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Catalan is not a dialect | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| koba Heptaglot Senior Member AustriaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5867 days ago 118 posts - 201 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, French | Message 17 of 46 02 November 2010 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | ||
How can you tell the difference from a language and a dialect? If you think Spanish and Italian are simply Latin dialects, then why not go further and say that all modern european languages are dialects of a Proto Indo-European language? What distinguishes a language from a dialect isn't necessarily its multi-intelligibility. The usability of considering a linguistic movement a "language" is simply for territorial, political, cultural and geographical boundaries. Take for example the Scandinavian languages: Norwegian, Danish and Swedish. Natives can understand each other with a little effort, and they're still considered independent languages. Another example is Portuguese and Spanish, which are to a large extent, mutually intelligible. But if you look at German dialects, they're not always intelligible to all. One might say that Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, etc are Latin variations, but using the term 'dialect' here is kinda disrespectful to the natives and it's like you're ignoring that they're independent languages and have their own culture. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5218 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 18 of 46 02 November 2010 at 6:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think everything is a dialect of English
Only joking before you all get uppity! I am entitled to a joke it's my birthday/nameday equivalent ..... This is a troll war get over it! Edited by maydayayday on 02 November 2010 at 6:41pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| vilas Pentaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6959 days ago 531 posts - 722 votes Speaks: Spanish, Italian*, English, French, Portuguese | Message 19 of 46 03 November 2010 at 9:46am | IP Logged | ||
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Valdotain a language and not a dialect
Piedmontese (Turin)is a language and not a dialect Lombardian (Milano)is a language and not a dialect Venetian is a language and not a dialect Trentin is a language and not a dialect Furlan is a language and not a dialect Ligurian(Genoa) is a language and not a dialect Emilian (Bolognese) is a language and not a dialect Romagnol (Rimini) is a language and not a dialect Tuscan(Florence) is a language and not a dialect Umbro is a language and not a dialect Marchigiano is a language and not a dialect Laziale (Rome) is a language and not a dialect Campano (Naples) is a language and not a dialect Lucano is a language and not a dialect Calabrese is a language and not a dialect Sicilian is a language and not a dialect Sardinian is a language and not a dialect So what? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Old Chemist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5172 days ago 227 posts - 285 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 20 of 46 03 November 2010 at 10:38am | IP Logged | ||
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As has already been said, for languages which are similar, language and dialect become a political issue, with those speakers whose "idiom" is described as a dialect taking offence and insisting they speak a language, sometimes from everyone else's point of view irrationally because the two are virtually identical, mutually intelligible and one just happens to be the standard speech
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 21 of 46 03 November 2010 at 11:22am | IP Logged | ||
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Italian is a dialect (of Tuscan) and not a language
just kidding, of course 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6010 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 22 of 46 03 November 2010 at 11:56am | IP Logged | ||
Very rarely is this the case. Most groups who "insist they speak a language" do in fact "speak a language". There is a massive difference between "virtually identical" and "very similar". For example, the Astur-Leonese language family is has certain consistent similarities within the family that it does not share with any of the dialects of Castillian. Yet Astur-Leonese is frequently dismissed as "a dialect of Spanish", and "virtually identical", even though the linguists all agree that it is not. The problem with dialects is that they tend to be described as "dialects of LanguageX" when they really should be "dialects of LanguageFamilyX". For speakers of dialects of Astur-Leonese, being called "a dialect of Astur-Leonese" is not a problem, because it doesn't make them subordinate to someone else's standard. But many Valencians reject the description of Valencian as "a dialect of Catalan", because "Catalan", which was originally the name of a family of dialects, has been co-opted by the speakers of the dialect technically known as "West Catalan". I'm pretty certain that if the autonomous region of Catalunia had called itself West Catalunia, then people from Valencia, the Balearics and Alguero wouldn't have a problem with their languages being called "a dialect of Catalan". 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5225 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 23 of 46 03 November 2010 at 7:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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About amending anything... the main use of that would be not to disturb oversensitive or nationalistic Catalan speakers, since we all know that the difference between languages and dialects is somewhat blurry.
That said, however, I think I can shed some light on a few points here: -Catalan has some orthographic features that are not present in Spanish: grave accents (`), cedilla (Ç), and punt-volat (·), and the n tilde sound is represented by 'ny' while it is ñ in Spanish, and, again, that is absent from Catalan. Also there are different (if somewhat similar) grammar rules, possessives, infinitives, etc. To me, that clearly makes them separate languages. But to each his own. -WRT Catalan, Valencian and Mallorquin I'm aware of some differences in vocabulary but I don't really know them well enough to tell if it's something deeper. In my high school books Valencian was described as a dialect of Catalan but that may be politics in action. Not that I care. -As Iversen said I doubt there are any Catalan speakers who never heard Spanish. But when I was in Barcelona I easily understood 95% of their jargon easily, except for different words, with a nearly 0 prior exposition (just some news flashes with Catalan politicians and subtitles). For whatever reason this greatly surprised my students (they probably have been taught to expect the opposite by their nationalist local governments), but then again I might be readier to understand things because I study languages. -A common myth I hear over and over again is that about Franco, and, frankly, it makes me sick by now. That's humbug spread by separatists and newly-coined opposers of his regime (the ones the world heard of only after the guy was dead): Franco crushed the separatists, yes (an obvious need), but not the languages. Books in Catalan (and presumably Basque, etc. but that I don't know) were published under his rule, which clearly wouldn't have been possible if those languages were really 'banned'. Under Franco's rule local languages other than Spanish were mostly ignored as being lower class (this is common knowledge), and mostly disregarded, but never banned. However, in the later years of Franco's rule the value of these languages was once again acknowledged and they were even planned to be incorporated back to the public schools system. Do you think I'm pulling it out of my a**? It was somewhat surprising for me too when I first found out about it here: http://www.filosofia.org/hem/dep/boe/19750701.htm but then I did my homework and found the official (as in 'government issued') document, theoretically sanctioned by Franco himself, and not yet erased by the Minitrue. Get it (scanned PDF of the original) while you can here: http://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-1975-13948 P.S. Could any administrator turn the URLs above into real links, please? Thank you :) Edited by mrwarper on 03 November 2010 at 7:18pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5692 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 24 of 46 04 November 2010 at 12:15am | IP Logged | ||
maydayayday, you win this round of life. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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