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From: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com (Julian Pardoe LADS LDN X1428)
Subject: Re: Lowlands language list
Message-ID: <DG6w9G.FHs@tigadmin.ml.com>
Sender: usenet@tigadmin.ml.com (News Account)
Reply-To: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com
Organization: Merrill Lynch Europe
References: <45aec0$l8n@knot.queensu.ca>
Date: Mon, 9 Oct 1995 16:24:52 GMT
Lines: 41

In article <45aec0$l8n@knot.queensu.ca>, 3gs8@qlink.queensu.ca (Schwab Georg) writes:
-->Silke-Maria  Weineck (weinecks@mail1.sas.upenn.edu) wrote:
-->
-->: As far as I renenber fron Linguistics classes, there is a Bavarian 
-->: language as well as a Bavarian dialect; the first one, no non-Bavarian 
-->: could possibly understand, the second one, we can nanage after a little 
-->: getting-used=to. Sane for Swabian.
-->
-->  Just to make shure, I just looked up "Dialekt" in my Meyer, and
-->"dialect" in my little Oxford dictionary. A dialect is a language which
-->does not conform to the rules of the standart language
-->("Standartsprache"), or in other words: a dialect is, in fact, a language.
-->The term "dialect" is often avoided, because (at least in English) many
-->people interpret it as an insult. 

In another article he wrote:
-->2. Anyone who thinks "Dialekt" is an insult does not know what the word 
-->means.

I thought that the old language-v-dialect issue had been settled when who-
ever it was first came up with the saying:

   "A language is a dialect with an army."

...and many people do think that the word "dialect" is an insult and that's not
because they don't know what it means but because it is often used insultingly,
either deliberately or through ignorance (e.g. Catalan -- or even Basque! -- is a
dialect of Spanish, Ukrainian is a dialect of Russian, ...)  The speaker
usually then goes on to deny that the "dialect" in question has any literary 
tradition ("just some peasant folk-tales...") or cultural value or... and one
can't help feeling that what they really mean is "Catalans are just Spaniards"
(where Spaniard means "Castilian" or course), "Ukrainians are just Russians"
and that they should stop whingeing and get on with it.

Does the term "dialect" have such a different set of associations in German
to those it has in English that a German wouldn't be offended by talk of the
"German dialect"?  If by "dialect" you mean "Mundart"[?] I can believe it.

-- jP --


