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Whether something is a dialect or a language from a shared lineage is a difficult distinction, even in natural languages.

Shanghainese is called a Chinese dialect, but it is a Wu language. It is not a dialect of Mandarin (aka the Beijing dialect), but it certainly is a dialect of a common "Chinese" language, even though it is a descendent of a language family that is not most closely related to Mandarin.

Even speaking of a functional/imperative divide is not necessarily a useful property when talking about Lispy languages. Where would you put Scheme (it's neither fully on the functional side nor does it feel at home on the imperative side). You could just as well make a distinction between Lisp 1 and 2 languages and use that as the primary discriminator.

The term "dialect" is fuzzy when applied to different spin-offs from a common pool.

(I do agree with you that they have not much in common, but often they were lifted from the same soup of ideas.)




>Shanghainese is called a Chinese dialect, but it is a Wu language. It is not a dialect of Mandarin (aka the Beijing dialect), but it certainly is a dialect of a common "Chinese" language, even though it is a descendent of a language family that is not most closely related to Mandarin.

That's the problem isn't it? A language is assumed to be a dialect of another language just because it uses the same script, regardless of its origins or how mutually intelligible it is. Reminds me of how Russian nationalists don't consider Ukrainian or Belarussian separate languages, but dialects of Russian just because they're written in Cyrillic. Might as well say that English, Hungarian and Vietnamese are dialects of Latin, just because they all use Latin script.

Same with Lisps really. People see the parentheses and assume all of these languages must be very similar, even though they really aren't.


>That's the problem isn't it? A language is assumed to be a dialect of another language just because it uses the same script, regardless of its origins or how mutually intelligible it is.

Is that really the reason? Does it follow then that Vietnamese is a Chinese dialect before it adopted a modified Latin script?

I think origins does matter, apart from shared script.




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