Re: THEORY: Languages divided by politics and religion

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)

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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