Re: dialectal diversity in English
| From: | taliesin the storyteller <taliesin@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Monday, May 19, 2003, 13:28 |
|---|
* Adam Walker said on 2003-05-17 16:11:25 +0200
> --- Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...>
> wrote:
> > E.g. to my father and mother, there was what they spoke -
> > "American" ["mVrkin] or ["m{r`kin]- and what everyone else spoke -
> > "Foreign" [fVr`n] (a very us-vs-them approach to life).
>
> My father distinguished three languages -- Mercan,
> Yankee and Furn. British was either a divergent
> dialect of Yankee or an *almost* reasonable dialect of
> Furn.
>
> Unfortunately there are NO objective criterion for
> determining what is or isn't a language. As long as
> Danish and Norwegian can be concidered languages while
> Mandarin and Taiwanese are considered dialect the
> situation is HOPELESS.
Uhm, I've recently been translating from Danish to Norwegian and I
assure you, the *grammatical* changes necessary points towards them
being two different languages. Just changing spelling and replacing
the odd word was far from enough. I used to think they were dialects...
(The original was in Czech, the Danish translation was from and
English translation of the original... m-e-s-s-y.)
t.
Reply