Talk:Vernacular/Archive 1

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What is the significance of vernacular? The significance of vernacular is in making a distinction between the rules of a language and the actual way speakers use their language.

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Why is some of the text randomly italicized? AtmanDave 23:14, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

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Where's Dante? 202.156.13.4 11:27, 16 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I added a short bit on literature, mentioning la Divina Commedia and pointed to the main article on Vernacular literature Jeffmatt (talk) 10:53, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

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What about First Grammatical Treatise?--157.157.240.50 (talk) 08:46, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Vernacular Slanguage
Efficiency is not deficiency. Slanguage sites deficiency by accosting language rights and loyalties of orderly need to zero trouble and be wholey true. A Vernacular slanguagism as prank and defile can avoid abusing innocent languagisms. Most medically orientated expressions for disease are slanguagism and a few people allow thier names to be accosted for the reputation of zeromentating disease and winmentating health. E.O.P. aka Eddie P. Hanter the trunk...a small christian in genius. Not gods christianity of Unclejesusamwiches to eat and go to heavy gear to die for our sins but the internetivitous,tree trunkedly, tropospherically, pulpy and paperiety, board footed, maple syrup, latex rubber, telephone polls and all that other christiantismicity...by the way ,religions come in threes and trees have catholic roots and monarchal tops that dowse and dun and rise and run...and god did not invent them either...war is god for the economy...Plants are Mother Earths by different paternity than ours. Gods draft is devilry and both know zeroing god is good, godesses and guildren first. The same goes for devil and devilress and deildren...we have been at it a long time and necessity already and are now down to ONe god ,no wife, devils tale up assinine. Battling god for the last rights of existence is not good. Zeroing war is good and winning the world is great. One breath I owed. Trouble is slang and war is extra very special trouble...Born with Warfluenza. No one means to be demented but short of absolutely zero warformalities every where on earth is the counter-contagious and protagonistic and antagonistic teacherousity of war and not the treastise of worlding creature beingness. Civilty is brave as war is couragsous cowardice. Imagine a coin with gods head and a devils tale ...civility is the coin standing on edge. War is the time economy struck from water's flow and hetero(the very odds of our survival) into Hydrogen Bombs and hero warship. Slanguagisms are crime and treason( Potting people as plants and spiking them with grow formula and cloning animals) Language owns the truth of ryhme and rythm and reason.

Ready Steady Go Zero Warantee, warpro, warcon, and negotiate settlement of world entitlement! Eddie P. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.82.158.190 (talk) 04:55, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

The non-standard dialects of a global language
It is sometimes applied to nonstandard dialects of a global language.

Maybe so (or maybe not) but Latin and the Romance languages are not an example. For one thimg, Latin was not a global language. For another, the Romance languages were not dialects of it; they were by then different languages. Latin has no identifiable dialects. The hypothesis that vulgar Latin had some is no doubt true but what they were is not known. Latin had different historical phases but those were not dialects either. No doubt vernacular can mean a dialect, such as the southern vernacular, but until you come up with a valid example it might be better not to complicate the definition. If you do, add your reference please. This article has no references and I do not know how it escaped acquiring the no references template.Dave (talk) 02:39, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Huh? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.229.13.33 (talk) 17:50, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

The need for vernacular
Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia (1305), which he wrote before the Divine Comedy, was an important justification of the need to start writing literature in the vernacular, the language of the people.

Off topic. This is not about the need to start writing in the vernacular. In any case this statement is totally unexplained. Does the public have to read de vulgari eloquentia and guess what you mean by the need? Looks like your opinionation to me and is unreferenced.Dave (talk) 02:50, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Phony diglossia
"The vernacular is also often contrasted with a liturgical language (in linguistics, the relationship between these "High" and "Low" languages or varieties of a language is referred to as diglossia). For example, until the 1960s, Latin Rite Roman Catholics held Masses in Latin rather than in local vernacular language, to this day the Coptic Church holds liturgies in Coptic; though parts of Mass are read in Amharic, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church holds liturgies in Ge'ez, etc. The Reformation was spread by the publication of Bibles and other religious writings in the vernacular, and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council permitted the use of vernacular liturgies in Roman Catholicism.

Similarly, in Hindu culture, traditionally religious or scholarly works were written in Sanskrit (long after its use as a spoken language) or in Tamil in the Tamil land (since Sangam era). With the rise of the bhakti movement from the 1100s onwards, religious works started being created in other languages Hindi, Kannada, Telugu and many other Indian languages throughout the different regions of India. For example, the Ramayana, one of Hinduism's sacred epics in Sanskrit had vernacular versions such as Ranganadha Ramayanam in telugu by Gona Buddha Reddy in telugu in 15th century, Ramacharitamanasa a Hindi version of the Ramayana by the 16th century poet Tulsidas."

