Transition Year Comenius Project

Language: Our Bridge to Past Present & Future

OUR PROJECT

The three countries involved in the Project speak different languages, so we were interested in finding out  how we came to have such different ways of expressing ourselves.

We began by asking  some basic questions:

What is language?

Language is:

Why do we have different languages?

Words

The words people use for a particular object or action have been agreed upon by another group of people, throughout history.

Different groups of people arrive at a different  word  for  a particular object.

This explains why we have different languages in different countries.

Let us take the English word 'lake' and see what word, or symbol, was used in the other languages of our Project.

In this table, the differences in the languages shown are clear.

However, we also found a remarkable resemblance between some words. 

One example was the English word "sugar".

Grammar

As well as applying different  symbols to  the same objects and actions, groups of people also developed different ways of linking these words, to facilitate a further range of communication.

Why are different languages spoken in one country?

In part, these varied languages can be explained by the geographical spread of our peoples, but we have to look deeper to discover why people, who today live side by side, choose to use diferent means of expression.

While history can answer these questions in part, we find another explanation in attempting to explain why we need language.

Why do we need language?

Language is a means of:

It would appear that even when a common language exists, there remains a natural drive towards differentiation, resulting in dialects. We see in the German situation that regions still have a spoken dialect, while everbody knows and writes Hochdeutsch. Our German partner school has carried out some work in this area.

If you wish to view their work please click here

It seems that it is this desire to maintain individuality which is the motivating force that ensures the survival of minority languages.

That our own language, Irish, is such a minority language, added further interest to this aspect of the study.

We learned that language has two distinct uses:

Will Irish continue to survive or will its importance as a symbol of our individuality succumb to the practicality of using English for communication?

Survey

To find out how important this symbolism is for young people, we carried out a survey among Dublin teenagers, where we made a very interesting finding.

How then can one explain the fact  that Finnish,a rare and difficult language, is spoken by 95% of the population in Finland, even though that country was governed for centuries by Russia and Sweden?

These questions drew us into a particular study:

Encarta says:

"Related languages are alike in that their grammatical elements and vocabulary show regular correspondences in both sound and meaning."

When we looked at our languages, we could see some  similarities:

German

Not only is there an obvious difference in vocabulary but also in  the shape of the Finnish sentence. The words themselves were longer in the Finnish sentence but the number of words was less. This is so because Finnish  is a more inflected language than the other three. This explains the length of the Finnish words which so intrigued us when we first saw them.  By inflection is meant that the changes of meaning   occur within the noun itself ,whereas in a more analytical language  this is achieved by means of prepositions and auxiliary verbs.

When we look at these charts we can see further diversification which explains why we find more similarities between English   and German than between either of them and Irish.The Finnish Language belongs to the Altaic Group which explains why it is so different to the other languages. Our Finnish partner school has studied the development of the Altaic group.

If you want to view their work please click here

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