jahoulih

One of the most interesting threads ever to appear here, and one that cannot be found using the search engine:<BR><BR>http://www.fodors.com/forums/threadselect.jsp?fid=2&amp;tid=1017067<BR><BR>Hope fully now someone searching for &quot;minorized&quot; will find this thread and be pointed to the original thread.

jahoulih

I'm not going to repost the whole original thread, but including the first few posts here might improve searchability:<BR><BR>Author: asko<BR>Date: 11/04/2000, 01:01 pm<BR>Message: I've seen a report on European countries and their languages, but I'd like to know, what about those small languages which are spoken by ethnic minorities, even in Western Europe? Appart of English, Spanish, French, German or Italian, which is the situation with the Irish, Gaelic, Welsh, Basque, Catalan, Breton, Occitan, Frisian and those languages? Do people usually speak them? Are they very different from the bigger languages?<BR><BR><BR>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<BR><BR> <BR>Author: lingo<BR>Date: 11/04/2000, 02:54 pm<BR>Message: I think everyone who lives in Wales learns Welsh when they are at school, but it's more predominantly spoken in the north - although you can certainly communicate with most people in English (and the Welsh language is nothing at all like English!). Other minority languages spoken in Britain include: Punjabi/Urdu, Hindi, Turkish - in fact the speakers of any of these might be more numerous than Welsh speakers!<BR><BR><BR>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<BR><BR>

jahoulih

One more post from the original thread (there's lots more where this came from):<BR><BR><BR>Author: Ben Haines<BR>Date: 11/04/2000, 04:02 pm<BR>Message: Fodors <BR><BR>Situations vary. I'll try to answer your two questions for each language. I'm going to make big mistakes, which I ask others to correct. <BR><BR>Irish. It is taught in school, but is to a great extent a political revival, so I think not widely spoken. A Celtic language, Irish is like other Celtic languages, but wholly unlike any other European languages <BR><BR>Gaelic. Taught in school only in highland, island, and remote parts of Scotland, but widely and naturally spoken in villages and hamlets in those parts. Celtic. <BR><BR>Welsh. Taught in school everywhere in north and mid Wales (even to my Enlish niece, who was cross), but after a century or more of official suppression by the English Welsh is weak in the south, and is strong and the natural language of villages and towns of north Wales and to some extent of mid Wales. Celtic. <BR><BR>Basque. Sorry: I don't know. <BR><BR>Catalan. Sorry, I don't know how much Catalan is commonly spoken. It is a Romance language, with very much in common with French and Spanish, and quite a lot in common with Italian, Portugese, and Romanian. <BR><BR>Breton. Sorry: I don't know usage. Celtic. <BR><BR>Occitan. Sorry: I don't know. <BR><BR>Frisian. In the Netherlands and I think in Germany children of Friesian speaking families are taught in Friesian for their first two years at school. I have the idea that plenty of families up there in Friesia speak the language at home. It is a Germanic language, with much in common with Dutch, English, and German. <BR><BR>Of these languages, some, like Friesian, are minor, while others, like Welsh and Catalan, are minorised, brought down by harsh governments from glorious days of great literature. The histories vary. <BR><BR>I like Lingo's point. In Vienna nearly all the newspaper sellers on the streets speak Hindi, in Marseilles and Paris you eat well if you order in Arabic, in London corner shops a standard tongue is Gujerati, and in fish and chip shops it is Cantonese or Turkish, in Berlin your doner kebabs (delicious) are served you by Turks, and so-called Indian restaurants in England are run by Bengalis from Sylhet District (which has its own form of spoken Bengali), but on settling here the families tend to learn Urdu. In the small state primary school where I'm a school governor we have some thirty languages as mother tongue. When we gathered food for our parish International Evening two weeks ago we had good food from native speakers of Kossovan, Somali, Tamil, a couple of forms of Creole, Turkish, German, and even English. <BR><BR>As you see, I'm glad you asked. <BR><BR>Ben Haines, London <BR> <BR>

cmt

Something's funny here. I posted on this thread about 10 minutes ago, and the post is not showing up. I suggested alos searching for &quot;minoriTIZed.&quot;

