Yes, if he/she is cunning.
What? Someone had to say it.
I wrote:
> Yes, I’m aware of the problems with Ethnologue.
Excalibre writes:
> Um, I’m not.
I only brought that up because the first time I used Ethnologue in one of my posts, some other poster started a nasty rant about how terrible Ethnologue was and derailed the thread with his hijacking of it. I now mention that I know that Ethnologue isn’t perfect every time I use it in a thread to ward off any similar hijacking of the thread. If you have no problem with Ethnologue, then I have no problem with it. The Wikipedia article mentions a few problems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnologue
I think the biggest problem is that Ethnologue tends to be too much of a splitter, distinguishing different languages in some cases where there are only different dialects.
Well, dialect and language are pretty contentious terms in certain groups. If Ethnologue is bashed for being too much of a splinter, it’s certainly not alone in that group.
Just curious. I’ve seen what Wikipedia has to say, and it makes the obvious point that Ethnologue’s data aren’t perfect, which doesn’t surprise or bother me in the least. And certainly they tend to divide languages very finely, but that’s their approach, and it seems silly to me to criticize that particular fact as though it invalidated their whole point.
But people love to criticize sources of information around here. I think some SDMB members like to rant about inaccuracies in Wikipedia while they masturbate.