These are not examples of diglossia, which are varieties of THE SAME language, such as formal and informal English. Latin and the vernaculars are DIFFERENT languages and the same can be said of all your other examples as well. See Bilingualism By Suzanne Romaine, page 33. She could be used as a reference if you had any liturgical diglossia, but you don't. Now there is the question of how many examples of vernaculars we need. In each of your examples vernaculars are contrasted with a lingua franca. The vernaculars are neither dialects nor diglossia, they are different languages, but the contexts are different. How many contexts illustrate this concept? Let me see what I can do with it.Dave (talk) 04:05, 6 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Well. Apparently the word diglossia was defined differently by Ferguson and Fishman. Ferguson did NOT allow different languages to be diglossia, but Fishman allowed any variation that has to be learned to be one, including bilingualism. This is an interesting situation. If we start spending space explaining all that then we are making the article be about diglossia, which has its own article. I think maybe, since I can find a reference for it, I will have to put back your concept of diglossia but not exactly the way you had it. You were using diglossia without explanation or references other than our article on it, which does not go into adequate detail or provide references either. Perhaps this is a job for supernote. The additional and controversial theory can be mentioned in a note. My reference has several pages on it and really that material belongs in the diglossia article but I am not doing that right now, I'm only checking articles linked to the Latin article so I know what can be said or linked there. I defer the diglossia article. I can either put the reference in a note, or better yet, in your sociolinguistics section, which, although currently incomprehensible, does state a goal of accounting for different sociolinguistic views. Maybe it goes there; maybe some of the extensive examples intended for Fishman's diglossia can be moved to there. Let's see how it comes down.Dave (talk) 10:40, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Dictionary discussion
"Up to the mid-fifteenth century, glosses and dictionaries were mostly bilingual and served the teaching of Latin. For reading and translation of Latin texts, dictionaries would usually display the sequence Latin lemma (unknown) followed by explanatory vernacular expression (known).  Dictionaries with reversed order would serve the more active tasks of speaking and writing.  Both types were solely concerned with the study of Latin, but at the same time they unintentionally documented the development of vernaculars at a time that these were not considered worth writing about.

With the emergence of monolingual dictionaries vernaculars arrived at their breakthrough. The gradual formation of nation states and the growing importance of national languages (that are briefly explained in the section Early Vernacular Studies) led to the publication of multilingual vernacular dictionaries in various combinations."

Sorry, I couldn't really do anything with this. There's no Early Vernacular Studies, for one thing. No doubt the editor had big plans but they never materialized. And then, first the editor says the dictionaries appeared in the 15th century, then he say they existed earlier. We can't get any sense at all of why these are the first vernacular dictionaries or what he means by a breakthrough. I have no doubt something meaningful can be said here, but he isn't saying it. He seems to be playing the game of referencing other articles just so they can be referenced when in fact the link doesn't really fit here. When Wikipedia puts the tag on an isolated article I do not think the intention is to start throwing this information into articles where it is not part of the subject material. Looking at all of them togther I see most of them say little or nothing but reference each other. This reminds me of an unfortunate game played in technical writing when the author has no intention of revealing confidential information: "see A" and when you get to A it says "see B" but there it says "see C" and when you get to C, "see A." We don't need that here. And finally, most of these generalizations need references, but I can see nary a one. I've spent a lot of time so far looking up the editor's generalizations here and elsewhere and finding any references is like pulling hen's teeth. Where I could find any I kept and enhanced the material. However, I think that effort on this stuff is past the point of diminishing returns. Sorry, sorry, so sorry, I have taken it out.Dave (talk) 12:21, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

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I would question the standard of the map attached to the article (first illustration). For some unknown reason it represents Germany within its before the WWII borders, or suggesting that it represents the extent of German language as it was before 1945, which is largely not true anymore. In addition, the labels are in Italian. Well it shouldn't be a problem for a reader interested in linguistics (languages), but I wouldn't say that it conforms to English Wikipedia, by the way see the comment by AtmanDave, below. User talk: ajwob —Preceding undated comment added 16:53, 11 November 2009 (UTC).

Dutch
I believe in the Dutch section two different languages got mixed up. This would be the low-lander language of Germany, the Low-German, with the Dutch, which has it's own history. The related part of the Dutch section, Luther etc. belongs in fact into the German section. In fact the German low-lander languages and the Dutch low-lander (niederlander) language have common roots, but this appears an infeasible generalization, as it is now presented. Please, see to correct this from material of the "History of Dutch" article. 70.137.159.3 (talk) 00:47, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Intrinsically?
"[T]he term 'vernacular' is intrinsically linked to Colonialism"&mdash;note the capital C. Is that true? "Intrinsically" means "by its essential nature or constitution", which implies forever. As I understand it, Colonialism refers to the period roughly from 1492 to 1960. The term "vernacular" has been applied to situations both previous and subsequent. (Yes, I realize that colonies existed in almost every age. On the other hand, when I think of "vernacular", the first thing that comes to mind is the establishment of national literatures after the dissolution of the Roman empire.) Gwil (talk) 13:57, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

A couple of oddities in the section on German
1. "Religious leaders wished to create a sacred language for Protestantism that would be parallel to the use of Latin for the Roman Catholic Church". Did they want a specifically sacred language and, if so, who pleaded for this? Moreover, did anyone want to "parallel" the use of Latin, the use of which was a unifying force in Roman Catholicism, at least until the second half of the C20? The alleged parallel with Latin is also highly misleading: Latin was a lingua franca and the Reformers were keen that services should be conducted in a language understood by the congregation. The claim about a "parallel" with Latin is at odds with the concept of the vernacular. Did any of the Reformers want a Protestant lingua franca?

2. Is it customary to translate Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft into English? Norvo (talk) 23:02, 31 May 2015 (UTC)