zulumoose wrote:Saim wrote:zulumoose wrote:A useful language is one which opens doors, ie has a unique utility in terms of society, business, travel etc.
Have you learned Irish? How do you know it doesn't open doors?
There is little to be said for a language that is almost entirely used by people who already have a common language they use on a daily basis. What can be done with the additional language that wasn't already achieved?
Teaching more people Irish promotes multilingualism in Ireland, gives them better access to their literary and cultural heritage. It's certainly helped out the Gaeltacht regions in an economic sense. It also gives a bit of a break from all the Anglo-monotony. Certainly it's better to speak two languages than one, right?
zulumoose wrote:What is the practical motivation for learning it, other than a quaint whimsical rush of nostalgia that seems a little false?
There's a bit more to identity than that.
I have lived in Ireland, if the language opens doors it is doors that were placed there recently, and deliberately, the sort of thing that should be resisted as it is devisive.
So let me get this straight:
1) A language should only be learned if doors are opened.
2) Language minorities cannot do anything to ensure that their language opens doors. That's just racist!
Can minority languages
ever win? This sort of "anti-nationalism" is fake and chauvinistic. Out of curiosity, do you know any Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, or any of the other languages of the state you mark on your profile?
South Africa is a perfect example of what that ends up doing, look up Sharpville if you are interested. The Afrikaans language is still suffering from the backlash against the promotion beyond utility policy.
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As far as I know about South Africa, you're talking about Afrikaans being promoted amongst black people? Well, that's stupid. But this is about promoting
Irish among the
Irish, not Afrikaans among the Zulus, Xhosas, Tswanas, Sothos, etc. Obviously I support English as a
lingua franca, the point is whether other languages should be learned.
How exactly is promoting multilingualism a benefit separate from the utility of the language chosen?
-It's better for the mind
-It makes it easier to learn "useful" languages
-It makes you understand multilingualism, and less likely to be chauvinistic about other language communities
I mean, my mother could've thought "let's not speak to him in Serbian, it's useless, let's get out a book and start teaching him Spanish". But ultimately, learning Serbian as a child helped me tremendously with Spanish and other languages I've picked up since then. And it's
my language, regardless of the lack of open doors.
Would a newly invented language be a good idea to teach, as it would achieve the same? A nonsense argument in my view.
That's where identity comes in.
But yes, it would be better than nothing. In fact, I wouldn't be adverse to teaching Esperanto to kids. They'll learn it faster than any natural language and then they'll understand how it is that one learns a language and what multilingualism actually is (two things sorely lacking among Anglophones).
The idea that knowing two languages is better than one is absolute nonsense unless the other language has utility,
Nope.
otherwise all that time spent in study could have been spent on something else that actually does have utility.
I'm talking about Irish immersion, where children learn other things
through Irish, not where they get hammered over the head with conjugation tables for years (i.e., the leaving cert nonsense Scot Dutchy brings up in every post).
There is more than enough school work that kids cannot wait to begin forgetting after final year. A useless language is at the top of many lists.
I wonder how many Gaelscoil graduates forget Irish completely. Very few, I would guess.
Those who took it in an English school as a class? Yeah, almost all of them. I want Irish instruction with high success rates.
Literary and cultural heritage? Oh come on, do you really think Irish kids taught the language at school have the slightest interest in what little remnants of text the local library might have,
Does any child in Australia have an interest in Shakespeare? Would you be prepared to remove English lit class from schools?
from an almost entirely illiterate past? Is there even such a thing as literature in that language?
Your chauvinism is showing.
Irish has one of the oldest vernacular literatures in western Europe (after Greek and Latin).[1]
Language is a tool, and the idea of preserving an old tool has some merit, but old tools are preserved in museums by those interested, no sense spending years teaching modern kids to use slide rules and manual typewriters.
The parents of those modern kids want them to learn it, no? Do they have no say in their children's education?
Are people not allowed to have identity? I consider myself an internationalist, and I hate it when people who are essentially using chauvinistic arguments pose as one (there's a long tradition of this, with people like Lenin talking about nations disappearing because the divide the proletariat, but ultimately that sort of reasoning contributed to Russian chauvinism).
by 
