tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post236899288390995070..comments2024-03-17T09:14:13.950+00:00Comments on John Wells’s phonetic blog: Avoch ayeJohn Wellshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13684304410735867148noreply@blogger.comBlogger95125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-950351800986502962020-02-14T09:23:03.625+00:002020-02-14T09:23:03.625+00:00Nice post thanks for sharing. read these blogs:
L...Nice post thanks for sharing. read these blogs: <br /><a href="http://book-flights.mystrikingly.com/blog/los-angeles-to-chicago-flights" rel="nofollow">Los Angeles To Chicago Flights</a> <br /><a href="https://sites.google.com/site/bookflightsatcheapfares/home/blog/new-york-to-chicago-flights" rel="nofollow">New York to Chicago Flights</a> <br /><a href="http://book-flights.mystrikingly.com/blog/new-york-to-chicago-flights" rel="nofollow">New York to Chicago Flights</a> <br /><a href="https://bookflights.hatenadiary.com/entry/new-york-to-los-angeles-flights" rel="nofollow">New York to Los Angeles Flights</a> <br /><a href="https://sites.google.com/site/bookflightsatcheapfares/home/blog/atlanta-to-orlando-flights" rel="nofollow">Atlanta to Orlando Flights</a> <br /><a href="https://bookflights.tumblr.com/post/190787496469/united-airlines-reservations-number" rel="nofollow">United Airlines Reservations Number</a><br />Robert Smithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17406862233315417980noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-44462164845695991302011-04-19T16:11:36.850+01:002011-04-19T16:11:36.850+01:00I was speaking of 19th-century Austrians of the Em...I was speaking of 19th-century Austrians of the Empire: after 1918, everything changed, with Austria becoming the smallest possible Small Germany.John Cowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11452247999156925669noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-15827577339774146502011-04-18T20:58:02.142+01:002011-04-18T20:58:02.142+01:00All four standard languages are founded on the his...<i>All four standard languages are founded on the historic dialect of Eastern Hercegovina</i><br /><br />...so that Standard Croatian is much, much closer to Standard Serbian than to the dialect of Zagreb (the capital of Croatia), and Standard Serbian is AFAIK closer to Standard Croatian than to the dialect of Niš in eastern Serbia.<br /><br /><i>but do you think those educators etc. can really make different languages out of what essentially was and is the same language? Such is the power of these ...tors? Imagine in the UK they 'implemented' [...] Obviously, it would be a farcical masquerade and no-one would think the British have a _different_ language, different from that of the North Americans.</i><br /><br />Replace "think" with "want to believe", and there you go.<br /><br />An army, a navy, and an ideology.<br /><br /><i>I have thought of a nearby problem for my theory, which is that you might consider the Anschluss 1936 to have been a German invasion of Austria, yet the Austrians still call their language "German".</i><br /><br />There was a short period in the 1960s when school reports said <i>Unterrichtssprache</i> ("language of teaching") rather than <i>Deutsch</i>, but Austrian Standard German is almost identical to the Standard German varieties of Germany and quite different from any dialect spoken in or near Austria, and it's not going to go away (or be greatly modified) anytime soon – if anything, it's becoming more similar to the standards of Germany.<br /><br />Most Austrians seem to have considered themselves Germans till the early 1950s or so.David Marjanovićnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-88790349835194850872011-04-14T13:41:48.982+01:002011-04-14T13:41:48.982+01:00Hm, my comment seems to be disappearing, I'll ...Hm, my comment seems to be disappearing, I'll try again....<br /><br />There's no reason for Omniglot to call the Serbian bit transliterated, Latin and Cyrillic are both commonly used to write Serbian.<br /> <br />Anyway, these translations seem okay, however if you take say the Lord's Prayer as an example, you'll find a few more differences. But yeah, your point still holds.Andrej Bjelakovićnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-52089469356434841862011-04-14T09:55:04.007+01:002011-04-14T09:55:04.007+01:00A postscript to my previous posting: at http://www...A postscript to my previous posting: at http://www.omniglot.com/writing/serbo-croat.htm<br /><br />you find the same §1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:<br /><br />Croatian:<br /><br />Sva ljudska bića rađaju se slobodna i jednaka u dostojanstvu i pravima. Ona su obdarena razumom i sviješću i trebaju jedna prema drugima postupati u duhu bratstva.