Re: THEORY: Languages divided by politics and religion

>From: Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
>An interesting question, and an oft-asked one.  There really is no certain
>answer to it.  If you try to measure "language" in absolute terms,
>you must always specify what level of abstraction you're willing to
>tolerate,
>since there really isn't any such thing as "language" per se, though there
>may
>be tens of millions or hundreds of millions "mutually intelligible"
>idiolects
>spoken by individuals across the world.  Indeed, even that is an
>abstraction,
>since an individual's idiolect is likely to change over the period of an
>average
>lifespan to a certain degree.
Yeah, ultimately there could be six billion languages in the world, all with
exactly one speaker, if you go to one extreme.  A lot easier than saying
that everybody speaks the same language in six billion dialects with varying
continua of mutual intellegibility.  I don't think they're such a thing as
100% mutual intellegibility nor 0%.  English and Dyirbal have at least a
very small mutual intellegibility since both languages have the word _dog_,
meaning "dog".  Almost zero, but not exactly.  Certainly the rest of the
languages are radically different beyond that.

Or how does Tagalog have _hindi_ to mean "no"?  That would result in a
possible "failure to communicate".

Anyway, the terms one should use would depend on who you're talking to.  If
you're conversing with a seasoned linguist, or someone speaking a like or
similar language, you've never refer to a "Chinese language".  In
Christianity, people may simply refer to themselves as "Christian", but
somewhere people begin to break it down into Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant,
Oriental, LDS, Unitarian, and Protestants would go further and call
themselves Baptist, Methodist, Adventist, Presbyterian,
Anglican/Episcopalian, Church of Christ, Pentecostal -- and the last one
could be Assemblies of God, Foursquare, COGIC, or one of the "oneness"
churches such as the United Pentecostal Church.  But if a Christian is
talking to a Buddhist, he'd be referring to universal and ecumenical
Christianity a lot more.

Likewise, to hoi polloi, you could say "Chinese" when you mean Mandarin or
Cantonese, or even say "Yugoslavian" (after all, that term simply means
"South Slavic") and mean either Croatian or Serbian.  I've heard people use
terms like "Czechoslovakian", but especially now that would be ill-advised.
It's even easier to say Portuguese, unless you *must* specify Brazilian or
no.  Or Romani, though you have a lot of kinds of Romani, from Vlach to
Welsh, from Sinte to Finnish.

Now mislabeling languages is unjustifiable in any case for a savvy
linguophile.  There would be no reason to refer to Rwanda as Swahili nor
Assyrian as Arabic or Icelandic as Danish.  Likewise talking about an
"American Indian" language (unless you say "the local dialect"), or
"Australian Aborigine" or "New Guinean", is also a clear sign of ignorance.

>As for politics, politics are by definition arbitrary associations of
>people within
>a community, just as communities are themselves arbitrary associations of
>individuals (cf. Locke's theory of government).  As such, both the
>linguist's methods
Now there you begin to see artificial, externally-imposed concepts of
"nationality" and "nation".  Look at Africa.  Why are there two countries
Zambia and Zimbabwe, since both were British Rhodesia and the current names
come from a common major river, the Zambezi (Mozambique, a former Portuguese
colony, derives its name from the same river).  (That would likely be the
name of the new nation should they merge into one).  They just happened to
be granted independence at different times, speaking of North and South
Rhodesia, and today they have highly contrasting governments: Zambia is a
market democracy and Zimbabwe is socialist and possibly a dictatorship.
(These unions have happened before.  Tanzania was two countries once.  There
are two Congos now.  But Ethiopia has lost its coastline which became
independent Eritrea, and civil war in Somalia have created two de facto
nations with different names [Somalia and Somaliland], even though Somalia
has NO GOVERNMENT AT ALL.  So it could go the other way.  Even tiny Rwanda
had a bloody civil war between rival ethnoi, Hutus and Tutsis, resulting in
so many dead and many more refugees.)

The differentiation of Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian (I don't believe there
is much of a "Montenegrin" language or even dialect) of course came as a
result of politics and religion.  Simultaneously, they are one langauge and
they are three languages.  A "trinity", if you wanna call it such.

DaW.
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