4 ms·

Urks, this is another chart using the highly questionable data from Ethnologue. For example German, it mostly counts the inhabitants of Germany (native and L2

by bhaak 11y ago

Urks, this is another chart using the highly questionable data from Ethnologue. For example German, it mostly counts the inhabitants of Germany (native and L2 speakers) as speaking "Standard German". Austria and Switzerland have almost no "Standard German" but "Bavarian" and "Alemannic". Which makes no sense at all. They claim to group their language families "based primarily on mutual intelligibility". But at least with German, this is clearly wrong. Austrians and Germans have no problem understanding each other (with Swiss German, the problem is a bit more complicated but it is generally acknowledged as a dialect of German). With the "mutual intelligibility" argument AFAIK Chinese should be split into several languages. If you remember that "The Ethnologue is published by Dallas, Texas-based SIL International [...], a Christian linguistic service organization, which studies numerous minority languages to facilitate language development and to work with the speakers of such language communities to translate portions of the Bible into their language."[Quote from Wikipedia] some of their decision make more sense. All Chinese speakers read the same script even if their spoken language is quite different. But Swiss Germans read mostly Standard German texts, there is very little literature written in Swiss Germans in print or online (besides texting or other informal communication). So take Ethnologue's data and this chart with more than the usual grain of salt.

Mithaldu 11y ago
> Austrians and Germans have no problem understanding each other Germans and Bavarians on the other hand ...
- bhaak 11y ago
  >> Austrians and Germans have no problem understanding each other > Germans and Bavarians on the other hand ... "Not wanting to understand each other" is a cultural and political thing and not due to linguistical issues. ;-)
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    That is a completely un-called-for accusation. I've seen elderly bavarians come up to Meck-Pomm and babble at the train attendant over their invalid tickets in high speed in the deepest and most incomprehensible Boarisch possible. There may be some people up here who don't even want to deal with that, but the bigger issue is those bavarians who don't even try to speak common german, or at least slow the fuck down.
    - bhaak 11y ago
      This is exactly the kind of culturing issue I was referring to. Those elderly Bavarians were probably not aware that they aren't being understood. Either because they were too agitated to switch to Standard German or a toned down Bavarian or because they just didn't know that they wouldn't be understood. If you lived your whole life in a place where the daily language of different people range from deepest Bavarian to Standard German, it can happen that you don't realize immediately that you speak in a hard to understood variant of the local language as at home, a Standard German speaker is not a reliable indicator that you won't be understood.
      - Mithaldu 11y ago
        Agreeing with all of that. To be clear, my previous post was taking offense to the "not wanting to understand" part. I can guarantee that train attendents want to understand, because every traveller taking up more than a specific amount of time effectively reduces their salary due to bonus structuring. Many people up here simply can't understand Boarisch because it's sufficiently different to be its own language.
        bhaak 11y ago
        Yeah, my reply was a bit tongue in cheek but the main gist is that Bavarian and Standard German are not that far apart linguistically. With a little bit of exposure you can understand it well enough. But in Germany the dialects have a lower social status so you don't get lots of opportunities to hear it as even those who speak dialect when at home or with friends usually switch to something more closer to Standard German when talking to obvious non-local people. In Austria and Switzerland, this is completely different situation there and you can expect to hear more dialect than you ever thought could possibly exist.
panglott 11y ago
There's just no unambiguous way to distinguish various dialects, sociolects, and other linguistics varieties into discrete "languages" easily. "Mutual intelligibility" is also problematic. In a highly multilingual community, people may have a high passive knowledge of another clearly distinct language that they can understand each other fine when speaking distinct languages/varieties.
tokenadult 11y ago
Yours is a good comment on the unreliability of Ethnologue for these kinds of language comparisons. I'll jump in here with a response to one part of your comment near the end. All Chinese speakers read the same script even if their spoken language is quite different. That's an oversimplification. Chinese speakers who have not learned to read of course don't read any script. And in actual current usage, written Chinese is conformed to the speech patterns of the national standard language, Mandarin, and reflects the vocabulary and grammatical patterns of that language. Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[4] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective. I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation "Does he know how to speak Mandarin? "No, he doesn't." 他會說普通話嗎？他不會。 in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write "Does he know how to speak Cantonese? "No, he doesn't." 佢識唔識講廣東話？佢唔識。 in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFrancis/dp/0824810686/ http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comparisons/dp/0824812077/ http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp... [3] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodied-Meaning/dp/0824827600/ http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie... [4] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.

by bhaak 11y ago

Mithaldu 11y ago

> Austrians and Germans have no problem understanding each other Germans and Bavarians on the other hand ...

bhaak 11y ago
>> Austrians and Germans have no problem understanding each other > Germans and Bavarians on the other hand ... "Not wanting to understand each other" is a cultural and political thing and not due to linguistical issues. ;-)
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  That is a completely un-called-for accusation. I've seen elderly bavarians come up to Meck-Pomm and babble at the train attendant over their invalid tickets in high speed in the deepest and most incomprehensible Boarisch possible. There may be some people up here who don't even want to deal with that, but the bigger issue is those bavarians who don't even try to speak common german, or at least slow the fuck down.
  - bhaak 11y ago
    This is exactly the kind of culturing issue I was referring to. Those elderly Bavarians were probably not aware that they aren't being understood. Either because they were too agitated to switch to Standard German or a toned down Bavarian or because they just didn't know that they wouldn't be understood. If you lived your whole life in a place where the daily language of different people range from deepest Bavarian to Standard German, it can happen that you don't realize immediately that you speak in a hard to understood variant of the local language as at home, a Standard German speaker is not a reliable indicator that you won't be understood.
    - Mithaldu 11y ago
      Agreeing with all of that. To be clear, my previous post was taking offense to the "not wanting to understand" part. I can guarantee that train attendents want to understand, because every traveller taking up more than a specific amount of time effectively reduces their salary due to bonus structuring. Many people up here simply can't understand Boarisch because it's sufficiently different to be its own language.
      - bhaak 11y ago
        Yeah, my reply was a bit tongue in cheek but the main gist is that Bavarian and Standard German are not that far apart linguistically. With a little bit of exposure you can understand it well enough. But in Germany the dialects have a lower social status so you don't get lots of opportunities to hear it as even those who speak dialect when at home or with friends usually switch to something more closer to Standard German when talking to obvious non-local people. In Austria and Switzerland, this is completely different situation there and you can expect to hear more dialect than you ever thought could possibly exist.

panglott 11y ago

There's just no unambiguous way to distinguish various dialects, sociolects, and other linguistics varieties into discrete "languages" easily. "Mutual intelligibility" is also problematic. In a highly multilingual community, people may have a high passive knowledge of another clearly distinct language that they can understand each other fine when speaking distinct languages/varieties.

tokenadult 11y ago

Yours is a good comment on the unreliability of Ethnologue for these kinds of language comparisons. I'll jump in here with a response to one part of your comment near the end. All Chinese speakers read the same script even if their spoken language is quite different. That's an oversimplification. Chinese speakers who have not learned to read of course don't read any script. And in actual current usage, written Chinese is conformed to the speech patterns of the national standard language, Mandarin, and reflects the vocabulary and grammatical patterns of that language. Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[4] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective. I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation "Does he know how to speak Mandarin? "No, he doesn't." 他會說普通話嗎？他不會。 in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write "Does he know how to speak Cantonese? "No, he doesn't." 佢識唔識講廣東話？佢唔識。 in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFrancis/dp/0824810686/ http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comparisons/dp/0824812077/ http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp... [3] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodied-Meaning/dp/0824827600/ http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie... [4] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.