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Re: THEORY: Languages divided by politics and religion

From:Danny Wier <dawier@...>
Date:Saturday, May 27, 2000, 22:55
>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. ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com