Janine

I believe there are major problems with the search function. It is virtually impossible to bring up many of the old threads, although I suspect they do still exist. <BR>Interesting feature that you can now post web-site addresses and link directly to them, though.

cmt

The minoritized languages thread USED to be searchable a few weeks ago.<BR><BR>The ability to jump to links is nice, but the most important function is the SEARCH, and that just does not work!

cmt

Thanks for posting this, jahoulih. The old thread was my all-time favorite serious thread, and it does seem to be lost to the indexing system. Since this thread, at the moment at least, is not lost, I'm going to list some words that should turn up this thread if they are put into a search. Then, I hope that people searching for info about some of these languages will see you link and proceed to that OTHER thread. (Let's use the OTHER thread for further discussion.)

Here are a bunch of search terms. I'll skip the commas in case they might confuse Fodors' fragile and primitive search engine.

Basque Catalan Occitan Ladin Ladino Romansch Friulan Furlan Frisian Sicilian Breton Welsh Gaelic Romani Romany Rhaeto-Romanic

Hope this works.

jahoulih

You're welcome, Carol. Just about two years since I posted this, and the search engine still has the same old quirks.

Ardfert

The Irish language survives and is still spoken daily by some people mostly in remote parts of the west such as Dingle,Connemara and Donegal.However there are schools all over the country where most subjects are taught in the language and there is even an Irish speaking TV channel.Road signs in Ireland are bilingual.See details on www.gaeilge.ie

cmt

It was such a good idea to post this new thread with a link to the old one, but now this new thread doesn't come up in the terrible Fodors search function either. However, I found it via Google. I just posted a link to an article on the original thread.

alanRow

minorized???

cmt

Minoritized. But the original thread used &quot;minorized,&quot; and the purpose of this new thread was to provide help people find that original thread, which had somehow fallen beyond the reach of the Fodors search system.

Christina

new threads have never come up in the search engine

I think Fodors still haven't fixed the search engine so that it works on relatively recent posts, though, say within the last couple months.

Christina

actually, I realized the OP was from 2003 so it should show up on some words, but it doesn't. That's some weird glitch that once in a while, and I don't know why, a thread doesn't show in a search. Putting the word minorized in quotes in the first post was not a good idea, as it won't find it that way, but should in the title, I think.

cmt

This thread was posted in February 2003 in an attempt to help people find a very interesting thread started in November 2001. Now neither thread (both old and long-running) shows up in a search. Various frills have been added to the site, but the most essential feature--the search engine--still doesn't work well.

waring

There are no more native Cornish speakers

Underhill

Minorized???

ekscrunchy

From today's New York Times:


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/sc...mp;oref=slogin

Sue_xx_yy

From the NYT article: &quot;In this area, for example, a group known as the Kallawaya use Spanish or Quechua in daily life, but also have <i> a secret tongue </i> mainly for preserving knowledge [sic] of medicinal plants, some previously unknown to science.

Good grief. If someone keeps their knowledge a secret, to say nothing of their language, is it any wonder that science - or anyone else - doesn't know about it?

And if they don't know about the language, because it is being kept a secret by the speakers, how in hey is anyone else going to speak it?

Surely it's a bit disingenuous to call such a language 'minoritized'.

(And yes, I know this thread dates from 2003, but the NYT article dates from the date of this post - it's online as of Sept 19, 2007. )

chimani

&quot;Minorized&quot;??

What is this word?

Even &quot;Minoritized&quot; - what is?

Why must you mangle the language?

A noun can become a verb at the drop of a hat.

Why not just ask about &quot;languages spoken by minorities in Europe&quot; and then we'd all know what you mean?