[Foundation-l] Umberto Eco on small languages/dialects Wikipedias (Aristotle article)

[Ilario Valdelli]

  On 19.09.2010 13:01, Marcus Buck wrote:
>    An'n 19.09.2010 11:32, hett Mark Williamson schreven:
>> We have heard this type of criticism before, that lower-prestige
>> varieties or languages that are not "official" or "national" languages
>> are somehow intrinsically incapable or unsuited to encyclopedic
>> writing. Article quality on a Wiki is not high or low due to some
>> intrinsic characteristic or trait of the language variety used, it is
>> a result of the content not being well-developed. Also, many languages
>> in a relatively small territory does not mean living in a ghetto; on
>> the contrary, count how many national languages there are in Europe,
>> then count how many across all of Latin America, then take a look at
>> economic indicators and you'll see that there is no necessary
>> correlation between linguistic diversity and poverty.
>>
>> -m.
>
> 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
>

The example of Eco is a little bit complex.

In few words: an article about philosophy written in a dialect has not 
the same value of another written in a standard language.

It is normal because any standard language has different registers, the 
dialect has limited registers and in general only for daily and familiar 
use.

The synthesis is in one sentence "Infatti il dialetto, ottimo per il 
comico, il familiare, il concreto quotidiano, il 
nostalgico-sentimentale, e spesso il poetico, alle nostre orecchie 
deprime i contenuti concettuali nati e sviluppatisi in altra lingua" 
which can be translated "The dialect, excellent for the funny, the 
homely things, the daily use, the nostalgic memories, and frequently for 
poetry, lowers in our understanding the conceptual contents  born and 
developed in other language".

It seems to me normal.

The standard Italian has had eight centuries to become the current 
standard language, and the Latin has been used in Italy for a lot of 
time to write scientific and philosophical books (and it is still used 
for ecclesiastic matters).

I understand the position of Eco because for eight centuries no language 
has been ghettoized in Italy, if the Italian standard is used as 
"super-language" probably there is a reason.

The process for a dialect to be a language is long and complex.

In the opposite side the Italian standard is not suitable for familiar 
language: it's a "standard" and aseptic language without "nuances".

If a dialect would be a language, probably it should accept to lose the 
wealth of words and expressions for daily communication.

It is what happened for Rumantsch Grischun and Limba Sarda who are 
"artificial" super-languages not used in the families or in the group of 
friends, but at the same time so weak to clash the expansion of more 
common standard languages.

Ilario