Re: Diglossia (was Re: Nur-ellen in the world of Brithenig)

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:

> Me govanen!
>
> John Cowan tetent:
> >
> > "Jörg Rhiemeier" wrote:
> >
> > > I guess that Kerno was officially held to be a dialect of Brithenig
> > > until a few decades ago, while in fact it is a language of its own.  Are
> > > Brithenig and Kerno mutually intelligible or not?
> >
> > Um.  There really is no fact of the matter about it.  Are High and Low
> > German mutually intelligible, or not?
>
> They are not, or only marginally so.
That's not the point, though.  John's point, if I read him aright, was
that the question of whether a form of speech is a language or a dialect
is not at all a simple matter. He was bringing up the matter of High German
and Low German because the traditional dialects (*not* the Standard
Hochdeutsch you are taught in school) of German form a continuum from
Austria to the Netherlands, and no two contiguous dialects along that
continuum are mutually unintelligible, while the dialects at either end are
so. That is, at least, what linguists say; I cannot say for sure not having
lived there.  In other words, the situation is quite complex, and any simplistic
attempt to call this or that set of dialects a language will be arbitrary to that
extent.

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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