Re: [Lingo] Bulgarian and Russian and Romanian (oh my?)

[Stuart Luppescu <slu@example.com>]

On Mon, 2011-03-07 at 13:12 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> While mutual intelligibility is clearly an important criterion, and my
> examples are mostly frivolous, I really have to wonder whether it is
> either necessary or sufficient. 

The other prime example of mutual intelligibility of two (what people
generally consider separate) languages is Swedish and Norwegian. I
remember hearing a long time ago, before I became a *recovering*
linguist, that languages are distinct if the people speaking them have
their own armies. By this definition, Mandarin and Cantonese are the
same language (despite lack of mutual intelligibility) and Swedish and
Norwegian separate. As someone mentioned before, it all comes down to
politics.
-- 
Stuart Luppescu -=- slu .at. ccsr.uchicago.edu        
University of Chicago -=- CCSR 
才文と智奈美の父 -=-    Kernel 2.6.36-gentoo-r5                
I was actually reading it with some curiosity as to
 how they managed to find 5 locations that were
 close to everyone on R-help...    -- Peter
 Dalgaard (after XL Solutions announced courses
 'R/Splus Programming       Techniques, @ 5
 locations near you!')       R-help (April 2004)

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