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From: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com (Julian Pardoe LADS LDN X1428)
Subject: Re: Serbo-Croatian
Message-ID: <D4vILr.4C9@tigadmin.ml.com>
Sender: usenet@tigadmin.ml.com (News Account)
Reply-To: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com
Organization: Merrill Lynch Europe
References: <3j4r1c$a9@Mars.mcs.com>
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 1995 16:46:39 GMT
Lines: 39

In article a9@Mars.mcs.com, madcro@MCS.COM (Marko Puljic) writes:
> Last time i checked cakavski and Kajkavski were not easily understood
>by STokavski speakers...odd they both happen to be Croat dialects..

Just as "a language is a dialect with an army", which language a dialect
is a dialect of is also determined by historico-political rather than
linguistic factors.  That people from Niedersachsen (used to) speak a
"dialect" of German rather than a dialect of Dutch or that Galician is
a "dialect" of Spanish rather than a dialect of Portugese has nothing to
do with the nature of the "dialects" in question and everything to do
with the way the frontiers happened to end up.

Having heard so many people call Catalan a "dialect" of Spanish I've
come to the conclusion that "dialect" is a word with so little
meaning that it shouldn't be used.  If it is has a meaning it is
usually insulting (and intended to insult) as with the row going on
on other news groups about whether or not Ukrainian is a "dialect" of
Russian or not.  (The basis of the row is that Ukrainians are one part
of some great pan-Slavic people (i.e. basically Russians) and should
stop whingeing on about their independence and their culture and rejoin
the motherland -- just as the new SOviet man was basically a Russian under
a new name.[*]) 

I tend to use word "variant" instead, with the understanding that "standard
(new high) German" is as much a variant of that greater (and ill-defined) entity
"the German language" as, say, Letzeburgish is.

-- julian pardoe --

[*] I read a really good article about the criteria Soviet linguists used
to judge things and how they were more political than linguistic.  Thus
some words were "international" (good) and some "foreign" (bad).  I can't
remember which language was under discussion, but the author quoted some
Soviet document that declared ""lingvistika" foreign but "fonetika" inter-
national.  Now, the Russian for "linguistics" is "jazykoznanije" whereas
the Russian for "phonetics" is -- surprise!! -- "fonetika".



