Language thread

[ursus arctos]

The current Minch is a strait between the Highlands and Inner Hebridies.

Is the book Marc Morris' on The Anglo-Saxons?

[Levin]

No, It's Max Adam's The King in the North, ostensibly a biography of Oswald of Northumbria. But he's meandering all over Britain, Ireland and France. To be honest it currently feels like someone recapping Bede.

[Discordant Resonance]

When a novel has obviously been run through Google Translate:



A phone rang, and after a couple of seconds, I heard the voice of a young woman:

"Hello"

"I'm the delivery (verb form relating to objects) man. Will you open me please!"

I give your order.

[Discordant Resonance]

It gets better:



"Hi dear (expensive)! Are you busy? Are you busy?" Felipe asked Sandra.

"Hello my heaven! Not at all. What's happening, baby (the actual word for an infant).

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

Are a lot of books translated into Irish? There's very few translated into Welsh and when they do it's mostly by respected (Welsh) authors.

[Discordant Resonance]

There was a slight vogue for it immediately after independence, but not in recent years - the example above was quoted from the library app BorrowBox, so presumably it must be more economical to try translating e-books.

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

Is it machine translated content farming then?

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

Grimly fascinated by this. Not entirely sure if it's because Mumsnet is the New Home of Online Fascism (TM) or this is really how a significant proportion of people in England relate to world around them, believing that people only speak other languages to confuse and alienate them.

https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_be...ike-in-England

Obviously it's chock full of all your favourite anti-welsh tropes ("I went into the pub and they all started speaking welsh"; "children in Wales are punished by refusing to let them go to the toilet unless they ask in welsh"*).

My personal favourite is "my husband's cousin twice removed speaks 'fluent welsh' and heard some people in a pub talking about them in Welsh and then replied in Welsh, oh you should see the look on their face" cos when you reframe it outside of this utterly paranoid mindset, it's almost certainly them encountering two people having a private conversation which they immediately imagine is about them, whereupon they bark some half-remembered school welsh at the two shop assistants and treat their bemusement as confirmation that they were indeed insulting them.

* this one is funny not cos it's untrue, but the way that in repetition it goes from something that's entirely benign to being some form of torture.

[Antepli Ejderha]

What were you doing on mumsnet BLT?

[treibeis]

Is this yet another thing about Welsh speakers being slagged off for speaking Welsh, and that "a significant number" of English speakers hate Welsh speakers?

Can't remember my family carrying on like that.

[Duncan Gardner]

Are a lot of books translated into Irish? There's very few translated into Welsh and when they do it's mostly by respected (Welsh) authors.

Ireland is a small market (7 million) of whom about 2 or 3% speak Irish to at least conversational level. So I'm guessing no

[Various Artist]

Jesus wept, there's 40 pages of BLT's linked Mumsnet thread. I've only read (and am only going to read) the first two, but it seems that the entrenched opinions are basically generalising and/or paranoid.

The number of people keen to flat out insist that switching to your first language to converse with your friend is just unforgivably RUDE, regardless of context, I find very odd. And yes, the number of people overly ready to assume that they're being gossiped about as soon as this happens adjacent to them is wearying. At the same time, the fact that the original poster immediately jumps to an interpretation of "hostility" and unfriendliness from the person opposite her on the train as soon as she and her friend slipped into Welsh, is arguably equally paranoid. As the more moderate replies have noted, was he meant to continue just grinning aimlessly at them instead of accepting that something else was now going on without him and therefore minding his own business?

Without being there, of course, it's impossible to judge the nuances of the situation. If this man were like many of the respondents in that thread, then clearly the OP would be pretty correct in assuming he was projecting a hostile reaction to his apparent 'exclusion' from the conversation. On the other hand, she could just be projecting onto him things that he wasn't actually intending, precisely because she was (consciously or subconsciously) expecting this sort of reaction.

[treibeis]

Probably not the same thing, but when I travel on trains that go from Czechia, sometimes through Poland, to Germany and then, maybe, to Denmark, there are lots of people who speak their first language in a six-seat compartment where four people can't understand the other two. Nobody gets arsey about it, because nobody - neither the interlocuters nor the "excluded" - give a fish's tit.

[Sporting]

I'm not totally sure that the majority of English people care either, just the loud ones on social media.

[Various Artist]

Well, exactly. Those queueing up to parp the aforementioned opinions so loudly in such threads will, by and large, tend to be a self-selecting assortment of the most entrenched.

[treibeis]

Well, exactly. Those queueing up to parp the aforementioned opinions so loudly in such threads will, by and large, tend to be a self-selecting assortment of the most entrenched.

So, does that mean that it's not really that many, then?

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

Is this yet another thing about Welsh speakers being slagged off for speaking Welsh, and that "a significant number" of English speakers hate Welsh speakers?

Can't remember my family carrying on like that.

I don't think it's particularly welsh speakers - I think a significant number of English monoglots feel threatened by hearing other languages spoken in public.

[ursus arctos]

It is indeed a thing among US nativists,.who don't feel any compunction from the fact that their.forebearers often spoke no English upon their arrival here.

[treibeis]

I don't think it's particularly welsh speakers - I think a significant number of English monoglots feel threatened by hearing other languages spoken in public.

"Threatened "? Really?

I've not been to Britain for over ten years, but I have a large extended family. I can't imagine any of them feeling "threatened" by somebody talking Foreign.

[Various Artist]

So, does that mean that it's not really that many, then?

Well, I hope not. In the grand scheme of things, they're probably a minority – just a vocal one, and sometimes an obnoxious one.

In the same way, I'd hope the number of "English monoglots... threatened by hearing other languages spoken in public" isn't actually a "significant" one, given that I imagine most of us with English/British families and friends would find it hard to imagine them in this role. But it's a demographic that is not completely absent, it would appear.

The worry, especially in what often feels like an increasingly xenophobic age, is that there turns out to be a lot more people out there who'll show their true colours in such matters, given the remotest hint of provocation. The amount of hatefulness that sprang, fully-formed, out of (relatively) nowhere in the summer around the Euro 2020 final springs to mind, for instance.

[ad hoc]

It's not just English monoglots. A large number of Romanians (a minority, I hope, but a sizeable one) get quickly stressed by the sound of people in Romania speaking Hungarian. I don't think they'd be especially bothered by any other language, but they have a visceral reaction to Hungarian, and feel it's wrong for people (who they assume, usually correctly, to be Romanian citizens) to speak in Hungarian.

If I'm out with my kids in a majority Romanian speaking area I actually get tense and vigilant when they're chatting to each other in Hungarian. (if they talk in English no one bats an eye)

[Antepli Ejderha]

Exactly the same in Turkey with Kurdish, well actually worse as some people would confront them. Izmir, despite its seemingly liberal leanings, is like that.

[ad hoc]

Yeah people sometimes get confronted in Romania too.

Do you have any sense as to whether Kurdish has become less "offensive" to Turks in cities like Izmir, now that the primary racism has shifted to Syrian refugees?

[Antepli Ejderha]

I've not been to Turkey for about 5 years now but I'd guess that the Syrian refugees are now the number one target of racism.

[Sporting]

What do people think about regional language requirements for (mainly public) workers? My partner teaches French in high schools but has had to pass C1 level in Valenciano (a dialect of Catalan). Luckily, she enjoys the whole process of language learning but for many people the requirement is not something they exactly love.

Which other countries have similar local requirements with reference to regional lingos?