# Good butter and good cheese, is Good English and Good Fries **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 10, 2004, 10:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305 "2004-04-10T10:44:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2016, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305/21 "2016-01-04T16:17:25Z")
> [@WotNot](#): > > I think there are probably several things in that article that people would argue with. Some might be merely quibbles, but the part quoted above, in particular, is true only if you don’t consider Scots to be a separate language to English. I realise that there’s still debate about the matter, but the official position of the UK government is that it is, and that ought to count for something. Yes, in that article McWhorter expresses his views as if they were the consensus view of linguists. I’m not sure I can completely blame him, though, as it wold be cumbersome to note each case where some debate is still to be had. However, a note at the bottom that not all linguists share the same views would have been nice. ---
**Author:** ![Drunky\_Smurf](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/drunky_smurf/32/449_2.png) [@Drunky\_Smurf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Drunky_Smurf)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2016, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305/22 "2016-01-04T16:25:29Z")
> [@Smeghead](#): > > Quiet, you. No need to let reality get in the way of you chastising new posters. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2016, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305/23 "2016-01-04T18:47:46Z")
> [@WotNot](#): > > Because the consensus among linguists and other academic experts is that there’s no clear dividing line between dialect and separate language, and that the distinction is principally a political one. 😃 > [@MrDibble](#): > > Would you consider [Ethnologue](https://www.ethnologue.com/language/sco) (a group effort by linguists and other experts) to count for attention-paying purposes? > [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Here is the Ethnologue entry with the tree for English: > > [https://www.ethnologue.com/subgroups/english-0](https://www.ethnologue.com/subgroups/english-0) > > Here is the Glottolog (a similar sort of classification of the world’s languages) entry with the tree for English: > > [Glottolog 5.0 - Macro-English](http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/macr1271) > [@John\_Mace](#): > > Yes, in that article McWhorter expresses his views as if they were the consensus view of linguists. I’m not sure I can completely blame him, though, as it wold be cumbersome to note each case where some debate is still to be had. However, a note at the bottom that not all linguists share the same views would have been nice. I’m not going to bother defending the article. It’s a data point on Frisian. It’s not a data point on Scots except negatively. It was taken from another site so McWhorter may have been more nuanced there. Or not. I don’t know. ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2016, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305/24 "2016-01-04T19:51:54Z")
> [@Drunky\_Smurf](#): > > No need to let reality get in the way of you chastising new posters. Ah, good. Drunky Smurf is irritated with me. I must be doing something right. OK, then, yes. It’s true. I find it SUPER annoying when people pop up and present facts that interfere with my nefarious patrolling of the boards in my Junior Mod-mobile. You can tell by how nasty and insulting my original condescending post was to the poor innocent newbie just how little I care for the feelings of others. FOILED AGAIN!! CURSES! ---
**Author:** ![Isilder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/cc9497/32.png) [@Isilder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isilder)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2016, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305/25 "2016-01-06T00:36:18Z")
> [@Daver914](#): > > while tongues like Dutch and German are no longer intelligible to us. Holland , as in Spanish scandanavia ? Germany, as in the home base of the latin and romance speaking Holy Roman Empire ? Italians, or Romans (from the roman alliance of city states) who didn’t like Italy moved … up north ? Which countries had more eastern (Slav … Hun … etc) settlers ? With eastern language ? Just go and look up the languages of the HRE and southern Scandanavia before Old Nordsk spread through… Frisian and Nordsk are more insular, safer from immigrants (and overarching politcal changes, such as HRE) mixing in other languages. ---
**Author:** ![aldiboronti](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9fc348/32.png) [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2016, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305/26 "2016-01-06T01:21:08Z")
Lallans, or Lowland Scots, isn’t regarded by linguists as a separate language. It diverged from Northumbrian English after the 14th century but it’s still a dialect of English. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2016, 9:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305/27 "2016-01-06T09:11:34Z")
> [@aldiboronti](#): > > Lallans, or Lowland Scots, isn’t regarded by linguists as a separate language. So the people who produce _Ethnologue_ and _Glottolog_ are No True Linguists, then? ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2016, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305/28 "2016-01-06T14:12:26Z")
