles or Slovaks is not unusual.

This article presents a typology of phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features illustrative of factors conditioning the usage of speakers and writers of Revived Manx, including substratal influence from English; language ideologies prevalent within the revival movement, especially forms of linguistic purism; and language-specific features of Manx and its orthography. Evidence is taken primarily from a corpus of Revived Manx speech and writing. The observed features of Revived Manx are situated within Zuckermann's (2009, 2020) framework of ‘hybridization’ and ‘revival linguistics’, which takes Israeli Hebrew as the prototypical model of revernacularization of a non-L1 language. However, Manx arguably provides a more typical example of what to expect when a revived minority language remains predominantly an L2 for an indefinite period, with each new cohort of speakers able to reshape the target variety in the absence of a firmly established L1 norm. (Manx, Celtic, languag...

This article presents a typology of phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features illustrative of factors conditioning the usage of speakers and writers of Revived Manx, including substratal influence from English; language ideologies prevalent within the revival movement, especially forms of linguistic purism; and language-specific features of Manx and its orthography. Evidence is taken primarily from a corpus of Revived Manx speech and writing. The observed features of Revived Manx are situated within Zuckermann's (2009, 2020) framework of ‘hybridization’ and ‘revival linguistics’, which takes Israeli Hebrew as the prototypical model of revernacularization of a non-L1 language. However, Manx arguably provides a more typical example of what to expect when a revived minority language remains predominantly an L2 for an indefinite period, with each new cohort of speakers able to reshape the target variety in the absence of a firmly established L1 norm. (Manx, Celtic, language revival, language ideology, language shift, language contact)*

Published open access at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-in-society/article/continuity-and-hybridity-in-language-revival-the-case-of-manx/FFAC5B3FC9E340F17EA26EBA4A7512D7 under the following creative commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In this article the role of different ideological viewpoints concerning corpus development within the Manx revival movement in the second half of the twentieth century is explored. In particular, the work of two prominent figures is examined: the Celtic scholar Robert L. Thomson, who published extensively especially on Manx language and literature, and also contributed to the revival, particularly as editor of several pedagogical resources and as a member of the translation committee Coonceil ny Gaelgey, and Douglas Fargher, a tireless activist and compiler of an English-Manx Dictionary (1979). Broadly speaking, Thomson was of a more preservationist bent, cautious in adapting the native resources of the language and wary of straying too far from attested usage of the traditional language, while Fargher was more radical and open especially to borrowing from Irish and Scottish sources. Both were concerned, in somewhat different ways, to remove perceived impurities or corruptions from the language, and were influenced by the assumptions of existing scholarship. A close reading of the work of these scholar-activists sheds light on the tensions within the revival movement regarding its response to the trauma of language death and the questions of legitimacy and authenticity in the revived variety. Particular space is devoted to an analysis of the preface of Fargher's dictionary, as well as certain features of the body of the work itself, since this volume is probably the most widely consulted guide to the use of the language today. Finally, it is argued that the Manx language movement today would benefit from a reassessment and discussion of the ideological currents of the past and present, and a judicious evaluation of both the strengths and weaknesses of existing reference works.

Final published version available open access at https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/scp/2/1/article-p97.xml

Centar Zagreber yidish-krayz za učenje jidiša osnovan je 2014. godine u Zagrebu. Klub organizira tečajeve jidiša, predavanja iz kulture, povijesti i tradicije aškenaskih Židova te književni klub. Premda status jidiša danas možemo svrstati u različite kategorije te ga možemo nazivati mrtvim jezikom, ugroženim jezikom ili jezikom u procvatu – ovisno u geografskoj lokaciji i zajednici koju razmatramo, to je jezik koji hrvatski Židovi više ne rabe. Točnije rečeno, jidiš nije nikada bio primarni jezik aškenaskih zajednica koje su živjele u Hrvatskoj prije Drugoga svjetskog rata. Međutim,
nedvojbeno je bio vernakular određenih obitelji i zajednica, bio je nasljedni
jezik te izvor mnogih posuđenica kojima su se hrvatski aškenaski Židovi koristili u svojemu razgovornom jeziku. Zagreber yidish-krayz pokušaj je oživljavanja jidiša koji rabi teoretski i metodološki okvir lingvistike oživljavanja jezika (engl. revival linguistics), nove lingvističke discipline i paradigme koju je predložio Ghil’ad Zuckermann. Ovaj rad predstavlja osnovne koncepte lingvistike oživljavanja jezika i razmatra njezinu praktičnu primjenu kroz analizu slučaja Zagreber yidish-krayza. U ovom se istraživanju analiziraju mogućnosti i ograničenja oživljavanja jednoga
židovskog jezika u hrvatskome kontekstu, profili učenika te reakcije javnosti na taj jedinstveni projekt.

