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

[Peter Constable <[e-mail]>]

> From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of
> Randy Presuhn

> Perhaps this would be a question for [e-mail], but I'll
> ask
> it here:  how then would one tag the "Stadtsprache" (city dialect) of
> Mannheim?
> While clearly not "standard German", it seems quite a stretch to lump
> it
> with the Pfaelzisch one might run into among the elderly in the
> countryside.

I don't have an answer but rather another question -- a thought experiment:

The colour space is homogeneously continuous and for that reason we can describe individual colour varieties with fine granularity as an array of integers over some range. (I suppose in principle we could use real numbers instead of integers.) But suppose it were not always continuous and certainly not homogeneous: how would we create a system to describe colour varieties? How would we define basic, commonly-used concepts such as RED? In terms of a range or in terms of a particular, focal target colour?

It happens that there was some linguistic research done related to this in the 1960s by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay; this is described in their book _Basic Color Terms_. First, they found certain regularities regarding the basic colour terms found in different languages, but then they also looked at how those basic terms could be defined. It turns out that if you define them in terms of ranges over the spectrum, there are no regularities, either across languages or across speakers within any given language. On the other hand, if you ask individuals to select a best example for a given basic colour term out of a large set of candidate colours (they used a standardized chart of 320 small colour chips), then there is a high degree of regularity across individuals both within a single language and also across languages.

Now, there has been subsequent research suggesting that there may be human-physiological factors contributing to that regularity. I don't know of any such factors contributing to how we define concepts _language X_ or _language Y_, and I doubt any such physiological factors exist. Even so, I find the situation with colour terms to be a useful analogue for considering how to define language concepts: it suggests to me that we would probably have an easier time attaching labels like "de" to certain focal points in the plane rather than trying to define them in terms of some specific set of limits.

Now, _defining_ those basic labels in terms of particular focal points doesn't mean that we never need to have labels (tags) for varieties other than the focal points -- of course, we do. It just means that we face a certain challenge in devising tags for those other varieties. In particular, it's likely that we might encounter some issues in arriving at a single consensus on a tag for particular non-focal varieties: because there are no regularities in how people define the boundaries, one will consider a particular variety to be a variant of X while another will prefer to consider it a variant of Y.

So, let me come back to Randy's question. What's the best way to define something like "de"? If you're a contributor to Ethnologue, then a very reasonable answer is probably Standard High German -- the focal value (best example). How should something like Stadtsprache be tagged? Well, quite possibly with a tag of the form de-X (for some X), though it should be recognized in advance that there may be some debate as to whether it shouldn't rather use a tag of the form Y-Z for some other ISO 639 code element Y.



Peter


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