--- 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). Often my father
> would claim complete
> unintelligability of accents from "the North" while
> having no problem with
> my dialect which sounds not at all like his and
> includes several foreign
> words.
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 criteion 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. The only possible "objective
identification of a language is in the case of an
isolate with no discernable dialects.
Adam