Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?))

Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl
Mon Apr 5 12:30:00 UTC 1999


"Frank Rossi" <iglesias at axia.it> wrote:

>The term Neo-Galician needs to be defined. Rick is referring, I assume to
>the semi-artificial common Galician language that had to be developed when
>Galician was recognized as an official language, a situation similar to
>Batua for Basque  (comments by Larry and the Basque experts appreciated),
>and even Catalan in the last century, before Pompeu Fabra and the Catalan
>Studies Institute, was practically reduced to a series of dialects. True
>Miguel?

Sure.  Any language without a unitary written standard becomes a
series of dialects.  In the case of Catalan, the standardization
resulted in a compromise between the old, Mediaeval literary
standard and the "dialect" of the economically and politically
dominant area, the city of Barcelona.  In a way, the same is true
of Batua, basically a compromise between the old Lapurdian
literary standard and the modern Gipuzkoan dialect of San
Sebastian (would probably have been Bilbao, if Basque hadn't died
out there long ago).  In both cases, there was also some
conscious effort to get rid of "castellanismes" and "erderismos"
as much as possible.

How does the Galician standardization compare?  To what extent is
the choice for Western morphology and Eastern pronunciation, for
instance, a conscious "political" move, and to what extent might
it be a side effect of either the Mediaeval standard or modern
regional economics (as opposed to "national" [or should I say
"popular"] politics)?

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam



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