[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wiktionary-l] English orthographies

[Jack & Naree]

disagree, but don't have the time to...

On 21/09/05, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 21/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The name is not misleading. It's called English because it's the
> language of
> > the English ethnolinguistic group in the nation of England.
> > That's academically accepted, end of story.
>
> Not really - I'd say it's called English by a historical accident; it
> could as well be described as "Franco-Latinate-Norse-Anglo-Saxon", the
> people as "Romano-Celtic-Norman-Anglo-Saxons", and the "nation" as
> "the Union of Normandy, Anglo-Saxony and the Daneland" [the Danes
> being the Vikings who spoke Old Norse]
>
> At best, it's called English because for a while it was only spoken in
> the area known as "England" - before spreading to Scotland, Ireland,
> the New World, and the British Empire. Did it cease to be English the
> moment it reached India? Of course not. And plenty of words were
> brought back to England having been incorporated into the language in
> these other places; were they only part of English when they reached
> the shore at Dover? Or, perhaps, when they reached the ears of
> Londoners? I see no reason to declare so.
>
> If there were no longer any such disctinguishable place as "England"
> (not so hard to imagine, given suggestions that areas like Cornwall,
> or "The North" around Yorkshire, could be separate nations with in the
> United Kingdom) it would not suddenly mean there was no such language
> as "English".
>
> Indeed, depending on your definition, this "English ethnolinguistic
> group" probably inhabits either the whole of the British Isles,
> including Scotland, and probably Ireland; or it only covers a fraction
> of what is currently considered the "nation" of England, historically
> centred around the educational and commercial triangle of Oxford,
> Cambridge and London. It seems arbitrary in the extreme to include a
> Cornish farmer and a Yorkshire miner in such a definition, but exclude
> a middle-class family from Edinburgh.
>
> > If Norwegian can have two wikipedias, then so should English, for the
> same
> > reasons.
>
> Or, alternatively, Norwegian shouldn't have two Wikipedias; if the
> situations are as analagous as you imply, I would support their
> merger. What Norwegian speakers would have to say on the matter is a
> whole other debate (and one of which plenty can probably be found in
> the list archives, if you look).
>
> --
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]
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