Re: [Ltru] Does 'de' really mean "only standard German"?

Randy Presuhn scripsit:

> I cannot agree with saying that "de" somehow *is* "standard German".

Well, no actually extant variety *is* Standard German, strictly speaking:
Standard German (as defined, say, in Duden) doesn't *exactly* match
anybody's idiolect.  However, what's described there is close enough
to many other idiolects that we can collectively call them all "de"
without crossing any mutual-intelligibility barriers.  (To me, "de"
is the set of idiolects mutually intelligible with my mother's; her
German was about as uninfluenced by locality as you could imagine,
bar a very occasional /x/ for "-g" other than "-ig", which she would
conscientiously warn her first-year German students not to emulate.)

> This leaves all non-standard varieties which have not been given
> language codes of their own in some sort of limbo, potentially requiring
> new top-level codes for things which really should not need them.
> (I have great difficulty understanding how a non-standard variety
> would be "within the scope for the standard variety".)

By being mutually intelligible with it, and therefore in some sense
part of it.  That way, new top-level codes can be, and are, properly
reserved for things that are *not* mutually intelligible with "de".
(I am using "mutually intelligible" as shorthand for the actual criteria
used by 639-3/RA; see http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/scope.asp#I .)

-- 
John Cowan  cowan@ccil.org   http://ccil.org/~cowan
Promises become binding when there is a meeting of the minds and consideration
is exchanged. So it was at King's Bench in common law England; so it was
under the common law in the American colonies; so it was through more than
two centuries of jurisprudence in this country; and so it is today.
       --Specht v. Netscape
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