From: André Szabolcs Szelp (a.sz.szelp@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Aug 05 2010 - 01:40:03 CDT
"will decide to reunite their cultural efforts [...] and increasing their
mutual cultural exchanges instead of wasting them for old nationalist
reasons"
You're either an utmost optimist, or you have really no idea of Eastern
European history, culture and "spirit". :-)
I doubt your described scenario will come true in our lifetimes.
/Sz
On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 11:10 PM, verdy_p <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> "Doug Ewell" wrote:
> > There is no "formal model" in the sense of a standard N-letter subtag
> > for dialects, because the concept of a dialect is too open-ended and
> > unsystematic. The word means different things to different people.
> > What may be a dialect to one person might be a full-blown National
> > Language to another, or just a funny accent to a third.
>
> The formal model already exists in ISO 639, that has decided to unify all
> dialectal variants under the same language
> code. Yes the concept is fuzzy, but as long as ISO 639 will not contain a
> formal model for how the various languages
> are grouped in families and subfamilies, it will be impossible to use
> dialectal variant specifiers with accurate
> fallbacks, without using subtags for the language variants.
>
> One know problem is for exampel Norman, which ISO 639 still considers as a
> dialect of French, even though it is just
> ANOTHER Oil language (from which Standard French emerged by merging,
> modifying and extending several dialects).
>
> But Jersiais is now an language with official in Jersey, which is clearly
> part of the Norman family. And that still
> needs to be distinguished from French. Still, there's no ISO 639 code for
> Norman (as a family or as the residual
> language in continentla Normandy in France), and no code for Jersiais as
> well. And French is considered in ISO 639
> as an "isolated" language, not as as "macrolanguage". So it allows no
> further precision.
>
> If something is added, it can only be a variant for the "dialectal"
> difference, such as "fr-norman" for the Norman
> family, or "fr-jersiais" for Jersiais, unless Jersiais gets its own ISO
> 639-3 code as an isolated language (leaving
> the continental Norman still as a dialectal variant of French).
>
> The "formal definition" of languages is the definition of ISO 639-3
> "isolated" languages. Everything below is
> dialectal (and ISO 639 has clearly stated that it planned for much later a
> comprehensive encoding of dialectal
> differences, most probably by defining a standard list of "variant" codes,
> even if these dialects may qualify as
> "languages" for some users)
>
> ----
>
> It's remarkable that for most linguists, Serbian, Croatian, annd Bosnian
> are only one language, with only dialectal
> differences (in the spoken language and with some grammatical derivations,
> and some minor lexical differences that
> are understood by all Serbo-Croatian speakers), orthographic differences
> (mostly based on their default script, even
> if Serbian still uses the two scripts but it defines a strict
> transliteration system that helps defining a unified
> orthography for both scripts, orthographies that are simplified in Croatian
> and Bosnian).
>
> So yes, the concept of dialects vs. language is fuzzy for linguists and
> users (and nationals that prefer to see
> their dialect named from their country as a full language instead of a
> dialect), but ISO 639 defines a formal model
> by its technical encoding: if there's an authority defending the position
> of a distinct language and defining an
> official lexique and orthography, it becomes a "de facto" language for ISO
> 639.
>
> Such split of languages in their dialectal differences promoted to isolated
> languages has occured and was endorsed
> by ISO 639, even if it was probably not in the interest of these countries
> to split their common language and to
> reduce its audience and cultural influence in other parts of the world (and
> for many of their own citizens, they
> won't care a lot about these formal official differences, as long as they
> understand it and can read and write it in
> a script that they can decipher it without difficulties, only because they
> will constantly live near other peoples
> sharing the same language but under a different name).
>
> Serbian is still perceived and encoded as a single language, despite it
> still uses two scripts, depending on the
> region of use (but it is now rapidly converging to the Latin script). May
> be the linguistic and cultural authorities
> of the four concerned countries (or five, now with Kosovo whose
> independance was recently validated by a
> international court?) will decide to reunite their cultural efforts, if
> they finally all use the same Latin script,
> by adopting a new neutral name (Dolmoslavic, Adriatic, Adrislavic ? Or even
> Yugoslavic ?) and increasing their
> mutual cultural exchanges instead of wasting them for old nationalist
> reasons (this will be even more important when
> they will finally ALL join the European Union with increased exchanged
> between them).
>
> Philippe.
>
>
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