<br /><br />Serbian (in transliteration)<br /> <br />Sva ljudska bića rađaju se slobodna i jednaka u dostojanstvu i pravima. Ona su obdarena razumom i svešću i treba jedni prema drugima da postupaju u duhu bratstva.<br /><br />Bosnian (in Latin alphabet):<br /><br />Sva ljudska bića rađaju se slobodna i jednaka u dostojanstvu i pravima. Ona su obdarena razumom i sviješću i treba da jedno prema drugome postupaju u duhu bratstva.<br /><br />Need I count the differences between (pairwise) the three? I can't having the impression that Cro, Ser, and Bos of this example differ far less than Nynorsk and Bokmaal of the example above.<br /><br />Compare Slovene: Vsi ljudje se rodijo svobodni in imajo enako dostojanstvo in enake pravice. Obdarjeni so z razumom in vestjo in bi morali ravnati drug z drugim kakor bratje.<br /><br />It remains to be seen, tho', to what extent the omniglot site is reliable in the relevant respect.Podpora społeczeństwahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08339088245843399386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-88351374253076871732011-04-14T08:57:01.194+01:002011-04-14T08:57:01.194+01:00Ad John Cowan
"Wojciech: At least as much as...Ad John Cowan<br /><br />"Wojciech: At least as much as BrE and AmE, probably much more. In truth, Nynorsk, Bokmål, Danish, and Swedish are likewise four standardizations of a single dialect continuum, though more diverse than the four standardizations of "our language"."<br /><br />When one compares texts (the same chapters of the Bible, say, the same Universal Declaration of Rights, the same use instruction of your motor-saw and such like) in languages grown out from the same dialect-continuums, such as: Danish-Swedish-Bokmaal-Nynorsk, or Czech-Slovak, or Russian-Ukrainian-Byelorussian, or Spanish-Portuguese, or German-Dutch-Luxemburghish-Yiddish, or Dutch-Afrikaans, or maybe various standarised or semi-standarised versions of Frisian or Rumantsch, one is immediately struck by two things:<br /><br />1. The texts are composed of recognisably similar words, here and there a completely different word, but rather seldom, in recognisably identical or nearly-identical order;<br /><br />2. 50 percent or more of these recognisably similar words display subtle differences, though -- here and there a different vowel or consonant or none where the other language has one, or some different prefix or suffix ... or such-like. This is seen from the texts in Bokmaal and Nynorsk I quoted above: for instance #1 of the Declaration of Rights contains 8 (subtly) different words in both languages, 6 identical (I am counting types, not tokens) plus a number of quite different words that can be discounted as stylistical variety of the translations.<br /><br />Now the above is not true of BrE and AmE (in their standard variants); the same text written in BrE and AmE looks, for the most part of it, exactly the same. Differences like 'colour'-'color' etc. are rare; they would increase drammatically in number if the r-lessness of BrE ('wuhk of aht') and the American 'd' (I am wriding a ledder) were codified in spelling, and perhaps the quality of the American short 'o' (oh my Gahd!), but even then they would remain regular and predictable, in way in which the differences between Czech and Slovak are not (the contrast between Bokmaal and Danish is a special case). <br /><br />A similar situation as in BrE and AmE obtains, methinks, in Germany's German and Austrian German, and Swiss (Standard) German, or France's French and Belgium's French, or Dutch and Flemish (standard, not dialects).<br /><br />Now, it'd interest me what your opinion is on Cro-Ser-Bos-Mont in this respect. Are these languages more like the former group (the Scandinavian ones, Czech-Slovak etc.) or are they rather like the various Englishes, or Germans, or Frenches, or Dutches? My impression is that they are decidedly more like the latter. Contrast Slovenian, which relates to 'our language' more or less like the languages of the former group: close, very close, very similar, yet still, clearly different.Podpora społeczeństwahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08339088245843399386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-48037318202343819532011-04-14T01:23:12.735+01:002011-04-14T01:23:12.735+01:00John Cowan