The question is where on the Indo-European tree to say that anything after that division is one language. Some linguists say that the division between English and Scots is between languages, while some say that it’s between dialects. Glottolog divides things more finely. This means you have to decide if the various creole Englishes are dialects or separate languages. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2016, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305/29 "2016-01-06T16:55:10Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > So the people who produce _Ethnologue_ and _Glottolog_ are No True Linguists, then? It’s not really clear what the tree in Glottolog is supposed to indicate. I find it particularly odd that they link Scots more closely to Old English (Beowulf), which is essentially unintelligible to speakers of modern English, than to Middle or Modern English. I also find it bizarre that they include separate branches for Guinea Coast and Pacific Creole English while not listing Jamaican or other Caribbean Creoles. And they have a separate branch for New Zealand English, but not Australian or South African. It doesn’t seem to me that the site is an authoritative reference on language classification. ---
**Author:** ![An\_Gadai](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@An\_Gadai](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/An_Gadai)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2016, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305/30 "2016-01-06T17:25:05Z")
[Here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Scots_dialects#/media/File:Looking_for_the_%22Cludgies%22%5E_-_geograph.org.uk_-_637820.jpg)’s a trilingual sign in Northern Ireland, in English, Irish and Ulster Scots (which is a dialect of Scots). Now tell me Scots is not a language! 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2016, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305/31 "2016-01-06T17:37:01Z")
The main reasons for not considering it a separate language are political and practical: as a set of dialects of the UK under strong pressure from standard English, it’s impossible to disentangle Scots from English. They’re not separate enough in usage to count them as separate speech communities. Therefore, the same language. I occasionally assign university students something by Robert Burns. They can neither read nor understand it without heavy glossing. While I can see a good argument for considering Scots a dialect of English, it fails the mutual intelligibility test with American English. There’s a time factor in there, of course; Burns isn’t contemporary. Still, I think it’s unarguable that had Scotland remained separate from England, Scots would be a separate language. As it is, due to constant re-mixing with Standard English, it’s just a widely divergent dialect. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 6:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305/32 "2016-01-07T06:18:29Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > The question is where on the Indo-European tree to say that anything after that division is one language. Some linguists say that the division between English and Scots is between languages, while some say that it’s between dialects. Glottolog divides things more finely. This means you have to decide if the various creole Englishes are dialects or separate languages. Scots isn’t a Creole, though. Whatever you decide for it, has no impact on your choices for them. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 9:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305/33 "2016-01-07T09:14:53Z")
I didn’t say that Scots was a creole. I didn’t say that the answer to whether Scots was a dialect or a separate language was necessarily connected to the question of whether the various creole Englishes are dialects or separate languages. I just said that they are both hard questions. In fact, they are harder questions than I thought. I now see that the question of whether something is a dialect or a language isn’t solved by seeing how close it is on the language tree. I’m going to have to rethink the question of how to distinguish dialects and languages using tree structures for language history like the ones in Ethnologue and Glottolog. This is clearly a more complicated problem than I thought. In the meantime, please don’t assume that you can figure out from what I wrote exactly what I really meant. This is one of the most irritating elements of the SDMB for me. I will say something (that might not be as accurate or fully sourced as it should have been) and someone jumps in and implies that I’m an idiot, a liar, or evil for saying that. Look, I’m trying, and I admit that sometimes I don’t get the facts straight. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 12:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305/34 "2016-01-07T12:20:17Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > I didn’t say that Scots was a creole. I didn’t say you did > [@](#): > > I didn’t say that the answer to whether Scots was a dialect or a separate language was necessarily connected to the question of whether the various creole Englishes are dialects or separate languages. Nah. You just jumped from one concept to the other in the space of two sentences and linked them via the Glottolog tree. It was so silly of me to think you thought the issues were connected. > [@](#): > > I just said that they are both hard questions. I agree they are > [@](#): > > In the meantime, please don’t assume that you can figure out from what I wrote exactly what I really meant. :dubious: > [@](#): > > This is one of the most irritating elements of the SDMB for me. I will say something (that might not be as accurate or fully sourced as it should have been) and someone jumps in and implies that I’m an idiot, a liar, or evil for saying that. Don’t be a martyr - nobody’s called you any of those things. All I said was that the issue of whether English Creoles qualify as languages or dialects is a separate issue from whether this parallel language _without_ significant creolization but its own evolution is a dialect or a language. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-butter-and-good-cheese-is-good-english-and-good-fries/239305.md?page=1)