Re: THEORY: Languages divided by politics and religion

In a message dated 2000/05/24 11:06:54 PM, DaW 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.)
>
>Or more likely, we could just take the middle road on this one.
>
>The floor is now open to all opinions.
    Purely from an ease-of-identification POV (Point-Of-View), I say - taking
some of DaW's examples as stated in DaW's post:
    - all Englishes should be identified if specified, i.e. whether it's
Scots, Southern US, Australian, etc....
    - Punjabi = Arabic and Gurmukhi Punjabi.
    - Norwegian =Bokmål and Nynorsk.
    -Azeri = Latin (formerlly Cyrillic) & Arabic .
    - Persian is Farsi, Dari/Afghani and Tajiki (the latter
written in Cyrillic).
    etc.,
        etc.

    my fav examples:
    - China Coast Pidgin, Chinese Pidgin English (CPE), Nauruan Pidgin
English, _Ham Soi_
    - New Guinea Pidgin English, Neo-Melanesian, _Tok Pisin_

    this of course puts more of a burden on the researcher(s) & printer, but
reduces some of the confusion IMHO due to the proliferation of language
names... till we can all agree to use the most common native names, i.e. Ham
Soi, Tok Pisin, etc..

    zHANg