> Yes, but they are language-specific. They are not universal, are they?
> They are "objective" within the language or dialect continuum.
>
> You complain about "relativistic approaches", but you're using one as
> well, aren't you?
===========
You may classify Uralic languages with them if you want.
A.
==========
>
> I totally agree they're practically the same language, but would all
> the Croatians/Serbs? While Czechs wouldn't mind if you called their
> language a dialect of "Czechoslovak", many Slovaks would be quite
> angry, I guess. Yes, silly nationalism, but that's irrelevant. Those
> languages have certain status, different phonologies, literary
> traditions etc. Easternmost Slovak, by the way, wouldn't be understood
> in westernmost Bohemia, or with serious difficulties.
>
===========
It depends what one calls "serious"
Anyway it seems these people are not very interested in understanding each
other.
And I'm not sure all English speakers understand each other easily.
A.
=========
>> It's written above :
>>
>>>> A dialect is a particular variety of a language that displays a certain
>>>> number of specific features, but nevertheless shares most other
>>>> features
>>>> with other dialects.
>>
>> Arnaud
>
> "CERTAIN" number is what number exactly?
========
Significantly fewer than those shared.
A.
========
> "SPECIFIC" features are which features precisely?
=====
It depends what languages you compare.
Moksha Mordvin does not have vowel harmony but Erzia Mordvin does.
This criterion is irrelevant when you compare Sicilian with Std Italian or
Mandarin with Cantonese.
A.
=====
> Some have proposed that dialect intelligibility should be above 90%,
> for instance.
> Others have proposed that dialects should have 81-100% on the swadesh
> list.
>
> So, what are your universal criteria? What do you propose to use? Is
> Chinese a single language?
=======
The cultural tradition is to consider the "dialects" (in Chinese the word
means : local languages) as "dialects", but in my opinion, they must be
considered separate "languages".
Mandarin has dialects and Cantonese and Mandarin are not dialects of the
same variety of language.
The level of abstraction of Chinese is comparable to that of Semitic or
Germanic.
Germanic is not a "language".
It's probable that the last common ancestor of all Chinese "dialects"
existed more than 5000 years ago in my opinion, and it may be much more.
This datation is the mininum to account for the fact Min dialects do not fit
in the matrix of the phonetic components of the Chinese writing, which is
based on proto-Mandarin dialects, which were already more simple than the
conservative Min dialects, at the time the Chinese writing was created.
A.
========
> Are Czech, Slovak and Polish dialects of the same language?
>
======
My knowledge of them is about zero
so I cannot answer.
I suppose that the different places of demarcative stress, plus the absence
or presence of long vowels plus different consonantal systems, all this must
make intercomprehension fairly uneasy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_language
They say here that Kashubian is not Polish, so I suppose it's worse with
Czech.
but here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_language
Czech is similar to and mutually intelligible with Slovak and, to a lesser
extent, to Polish and Sorbian.
I cannot judge by myself.
I noticed :
"Smrz pln skvrn zvlhl z mlh." meaning "Morel full of spots dampened from
fogs".
Does it mean the same as "Colorless green dreams sleep furiously" ?
A.
======