Re: The many colors of Obama
- From: Henry Flam <hflam@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:49:38 GMT
In article <KFp00D.1GsA@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:
In article
<d3cc3278-0379-4ab4-a1e0-ef83420f0068@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Quadibloc <jsavard@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Or the Norwegians, where the country rubes still speak Norwegian
instead of Danish (or, conversely, where those who live in the big
city have decided they aren't going to bother learning Norwegian)?
Or the Swedish who can (AIUI) understand Danish perfectly
well but pretend not to because Danish is considered rustic
and vulgar?
I was going to mention French, where if you don't have a
Parisian accent you are looked down on; but your example is
so much better.
Hal was remarking to me this morning that the French have
still not gotten over it that French is no longer the
international language of diplomacy, and I pointed out that
French is a lot less forgiving of mistakes than English. We
then degenerated into a discussion of just what is English,
and how far it has to mutate before it isn't English any
more, and what about tok pidgin?
My impression is that, strictly speaking, English is no longer a single
language, but a collection of languages which are in process of
increasing differentiation, like Late Latin. This was first brought to
my attention in the early seventies, when I say the Jamaican film, _The
Harder They Come_, subtitled for Canadian audiences. I noticed that not
only the vocabulary, but the grammar was different from the standard
school English.
.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at hotmail dot com
Should you wish to email me, you'd better use the hotmail edress.
Kithrup is getting too damn much spam, even with the sysop's filters.
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