Thanks for that. No puzzle about my co...John Cowan<br /><br />Thanks for that. No puzzle about my comments of the alphabet for Moldovan — it was just ignorance. Everything I knew about Moldavian/Moldovan was learned before 1989, and the detailed book I had to hand was also out of date. I did know about Transnistria, but assumed that they didn't bother with the language.<br /><br />I'm sort-of glad I put out some inaccurate comments. As a result I'm now much better informed!David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-14568960342052650972011-04-13T18:28:11.409+01:002011-04-13T18:28:11.409+01:00Wojciech: At least as much as BrE and AmE, probabl...Wojciech: At least as much as BrE and AmE, probably much more. In truth, Nynorsk, Bokmål, Danish, and Swedish are likewise four standardizations of a single dialect continuum, though more diverse than the four standardizations of "our language". What is more, the spoken dialect isoglosses often run east and west in Norway-Sweden, whereas the political boundary runs north and south, with the result that central Norwegians may well understand their Swedish neighbors better than their compatriots in the south. (Norwegian, unlike the other two but like English, does not have a prestige accent/dialect.)<br /><br />Infinitum, Andrej: I should note that my understanding is completely dependent on the work of Miro Kačić, the Croatian linguist (in both senses of that term). While highly respected, Kačić's work is of course controversial, like everything else about the language he worked on.<br /><br />David: I don't understand. Moldovan <i>is</i> written in the Latin script and has been since 1989 — except in Transnistria, the Slavic-dominated region east of the Dniestr which the Moldovan government does not control. Indeed, all parties outside Transnistria agree that Moldovan and Romanian are the same language, use the same orthography, and so on, except that it is called <i>Romanian</i> in Romania and <i>Moldovan</i> in Moldova, as if in America we insisted on calling English <i>American</i> (we sometimes do, of course, but not often, certainly not for all purposes).<br /><br />The Austrian version of German nationalism would be <i>Grossdeutschland</i>, a state uniting all the German lands under Austrian hegemony. Once the 1866 Austro-Prussian War made it clear that <i>Kleindeutschland</i> was the order of the day, it's hard to see Austrian Germans as feeling national (as opposed to cultural and linguistic) identity with the rest of the Germans.<br /><br />Digression: The original intent of German's much-derided national anthem, <i>Deutschland, Deutschland über alles / Über alles in die Welt</i>, was not world conquest, though that's the Nazis made of it. It was essentially civic-nationalist, and proclaimed loyalty to Germany-the-shared-language-culture-ideology over the particularist German microstates that were all that existed in 1841, to "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit", as the third stanza (now the only official stanza) has it. Brecht's unofficial new lyrics, "Und nicht über und nicht unter / Andern Völkern wolln wir sein / [...] / Und das Liebste mag's uns scheinen / So wie anderen Völkern ihr's" set the record straight.<br /><br />Andrej: Thanks for the correction: <i>mixed</i> was an ill-chosen word on my part.John Cowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11452247999156925669noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-21953186766065443392011-04-12T22:48:01.184+01:002011-04-12T22:48:01.184+01:00As a speaker of Serbian, I'd say John Cowan ha...As a speaker of Serbian, I'd say John Cowan has pretty much nailed it. Just to clarify, "Standard Serbian is mixed Ijekavian and Ekavian" is true, but only in the sense that both are considered standard in Serbian, not that they are literally mixed in SS. <br />Basically, people in Serbia use Ekavian, Serbs in Republika Srpska part of Bosnia use Ijekavian (and they'll probably call their language Serbian rather than Bosnian).Andrej Bjelakovićnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-76805030513258876112011-04-12T20:18:19.901+01:002011-04-12T20:18:19.901+01:00John Cowan
Thanks for clarification and details. ...John Cowan<br /><br />Thanks for clarification and details. <br /><br />Do you see any chance of Moldova reverting to the Roman alphabet? Or do your italics in '<i>official</i> position' imply that the Romanian government is more attached to separate language status than it admits?<br /><br />Why did the German-speakers of Austria not consider themselves part of the German Lands? I can see why foreigners saw 'Germany' as a geographical entity before it was a state, but why should German-speaking Austrians think so? Or did they believe in a multi-ethnic multilingual Empire?David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-5364697571343387102011-04-12T18:39:28.879+01:002011-04-12T18:39:28.879+01:00Ad infinitum scribam
