Re: THEORY: Languages divided by politics and religion

Danny Wier wrote:

> >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.
Well, my point was that all linguistic terms used to describe similarities
are abstractions, and as such don't really exist "out there" in the real
world except insofar people perceive them to exist.  They're arbitrary
relationships.

>  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.
If an monolingual English speaker heard someone speaking Dyirbal and heard
that person say /dOg/ within the stream of other phonemes, do you think the
English speaker would recognize that for what it was?  Most people who hear
a foreign language they don't know are likely not to be able even to discern one
word from another.

>  I've heard people use
> terms like "Czechoslovakian", but especially now that would be ill-advised.
During Soviet occupation, a fictional Czechoslovak standard language was
more or less imposed on the country, IIRC.  It incorporated elements of
both Czech and Slovak.

> 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.
Perhaps.  But then you're not talking about the people involved, so
much as outsiders who don't really care about the situation.

> But Ethiopia has lost its coastline which became
> independent Eritrea,
Well, that's a tougher issue.  Eritrea during colonial days was a distinct
colony, controlled by Italy IIRC.  After the war, the Allies handed it
over to the Ethiopians for their part in resisting Mussolini.

> 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.
No central government.  It has plenty of regional de facto tribal
dictatorships.

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