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

[Jim Fidelholtz]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 7:54 PM, Angus B. Grieve-Smith <grvsmth at panix.com>wrote:

> ...
>   Incidentally, I'm not saying that Yiddish is or isn't a language; I'm
> saying that the question is not a purely linguistic one.
> ...
>   How do you figure out which one is the "base language" and which one is
> the "dialect"?
>
>   Why not just have a measure of mutual intelligibility?  What do labels
> like "language" and "dialect" add to it?
>
Hi, Angus & al.,

Why not just have a measure of mutual intelligibility?  ...   Because very
often the intelligibility is *not* mutual. There are lots of real-life
examples. Perhaps the best-known one is that Portuguese speakers fairly
readily understand (without extra language study) speakers of Spanish, while
the latter have a much tougher time understanding Portuguese. Likewise,
Midwestern American speakers are understood by speakers of nearly all other
varieties of English much more readily than they understand speakers of
other dialects. In both cases, aside from undoubted cultural reasons, the
basic reason is that the readily-understood variety or language is similar
in some sense to the 'underlying forms' of the less-readily-understood
varieties. (This is, of course, way oversimplified.) In other words, we
could view Portuguese (at least partially) as Spanish with a few extra rules
added to it. Similarly, we could view British (or Boston or Southern US or
...) English as Midwestern American English with extra rules added
(different ones in each case). If you speak the 'added rules' variety, in
some sense you have the basic ('leveled', so to speak) variety as basic to
the forms you actually utter, while the 'basic' speakers have no analogous
way to get to the 'added' forms (of course, the added rules could delete
material: cf. Northeast US, Southern US or British 'r-less' varieties to
Midwestern US English).

Of course, most situations are not so clear as these (and of course these
ones have their own difficulties). But I trust the point is fairly clear, if
not uncontroversial.

Jim

-- 
James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO
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