About five thousand is a fair guess as how many language are uses by many people in the world to day. in Columbia for example, almost two hundred separate language and dialects have been identified (Arango Montoya 1972). But "dialects" is a key word- what is "a language" really? Swedish and Norwegian have a high degree of mutual intelligibility, but we count them as two. "One language", Chinese, includes Cantonese and Mandarin, which are about as dissimilar as Portuguese and Italian. To be scientific we have to ignore politics and forget that Sweden and Norway have separate flags and mainland China one. True differences are quantitative: how much should we allow before graduating X from "a dialects of Y" to "a language, distinct From Y"?
to be continued..
to be continued..
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No bodies perfect in the world. SO!! Give me comment (s)