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Start ::  Cornwall24 Discussion ::  Cornish Language, Culture and History ::  Spelling Wars: A bit of Basque perspective
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Spelling Wars: A bit of Basque perspective
ScandinavianStranger Posted: 22.11.2007, 11:14



registered: Apr. 2007
Posts: 33

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last visit: 02.12.07 		Hello, I’ve been passive on this forum for a long time now. (I won’t learn Cornish until the SWF is finalized and agreed upon, and as that process is already rolling, I have nothing to add to the general discussion.)

However, I recently stumbled upon the following in a book (Language: The Basics, by R.L. Trask [Routledge 1995]). This is not to make a political statement or an attempt to make fun, but it had me giggling as I recognized so much from COW (the Cornish Orthography Wars). icon_lol I hope you too will appreciate the historical parallel (striking or far-fetched as it may be) – and that I don’t break any copyright laws by quoting that much:

[As Spain has got rid of its dictator Franco, the Basques are again allowed to use their own language:]
Quote
And, like the Norwegians before them, they faced some daunting obstacles, beginning with the obvious question: what sort of Basque should be promoted?

Though quite small, the Basque Country is criss-crossed by mountain ranges which chop the land up into narrow valleys, and the regional dialects of Basque differ from one another more greatly than do the dialects of English in England. Vocabulary, pronunciation, grammatical forms – all of these can change dramatically in the space of a few kilometres.

This state of affairs naturally called for an almost astronomical amount of decision-making and compromise. Most people were eager to see the creation of a single standard form of the language, but, at the same time, nobody wanted to abandon the particular words and forms he’d grown up with in favour of somebody else’s usages. Moreover, the Basques, like everybody else, had their own views of other people’s varieties. The Spanish Basques complained that the French Basques sounded patronizing and pretentious, while the French Basques complained in turn that the Spanish Basques sounded slovenly and crude. And everybody agreed that the speakers of the Bizkaian dialect were impossible to understand. Little by little, however, the highly regarded linguists of the Basque Language Academy put together the skeleton of a new standard form of Basque, called Euskara Batua, or Unified Basque (the Basques call their language euskara). Enthusiastically in some cases, grudgingly in others, the Basques have gradually accepted the new standard, so that today the majority of younger speakers can speak and write Batua as well as their local dialect.

Not that everything went smoothly. One of the strangest incidents in the whole political history of European languages traumatized the country throughout the 1970s: the War of the Aitches.

The French Basques have a consonant /h/, which they pronounce in many hundreds of words and which they have always written in their traditional spelling. Hence French Basques write, and pronounce, hau ’this’, horma ’wall’, aho ’mouth’, behar ’need’, alhaba ’daughter’ and ethorri ’come’. The Spanish Basques lost all their aitches many centuries ago, long before Basque began to be written down, and the Spanish Basques write, and pronounce, au, orma, ao, bear, alaba and etorri. At least for the purposes of writing, the Academy had to make a decision about this, and it adopted the delicate compromise of writing the h everywhere where the French Basques had it except after a consonant. Hence the Batua forms of these words are hau, horma, aho, behar, but alaba, etorri.

A good decision? Many outside observers thought so, but the result sent the Spanish Basques into convulsions. At a time of great political strain (this was the period where the dying Franco was using his police for one final, and murderous, attempt at stamping out Basque aspirations), these aitches brought about an unprecedented alliance between left-wing and right-wing Basques. The left-wingers objected bitterly to having any aitches in Batua, on the ground that silent consonants would make the written language more remote from speech of the masses (conveniently overlooking that standard Spanish does exactly the same thing: it writes hundreds of silent aitches). The right-wingers objected even more bitterly on the rather less subtle ground that they’d never had aitches before, and didn’t see why they should have them now.

Any rational discussion about the development of Batua was all but drowned by the resulting furore. The right-wingers, who were mostly elderly and usually both were fluent and very literate in Basque, might have used their knowledge to influence that development in useful direction, but instead they expended their energies in writing newspaper articles, pamphlets and at least one entire book fulminating against Batua in general and aitches in particular. They sneered at the new standard as ’euskeranto’ (a pun on the name of the famous artificial language Esperanto), and they hurled about such words as ’poison’ and ’cancer’, previously rarely seen in discussions of spelling systems. The left-wingers, who were typically less literate in Basque, contended themselves with angry speeches at mass meetings and the occasional diatribe in an underground magazine. A handful of linguists and other specialists continued to work quietly away on the essential business of creating tens of thousands of new words, to allow Basques to talk about such varied subjects as physics, economics, publishing and linguistics in their language (this entire process is called language planning), but, in the street, hardly anyone seemed to be talking about anything except aitches.

It passed, of course. The elderly right-wing opponents grew older and died, while the young left-wingers merely became middle-aged wage-earners with families, and for them jobs and children came to seem more important than aitches. Today, two decades later, everyone puts the aitches just where the Academy decided to put them all those years ago. I can’t recall the last time I even heard somebody mention the subject of the aitches. Forgotten though it is today, the War of Aitches stands as testimony to the passions which can be evoked by even the most trivial linguistic issue. Language is different from other things.








edited by: ScandinavianStranger, Nov 22, 2007 - 11:18 AM
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goky Posted: 22.11.2007, 11:46

goky

registered: May. 2007
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QuoteLittle by little, however, the highly regarded linguists of the Basque Language Academy put together the skeleton of a new standard form of Basque, called Euskara Batua, or Unified Basque


Too bad we do not have a Cornish Language Academy with highly regarded linguists.



edited by: goky, Nov 22, 2007 - 11:46 AM

The blog The Great Goky Blog
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Nothlenn Posted: 22.11.2007, 11:56

Nothlenn

registered: May. 2007
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last visit: 29.04.08 		Yes, I can see the truth in this for Kernewek, and very interesting it is indeed as a parallel, but who exactly put it all in place for Euskara, standardising it with everything organised by a democratically elected body only to have it put back to square one?

That's what happened here with Kernewek in the first place so not exactly the same kettle of fish. KK adherents, in majority, were quite happy with a few Ks and Kws, a couple of Nns and Mms, an Oe or two, but see what happened, there have been wars over the look of the language (Cosmetic Cornish) putting us all back to square one.

It is the destructiveness inherent in implementing a new 'consensual' spelling system that has irked me since it flies in the face of the wish of the majority of users and wastes the prodigious work that had gone over twenty years into promoting a teachable language, thereby rubbishing what was already perfectly acceptable as a standardised spelling. This was accepted by the independent Commission in their report who should have gone on to recommend it and allow the funding to continue and the objectors to get ised to KK.
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Sterenn Posted: 22.11.2007, 14:55



registered: Apr. 2005
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last visit: 03.01.08 		Nice to hear from Scadinavian Stranger again, the voice of reason. Let's just get on with it. I'll accept whatever, then we can get the kids interested.
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ScandinavianStranger Posted: 23.11.2007, 09:02



registered: Apr. 2007
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last visit: 02.12.07 		*flattered* icon_smile
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