Re: Newest natlang?

Given the smiley at the end of his message, I am inclined to say that he was
trying to quibble with the semantics -- once a dialect has an army and a
navy you can't call it a dialect anymore. (:
Eugene

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 3:59 PM, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 01:09, caeruleancentaur
> <caeruleancentaur@...> wrote:
> >> Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...> wrote:
> >>
> >> If having its own army and navy turns a dialect into a language...
> >
> > How can a dialect have its own army and navy?  :-)
>
> Honest question?
>
> Perhaps you're not aware of the saying "A language is a dialect with
> an army and a navy" (or "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un
> flot"), attributed to Max Weinreich.
>
> So Eldin was saying that if a group of speakers have an army and a
> navy of their own (i.e., roughly, if they form a sovereign nation with
> its own defence), then what they speak would no longer be considered a
> dialect but a separate language. (As, for example, Bosnian might be
> considered a separate language from Serbo-Croatian or BCS
> [Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian] only once Bosnia and Herzegovina became a
> country of its own, but a dialect of BCS while part of Yugoslavia.)
>
> So it's not literally the _dialect_ that has the army and navy, but
> its speakers.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
>

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