[Corpora-List] Can corpora help to distinguish a dialect and a language?

[somersh at cs.man.ac.uk]

> Exactly. I believe it was Chomsky who once defined language as a dialect
> with an army.
>

No, not Chomsky, as the prior debate has clearly indicated. I always
understood it to be Weinreich's quote, but the story as related in an
earlier post suggests it was a member of the audience.

I find this a funny discussion - I thought it was one of those questions
that linguists agreed was not answerable. Mutual intelligibility is a
silly definition: I have seen Italians and Spaniards converse in their own
languages perfectly happily, and Norwegians, Danes and Swedes. And I have
seen Glaswegians and Geordies interviewed on TV and have had to turn on
the subtitles.


_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora