Re: tlug: kanji or romaji for Japanese? (was: parallel-port IDE)

[Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com>]

Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com> writes:

> > I think that this is what someone once meant by the 'babel' concept -
> > human languages tend to diverge into more and more fragmented languages
> > instead of converging on one language.  It's kind of sad.  Imagine all the
> 
> Actually, it's going the other way.  The attrition rate of languages today
> is tremendous.  Linguists are scrambling to record disappearing languages
> while there are still native speakers left, but splinter languages are
> probably now disappearing faster than they can be recorded.  It is not
> likely that there will ever be just one world language, but language
> extinction seems to be accellerating, rather than slowing down.

It's late and, oh what the heck, I might as well dive into this
as well.  Territorial languages may be on the wane, but what
about the dialects of academic territories?  My neighbor is a
mechanical engineering professor at Nagoya U.  We have no problem
swapping common or garden jokes from our countries of origin
(happily his flavor of Bulgarian humor translates well into
English).  But when he starts talking about his work, I'm
completely lost.  The same would be true if he were from my home
town.  This may seem trivial, but simple linguistic divisions
like this have been known to destroy marriages.  Language as a
whole, but particularly English, has lost some of the commonality
that it once had.

That's one facet that's been missed in the day's discussion of
"language".  Another is that, as someone put it today, language
is a process, not a state.  It's easy for new dialects to
splinter off from a linguistic monolith --- not much capital
investment is needed to create a word.  A linguistic sub-group
might be limited by space (a hill tribe) or by an educational
boundary (mechanical engineers and Linux gurus), or by time
(gendai-ko graduating from high school in 1998/99 Japan).

I wouldn't start ringing the death knell of dialect just yet.
There's a nasty potential for gotcha in the spirit of man.

So it seems to me, anyway.

Cheers,
-- 
-x80
Frank G Bennett, Jr         @@
Faculty of Law, Nagoya Univ () email: bennett@example.com
Tel: +81[(0)52]789-2239     () WWW:   http://rumple.soas.ac.uk/~bennett/
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