Visualising Infinity: The Trouble With Languages : Precisely, Dave.

» rkhen - Precisely, Dave.

Precisely, Dave.

Your point about whose French is French and whose English is English is the first loose thread in the rat's nest that obscures the central truth about language: ultimately it's a continuum, not a set of organically-distinct languages.

One point you didn't make, but might have, is that if you go backward in time, the language issue becomes even more hazy. At what point does French emerge? What about those traditions that don't win the "competition" to be French? What language were they? And the ones that merge over time into a another tradition different from both old and modern French? What are they, and when did they stop being French? And then there's the traditions _absorbed_ by modern French after we've decided modern French appeared. How could it still be French, now that it's different? You can drive yourself nuts like this.

Here's another problem: modern English, French, and German all share a relatively recent common ancestor, sometimes called Frankish. Now we have to ask, at what point did English stop being Frankish? And what was it after it wasn't Frankish, but before it was English? And which of the two languages is the real inheritor of Frankish? And what about all the words in all three languages that trace their ancestry to languages other than Frankish?

If you're already sick of this snarl, thank your lucky stars I haven't mentioned the fact that there were three regional usage traditions _within_ Frankish, largely unintelligible to one another, and all three of the modern languages I've cited contain elements from all three Frankishes. So which is descended from the "real" Frankish? And what _was_ the "real" Frankish.? And so on, and so on....

Bottom line: the lines can't be drawn. And as you have also pointed out, if we insist on a linear descent model for modern languages, we soon arrive at insisting that we're both writing in Sanskrit, which is ridiculous.

The different-language model is an acceptable fiction, indeed a necessary one, as long as we all remember that it's just a convenience. It's when social or political conclusions are drawn from this fundamentally-flawed idea (like the Hitlerian philosophies you cite) that they become unacceptable.

Thanks for stopping by, Dave. You've brought up valuable points.

-- posted by rkhen