Talk:Indo-European languages

Cornish and Manx

A user recently remarked that Cornish and Manx are not extinct. If there is any documentation that there are still speakers around, I'd be glad to see this evidence. Cornish died out in the 18th century, though some people have tried to revive it in the 20th century. Though some 1000 people claim to be able to speak it, I am not aware that there are native speakers. Manx died out with its last native speaker in 1974. It also is being revived, but as a linguist I'm not impressed with the primary school efforts on the Isle of Man. Isn't this like claiming all professors of Latin to be speakers of the language? Perhaps I'm being too rigid. After all, Hebrew may be said to have been extinct until the 20th century when it was revived. Michel van der Hoek 03:36, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I disagree. As a sociolinguist, let me remind you that Cornish and Manx are "revived", just as you recognize it, so they have speakers, so they are living languages. The fact that there are no native speakers does not impede that there is a living practice of those languages (in fact, now there might be native speakers in Cornish-speaking families). You cannot compare those languages with Latin. Users of Cornish and Manx are ordinary people who practice their languages in all sorts of situations; on the contrary, users of Latin are learned people who do not use Latin this way. Concerning the facts about Cornish, please see the article Cornish language and the Cornish Language Partnership website (which is supported by local authorities). Cornish and Manx are now protected by the United Kingdom under the European Charter for Minority languages. Both are taught as living languages in several schools. --Domergue Sumien 07:42, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I think the problem here is that Cornish was not so much 'revived' as 'reconstructed'; as speakers today cannot possibly know how the original Cornish sounded or was used, it follows that a lot of research and guesswork was involved (I think they may have used Welsh or other Celtic languages in some way as a guideline, perhaps) in recreating it. In a way, then, what is used today is Cornish because socially people regard it as Cornish, not because this modern form developed as a living language from older forms of Cornish. We should be careful about presenting Cornish as something that never actually 'died out'. John Stephenson 13:18, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Despite my skepticism, I think I agree more with Domergue Sumien to some extent. I am willing to believe that there are speakers of Cornish and that this Cornish is much like the original Cornish language that died out in the 18th century. I'm sure many expressions survived even in the English vernacular of Cornish people. Two hundred years is not so very long. But I do think we ought to acknowledge that Cornish as a language completely died out and that no native speakers are now recorded. This is not to denigrate those people who honestly and commonly use that language proficiently (because of the L2 classes taught in Cornish), but I do think we ought to stick with some basic definitions. Find us some trustworthy documentation for native-speaker usage of Cornish and we'll amend the article to fit the facts. Same for Manx, though here we have more extensive and recent research because the last native speaker died in 1974 and he and his language was widely studied in the 20th century. As for Latin, there are many people who use it frequently in everyday speech all across the world. For one, I am given to understand that it is fairly common among non-Italian cardinals in the Vatican and not at all reserved for "learned" writing. There is also a news broadcast in Latin on Finnish radio. Michel van der Hoek 17:49, 16 October 2008 (UTC)