The paper explores how Chingoni, a language of the conquering Ngoni, lost out to Chitumbuka and Chichewa, the languages of the conquered Tumbuka and Chewa respectively, as a language of everyday communication to the extent of being moribund. Since language is usually considered to be a marker of identity, the link between the Ngoni identity and Chingoni is also explored and it is concluded that language is not a sine qua non ingredient of group identity. The paper also examines efforts being made by the Abenguni Revival Association to revive Chingoni which is now considered an endangered language. It concludes that although the efforts are laudable, it is very unlikely that they will produce positive long term results.

Este artículo esboza la historia lingüística y sociocultural de Capadocia y los capadocios desde el Imperio hitita en la Edad de Bronce tardía hasta el intercambio de población entre Grecia y Turquía en 1923-1924. Se describe la helenización de Capadocia después de la conquista de Asia Menor por Alejandro, incluyendo el largo período de bilingüismo que puso en relación la lengua capadocia antigua (probablemente luvita o una lengua anatolia relacionada) y el griego capadocio. Ya en la Antigüedad tardía el capadocio se consideraba una versión «bárbara» de griego, pero se produjo una transformación mucho más dramática tras la derrota del ejército bizantino por los turcos selyúcidas en la batalla de Manzikert (1071) y la posterior conquista de Asia Menor. Esto dio lugar de nuevo a un largo período de bilingüismo durante el que la mayoría de los capadocios finalmente se pasarían a la lengua turca. Una minoría de aproximadamente el 40% siguió hablando griego junto con turco, pero el griego estaba tan fuertemente «turquizado» que el capadocio era incomprensible y sonaba como turco para otros griegos. Después del intercambio de población, los capadocios fueron discriminados por su aspecto, pero sobre todo por su lengua, y, como resultado de ello, se volvieron cada vez más reacios a transmitir su lengua materna a sus hijos y nietos. En la década de 1980 se creía en general que el capadocio se había extinguido hasta que Mark Janse y Dimitris Papazachariou descubrieron que un dialecto capadocio particular todavía se hablaba en cierta medida en Grecia. El reconocimiento del capadocio como una auténtica lengua por los estudiosos se convirtió en un instrumento útil para invertir las connotaciones negativas de los capadocios hacia su propia lengua heredada. La historia del capadocio es, por tanto, otro testimonio de la relevancia social de la investigación académica en las humanidades.

In language revival, text creation is one of the key areas where language development work is focussed. As texts are predominantly developed from the starting point of a text in English, methods used for translation are crucially important in determining the form of the end product. In this paper, we present a representative selection of texts to illustrate different strategies used within translation processes.

This article sketches the linguistic and socio-cultural history of Cappadocia and the Cappadocians from the Hittite Empire in the Late Bronze Age until the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923-1924. It describes the Hellenization of Cappadocia following Alexander's conquest of Asia Minor, including the long period of bilingualism involving the old Cappadocian language (probably Luwian or a related Anatolian language) and Cappadocian Greek. Already in Late Antiquity Cappadocian was considered a “barbarbic” version of Greek, but a much more dramatic transformation took place after the defeat of the Byzantine army by the Seljuk Turks at the battle of Manzikert (1071) and the subsequent conquest of Asia Minor. This resulted again in a long period of bilingualism during which the majority of the Cappadocians would eventually shift to Turkish. A minority of approximately 40% continued to speak Greek alongside Turkish, but the Greek was so heavily Turkicized that Cappa...