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Re: THEORY: Languages divided by politics and religion

From:Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
Date:Thursday, May 25, 2000, 12:23
Danny Wier wrote:

> Now I'll cut to the chase. Should languages be split according to > political/ethnic and religious/sectarian divisions, even though the > languages on each side of the boundary are highly mutually intellegible? > (In other words, being a "splitter"; SIL is like that.) Or should languages > be "lumped" together even if co-comprehension is very low -- even to the > extreme of saying Chinese is one langauge divided into five major dialects > (Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese etc.)
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. One way of looking at language is to ask yourself: what is a person? Is the little drummer-boy who barely survived the battle the same as the aged general who has won many battles and is nearing the end of his carreer? This perhaps captures more of the generalization: that no language will be the same from one moment to the next, yet it will be subtantially based on those previous moments, just as the events that lead the boy to become a general can in theory be specified with precision. 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 of analyzing people's language use and the political scientist's methods for describing political behavior both share the characteristic that they can only reason from a posteriori principles, internally from within a preexistent social system, and cannot acquire the kind of a priori understanding we would like to have. They both, consequently, do not have the theoretical tools with which to make absolute categorizations: the linguist must, at some point, simply declare a set of considerably intelligible idiolects a language, just as politicians must simply declare a state to exist. And they can argue about where to draw those lines: some linguists may think idiolects 1 through 15,000 to be a particular language community, while another may want to divide that into two distinct language communities. A politician may wish to declare certain scraps of earth to be a state, while other may wish to categorize it as part of another state. There is no way to decide between the two categorizers which is "right", because rightness or wrongness are themselves abstractions which have no independent ontological existence or meaning. Those who wish to say one two people belong to the same "language" group are thus imposing something that is not really there, except insofar as the individuals who make it up believe it is there. (This was incidentally the problem with Marxist thought: "proletarians" as such do not exist, unless the people who belong to that abstract grouping believe they do, for only then can they achieve political change) =========================================== Tom Wier <artabanos@...> "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." ===========================================