Thanks for such a comprehensive answer, Lawrence. It would be
interesting to look at the mystery plays, were I scholar of that bent,
which I'm not. No translated bible accounts for a lot. (Welsh has an
entire tense which is dedicated to biblical use, contrived so that one
could start syntactically correct sentences with the word "Christ".)
> Anyway the sense of being a small country with its own traditions and
> language really has gone from here or been turned into trinkets.
>
> I find it useful, increasingly so; to work with that worked at
> awareness but it's a way of psyching myself and it's not a widespread
> enthusiasm.
What I like about the Celtic nations is their pockets of bilingual
resistence in the huge sea of monoglot English dominance; they belong
to Britain, but those of them who chose to do so are capable of seeing
English from the outside, as it were. Poetry Wales recently published
English-language poetry from West Africa, and it was refreshing to see
one's old established language appropriated for a very different
literary tradition. In a sense it's all very "post-colonial," but not
the same, in that geographically Britain is a whole. I presume you can
have some of the same language relationship going on with indigenous
peoples in the Americas.
We ought to be able to build those kinds of relations between Norwegian
and Sami here, but, well, Sami culture isn't exactly taken seriously by
the average Norwegian.
--Knut
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