The Southend Pound

[Tangled up in Blue]

The Cornish language. In Devon ....?!?!?!?!?!....

Why not? Devon's next door to Cornwall after all.
They speak Catalan in Sardinia and there's a fair bit of the Med in between!
Catalan is also spoken in some parts of Southern France ie The Midi.

 

[Mrs S]

Been doing that for years ! They also want independence. I hope not id miss the cornish pasties . Maybe we could have a treaty , a pastry one hmmm.

What? Devon wants independance - just like Cornwall? When did that happen .... or are we getting the wires of cultural identity a little crossed here???

 

[Tangled up in Blue]

Because it is one of the poorest regions in the UK and receives poverty grants from the EU.

Grants which the locals have successfully resisted to build a motorway from Exeter down to Cornwall.

 

[Yorkshire Blue]

Just been watching Michael Portillo's programme where he goes round Britain on the train (only because I couldn't be bothered to switch over to SSN).

One of the places he visited was the Devon town of Totnes. One of the things that struck me was that the local people there have introduced their own currency, the 'Totnes Pound'.

Around 80 shops, restaurants and pubs in Totnes accept the currency and it encourages locals to spend money in the town itself rather than elsewhere. It's apparently very popular with residents and tourists alike.

Perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea to get the 'Southend Pound' up and running to see if it could spark up the local economy?

Is this similar to the Pink Pound?

 

[Mrs S]

Why not? Devon's next door to Cornwall after all.
They speak Catalan in Sardinia and there's a fair bit of the Med in between!
Catalan is also spoken in some parts of Southern France ie The Midi.

Different argument altogether. Catalan is a living language that has survived and continued in use up to the present day .. it is spoken in these other places as a natural product of human migration - becasue people, as they have moved, have taken their language with them. Cornish, on the other hand, is a dead language not spoken for 300 years and reinvented in the last two decades largely for political and financial gain ... ie: to access the giant pot of money known as the European Social Fund (under Objective One) - to do this required 'proof' of identity as a cultural minority - the main criteria for this being the existence of a national language.... a 'living' language .. and so the boffins got to work in the language labs, piecing together the common factors of the Gaelic languages that DO survive.... Welsh, Breton, Manx ... plus the few snippets of Cornish that are remembered in the few rare documents that do survive (Cornish was traditionally a spoken rather than written language) - and hey presto! - 'Modern Cornish’ was born!! Having had my own children go through the education system here, I have seen the insidious ways this has been put into place … the slow, creeping shift in mass consciousness until we all start to believe that it never actually went away … point is though, REAL Cornish people do NOT speak - and certainly cannot write - Cornish – they speak and write in English – often very badly. BUT the whole ‘national identity’ thing has really taken off and the language revival is a very central aspect of this. And plus of course it is very much played to the audience for the tourist trade –we now have ‘bilingual’ signs (such as, for the toilets in pubs and also road signs) – the irony being that Cornish people can’t actually read them! It is all just a load of spin, really. But – getting back to my point – Cornwall and Devon are not the same place. This is why the notion of introducing the language to schools in ‘that area’ IS ridiculous.

 

[Mrs S]

Why isnt ridiculous? Cornwall is part of England. The Cornish language has all but died out. Why try and revive it now? They all speak English anyway.

If they insist on teaching another language, why don’t they pick one that might be beneficial to them as some stage in their life.

surely the idea of speaking different languages is so you can communicate with other people. If you already communicate in the same language why do you need another one?

All very relevant points. Aside from the financial gains mentioned in previous post, it is all about raising self-esteem and reinstating a sense of national pride and identity - although to be honest I find (as an 'emmet' - that is what the Cornish call us people who come to live here from elsewhere) - there is more than enough arrogance in the Cornish sense of 'national pride' as it is - not to mention the blatantly racist disregard of all who are not 'native' ... and yes, I totally agree, there is no point having a language that no-one else (or even yourself) can understands or is able to use! And from my experience most of 'em need to learn English properly before they tackle anything else - educational standards, particularly literacy, are notoriously low down here, amongst the indiginous masses .....

