The only thing this thread was really missing was the Pitee. Looks like someone stepped in to take his place!
As much as I like a pitting with beautiful and unique swearing, I can also appreciate one that has none, like this one. Colibri’s is one of the best pittings I’ve seen in a long time.
Of course, on preview he has had to resort to swearing, albeit at roger thornhill.
At least he’s not accusing you of being retarded, a liar, and dishonest.* 
*Which doesn’t belong in GQ anyway
However, by not accepting my own statements that I did not (originally) consider him as such, he essentially did call me a liar. And his original accusations were a backhanded way of insulting me, by alleging that I had insulted him when I did not.
As I said, I have no objection to swearing per se. If lissener shows up here in anything but a highly apologetic mode, I guarantee you wll see some.
**lissener **apologize? Just trying to *conceptualize *being wrong would make his head explode, let alone typing it out on a message board for all the 'net to see.
I think you should cuss him out in a Spanish language, like Basque.
Maybe he can do it in an American language, like Spanish.
That would be amusing in itself.
Now that’s funny!
Polycarp, I know you’re one of those people who tries to see the good side of everything, and also, I generally think lissener gets shorter thrift than he deserves, and people keep picking his last nerve about that SF film, so I tend to favour him in a lot of his dust-ups.
But that underlined bit? So not true. Even when he’s right, he’s often a pompous ass.
And in this case, he’s as not right as a very not right thing wearing the national costume of Verynotrightistan.
As a 3rd party observer to this call-out, sending a person who’s being pitted a formal invitation was unnecessary at best; meddling & attention whoring at worst.
I assumed you were referring to an obnoxious e-mail, but you actually hijacked someone else’s thread to call out someone you didn’t even pit in the first place? Kinda implies you have the lawn chair open and the popcorn made, no?
Here’s some unsolicited, but well-intentioned advice: Lay-off.
Heh. I was thinking the same thing. When is lissener not a pompous ass?
This is a bit of a hijack, but it’s something I’ve been wondering about regarding this whole incident. From what I understand, there’s a big debate over where a dialect stops and a language begins. I know a lot of it is political…there’s that saying that “A language is a dialect with its own army”, but that there can often be real debates over whether two people speak different languages or just different dialects of the same language. So, for example, the “Scots” that you see in Burns’ poetry…some people say that’s a dialect of English, and others say it’s a seperate language. Likewise with Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian…some people say it’s one language and others say it’s three seperate ones, Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian.
Is that the case with some of the different languages of Spain? I know it’s obviously not the case with the Basque language, which isn’t even Indo-European, but in the cases of languages like Galician, Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian, are these languages that are close enough to Spanish that they could, by “language lumpers”, be considered dialects, but for political reasons, they’re considered seperate languages?
Fair complaint, but I think if you are being pitted, it is good to be notified. You are welcome to your opinion of my intentions, but I do not dislike lissener and I have hopes he will come in and apologize. The lawn chair comment is funny coming from you, but then you are quite the joker aren’t you?
Jim
You’re quite correct about the splitter and lumper factions and on the dialect / language debate. I don’t have much specific knowledge (to the extent that I wouldn’t answer a GQ on this), but I do know that Galician is closer to Portuguese than to Spanish, for your first example; also, Valencian and Catalan are different names for the same language.
They are all close enough that I (a non-native Spanish speaker) can read them fairly easily (with dictionary dives here and there), but that doesn’t mean much as far as mutual spoken intelligibility. However, they are much, much closer to each other than are the various languages that masquerade as “Chinese”.
ah, but since (as you know) the guy is posting in the pit, in other threads, and I dare say he’s erudite 'nuf to recognize his own screen name in the title of a thread, I’d argue that the point that he’s being pitted isn’t lost on him, n’est-ce- pas? (sorry, I don’t speak Spanish )
Ok, I will not ever do it again. I hope that is satifactory to you and John.
Jim
No. Galician and Catalan are indisputably separate languages from Spanish. There is simply no question about whether they are “dialects” of Spanish - certainly not linguistically, but I would venture to say there’s no political debate about it either. For instance, Franco prohibited public use of Galician and Catalan, which indicates that even in his time (before the modern wave of nationalism around Spain’s minority languages arose) they were regarded as separate languages that could be dropped, rather than regional accents or dialects that couldn’t easily be cast off.
Galician is closely related to Portuguese; sometimes both are treated as dialects of “Galego-Portuguese”. It’s far more similar to Portuguese than to Spanish; further, in my experience in Galicia, lots and lots of signs - road signs, advertisements in shop windows, and everything else - were printed in the language - mostly using the Normative Orthography promulgated by Galicia’s government (or “A Xunta de Galicia”, as it was called on government notices.) I believe it is used in education as well, at least to some extent; at any rate, the existence (and apparently widespread facility in) written Galician should be evidence that native speakers of it, and non-speakers who live in the region - clearly treat them as separate languages. Galician is somewhat mutually comprehensible with Spanish, but not perfectly so - and it’s far more different from Spanish than any of the regional varieties of Spanish spoken in Spain.
