Not on my part. I'm trying to get over the distinctions between accent, dialect and language.
>You can have exactly the same words spoken but overlaid with an
>accent which makes things impossible to understand.
Indeed, but that's not dialect.
>Also, I doubt anyone can understand 10% of any other dialect from
>the off without having experienced it before.
I disagree. If it's a dialect something like 80-90% of the words are the same. If it were as little as 10% it would make English a dialect of German, Latin and French.
The combination of dialect and accent may make speech sound like a completely foreign language.
>You can get completely
>lost very quickly below the level of dialect. Can you understand it
>with a bit of time and application? Sure.
>Are Spanish and Portuguese dialects of the same language? Pretty much.
>Look at them written. In fact, Portuguese and Gallego are very similar
>indeed. Can a Brazilian understand S. American Castillian? Usually. Can
>a Hispanic American understand Brazilian Portuguese? Very rarely. Go
>figure. Can a Brazilian understand Portuguese from Portugal? Rarely.
I agree there is a fuzzy boundary between language and dialect. The desciption having more to do with history and politics than any logical rule.
>With languages which have been exported from the Old World to the New
>(e.g. English), a lot of the original variation is lost due to the
>bottleneck and to mixing in the new place. It is the same as population
>genetics/evolution.
Sure.
>As for Trainspotting...it wasn't Newcastle, it was Edinburgh. but in
>this instance, we are probably talking of different versions of Old
>English - the Scottish version was pretty much ditched.
I've never heard of an Edinburgh dialect and the accent is pretty unremarkable. There's a Scots dialect which includes significant borrowings from Scots Gallic. How much it is used in Edinburgh I'm not sure as I don't know if Gallic has ever been spoken in that part of Scotland.
>Perhaps the most illuminating thing of all is to look at this site:
>http://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
>:)
It looks incomprehensible until you realise that most of the strange words are phonetic spellings of a very broad Scots accent. Then it's readable with only a small proportion of dialect words.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/
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