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MrMobster t1_j21dvb7 wrote

Reply to comment by SereneDreams03 in Ask Anything Wednesday - Economics, Political Science, Linguistics, Anthropology by AutoModerator

Neither “dialect” nor “language” are strictly defined concepts in linguistics. The classical criterion of recognizing dialects is mutual intelligibility (the varieties are clearly different but people can understand each other), but it’s not entirely unproblematic. “Language” is usually recognized on the basis of some political, cultural or historical significance.

The current approach in linguistics is to leave these things somewhat ambiguous and just note different varieties and their relationship between each other (approach that glottolog takes). Some have been advocating for “doculects” - identifying a variety on the basis of the publication or data that describes it. In the end, one can come up with multiple different measures for what’s a dialect and what’s a language, many of them useful in own way. ,

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hairyforehead t1_j223r18 wrote

I heard it's similar in biology with race, population, species etc. and medicine with diseases and syndromes...

Science is just labeling Rorschach blots.

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MrMobster t1_j23hc08 wrote

It’s interesting, isn’t it? We humans like to classify things and give them clean, well defined labels. And we often have a good reason to, since there is obviously something going on. It’s not like these labels are entirely arbitrary. But pinning down the nature of the label is often exceedingly difficult. I suppose that’s the difference between ideals and reality. I mean, we all know the difference between a bowl and a vase, but where does one start and where does one end?

This is a common theme in any discipline that studies complex systems. Especially linguistics. It’s a bit of a tragedy of language science as many linguists confidently operate in notions that have very weak theoretical foundation. There is a lot of unspoken assumption, driven by tradition, in the linguistic theory, and not enough people question the tradition IMO. I mean, starting with such basic things like “meaning” or “word”.

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