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Should dialects exist? | ||
Tags: Dialect | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| zenmonkey Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6555 days ago 803 posts - 1119 votes  1 sounds Speaks: EnglishC2*, Spanish*, French, German Studies: Italian, Modern Hebrew | Message 33 of 38 02 March 2012 at 2:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is as if the person started this thread was recommending we all speak Polish...
On the other hand, to talk about "biodiversity" with respect to languages is an abuse of the word (unless we are talking about chimp and whale languages). It is sufficient to talk about diversity of languages; if all the languages of the world disappeared to be replaced by one single language this would have no impact on biodiversity. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6275 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 34 of 38 19 March 2012 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would guess a lot of dialects are endangered and many have died out. Modern mass education and the mass media both tend to undermine dialects, since they tend to encourage standard or official languages.
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7159 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 35 of 38 19 March 2012 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | ||
+1 The idea of "biodiversity" of languages is rather um, incongruent to me too. Should we then open ourselves to considering entities languages as Esperanto or Interlingua as "engineered" entities similar to Dolly the Sheep or more maliciously "Frankenfood"? How about programming or musical "languages". How do they fit in the linguistic "biosphere"? :-P In a wider sense I question the equation of language (including its technical components) with living things (specifically humans) which is no doubt fed by humans' observation that users of languages are often fellow humans. It manifests itself into thinking that languages as living things that can be "disfigured" or "infected" by "pathogens" in the form of loanwords or foreign expressions (I guess that even the terms "language birth" and "language death" play on this biological association). I find that language purists tend to extend this metaphor of languages being like people for it seems to cloud the analysis with emotion and permits one to make judgements that would be inapplicable otherwise. I remember the nationalist Croatian linguist, Stjepan Babić earnestly stating in the 1990s when Croatian purism was moving into overdrive (since then it's died down): "The loss of a single Croatian word is the same as the loss of a Croatian soldier. By the same token, the rescue of a single Croatian word is equal to the rescue of a Croatian soldier.". This is really taking the metaphor quite far. Not only does he feel that his native language is human, but actually it's a coherent military unit with Babić the linguist tacitly being some kind of general or marshal. It sounds fancifully macho not to mention striking for an otherwise trained linguist to flash emotion so strongly. Edited by Chung on 19 March 2012 at 9:17pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6275 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 36 of 38 21 March 2012 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | ||
It is surprising how often emotion, frequently stimulated by nationalism, has unbalanced people whose judgements you would think would be scientific and rational. But since language defence and propagation are often motivated by nationalism of one kind or another, perhaps this should not be so astonishing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vilas Pentaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6963 days ago 531 posts - 722 votes Speaks: Spanish, Italian*, English, French, Portuguese | Message 37 of 38 22 March 2012 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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Now I am in holiday in Sicily.
Here almost everybody is bilingual Sicilian/Italian And is very nice ! and there are also some differences between different "dialects" and accents of Sicilian! Maybe biodiversity is not the right word . Let it call it glosso-diversity ! Glosso-diversity make the world richer! "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" is a humorous quip about the arbitrariness of the distinction between a dialect and a language (from Wikipedia) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4862 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish | Message 38 of 38 05 May 2012 at 11:11pm | IP Logged | ||
Yeah, and that's why I learn all of these languages, you've seen through me ;) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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