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From: EURMXK@MVS.sas.com
Subject: Re: Dialect or Language?difference=???
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Date: Fri, 9 Dec 1994 10:45:00 GMT
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In article <3bqt4g$qub@gordon.enea.se>,
sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
 
>M. Kiefer (EURMXK@MVS.sas.com) writes:
>>German and Luxemburgian ("Letzeburgisch") aren't abstand languages, but
>>both are (Letzeburgisch to some extent at least) ausbau languages.
>>H. Haarmann calls Luxemburgian a "Kulturdialekt", i.e., a dialect
>>which has been developed into an official means of communication.
>>The same relationship as between German and Luxemburgian applies
>>to Portuguese and Galician, Romanian and Moldavian, Spanish and
>>Ladino, for instance.
>
>I'm not sure I understand the definitions involved here, but I'm
>a little puzzled by the examples. Maybe before I go I should ask:
>do Swedish, Danish and Norwegian qualify as ausbau, but not
>abstand languages?
>
>Anyway, even if Galician is often lumped with Portuguese, the little
>I've looked at Galician, the two definitely seem distinct, although
>likely to be mutually intelligible.
>
>But Roumanian and Moldavian? Does literary "Moldavian" have any
>qualities which distinguishes it from Roumanian? During the Soviet
>era "Moldavian" was written with Cyrillic script - and still is in
>that funny anachroism known as the Transdniestr Republic - which
>at least accounted for a superficial difference from Roumanian.
>Today, the present regime hangs on to the Stalin invention, but
>are we talking two languages or only two names?
>--
>Erland Sommarskog, sommar@enea.se, Stockholm
>Pour qui est-ce qui vous croyez que je parle?
 
I speak Portuguese, but I only know about Galician theoretically.
Both have been separated politically for at least 500 years, so there
are surely phonetical and lexical differences, but I don't think they
diverged significantly.
Luxemburgian only recently emerged as an official written language;
it can be seen as a German dialect which is not significantly different
from the neighbouring dialects in Germany and France ("Moselfra"nkisch")
which have not been developed into official languages.
 
So, I regard the criteria of mutual intelligibility on the one hand,
and the political decision to develop a language as an official means
of communication, as useful to discriminate between a language and
a dialect.  But this needs to be taken with a grain of salt in each
case, and there are shades of grey in between.
 
I don't know if the usage of different writing systems was the only
criterion which separated Romanian from Moldavian.
 
Kind regards,
M. Kiefer
