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Properly: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy." But I like the original Yiddish, because it illustrates the point rather clearly (transcribed to the
by _petronius 10y ago
Properly: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy."
But I like the original Yiddish, because it illustrates the point rather clearly (transcribed to the latin alphabet): "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot"
There's a nice, relevant discussion of the origin of the quote on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
- mikeash 10y agoThis seems to be unfairly biased against landlocked countries. Kazakh and Lao are languages too!
- pluma 10y agoI think that's intentional. As I understand it Jewish humour is typically self-deprecating, which explains the irony of saying that about language in Yiddish; a language which has neither a navy, an army nor a country (except for a short time during the Soviet era), and was generally dismissed as "just broken German" similarly to AAVE. Considering the history of the quote it's probably a direct dismissal of the "just broken German" assertion (because German had an army and a navy but Yiddish obviously did not).
- mikeash 10y agoMakes sense to me. It just struck me as funny, as I've always just heard it as "with an army," and the implications of adding "and a navy" were amusing.