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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4838 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 169 of 299 25 October 2013 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I doubt if many will agree, but I've always thought that spoken American English and
spoken British English will eventually have diverged so much that they could be considered separate languages, or at least, distinctly different dialects. This will happen much more slowly if only the written language is considered. It's true of course that the internet, movies and TV slow down the divergence, to some extent, but, for example, how much general American culture does the average Briton really get exposed to? Probably not as much as we imagine. We see the mainstream movies and TV (some of us), and the major news stories from Washington and New York, but how much do we know about the deep south, or the Rockies, or the mid-west, for example? And vice-versa, of course. We adopt some American linguistic usages, but not others, and our two versions of English continue to develop in different directions. The USA also has the interesting influence of Spanish, a highly significant "minority" language, which is something we don't have. (And US Spanish has itself diverged somewhat from Latin American Spanish, which in turn has diverged somewhat from Peninsulan Spanish, so those are potentially two or three more "separate languages" that used to be one. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5344 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 170 of 299 25 October 2013 at 7:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
If they are exposed to 10% of the American culture an average Norwegian teen ager is exposed to on a daily basis they should be doing ok. :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6592 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 171 of 299 25 October 2013 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So here's a thing: To the average Swede, peanuts are nuts and heat and temperature are pretty much the same thing. To a biologist, however, a peanut is not a nut and to a physicist, heat and temperature are two very different things. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that to your average layman, Swedish and Norwegian are different languages, because that's how we refer to them in everyday life, but to a linguist, they are standardized variants of a single multicentric language. In the same way, though most people will use the term "Chinese" to mean a single language, to a linguist it's a language family consisting of many languages.
The problem is that people are trying to find a definition that applies to both. A definition that will be scientifically valid and still conform to what we normally call a language. And that's not how it works. There's one scientific concept of language and one everyday concept, and the everyday concept doesn't have a strict definition, because that's not how language works. Words don't have definitions, they're labels that refer to vague categories with lots of exceptions. But these vague categories mostly overlap between people and communication is still possible without clear definitions. So screw trying to define the word "language" the way we use it in everyday speech. It doesn't need a definition. Science, however, does need definitions to be done correctly. Thus, linguists will have to adopt a definition of "language". This definition does not, however, need to correspond to how we use the word in everyday speech. It just needs to be internally consistent and useful for doing science. And we don't have to adapt our speech to conform to the scientific definition, but can still happily call Swedish and Norwegians different languages, even if it's not what the linguists call them. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4838 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 172 of 299 25 October 2013 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
Ah yes, teenagers. They speak their own language in any case. :) My own grown up kids probably watch far more US material than I do. The last things I watched with any regularity were The Sopranos and Frasier, and nowadays it's only (occasionally) The Simpsons and Family Guy. I would perhaps like to learn to speak like Peter Griffin as a party piece, although not on a regular basis. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6607 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 173 of 299 26 October 2013 at 1:52am | IP Logged | |||||
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4632 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 174 of 299 26 October 2013 at 9:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The Romance-speaking countries are a patchwork of contrasting dialects. Modern standard Portuguese and
Italian are relatively recent innovations, basically one particular dialect was chosen and elevated to the status of national language. If we consider someone who speaks good French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese as quadra-lingual, could we not say the same about one who is highly proficient in a two differing Italian dialects and a strong variant of standard French alongside the official version? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6713 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 175 of 299 26 October 2013 at 9:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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OK, to botanists most berries aren't berries (but bananas are) and most nuts aren't nuts, but maybe some botanicists are. If a scientific movement wants to be taken seriously then it shouldn't define its central notions in a way that is totally different from the way those words normally are used. And even less when those notions are so emotionally laden as language and dialect. And given the absurdities committed by botanists, I would be hesitant to let linguists decide over commonly used words. Let they invent their own terms and try to give them consistent definitions if they can.
But seriously, what could linguists conceivable choose to define degrees of relationship? The most obvious candidate would be the good old soundshifts of the historical linguists (maybe in a new guise using cladistic analysis), but it has been shown long ago that wawelike developments seriously complicate the picture when we study dialect continua. And then we have not even mentioned sounds introduced with loanwords and other external influences. But then maybe intercomprehensibility? That is certainly a relevant parameter, but dependent on the persons you ask you will get widely different results. Swedes in Malmö probably understand Danish better than Swedes in Kiruna because they have heard more Danish, and even if that factor has been neutralized you still have persons who speak clearer than others and persons who are better at understanding foreign speech in general. You can't even count on symmetrical levels of comprehension. So intercomprehensibility is also relevant, but insufficient. So is there then any simple parameter which linguists can use as a general criterium for degrees of relationship? Not as far as I can see. And even if some rubbish committee made a choice it wouldn't be binding for anybody, and the catfight would just continue unabated. In this situation I prefer the current mess, where we at least know the main positions. Edited by Iversen on 26 October 2013 at 10:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5440 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 176 of 299 26 October 2013 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I believe that the simplest criterion for distinguishing language and dialect is simply administrative recognition. This
has nothing to do with linguistic reality. We can say that Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are separate languages regardless of questions of degree of mutual intelligibility simply because these are officially recognized languages. I know that this does not do justice to the realities on the ground, but it simplifies the whole debate. This, of course, has always been my position on the Balkan languages question. Edited by s_allard on 27 October 2013 at 3:24pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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