Language standards (was: "y" and "r")

At 2:02 pm +0200 1/4/01, Mangiat wrote:
>Nik wrote:
>
>> Raymond Brown wrote:
>> > I would
>> > assume, and I guess most others would, that it'd be the way an educated
>> > Italian speaking what most text books give as standard Italian.
>>
>> But there's no such standard in English.  There is such a standard if
>> you're specifying British English, but American English has no such
>> standard, it seems to have regional standards.  I'm not sure if
>> Australian English has such a standard, but at any rate, there's
>> definitely no standard for "World English".
>>
>
>Italian hasn't an established standard, as well.
Yet textbooks seem fairly agreed (not 100%, I admit) on what Italian
ideally should be like.

I don't think anyone speaks 'standard X' whatever language X is.  I doubt,
e.g. whether there has ever existed a "pure 100% Received Pronunciation'
speaker of southern British English.  These standards seem to be ideals to
which educated speakers think they adhere.

[snip]
>
>For istance, the way Tuscanians pronounce a word should be the rule;
I thought it was "Tuscan as pronounced by Romans"  :)
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At 1:18 pm -0400 1/4/01, John Cowan wrote:
>Raymond Brown scripsit:
>
>> I'm by no means an expert on Italian regional dialects, but I do understand
>> that northern dialects are not immediately comprehensible to southern
>> dialect speakers & vice-versa, i.e. there is a good deal of variation
>> within Italy.
>
>I think that there is no great barrier between northerners and southerners
>*when both are speaking Standard Italian*.  But of course people in both
>North and South often speak their so-called local dialects, which really
>amount
>to separate languages -- indeed, far northern Italian dialects are
>really Gallo-Romance rather than Italo-Romance at all.
Precisely what I meant.  But large regional differences like this generally
influence the way a standard language is pronounced, and Mangiat's email
seems to bear this out.

>> I was under the impression that there was some sort of notional "general
>> American", but I may be mistaken.
>
>"General American" is the name of a specific regional variety.  It has
>a broader distribution than the other regional varieties, but it is not
>truly "general".  Furthermore, it does not have special status in
>the other regions.
Right - I obviously misunderstood the term.

Ray.

=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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