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>Scots is a dialect of English It's up to the linguistic community to decide that, if their variety should be considered a "dialect" of something else or a "la

>Scots is a dialect of English It's up to the linguistic community to decide that, if their variety should be considered a "dialect" of something else or a "language" on its own. Linguists already gave up that question, it's more useful to talk about varieties anyway. And it's the same deal with Galician versus Portuguese, with a difference - "Scots is a dialect of English" threatens Scots, but "Portuguese is a dialect of Galician" doesn't threaten Portuguese (it threatens Galician instead).

gsnedders 5y ago
Or whether Danish and Norwegian and Swedish are the same language, but different dialects. Depending on how you define "dialect" or "language", they may or may not be. To quote the obligatory quip: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy".
- dfawcus 5y ago
  "Or whether Danish and Norwegian and Swedish are the same language, but different dialects." I recently watched the Swedish production "Blue Eyes" (with English subtitles), and was amused at the amount of speech which struck me as being 'English with an odd regional dialect'. Usually these were simple 'core language' statements and / or imperatives. I guess that is more the lasting Viking and Dane Law impact upon the English, than English feeding in modern Swedish.
  - lvxferre 5y ago
    >I guess that is more the lasting Viking and Dane Law impact upon the English, than English feeding in modern Swedish. It might be the result of common Germanic grounds, not necessarily lateral influence. I got the same when learning German - sentences like "das Haus ist rot" or "ich trinke Wein" are surprisingly easy to catch up from English. And after some time you start noticing patterns, that help you further.
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      Fun increasingly off topic facts: a lot of those patterns were originally noticed and compiled by the Brothers Grimm (noted assemblers of fairy tales from across Germany) as they got caught up in the pattern of differences between Low German (the language families that include Dutch and Old English) and High German (what today we think of as the German language) as they assembled all the local fairy tales they could find. High German went through a consonant shift [1] that Low German did not. A lot of the pattern you can see when learning German and knowing a lot of older words in English is applying exactly that consonant shift, plus or minus English's own interesting Great Vowel Shift [2] and large influx of latinate words from French and other languages. (The Brothers Grimm even traced some of the shifts as far back as they could to proto-Germanic, making them some of the first explorers of Proto-Indo-European [PIE] sound shifts and Grimm's Law is named after them. [3]) The evolution of languages is fascinating. Circling somewhat back to the topic above: the difference between "dialect" and "language" is a complex subject just as most "speciation" debates in other evolutionary fields have a lot of hidden complexity. "Language" versus "dialect" versus "creole" doesn't have a lot of simple answers though historically that joke that "a language is a dialect with an army" tracks more than it doesn't which is why it is a good joke. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law
      - lvxferre 5y ago
        Yup. And theoretically, Grimm's Law would allow you to find those patterns even between some random Germanic vs. Romance/Latin pair; like e.g. plenus/full, tres/three, head/caput. Too many changes piled up to be useful though. (What I find really funny is that some people show some sort of intuitive awareness of those regular sound correspondences, when dealing with closely related languages. I don't recall this among EN/DE speakers, but it's all the time among PT/ES ones: either joking "swap O with UE and you get Spanish" or "drop random consonants and you get Portuguese". Cue to "quiero una cueca cuela y un sorviete" pseudo-Spanish.) Among the three you mentioned (language, dialect, creole), at least creole is well defined - it's the resulting evolution of a pidgin becoming a full-fledged language. At least in theory, because in practice we get partial creolisation and decreolisation of varieties.

gsnedders 5y ago

Or whether Danish and Norwegian and Swedish are the same language, but different dialects. Depending on how you define "dialect" or "language", they may or may not be. To quote the obligatory quip: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy".

dfawcus 5y ago
"Or whether Danish and Norwegian and Swedish are the same language, but different dialects." I recently watched the Swedish production "Blue Eyes" (with English subtitles), and was amused at the amount of speech which struck me as being 'English with an odd regional dialect'. Usually these were simple 'core language' statements and / or imperatives. I guess that is more the lasting Viking and Dane Law impact upon the English, than English feeding in modern Swedish.
- lvxferre 5y ago
  >I guess that is more the lasting Viking and Dane Law impact upon the English, than English feeding in modern Swedish. It might be the result of common Germanic grounds, not necessarily lateral influence. I got the same when learning German - sentences like "das Haus ist rot" or "ich trinke Wein" are surprisingly easy to catch up from English. And after some time you start noticing patterns, that help you further.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    Fun increasingly off topic facts: a lot of those patterns were originally noticed and compiled by the Brothers Grimm (noted assemblers of fairy tales from across Germany) as they got caught up in the pattern of differences between Low German (the language families that include Dutch and Old English) and High German (what today we think of as the German language) as they assembled all the local fairy tales they could find. High German went through a consonant shift [1] that Low German did not. A lot of the pattern you can see when learning German and knowing a lot of older words in English is applying exactly that consonant shift, plus or minus English's own interesting Great Vowel Shift [2] and large influx of latinate words from French and other languages. (The Brothers Grimm even traced some of the shifts as far back as they could to proto-Germanic, making them some of the first explorers of Proto-Indo-European [PIE] sound shifts and Grimm's Law is named after them. [3]) The evolution of languages is fascinating. Circling somewhat back to the topic above: the difference between "dialect" and "language" is a complex subject just as most "speciation" debates in other evolutionary fields have a lot of hidden complexity. "Language" versus "dialect" versus "creole" doesn't have a lot of simple answers though historically that joke that "a language is a dialect with an army" tracks more than it doesn't which is why it is a good joke. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law
    - lvxferre 5y ago
      Yup. And theoretically, Grimm's Law would allow you to find those patterns even between some random Germanic vs. Romance/Latin pair; like e.g. plenus/full, tres/three, head/caput. Too many changes piled up to be useful though. (What I find really funny is that some people show some sort of intuitive awareness of those regular sound correspondences, when dealing with closely related languages. I don't recall this among EN/DE speakers, but it's all the time among PT/ES ones: either joking "swap O with UE and you get Spanish" or "drop random consonants and you get Portuguese". Cue to "quiero una cueca cuela y un sorviete" pseudo-Spanish.) Among the three you mentioned (language, dialect, creole), at least creole is well defined - it's the resulting evolution of a pidgin becoming a full-fledged language. At least in theory, because in practice we get partial creolisation and decreolisation of varieties.