From: tgpedersen
Message: 24105
Date: 2003-07-03
> At 5:50:38 AM on Tuesday, July 1, 2003, tgpedersen wrote:True, the two types are imaginary in their pure form.
>
> > There is a problem in a hierarchy: how do you regulate
> > who's right and who's wrong?
>
> In terms of speech you don't have to: the speech of those at
> the top of the relevant hierarchy is taken as the model.
>
> > Therefore all hierarchical (ie. land-locked) countries
>
> You'd be hard put to find any human society, let alone a
> country, that didn't have some sort of hierarchy.
>Actually I was thinking France. England seems to be vacillating,
> > have a rudeness relation centered on their capital: people
> > in the capital may be rude to people immediately outside
> > it because of their language, they in their turn may be
> > rude to those further out etc. In short, the rudeness
> > relation is a partial ordering which orders the nation
> > into concentric rings and its transitive closure defines
> > the nation.
>
> Except that it doesn't happen unless the area involved is
> fairly small. What you get instead are regional centres
> defining regional prestige varieties (which may of course
> still be less prestigious than that of a national court or
> literary centre). And of course Paris and London are
> historically notoriously also home to very non-prestigious
> varieties.