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From: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com (Julian Pardoe LADS LDN X1428)
Subject: Re: What is a Language
Message-ID: <Dq0oLn.1y9@tigadmin.ml.com>
Sender: usenet@tigadmin.ml.com (News Account)
Reply-To: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com
Organization: Merrill Lynch Europe
References: <4kmi5h$8qj@altrade.nijmegen.inter.nl.net>
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 1996 17:29:46 GMT
Lines: 70

In article <4kmi5h$8qj@altrade.nijmegen.inter.nl.net>, T.Gerritsen@inter.nl.net (T.T. Gerritsen) writes:
-->CLieberman@gnn.com (Charles A. Lieberman) wrote:
-->
-->
-->>But Czech is one language separate from Slovak for POLITICAL reasons.
-->
-->No, I clearly explained the historical differences between the two.
-->Please refer to a textbook on Slavonic languages or a good
-->encyclopaedia for more information.
-->
-->>equally good example wd be if you'd said that Nederlands and Flemish are 
-->>more or less mutually intelligible.  There are almost certainly differences 
-->>between them, but I'd say (with almost NO first-hand knowlege, certainly of 
-->>Flemish) that linguistically they're different DIALECTS rather than distinct 
-->>LANGUAGES.
-->
-->You're absolutely right. Nederlands and Flemish have a long common
-->history, and only after the fall of Antwerp (I would say) did two
-->separate literary traditions emerge. But this corroborates my earlier
-->statement, that historical considerations should be more taken into
-->consideration than mutual intelligibility.

Yes!  That the languages (formerly) spoken in the north-western areas of
the FR Germany are called dialects of German rather than dialects of 
Dutch has everything to do with history and nothing to do with linguistics.

I suspect that the same is true of Galician wrt Spanish and Portuguese.

"A language is a dialect with an army" -- is there really any more that
can be said?

A bit of speculative thought: The relationship "is a dialect of" is not
symmetric but if we reexpress it as "has a language/dialect relation with"
then it becomes symmetric.  (This seems relatively insignificant because
from a linguistic point of view one can't say which is the dialect and
which the language.  Perhaps "are dialects of the same language" would
be a better way of expressing it.)  Thus we have
   DL (Dutch, Flemish)
(or not, depending on your viewpoint).

Because DL is symmetric
   \/ x, y : DL (x, y) <=> DL (y, x)

Now, it seems to me that the dialect relationship is such that
   \/ x, y, z : DL (x, y) & DL (y, z) => DL (x, z)
DL partions the set of dialects into disjoint "language" sets.  (I'm
not sure what the mathematical name for this is.  It's transitivity
I guess but because the relationship is symmetric it doesn't
constitute any kind of ordering.)

If we call the relationship "is mutually intelligible with" MI the
claim is that 
   \/ x, y : DL (x, y) <=> MI (x, y)

It follows from this that
   \/ x, y, z : MI (x, y) & MI (y, z) => MI (x, z)
but I don't think that this is true at all.  I could imagine that the
following statements are true:
   MI (Castillian, Catalan)
   MI (Castillian, Galician)
It should follow that 
   MI (Catalan, Galician)
but this is probably not so.  Just because Castillian and Catalan are mutually
intelligible and Castillian and Galician are mutually intelligible it does
not follow that Catalan and Galician are mutually intelligible.  Hence
the claim that MI <=> DL cannot be true.  Q.E.D.  (Well, almost.  The
``transitivity'' claim could be false but it seems pretty intuitive to me.)

-- jP --

