DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com wrote:
> >Shit. Language is tougher than any state power, . . .
> >But any language is too tough to need such support.
>
> >Carrol
>
> Hmmm ... you may be a bit optimistic here mate -- (I'm guessing that your
> first language is English). As a speaker of a language (Welsh) which
> looked in genuine danger of dying out at the beginning of this century, and
> which has been kept on life-support throughout it by the poets as well as
> the politicians, I'd say that the health of language is something that
> needs to be guarded a bit more energetically than you'd think.
I think our points can be reconciled. A commonplace of the last century (perhaps emphasized by some "post modernists" but basically just modernist) is that culture is embodied in language. I would argue, rather, that language is embedded in culture: again, the fundamental marxist premise of the priority of action to thought and the embeddedness of thought in action. Now culture is susceptible to violence in a way that language is not -- and if a culture which carries a language is "violently" fragmented, if the social occasions, the actions, which require the language diminish, *then* the language is indeed threatened. Consider the many Indian languages destroyed in the course of the European invasion of this hemisphere. Under those conditions, some conscious (Leninist as it were) action is necessitated to create the situations, the contexts, in which the language is exercised. And there indeed poetry can indeed be of great service. I understand that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Czech language was kept alive within the Austo-Hungarian Empire by such conscious action --conscious action which in that case too revolved around explicitly literary questions.
And of course, literature can give a half-life of sorts to languages no longer spoken. Classical Latin is one example. And there exists a society dedicated to keeping medieval latin alive. The latter was a living language, undergoing the kind of change (corruption) that all living languages undergo, until (at least according to C.S. Lewis) the "Classicists" of the renaissance killed it by their attempt to revive classical latin.
Off hand: as long as people with real purposes embedded in significant actions (like supper time conversation) continue to use a language, the language will, as it were, take care of itself. Destroy that supper time conversation -- and the language is in trouble.
Carrol