| Wiktionary:Information desk Dec 2nd 2012, 03:16 Child languages as dialects: | ← Older revision | Revision as of 03:16, 2 December 2012 | | Line 1,502: | Line 1,502: | | | | | | | | :::::The planet Earth could be considered flat (as opposed to spherical). It could be, but it's not. I don't think that sense of "could be" is meaningful and that's why I do not think he meant it that way. Virtually everything ''could'' be considered virtually anything. Whiskey could be considered water, Australia could be considered a possession of China, horses could be considered cows. What matters is that it is not. [[User:Stephen G. Brown|—Stephen]] <sup>([[User talk:Stephen G. Brown|Talk]])</sup> 22:56, 1 December 2012 (UTC) | | :::::The planet Earth could be considered flat (as opposed to spherical). It could be, but it's not. I don't think that sense of "could be" is meaningful and that's why I do not think he meant it that way. Virtually everything ''could'' be considered virtually anything. Whiskey could be considered water, Australia could be considered a possession of China, horses could be considered cows. What matters is that it is not. [[User:Stephen G. Brown|—Stephen]] <sup>([[User talk:Stephen G. Brown|Talk]])</sup> 22:56, 1 December 2012 (UTC) | | | + | | | | + | :::: For us to consider modern Romance languages to be dialects of Latin, we would have to redefine [[Latin]], [[dialect]], and/or the terms for all the modern Romance languages. The point is that Latin refers to the language as it was written and spoken a couple of thousand years ago. The modern languages have massively changed from that in many directions, so you would have to redefine Latin to mean what we now refer to as the Romance languages. And even if one considered this redefined Latin to be a macrolanguage like Chinese or Arabic, there's still the issue of all the child languages having their own identities as separate languages, each with their own standards and even governing academies. Also, unlike Chinese and Arabic, there's no common written standard, either. There's nothing really that unifies them but resemblances and the knowledge that they descended from a common ancestor. [[User:Chuck Entz|Chuck Entz]] ([[User talk:Chuck Entz|talk]]) 03:16, 2 December 2012 (UTC) | | | | | | | | : The predecessors of the modern Romance languages were dialects of Latin, but I would say the modern Romance languages are not dialects of Latin, firstly because they're not mutually intelligible with each other or with Latin, and secondly because they're descendants of Latin and descent is a separate relationship from dialectality. That's part of the definition of a "[[dialect]]" in relation to a "[[language]]" vs a "language" in relation to another "language". [[User:-sche|- -sche]] [[User talk:-sche|(discuss)]] 22:44, 1 December 2012 (UTC) | | : The predecessors of the modern Romance languages were dialects of Latin, but I would say the modern Romance languages are not dialects of Latin, firstly because they're not mutually intelligible with each other or with Latin, and secondly because they're descendants of Latin and descent is a separate relationship from dialectality. That's part of the definition of a "[[dialect]]" in relation to a "[[language]]" vs a "language" in relation to another "language". [[User:-sche|- -sche]] [[User talk:-sche|(discuss)]] 22:44, 1 December 2012 (UTC) | |  |
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