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

[Mark Williamson]

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 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> The most common different orthographies are those for the American and
> British spelling.. When it comes to differences between British and American
> English, the standard version of either can be well understood in either
> country. Australian English or Jamaican English are less easily understood.
> I do not know to what extend Indian English is homogeneous..
>
> As long as people write in either the UK or US orthography, the words are
> easily enough understood. The problems comes with implied expected
> knowledge. This is where things break down.
> Thanks,
>      GerardM
>
> On 19 September 2010 14:08, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 19 September 2010 12:42, Ilario Valdelli <valdelli at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > It is normal because any standard language has different registers, the
>> > dialect has limited registers and in general only for daily and familiar
>> > use.
>>
>>
>> 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.
>>
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