[Theforum] Re: [Admin] Re: langs (was: 17320)
Bob Davis
bobd at members.evolt.org
Tue Nov 13 08:19:14 CST 2001
At 7:05 AM +0000 11/13/01, you wrote:
>Madhu Menon wrote on 13/11/01 7:52 am
>
>>Agreed. German is spoken in many countries, including Germany and Austria.
>>French is spoken in France, Algeria, and Vietnam. Spanish is the official
>>language in 21 countries. English is... well, you get the idea.
>>
>>Instead, we should simply list the language by its name, like "Español",
>>"Français", etc.
>
>And is that Quebecois Français, or Français as spoken in the Elysee
>Palace?
>And is that Español as spoken in Spain, or that spoken in the other
>20 countries?
My vote would be that we try to use "standard" language. The language
that one would find in text books, the literature that is part of the
linguistic culture, etc. In German, that's pretty simple to
determine. Austrian German and "German German" are pretty different -
there are villages in Austria where it's damn near impossible to
understand folks - and Swiss German is even worse. However, they all
understand formal, written German.
>And does it matter? Are they different enough to be significant?
In the above cited cases, they are significantly different in spoken
form, but there's the formal German that is taught the same pretty
much everywhere (don't know about Namibia though...large German
speaking population there). As for some of the variants of German
(such as Amish, in particular), I don't think we'll need to worry so
much about them.
>
>But I don't have enough Spanish or French to know if
>that's the case there.
According to Heather (who speaks Spanish fluently), an article would
be understood throughout the Spanish speaking world if it were
written in "standard Spanish", which, in Spain, would be Castillian
(sp?). This assumes some education (which would be a save
assumption, I think).
Pretty much, I think as long as we stay away from localized slang (we
have this problem in English too, remember?) and patois, we should be
ok.
bob
--
bob davis
bobd at members.evolt.org
http://www.bobdavis.org/
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