Norwegian comes in through t...Ad infinitum scribam<br /><br />Norwegian comes in through the initial fragment of J. Cowan's posting:<br /><br />"Standard Serbo-Croat was never a single standard; rather, it was a fusion of two existing standards, an agreement that Standard Croatian and Standard Serbian (both of which already existed) would be treated as equally acceptable for all purposes. In this way it is like Standard Bokmål-Nynorsk, and like what would be the case if British society decided to accept American English as a written standard with a status equal to British English, or vice versa."<br /><br />He forgot to explain that Bokmål and Nynorsk are both Norwegian in a sense. The difference between them is, to my knowledge, far larger than that between British English and American English or, again to the best of my knowledge, Serbian and Croatian.<br /><br />Example:<br /><br />Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Lord's Prayer, in:<br /><br />Nynorsk:<br /><br />Alle menneske er fødde til fridom og med same menneskeverd og menneskerettar. Dei har fått fornuft og samvit og skal leve med kvarandre som brør.<br /><br />Fader vår, du som er i himmelen!<br />Lat namnet ditt helgast.<br />Lat riket ditt koma.<br />Lat viljen råda på jorda<br />så som i himmelen.<br />Gje oss i dag vårt daglege brød.<br />Forlat oss vår skuld<br />som me òg forlet våre skuldmenn.<br />Før oss ikkje inn i freisting,<br />men frels oss frå det onde.<br /><br />Bokmål:<br /><br />Alle mennesker er født frie og med samme menneskeverd og menneskerettigheter. De er utstyrt med fornuft og samvittighet og bør handle mot hverandre i brorskapets ånd.<br /><br />Fader vår, du som er i himmelen! <br />La ditt navn holdes hellig. <br />La ditt rike komme. <br />La din vilje skje på jorden <br />som i himmelen. <br />Gi oss i dag vårt daglige brød. <br />Forlat oss vår skyld, <br />som vi òg forlater våre skyldnere. <br />Led oss ikke inn i fristelse, <br />men frels oss fra det onde.Podpora społeczeństwahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08339088245843399386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-50527165393947663642011-04-12T18:10:46.633+01:002011-04-12T18:10:46.633+01:00@John Cowan: good summary for Serbo-Croatian
@Woj...@John Cowan: good summary for Serbo-Croatian<br /><br />@Wojciech: how does Norwegian come in here?infinitum scribamnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-12824327301605632892011-04-12T17:52:53.830+01:002011-04-12T17:52:53.830+01:00ad John Cowan
since you seem to know so much abou...ad John Cowan<br /><br />since you seem to know so much about 'our language': do Croatian and Serbian, say, differ at least as much as do British and American English? To my knowledge, bokmaal and nynorsk differ to a far larger degree than the said BrE and AmE.Podpora społeczeństwahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08339088245843399386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-81307514050870942822011-04-12T16:55:15.965+01:002011-04-12T16:55:15.965+01:00David Crosbie:
Although it's true that there ...David Crosbie:<br /><br />Although it's true that there was a hard break in the official spelling of Romanian in Moldova between 1918 (when Romanian Cyrillic went away) and 1924 (when Moldovan Cyrillic was promulgated) due to the political union between Romania and Moldova at that time, six years is a short time in the life of an orthography, and it is plausible to see Moldovan Cyrillic as a reformed spelling in the same sense that Soviet Russian was a reformed spelling of Tsarist Russian (though somewhat more drastically so; more letters were abolished). That being the case, it is plausible to say that the imperial power in Moldova <i>retained</i> rather than <i>imposed</i> a Cyrillic orthography as a way of distinguishing the Romanian of Moldova from the Romanian of Romania.<br /><br />There certainly are differences between Moldovan Romanian and Romanian Romanian, but it is the <i>official</i> position of the Moldovan government that the official language of Moldova <i>is</i> Romanian, though <i>Moldovan</i> is its official name in Moldova. This is not equivalent to the situation in former Yugoslavia.<br /><br />Lastly, I'd say the point at which Austria was definitively divided from the German lands was either 1805 or 1866/67, but by no means 1871.John Cowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11452247999156925669noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-63751854424145308762011-04-12T16:30:12.917+01:002011-04-12T16:30:12.917+01:00Standard Serbo-Croat was never a single standard; ...Standard Serbo-Croat was never a single standard; rather, it was a fusion of two existing standards, an agreement that Standard Croatian and Standard Serbian (both of which already existed) would be treated as equally acceptable for all purposes. In this way it is like Standard Bokmål-Nynorsk, and like what would be the case if British society decided to accept American English as a written standard with a status equal to British English, or vice versa. It is that agreement which came apart when Yugoslavia did, and it has been followed by the creation of a third standard for Bosnian and a nascent fourth one for Montenegrin.<br /><br />All four standard languages are founded on the historic dialect of Eastern Hercegovina, a neo-Shtokavian form which is now the most widely spoken dialect variety of <i>naš jezik</i> 'our language', as it is politely called, in the whole of former Yugoslavia. They differ roughly as follows: Standard Croatian is exclusively Ijekavian, admits influences from the Chakavian and Kajkavian macro-dialects, is relatively hostile to Western loanwords and does not normally respell the ones it accepts, and is written exclusively in the Latin script; Standard Serbian is mixed Ijekavian and Ekavian, has no such influences from the other macro-dialects, is relatively friendly to Western loanwords and respells the ones it accepts to match Serbian pronunciation conventions, and is written with equal acceptability in the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Standard Bosnian is close to Standard Serbian, has some influences from palaeo-Shtokavian macro-dialect, is exclusively Ijekavian, and uses the Latin script only; Standard Montenegrin will probably wind up using the Latin script only and being exclusively Ekavian. There are of course many differences in vocabulary, on about the same scale as BrE-AmE differences.John Cowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11452247999156925669noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-81286556002328421232011-04-12T13:58:28.892+01:002011-04-12T13:58:28.892+01:00Ad David Crosbie
not knowing much about Scots, I ...Ad David Crosbie<br /><br />not knowing much about Scots, I must confess I have always believed things are the way the you are describing them, so in this case here is perfect agreement between us. Pseudo-dialectised Abstand, plus non-Abstand English dialects, shading off little by little into just a Scottish accents in standard English. Plus benighted people believing Scots is 'nothing but' those non-abstand dialects and accents... . But after Burns there was one Hugh MacDiarmad, a Scots poet, authors of 'Hymns to Lenin' and other beautiful poems -- was he not (in his poems) Scots? <br /><br />Sardinian and certain variants of Frisian are in a somewhat similar situation, even if not exactly the same. Kashubian in Poland may be a case in point too, though opinions differ. In the Netherlands there is a thing called 'stadfrysk' or town Frisian, a Frisian-influenced Dutch dialect, in Germany they call 'Ost-Friesisch' (Eastern Frisian) certain Low German dialects spoken where Eastern Frisian had been spoken centuries ago, and, too, to some extent influenced by it in phonetics and phonology.Podpora społeczeństwahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08339088245843399386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-64291382719743195402011-04-12T13:37:45.760+01:002011-04-12T13:37:45.760+01:00The Ausbausprache – Abstandsprache – Dachsprache ...The <b>Ausbausprache – Abstandsprache – Dachsprache</b> distinction which John has directed us to allows clearer discussion of the various 'languages' that popped up in the thread. But the distinctions are perhaps <b>too</b> precise to the 'language' that prompted us — Scots.<br /><br />In some ways, Scots fits the description of <i>pseudo-dialectized abstand language</i>. If Scots literature had ended with Robert Burns, that might now be accepted. But there is a modern literature and a modern aspiration to a Scots of public discourse. And in the changed political dispensation, Scots has the status of one of three official 'languages' — albeit more limited in use even than Gaelic. In short, those who use and advocate Scots as an Ausbausprache are becoming more numerous and less marginalised.<br /><br />The existence of urban vernaculars that resemble <b>real</b> non-abstand dialects of English complicates the picture. These are sometimes described as 'Scots' — even believed by some to be <b>typical</b> of Scots.<br /><br />In <i>Accents of English</i> I understand John to imply a clear distinction between <i>abstand</i> Scots and <i>non-abstand</i> Scottish English. If I understand John correctly, each has its own phonology, but the phonology and phonetics of Scottish English have been affected by Scots.David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-30934408634655254762011-04-12T07:53:55.965+01:002011-04-12T07:53:55.965+01:00Ad David Crosbie
