disagree, but don't have the time to...
On 21/09/05, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 21/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy(a)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]
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l