[Corpora-List] Phonetic corpora typology

[maxwell]

On Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:36:03 -0500, "Angus B. Grieve-Smith"
<grvsmth at panix.com> wrote:
>     All those questions, and the status of "language" or "dialect" 
> depend on two things: mutual intelligibility and politics.  Why not just

> compute mutual intelligibility and leave the politics to the
politicians?

That's exactly what the Ethnologue (and the ISO 639-3 codes that largely
come from the Ethnologue) do: for the most part, they are based on mutual
intelligibility, either measured in the field, or estimated from lexical
similarity where field measurement has not been done.

That is BTW probably the #1 reason people criticize the Ethnologue
decisions: "The wonderful thing that I speak is a separate language, not
just a dialect!", or on the other hand "You're interfering with the
solidarity of that people group by claiming that they speak different
languages!"  I.e. many people prefer the socio-political definition of
"language" vs. "dialect."  (Another reason is when people--usually
linguists--say, "Those can't be mutually unintelligible, look at how
similar these two word lists are!")

>     Related to the issue of how to measure mutual intelligibility: at 
> the 2008 LSA, I attended a fascinating paper by a linguist who was 
> studying languages in Cameroon.  He was revising all the mutual 
> intelligibility findings based on new data; apparently the researchers 
> who had been there before had asked villagers questions like, "Can you 
> understand the people in the next village," and they had gotten answers 
> like, "Who can understand those people?  They do things so different 
> over there."  His work had implications for Greenberg's classification.

I suspect that's this paper:
   www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jcgood/farrargood-WesternBeboidNCs.pdf
by Jeff Good and Scott Farrar.  Good point, but at a guess perhaps more
relevant to the classification issues than to the language vs. dialect
issue.  (I should ask Jeff, he and I have had a recent conversation on the
ISO language codes.)

> Similarly, there's the study by Rubin (1992) that found that 
> comprehension is reduced when the speaker is perceived as "other."  
> ...
> In other words, mutual intelligibility is often a political matter.

Yeap, sort of like measuring the temperature: you can get different
answers from a thermometer in the sun or in the shade.  Fortunately, you
can control where you put the thermometer; those danged people and their
&^%$! politics are harder to control for!

   Mike Maxwell

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