Comment by groovy2shoes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by groovy2shoes | Hacker News Reader

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> The usual criterion for distinguishing language from dialect is mutual intelligibility.

The problem with this criterion is that mutual intelligibility is not transitive, so it doesn't support an intuitive notion of sameness that one might expect. Consider some language with distinct dialects A, B, and C lying at different points on the dialect continuum. If A and B are mutually intelligible, and B and C are mutually intelligible, it is still possible that A and C are not mutually intelligible. However, this is a property we'd expect if this criterion were enough to say that A, B, and C were all dialects of the same language. In addition to being unintuitive, it also raises some tough questions, like: if they're all the same language today and the last speaker of B dies tomorrow, are A and C still dialects of the same language?

From a linguist's point of view, there's no useful distinction between a dialect and a language. It's more common to talk about "varieties", which is a more general term that includes dialects, regiolects, sociolects, idiolects, &c. Grouping of varieties is done contextually and for utility, often for the sake of convenience, and often according to some guiding principles (phylogeny in diachronic linguistics, for example, helps us to understand the historical relationships among groups).

There's some truth to the quip that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, though: in practice, the distinction between the two is a sociopolitical one. Some people will be very upset if some outside group starts insisting that, in fact, no, you do not speak Arabic anymore, or, no, you do not speak Chinese anymore, or, no, Moldovan was never really a language. For many people, their native language is an integral part of their national identity, and it's not for outsiders to decide. It won't matter how precise and logical a definition someone comes up with, because it was never a scientific or philosophical issue to begin with. We allow social groups to self-actualize their own identities, or everyone is gonna have a bad time.

>From a linguist's point of view, there's no useful distinction between a dialect and a language.

I think you mean, for edge cases, there’s no useful distinction. Mutual comprehensibility is a pretty useful concept, and no one makes “Arabic is a the same language as English” their Hill-to-die-on.

When the edges are numerous and blurry, you have to question the utility of trying to formalize a definition. Obviously, the idea of discrete languages is socially useful in many situations, but there's no point in trying to invent a hard rule to distinguish a dialect from a language. That's why it's better thought of as a continuum, with English vs Arabic being obviously distinct but recently divergent and convergent varieties left forever moot.

The fact that you can recognize Arabic and English as being different languages, with practical implications, means that a substantive distinction exists.

That's a really simplistic way of looking at it. To most people, red and blue are very distinct colors. No one would argue that they're the same. But are crimson and pink different colors, or different shades of the same color? What about #f00 and #f11? It's both arbitrary and contextual.

Categorization is easy when a difference is so large as to be irrefutable. But thinking in terms of continuum is much more useful when looking at small differences.

The fact that the boundary is blurry does not mean it doesn’t exist or that it doesn’t make useful distinctions.

I feel like you didn't bother to read my last comment.

Language is simply uncountable. House and haus are pretty much the same word to me, so English and German overlap. If they are not disjunct, it doesn't make sense to count them one by one. That would be like counting sand by the corns, and by extension, coast lines by the sand. Language is recursive (a rose is a rose is a ...), what is its Housedorff dimension!? If you take a point in a topological space and give it a closed cover, you can calculate the area of the disc, but ... ok, I have close to no idea of complex analysis (didn't expect it would come in helpful for linguistics). The point is, if two arbitrarily large set's of Language are easier to compare by what they have in common, than where they are mutually exclusive, than you could colloquially call those different sets of language. If you can't even parse the speech, you won't be able to do that, so a natural speaker will perceive it as different. Book keeping Linguists are more interested in, or even bound to writing, as is clear from them calling spoken syntax "grammar" (which is from gramm~graph~scrapho writing, drawing, unless I'm missing something).

Well, it's countable in the sense that a countable number of humans have existed, with a countable (or at least bounded) number of idiolects per human. That's pretty much the "point in discrete color space" point of view I was getting at on one extreme. That's not a very useful level of granularity for much else other than upper bounding. At the lower bound, maybe we all just speak and sign dialects of some inherent Chomsky-esque universal grammar. In between, there are all sorts of ways you can draw borders on the map to tesselate it into languages, but few of these schemes can be defined without resorting to idiosyncratic decisions.

Language is a social construct. We're colloquial beings, and 99% of the time we all agree on what's what. What irritates me are the folks that think that the remaining 1% can be decided in some kind of objective way. Is Scots its own language? Depends on who you ask, and in what context. There are valid arguments either way. Embrace the ambiguity.

In the case of Scots and Scottish English, there's a lot of blurring and the distinction is of questionable actual value -- though I would make that distinction personally. I speak Scottish Standard English, and have a parent whose first language was a variety of Modern Scots. I find it very hard to follow them when they've switched into it to speak with someone from their hometown. Due to the difficulty in parsing it, both in my case and in the case of the other parent after 40-ish years of marriage, I'd consider it more than just a dialect.

Both Scottish English and Scots descend from the same root Anglic, but there's been divergence since then -- in the same way Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are descended from the same root, are somewhat mutually intelligible, but are treated as two different languages. It's useful to make that distinction simply because there is a degree of unintelligibility.

Everyone on this website is speaking an Indo-European language, and I'd bet a majority of them have an Indo-European language as their first language. They're all from the same root, so are they all speaking dialects of Indo-European? Or are they speaking distinct languages? Where, exactly, you decide "this was a dialect, but now it's a language!" I can't say, but that point surely exists. It's obviously muddied by politics and national identity and a hundred other factors, but at some point, surely, a language ceases to be a dialect and becomes a language of its own.

That point exists, but it's contextual. You could draw the line at shared identity. Or political boundary. Or the existence of a body of literature. Or a certain bar of recognition. Or a certain number of university programs. Or some concept mutual intelligibility. Or whatever. But these distinctions will conflict with one another, so there is no clear line.

I have no real authority, but to me, I see no reason why Scots shouldn't be a language. English and Scots would certainly not be the most similar languages to be considered distinct. Plenty of other varieties of the English continuum, for that matter.

It's a matter of ongoing language exchange. So English is still a common language, but Afrikans and Dutch are different, if South African speakers are not exposed to dutch a lot. I'm not sure how it is for Portuguese at home and in Brazil. The Brazilians have little exposure to Portuguese media content, I guess, so I'd expect it would diverge, if it develops quickly, if language change didn't get slower for various reasons, which I suppose it did though due to social and technical developments.

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