An'n 19.09.2010 11:32, hett Mark Williamson schreven: I agree with the points you make but I don't agree that that is what Eco said (although I don't speak Italian and automatic translation is rather poor). Eco is a very intelligent man and he wouldn't say things that are so stupid. He actually values "dialect" Wikipedias (I'd object to calling them dialect Wikipedias, that term is derogatory in the first place, but as the term was used I quote it) for their ability to support awareness of regional culture. He then counters this positive argument with the negative argument that "turning local tongues into the sole means of communication" decreases the role of the national standard language and would therefore lead to a situation where people are captured in the very limited frame of their local tongue. And here's where the intellectual mind of Eco lapses. He's thinking with the mind of a 19th century humanist who's living in a world where 90% of the population are illiterate peasants who have little understanding of the world (at least those aspects of the world that are relevant to a humanist's mind. The peasants were not dumb and had outstanding knowledge of the world directly surrounding them and relevant to their daily lifes). On one side these 19th century humanists deeply cared about the "improvement" of the peasants but on the other side they were highly arrogant about their own level of intellect. And so they were arrogant about their language. At the universities they learned Latin and the national standards. Every educated person spoke standard languages and all the uneducated people spoke non-standard languages. The correlation was clear to them. But of course there was one fatal fallacy: the correlation was not a product of the superiority of some languages over others but it was their own admission policy that created the correlaton: "you won't get any education if you don't learn the standard language in the first place". The system solely depends on its own positive feedback. Once you break the feedback chain (by establishing education in a non-standard language) the argument collapses. So Eco's idea is fallacious. Estonian is a nice example. There are only 1.25 million speakers of Estonian. That's a rather low number. Less than the speaker numbers of most of the Italian tongues Eco is talking about (Piedmontese has 2 million, Sicilian even 8 million). But the Estonian-speaking society is in no way inferior to other societies. If Siclian or Piedmontese were not suppressed by the Italian standard language and were allowed to establish their own education systems there would be no problem. There would be no "ghettoization". Marcus Buck User:Slomox

On 19 September 2010 12:42, Ilario Valdelli <valdelli(a)gmail.com> wrote: This, by the way, is why we don't have multiple English Wikipedias - in the higher registers, all the dialects (which are frequently all but mutually incomprehensible in the lower registers) converge and educational English is quite consistent. The only major dialectic variant is American versus British spelling, and anyone who reads one can read and often write in the other. - d.

Standard Australian English is very easy to understand for me as a North American speaker of English, especially when written because that eliminates the potential problem of different accents. Standard Jamaican English is easy to understand, perhaps you are thinking of Jamaican Creole, which is often impossible or nearly impossible to understand for me personally and is usually considered an independent language by linguists and actually has a test WP: http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/jam/Mien_Piej -m. On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 2:08 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, the question of English is different. The dialects and local languages in Europe are generated by: A) a form of "regionalism" or local adaptation of a standardized language B) local languages derived directly from from Indo-European root or from an old language like Latin (i.e. the Sardinian languages). These local languages don't have a large presence of registers and the standard language substitutes them for *different kind of registers* (i.e to write administrative documents). For this reason there are persons who use Italian in some geographical areas with different accent and with a substratum of local language. It can be considered like a "regionalism" but this situation lives together with local languages which have a strong derivation from an old language from whom they keep archaisms or old syntax. An example that I have faced is a local language in Calabria which is an old Greek not derived from current language spoken in Greece but generated probably from a local form of Greek due to the presence of Byzantium in this area in the Middle Age. The problem is that the regional languages are disappearing because they would be "official language" and the local government forgot that the vitality of these local languages is in the daily use. In few words the local governments focus their effort in a high level, to build new registers, and not to support the low levels and the low registers. In the same time the large use of Italian in the media is generating a form of local regionalism which is replacing the local old language. The result is that the young people are changing their language in a standard Italian with interference of local language (most of all in the inflection). The English languages spoken in USA or Australia, for example, are more or less similar to this last situation: it is not a derivation from an old root of English language, but it's a "local" adaptation of the standard English. The example that I have is the Italian spoken in Switzerland (who I live) who is influenced a lot from French and it's also used in high registers, but for daily use the persons continue to use a local form of the Lombard language. This Swiss Italian language is derived from the standard Italian with some small differences most of all in some colloquial expression or in some accent and with an "enrichment" of words derived from French or from local dialect. Ilario

On 19 September 2010 20:08, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote: Although you can be faced with the sort of choices many major languages, languages whose speakers have a great deal of pride in them, faced when needing words for concepts in 20th century science and technology: cut'n'paste vocabulary from English, or make up a complete set of synthetic terms for the sake of differentiating themselves from English. Both are problematic, though I'm not sure what form an ideal solution would take. - d.