Catalan benefits from even greater nationalism on its behalf; there’s something of a political movement in Catalunya to secede entirely from Spain, and a lot of Catalans hold a great deal of pride in the Nation of Catalunya and its flag and separate identity. The language is definitely viewed as a marker of that separate identity among speakers (an attitude not necessarily shared by Valencians; the language is spoken throughout Valencia (though it’s not as vital there as it is in Catalunya) but speakers are known to claim that Valencià is a separate language from Català.) There is an official Catalan writing system (and that system is not controversial, to my knowledge, whereas amongst Galicians there are some who favor alternate orthographies) and I’m fairly certain that a majority of Catalans are fluently literate in the language, although certainly some Catalan speakers can only read and write in Spanish. There’s a TV station, radio stations, and at least two daily newspapers in Catalan - check out the website of Avui if you’re curious; the name is Catalan for “today”. Furthermore, while Catalan and Spanish are doubtless similar enough to permit at least some communication, they are quite different and mutual comprehensibility is extremely limited. Catalan probably shares more vocabulary with French than with Spanish; the sound system is pretty dissimilar to both languages, but again is probably more similar to that of French, and it could be argued that morphologically it’s more similar to French as well - although due to the differences in sound systems, Catalan and French speakers don’t communicate very well either.
In both languages, there’s a pretty widespread sense of the history of the languages and cultures; Catalunya was a separate - and extremely powerful - kingdom from Castile during the middle ages, and that history hasn’t been forgotten. Both Galician and Catalan experienced literary “renaissances” in the 19th century - the Galician Rexurdimento and the Catalan Renaixença - which indicates that awareness of the languages’ separate literary traditions is not merely an artifact of recent nationalism but extends back for some time. (As a matter of fact, the argument I alluded to earlier regarded Galician’s writing system centers on whether the current Normative Orthography, closely based on that of Spanish, should be exchanged for Galician’s medieval orthography, which is much more similar to that of Portuguese - thus, the debate revolves around arguments over Galician’s identity in a historical context.)
So indeed they are “Spanish languages” in the sense of being languages from Spain - just like, say, Ainu is a “Japanese language” or Tatar is a “Russian language”. But linguistically there is no question that they are separate languages from Spanish, and the public perception matches that idea. Speakers of Galego and Català universally recognize them as separate languages from Spanish - and indeed most speak Spanish as well - and Spanish-speakers do as well. The words castellano and español are unambiguous when they refer to languages - they refer only to Spanish and assuredly not to Galician or Catalan, either in any linguistic sense or in the sense of the perception of speakers of any of the languages.
Interesting. As Bambi points out, the question is somewhat open. However:
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Catalan is very clearly a distinct language, with a political, cultural, and linguistic tradition separate from Spanish proper. Though there has been some convergence, the basic language is as close to Occitan as to Spanish.
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Valencian is a dialect of Catalan, or alternatively an alternate name for the same language, preferred in Valencia for obvious reasons. It’s “Catalan with a southern accent.”
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Gallego, or Galician, is equally distinct. It is substantially closer to Portuguese than to Spanish, to the point that some lumpers include it as a dialect of Portuguese. (I as a moderate on those arguments disagree.) It’s distinct from both Spanish and Portuguese in preserving a substantial Celtic vocabulary from pre-Visigothic (mostly pre-Roman) times; both the “major” languages have generally preferred the Latin-derived or adapted-Germanic (from the Visigoths) term in many cases where Gallego preserves the Celtic.
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It’s intriguing that you bring up Lallans Scots in this context. Aragonese is the other major example (besides Lallans) of evolutionary convergence. Like Scots, Aragonese began as a dialect quite distinct from Castellano but as the Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile grew to dominate the peninsula, the languages converged, and today the speech of most of Aragon is a Spanish dialect. About 30,000 people in the mountainous north of the province of Aragon retain a highly conservative dialect which, among other things, preserves the Latin initial “F” in words like filio and ferro (Latin filius and ferrum, Spanish hijo and hierro). This could arguably be considered a distinct language but I personally consider it an archaic dialect of the Spanish that evolved from the combination of Old Aragonese with Old Castellano.
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Andalucian and Estremaduran are clearly dialects of Castellano Spanish, ones that, like Yorkshire and Lancashire English, gave rise to many New World Spanish dialects, but nonetheless dialect forms.
A strong lumper would call Gallego a dialect, but of Portuguese. Regarding Catalan, argumentation might go in any of three ways: distinct language, dialect of Spanish, or dialect of Occitan. My moderate view considers it a distinct language, including Valencian as a dialect.
But I’m sure French is spoken in some parts of Spain, so I think it’s fair to call French Spanish. Or Spanish French. In fact, I think we should just call all languages “Terran”, since they’re all spokein on earth. We all speak Terran. That should help avoid confusion.