Lest I should be misunderstood: ...Ad David Crosbie<br /><br />Lest I should be misunderstood: I am NOT against anyone's declarations of (political) independence, at least not _a priori_, nor against anyone's wish to call his/her/its/their language anything he/she/it/they please(s) --- if the chaps from Grevelfingen decide to call their language 'Grevelfingisch' rather than just 'German' -- why, let'em. <br /><br />Such strivings are by in themselves innocuous and deserve some (tongue-in-cheek) respect: after all, the Grevelfingians may have a eighty-something words for local realities, and pronounce the word 'Boden' ('floor') with a particular inflexion of voice... What I have a certain problem with, rather, is the expectation that such Grevelfingisches should really be, and in all seriousness, considered languages different from those from which they separated (in name, and maybe in the political status of the community of their speakers).Podpora społeczeństwahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08339088245843399386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-24182391743878063002011-04-12T07:31:41.246+01:002011-04-12T07:31:41.246+01:00Ad wiarek
Re Afrikaans and Dutch I am not sure. M...Ad wiarek<br /><br />Re Afrikaans and Dutch I am not sure. May be one of those really tricky cases I said are rather rare in the European linguistic space. One thing that strikes me is that, if you compare the same text, such as the Lord's Prayer or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or such, in both of them, you find some differences in literally every word, and quite often you find outright different words. This is not the case with British and American English. Codifying the r-lessness of the British ('wuhk of aht') and the d-quality of the American intervocalic 't' ('love-ledders', 'twendy', 'liddle' --- not just intervocalic) would increase the number of discrepancies dramatically but it would still be not exactly the way it is between Afrikaans and Dutch. OK, you can codify lots of things, such as the characteristic diphthongal pronunciation of the short 'a' in AmE ('come arn, mayn!' or '.. mairn' or some such) or you-all, or youse or lots of others. But then, not all Americans say 'thayt bayd mayn' for 'that bad man' or 'you all' or even 'you guys' for 'you' in plural. It would be a political folly to legislate that all should.<br /><br />I don't know those Flemish dialects, but one characteristic feature of all dialects of a language (German, Polish, Italian --- these are I have some idea about) is that despite their sometimes very deviant (from the standard language) phonetics they copy the standard language's idiomatics, phraseology, learned and not-so-learned words, and even grammar. (For instance, when I studied Swiss German, the books said: 'never use the active participle in -nd, it does not exist in Swiss German'. But I heard them quite often in everyday Swiss German speech...) Luxemburghish, for instance, has emancipated itself at least in part from Standard German in this respect, borrows words from French rather than German ... that is why, I feel, its claim to independent languagehood looks credible (though still disputable, I agree). Whether this be or not the case with Afrikaans and Dutch --- I don't know and can't check very quickly, lacking any mentionable competence in either.<br /><br />Ad David Crosbie,<br /><br />I am not a lingust, I must modestly admit, so I don't know what language 'really' is, i.e. what science claims (with good reasons, supportedly, and so on) it is. And in addition, I am quite insensitive to political and/or nationalist ideas about language, and decrees on languages. I flatter myself to have a 'robust sense of reality' (as sir Bertrand would have said) of various languages, but that's, admittedly, very naive and bound to seem nonsense to a skilled linguist. I wish I had understood exactly why it is so naive, but ... let the matter rest at this.<br /><br />If Scots is not moribund --- all the better, this 'gars' me rejoice, by contrast. I by all means like linguistic variety (where there really is some...)<br /><br />Re unsupported assertions (such as for instance?..) come on (or 'cuhm ahn' as a future American language writer would write) --- we are not discussing on the pages of a learned Journal (founded 18-something on the incentive of some Imperial Academy or another) so we don't have to build in learned footnotes into our posts, I'd think...Podpora społeczeństwahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08339088245843399386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-33789345044555038742011-04-11T23:14:14.577+01:002011-04-11T23:14:14.577+01:00Wojciech
