Re: dialectal diversity in English

Jan van Steenbergen scripsit:

> I don't think this comparison holds, because the question whether or not the
> earth revolves around the sun can be empirically answered.
Ah, it seems I have garden-pathed you successfully.  The description
"the Earth revolves around the Sun" is only mathematically simpler than
the description "the Sun revolves around the Earth".  It's possible to
transpose all of Newtonian dynamics to the key of Tycho, so to speak,
in which the Sun revolves around the Earth and the other planets revolve
around the Sun; the mathematics is more complicated, but not incorrect.

> Categorizing,
> however, is a matter of drawing lines and setting criteria, which is indeed a
> matter of taste and personal objectives.
Of objectives, certainly, personal or otherwise.

> If only it were that easy! Let's face it, the story becomes already much more
> complicated when dialect Z appears: X and Y are mutually understandable, and so
> are Y and Z, but X and Z are not.
Actually, this is no problem for this view: X and Z are distinct
languages, and for the purposes of distinguishing languages it does
not matter whether we take Y to be a dialect of X or a dialect of Z.
As someone said, there is no saying when night passes into day or vice
versa, yet day and night remain pretty distinct.  Similarly, it's easy
to say what the best instance of green is, ditto for blue, though blue
and green have no distinct boundary.

> Now, if you consider the fact that all
> languages and dialects are parts of one big continuum, then drawing lines
> becomes a merely subjective activity, and mutual understandability is not an
> issue anymore.
If we had to draw lines (literal isogloss bundles), that would be correct,
but we do not.

> Look at the Netherlands: there are many dialects that are mutually completely
> inunderstandable, even some dialects that are not understandable for a speaker
> of Standard Dutch. Yet, nobody denies the fact that Dutch is a language with a
> huge number of dialects. We are definitely no Dagestan.
No, indeed.  Nevertheless the Ethnologue identifies 12
languages currently spoken in the Netherlands, in addition
to Frisian, two flavors of Romany, and Dutch Sign Language.
See http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=Netherlands .
The family tree groups Standard Dutch, Afrikaans, and Vlaams (which
overlaps 3 countries) as "Low Franconian", and Achterhoeks, Drents,
Gronings, Plautdietsch (Canada), Sallands, Stellingwerfs, Low Saxon
(Germany), Twents, East Veluws, North Veluws, Veenkoloniaals, Westphalien
(Germany), and Westerwolds as "Low Saxon".

Note that some of these names have ambiguous reference: "Vlaams" in
Flanders may refer to the local variety of Standard Dutch, or to the
local language.

--
Andrew Watt on Microsoft:                       John Cowan
"Never in the field of human computing          jcowan@reutershealth.com
has so much been paid by so many                http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
to so few!" (pace Winston Churchill)            http://www.reutershealth.com

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