For the last few months Eira has been brushing up on her Latin with Duolingo and it seems to have paid off, as she’s elbowed herself into the top 1% of Duolinguists. The Duolingo model of learning is all about scoring points and getting promoted to the Diamond League, based on the ‘hit the target but miss the point’ school of pedagogy. Vedi, Vidi, Vinci. Learning a language is secondary to winning the race. I know next to nothing about the science of learning languages but I do know that the process is very good for your brain. With a diet of fish oils and Duolingo your neuroplasticity will thrive. I assume language learning starts with total immersion as babies and moves onto the theoretical stuff in the classroom with grammar, verbs, tenses, and the creepy eavesdropping of the language lab (‘écoutez et répetéz – ping’). The dénouement is the Duolingo league of gems. To comprehend language we don’t have to see the words that we hear and speak – except ofcourse with sign language where we must see and not hear – reading obviously comes later, otherwise babies would need to be literate before they could speak. Impossibly precocious. And with a dead language like Latin, why the need to hear it spoken on Duolingo, after all it only exists on paper? Actually, is it really dead if it’s still being read? Does a language die with its last native speaker if it can be raised from the dead by a future generation, as is happening with Cornish? The late linguistics expert, Professor Stanley Unwin, might have been able to enlighten me, although I can’t see anyone reviving his unique brand of gibberish.
Today, Welsh has a very healthy pulse despite the best efforts of some to snuff it out, notably with the notorious Welsh Not and The Blue Books. However, a few contemporary reactionaries with nineteenth century attitudes still like to flaunt their ignorance.
Welsh has been one of the most popular languages on Duolingo who, perversely, have just decided to stop updating it. Breton, on the other hand, has never made it onto the Duolingo menu. This week Instagram showed me a photo of the late Breton poet Anjela Duval. I had to look her up and discovered an unexpected story of a defender of faith, nature and language. Her position on the relationship between Brittany and France was, you could say, droit au but:
I loathe the sight of my country’s old people pining in homes for the toil they once knew, and the young mothers of my country speaking the language of the oppressor to their babies. (Kan an Douar).
Another unexpected discovery for me is that her poetry embodies the predicament faced by an endangered language: almost no one can read her poems, not only because the written form of Breton is unkown to many Breton speakers, but also because she wrote in a mixture of formal, vernacular and neologisms. The renaissance of Breton literature, I learned, was led by intellectuals disconnected from native speakers and yet Duval’s writing too was inaccessible to her neighbours, the farmers and peasants who worked the land around her. Some of her poems have been translated from the original Breton and those that I have read are filled with her passion for nature, tradition and regret for a way of life that she could see was disappearing. There is a profound rootedness in the land that she had lived, worked and died on; understandable for someone who had lived on the same 40 acre smallholding with her parents and who remained there after they died. The reviews of her life and work describe her as a mystic and a patriot and my sense is that she had a kind of pan-patriotism attached both to her specific culture and land and to the wider natural world that she shared with all creatures and peoples.
Welsh and Breton speakers share remarkably similar victim histories of language suppression and cultural oppression that have fuelled political ambitions of independence and nationalism in both peoples. Elements of the nationalist movement in Brittany flirted with Nazism before the war and a tiny minority of them actively collaborated during occupation. Today, Anjela Duval is an icon for Breton political activists who now seem more aligned with the centre and Left while the Front de Libération de la Bretagne have gone down the political cul de sac of burning second homes. The possibility of an independence referendum seems a very distant and unwinnable prospect for them.
ELVES
A people of elves
A degenerate people
A genocidal people
Drowned in red wine
Drowned in French pom-pom
And in the political slogans
A people resembling Elves
Playfully amusing themselves
In the abandoned heath
Dancing among the megaliths
To the sound of the toads
To the mysterious music
Of the wind and the sea
The lament of the streams
The rustling of the woods
And the enchantment of the Harp
And the bagpipe of the night-Festivals
Elves crouch in their hole
As soon as the Masters roar
As soon as the Frenchman’s roosters crow
A defeated people, drowned
Like the City of Ys in the ocean (1)
Some complain in the dark night
About their lost Liberties
While dancing like Elves
On the dried ground of the warren
And kneel every morning
Before the French-God.
Do back-breaking work,
During the day, during the week,
For the Country that sucks them…
Ah! People disintegrated
Turned to elves!
What miracle will be needed
To awaken you?
1) A legendary city submerged in the sea due to the wickedness of its people.
Translated by Lenora Tim.
Odi et amo 