Your latest post is full of unsupported ...Wojciech<br /><br />Your latest post is full of unsupported assertions that I can't accept for a moment. I find I can't argue with you any more; it's wearying and gets us nowhere. What you call 'a language' is for me a nonsense.<br /><br />And Scots is not moribund.David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-82384519259598636382011-04-11T20:03:22.703+01:002011-04-11T20:03:22.703+01:00@Wojciech: Should ever (...) the differences (...)...@Wojciech: <i>Should ever (...) the differences (...) be codified, speakers of both of them would for still a long time agree that they speak the same language. Would they not? </i><br /><br />Well, that was my Afrikaans example. The differences between Afrikaans and Dutch were codified quite recently. But you say yourself that they are "not like that at all" (i.e. unlike SBE vs. SAmE). Do they consider each other speakers of the same language?<br /><br />BTW, there has been dialectometric work showing that some Flanders dialects (in the west, of course) are linguistically more divergent from Standard Dutch than Afrikaans is... Hmmm...wjarekhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07871668374161722713noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-66120883815609746422011-04-11T18:55:34.796+01:002011-04-11T18:55:34.796+01:00Ad David Crosbie
I did not claim that British and...Ad David Crosbie<br /><br />I did not claim that British and American English are two codified standards. What I claimed was a counterfactual (maybe too risky to claim): Should ever (however unlikely that is) the differences between the two varieties be codified, speakers of both of them would for still a long time agree that they speak the same language. Would they not? <br /><br />As for Norwegian, I am not sure which of the many standards you are alluding to, but nynorsk in any case is not a variant of Dano-Norwegian. Dano-Norwegian did not, methinks, outlive its usefulness, for it continues being the standard form, but the name 'Dano-Norwegian' did. It's 'bokmaal' now, a rather misleading name. But the Norwegian situation is extremely tricky, and in flux. Nynorsk and bokmaal are not two variants of the SAME language, they are different (albeit close) languages called the same name. Bokmaal could be considered a variant of Danish, but for one thing it has considerably developed away from its mother tongue, and then it is politically highly inopportune to say a thing like that... . One very important factor is that the Norwegian phonetics is wildly different from the Danish, far more than the American from the RP. <br /><br />Serbo-Croatian was a somewhat artificial creation of Vuk Karadzic, but Italian was a somewhat artificial creation of Dante... . The dialects Karadzic subsumed under his standard were not those we know as 'Croatian', 'Serbian' or what not --- their borders cut across today's political borders. <br /><br />Against the adage by Weinreich I would adduce two counterexamples: Frisian, and Catalan. Would it be unfair to mention Welsh, or Faroese as well? I also sort of sympathise with Sardinian's aspiration to languagehood: sa limba sarda. No navy and no army, except the Italian ones. Not without reason do they sometimes write on their walls: A foras sus colonisadores itaglianos.<br /><br />Re Scotland and Scots, as I wrote somewhere else it really 'gars me greet' (makes me weep) that real Scots is so moribund to-day as it is, or seems to be. It was close enough to English, though, to produce a number or intermediary forms, including various Scots or Scottish accents in what in writing is standard British English. Sunt lacrimae rerum, or, in this case, linguarum.Podpora społeczeństwahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08339088245843399386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-62343685156831036622011-04-11T18:26:58.268+01:002011-04-11T18:26:58.268+01:00Wojciech
British and American English are not cod...Wojciech<br /><br />British and American English are not <b>codified standards</b>. But Norwegian <b>does</b> have two standards — varieties of Dano-Norwegian that became national codified standards overnight in 1917.<br /><br />A similar standard to Dano-Norwegian was Serbo-Croatian — a codified standard made official at the stroke of a pen in 1850.<br /><br />Just as Norwegians in a newly independent Norway chose to have codified national standards, so do the Croats, Bosnians, and (possibly) Montenegrians in their newly independent states.<br /><br />Everyone agrees that Dano-Norwegian outlived its usefulness. I believe we'll eventually agree that the same is true of Serbo-Croatian.<br /><br />The <i>dialect with an army and a navy</i> definition is robust — at least for the tongues of modern states that are not landlocked. And it works for many languages in the past. Scotland used to have an army, a navy and a language distinct form the English of London.David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-29590965653382981762011-04-11T15:47:27.808+01:002011-04-11T15:47:27.808+01:00Ad David Crosbie