 

[Tangled up in Blue]

Different argument altogether. Catalan is a living language that has survived and continued in use up to the present day .. it is spoken in these other places as a natural product of human migration - becasue people, as they have moved, have taken their language with them. Cornish, on the other hand, is a dead language not spoken for 300 years and reinvented in the last two decades largely for political and financial gain ... ie: to access the giant pot of money known as the European Social Fund (under Objective One) - to do this required 'proof' of identity as a cultural minority - the main criteria for this being the existence of a national language.... a 'living' language .. and so the boffins got to work in the language labs, piecing together the common factors of the Gaelic languages that DO survive.... Welsh, Breton, Manx ... plus the few snippets of Cornish that are remembered in the few rare documents that do survive (Cornish was traditionally a spoken rather than written language) - and hey presto! - 'Modern Cornish’ was born!! Having had my own children go through the education system here, I have seen the insidious ways this has been put into place … the slow, creeping shift in mass consciousness until we all start to believe that it never actually went away … point is though, REAL Cornish people do NOT speak - and certainly cannot write - Cornish – they speak and write in English – often very badly. BUT the whole ‘national identity’ thing has really taken off and the language revival is a very central aspect of this. And plus of course it is very much played to the audience for the tourist trade –we now have ‘bilingual’ signs (such as, for the toilets in pubs and also road signs) – the irony being that Cornish people can’t actually read them! It is all just a load of spin, really. But – getting back to my point – Cornwall and Devon are not the same place. This is why the notion of introducing the language to schools in ‘that area’ IS ridiculous.

Yeah.I saw these same arguments on the link that Shrimpero provided and assumed (correctly as it turns out)that you were the Lisa concerned.

BTW when did you become such a (self-appointed)expect on minority languages and diglossia?

Personally,I'm rather proud that my own children are fluent Catalan speakers.

BTW, I didn't say that Cornwall and Devon are the same place.
What I actually said was that they're next door to each other ie neighbouring counties, in the same way that the Midi is next door geographically to modern day Catalonia.
Historically they were part of the same nation state(round about the time that Magna Carta was signed) which also included The Pyrénées(which also explains why Catalan is still spoken there)even in (so called)French territory.

 

[Tangled up in Blue]

. Cornish, on the other hand, is a dead language not spoken for 300 years

Actually according to my copy of "The Oxford Companion to the English Language" it's actually only 200+ years :-

"its last known fluent speaker,Dolly Pentreath, of the village of Mousehole, died in 1777."

 

[Rob Noxious]

I bet one Southend Pound that Barney's off to the South-West today...:'(

 

[Napster]

I studied Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic at uni, so I'm all in favour of Cornish being reinvented. In fact, if Latin phrases can still be used, it seems hypocritical to assume an English language can't also be used.

Native speakers are naturally different to fluent speakers, but there are a great many fluent speakers of Cornish. (there's even some Welsh speakers in Patagonia, and Scottish Gaelic in Nova Scotia, or New Scotland)

I would have no problem my children learning any language, dead, or alive. It opens up a whole world of possibilities.

 

[Mad Cyril]

I studied Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic at uni, so I'm all in favour of Cornish being reinvented. In fact, if Latin phrases can still be used, it seems hypocritical to assume an English language can't also be used.

Native speakers are naturally different to fluent speakers, but there are a great many fluent speakers of Cornish. (there's even some Welsh speakers in Patagonia, and Scottish Gaelic in Nova Scotia, or New Scotland)

I would have no problem my children learning any language, dead, or alive. It opens up a whole world of possibilities.

I studied Physics at university but I am not in favour of dropping nuclear weapons on people or trying to create some sort of death ray.

 

[Mrs S]

Yeah.I saw these same arguments on the link that Shrimpero provided and assumed (correctly as it turns out)that you were the Lisa concerned.

BTW when did you become such a (self-appointed)expect on minority languages and diglossia?

Personally,I'm rather proud that my own children are fluent Catalan speakers.

