Greatest Software Ever Written 4263

Stan Barr

Actually, I thought there was a definition of "dialect" but that may be because I'm not actually familiar with the English concepts here.

That said, there are certain gray areas, sort of like with the concept of "species" in biology, of course.

But I thought that the clbuttification was mostly similar, with interbreeding in biology and intercomprehensibility in linguistics?

It still falls through with the Chinese because the Western usage doesn't effectively distinguish between spoken and written language.

Trying to count dialects in any language is something I would prefer not to do, what with there often not being any useful distinction between any given two where you could rule that one dialect ends and another begins, AFAICT.

Which is still a lot, comparatively.

And given that "Pidgin" used to be more or less a generic term for simple ad-hoc trade languages based on some major one, typically English, French or Spanish ... well, PNG Pidgin is sort of almost comprehensible as very badly spoken English, occasionally.

Well, it seems someone else has totally given up on Finnish too as the ingredient listings on some imported foodstuffs are just about gibberish... so I occasionally end up reading the French or English listings on them (and finding discrepancies between them too).

The user instructions on some cheap electronics are even worse.

-- #Not speaking for my employer. No warranty. YMMV.