----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Curwen" <tony.curwen@cerl.org>
Subject: Britain ...
> the promotion, teaching and use of the Welsh language is going well in some parts of the country (less so in others) : it's inevitably a hard struggle against a dominant majority English culture (TV, etc.).
Is not the question about the meaning of "dominant" & the meaning of "English"? (The hard struggle against TV culture goes on all over the world: the substitution of images for words, a danger against which Belloc warned and Gore Vidal continues to warn. (Note to John Y-W: books are the primary but not sole repositories of words; that's what the whole of this discussion is about).
Wherein lies the difficulty of teaching children to speak several languages? Children have no problem with it, being more intelligent than their elders. Consider the original question: is Scots a language, despite the Scottish parliament's refusal to acknowledge it? From the highly informative answers (once the confusion with Gaelic was cleared up), it seems it is, and a lovely language at that. As is Spanish, the question about which sparked off my inquiry.
The sense of the answers seems to be that "English" (undefined) is imposed on children. This may be why speaking Gaelic was forbidden by the British ("Paddy dear & did you hear.... the shamrock is forbid by law to grow in Irish ground...").
Gabriel Austin
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