Re: Macrolanguage (was: Forms for Montenegrin)
John Cowan <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.ietf.languages |
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| Message-ID | <CAD2gp_RnReLrUjSdwimpQN0ZKRXPft7T+YE83NH2-o_cXL2ASg@mail.gmail.com> |
On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 3:51 PM, Michael Everson <[email protected]> wrote: > On 22 Dec 2017, at 20:27, Doug Ewell <[email protected]> wrote: > > > "Macrolanguage" is completely an ISO 639-3 concept. > > The term is odd, but it’s a familiar concept in linguistic classification. > It isn't, which is why Peter Constable (who is certainly familiar with linguistic classification) invented it. > You imply that Montenegrin’s would either have no macrolanguage (but it is > not a linguistic isolate) or that its macrolanguage would be anything other > than Serbo-Croatian. But neither of those would be correct. > English does not have a macrolanguage, but it is not a language isolate. Rather, it does not belong to a group of languages (as defined by linguistic standards) which are for some purposes treated as a single language with a single name, as is the case for Chinese, Arabic, Norwegian, Quechua, and Serbo-Croatian. If on the other hand it were usual to call both English and various English-based pidgins and creoles simply "English", and only differentiate between them in specialized contexts, then English would indeed be part of a macrolanguage called "English (macrolanguage)". -- John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan [email protected] An observable characteristic is not necessarily a functional requirement. --John Hudson _______________________________________________ Ietf-languages mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages