[Foundation-l] [Fwd: Sardininan - Sassarese languages or language and dialect?]

[Mark Williamson]

On 11/09/2007, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2007/9/11, Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it>:
> dialects, which are not). The question should be whether the 4
> languages and the newly created official version are close enough to
> be considered dialects of a single language. If that is the case, then
> there's only one official form of the language, and using that is not
> a strange thing to do.

Unfortunately, the language committee refuses to do that because it
would be "unfair", despite the fact that linguists can and have done
studies in intelligibility for certain varieties (although, I am
guessing, not those of Sardinia).

Instead, they choose to believe that anything assigned its own ISO
code must automatically be a separate language, and anything that does
not have one must be invalid and need to be deleted right away because
it is just a mutually intelligible dialect or a non-existant language
squatting a code that belongs to somebody else.

Standards compliance is a good thing, but there is a certain point at
which the enforcers of the standards become rabid and they have gone
too far.

Mark

-- 
Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.