BTW, I didn't say that Cornwall and Devon are the same place.
What I actually said was that they're next door to each other ie neighbouring counties, in the same way that the Midi is next door geographically to modern day Catalonia.
Historically they were part of the same nation state(round about the time that Magna Carta was signed) which also included The Pyrénées(which also explains why Catalan is still spoken there)even in (so called)French territory.

I meant 'spoken' in the true sense, as in a practical mode of communication .... Numerous sources (which the writers of your Oxford Companion to English clearly hadn't read) recognise that Dolly very much played to the crowd – she would apparently rant and rave in an ‘unrecognisable tongue’ that was assumed (by the English listeners) to be true Cornish. And I didn’t say that you said Cornwall and Devon are the same place … this was in a much earlier post by somebody else, which in itself sparked all these different threads of conversation.... Keep up man. Keep up. But, getting back to the main point, readers may be interested to know that here in Cornwall there is such a thing as the ‘Cornish pound’ – albeit a run of joke money circulating as something of a gimmick (mainly in pubs).

 

[Thorpe Groyney]

I studied Physics at university but I am not in favour of dropping nuclear weapons on people or trying to create some sort of death ray.

What a waste.

 

[Tangled up in Blue]

I bet one Southend Pound that Barney's off to the South-West today...:'(

I suppose He might just stay until aftertomorrow's game but I doubt it somehow.

 

[Tangled up in Blue]

I studied Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic at uni, so I'm all in favour of Cornish being reinvented. In fact, if Latin phrases can still be used, it seems hypocritical to assume an English language can't also be used.

Native speakers are naturally different to fluent speakers, but there are a great many fluent speakers of Cornish. (there's even some Welsh speakers in Patagonia, and Scottish Gaelic in Nova Scotia, or New Scotland)

I would have no problem my children learning any language, dead, or alive. It opens up a whole world of possibilities.

The voice of reason.

 

[Tangled up in Blue]

And I didn’t say that you said Cornwall and Devon are the same place … this was in a much earlier post by somebody else, which in itself sparked all these different threads of conversation.... Keep up man. Keep up.

Yes, that was in an earlier post by Osymandus which you dismissed but you linked it with your reply to my question as to why Cornish shouldn't be taught in Devon as a "ridiculous" idea.

<Cornwall and Devon are not the same place. This is why the notion of introducing the language to schools in &#8216;that area&#8217; IS ridiculous.<

As a linguist by profession I do in fact try to keep up with new developments in the field and indeed with some of the many threads on SZ but not 24/7 ! :)

 

[pottster]

I studied Physics at university but I am not in favour of dropping nuclear weapons on people or trying to create some sort of death ray.

I studied dentistry at college but i am in favour of dropping nuclear weapons and creating a death ray

 

[Tangled up in Blue]

I studied dentistry at college but i am in favour of dropping nuclear weapons and creating a death ray

To quote Mad Cyril -What a waste!

 

[Tangled up in Blue]

this was in a much earlier post by somebody else, which in itself sparked all these different threads of conversation....

Without wishing to blow my own trumpet(so to speak),unduely, I suspect it was my own post(in reply to Steveo's) asking why shouldn't Cornish be taught in Devon that sparked off most of this subsequent debate, therebye taking us somewhat :offtopic: as far as the Southend Pound is concerned.My apologies to SG btw.

 

[Tangled up in Blue]

I meant 'spoken' in the true sense, as in a practical mode of communication .... Numerous sources (which the writers of your Oxford Companion to English clearly hadn't read)

It would be unwise to denigrate(editor) Tom McArthur's "The Oxford Companion to the English Language" without being fully familiar with its contents.
You might also want to take a look at David Crystal's excellent "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language".David Crystal is widely recognised as being Britain's foremost linguistic authority.
He points out that:- "Linguistic history contains several examples of English supplanting other languages-Cumic,Cornish"etc and suggests that where this happens, "A reaction can take place ,as people become increasingly conscious of the rights of minorities,but the atmosphere is inevitably one of uncertainy and mistrust."
"Emmets" of course have a vested interest in denying the importance of the Cornish language.
For personal and professional reasons I prefer to celebrate the existence of minority cultures and their languages.