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From: donh@netcom.com (Don HARLOW)
Subject: Re: Dialect or Language?difference=???
Message-ID: <donhCzv02p.GIF@netcom.com>
Organization: Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
References: <3atgla$890@news.CCIT.Arizona.EDU> <3b0euv$jr0@medici.trl.OZ.AU> <kjp1003-251194105334@pc1003.sidg.pwf.cam.ac.uk> <Cztq12.H64@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 1994 05:18:25 GMT
Lines: 27

iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) skribis en lastatempa afisxo <Cztq12.H64@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>:
>In article <kjp1003-251194105334@pc1003.sidg.pwf.cam.ac.uk> kjp1003@hermes.cam.ac.uk () writes:
>>The criteria of mutual intelligibility cannot be thus viewed as a
>>means of dividing up varieties into languages and dialects.
>
>That's right.  Czech and Slovak come immediately to mind.
>
Serbo-Croatian has also recently gone the way of all flesh...

>>and the dialects of Chinese such as Mandarin are surely languages by
>>the mutual intelligibility criterion, yet are always called dialects.
>
>Always?  In my experience Mandarin and Cantonese, say, are virtually
>always counted as separate languages.
>
My own experience (in China) is that at least some Chinese will go to great 
lengths to prove that Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, etc. are merely dialects of 
the same language, even using the argument: "Look, they're written the 
same way, so they must be the same language!" (To which my reply was that 
by this argument all European languages must be dialects, since all 
European countries use the same set of road-signs...)

-- 
Don HARLOW			donh@netcom.com
Esperanto League for N.A.       elna@netcom.com (800) 828-5944
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/elna/elna.html         Esperanto
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/donh/donh.html 