Yes I know there is no law again...Ad David Crosbie<br /><br />Yes I know there is no law against 'suspenders' or 'I insist that he not say ''suspenders''' in Britain, but even if there had been any, I claim, no-one would (political correctness and stuff aside) seriously think British is a different language from American.<br /><br />British (stadard) and American(standard) are two standards of the same language. <br /><br />Czech and Slovak are not, though. Neither are Swedish and Norwegian, neither Spanish and Portuguese. They are all very similar, pairwise, but different.<br /><br />C, S, B, M, by contrast, are (methinketh); so are Rumanian and Moldovian (ditto), so are Dutch and Flemish (ditto). <br /><br />Flemish and Dutch are two variants of the same standard, called Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands, or General Literare (or: Cultured) Dutch, which provides for local variants in the Netherlands and in Belgium.<br /><br />I do not set much store by mutual intelligibility. It is subjective and gradeable and generally unreliable. Chinese is a language and is not at the same time: putonghua is _the_ Chinese language, and then there are various Chinese languageS.Podpora społeczeństwahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08339088245843399386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-377103124456226005.post-86333363631563720532011-04-11T12:08:07.736+01:002011-04-11T12:08:07.736+01:00Wojciech
There are no institutional rules against...Wojciech<br /><br />There are no institutional rules against writing 'suspenders' in Britain or 'braces' in America. We abstain for the purely practical reason that each word has a more common meaning in one country or the other.<br /><br />By contrast, take this anecdote from when I was involved in English language exams for the armed forces of the Czech Republic. When the advanced Level Three exams was set up, it was decided that a measure of English-Czech interpreting skill was desirable, so a little simulation was included in the Oral Paper.<br /><br />But the Czech Armed Forces still contain officers from the old Czechoslovakian forces, some of whom speak Slovak. This had not been foreseen when the marking criteria were drawn up. They called for markers to consider the quality of the Czech interpretation. I was in a markers' meeting where some members were seriously considering deducting marks from the Slovaks.<br /><br />In the modern world, languages are defined, assessed and enforced by officialdom. There are societies where we can ask linguists to identify languages, but none of them are in Europe or the rest of the developed world.<br /><br />No speaker of American English in Britain can be denied employment, justice, political rights, freedom of speech or any other limitations on simple linguistic grounds. The worst that can happen is the editors may change their spellings, or that they may not be invited to speak a second time in public fora.<br /><br />Moreover, English speakers the world over lay collective claim to the English language culture. Many of our great writers were Irish, but many of us don't know and wouldn't care. Popular culture is largely American and our soap operas are Australian. English is too big to be the possession of any one political unit.<br /><br />English attained this significance before the age of modern nationalism. Indeed, it was before the age of single national languages. English was of secondary importance compared to Latin for many purposes, and then for a time of tertiary importance compared to Latin and French. In the modern world, nation states feel the need to have single national languages. And with the modern definition of <i>nation</i> that means an <b>exclusive</b>.<br /><br />Modern national languages are codified the way that the great languages of the past were codified. As I understand it, Portuguese was codified with emphasis on the differences with Spanish. In Former Yugoslavia, the new nations have fewer differences to emphasise. In Bessarabia, the colonial power relied more on a change name (to <i>Moldavia</i> and <i>Moldavian</i>) and a change of alphabet than anything grammatical or lexical.<br /><br />The right of the <i>de jure</i> governments of Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and the <i>de facto</i> government of the Soviet Republic of Moldavia to codify distinct languages is unassailable. Mutual intelligibility is of no relevance whatsoever.<br /><br />This works both ways. By mutual the intelligibility criterion Chinese would not be a language<br /><br />As to what in English we call <i>Flemish</i> and <i>Dutch</i>, my understanding is that they are the same language because the political establishments say so.David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.com