Talk:A language is a dialect with an army and navy

message: Antoine Meillet wrote extensively about the differences between dialects and languages, and described military and political action as significant determinitive forces. An aphoristic military analogy  is therefore a very reasonable thing to expect from him. A linguist familiar with his work and who had never heard the statement “a language is a dialect with an army and navy” associated with any specific author, if asked to comment on its origin might reasonably answer, “I don't know where it comes from, but it certainly sounds like something that Antoine Meillet could have said.” Pending the location of an explicit reference in Meillet's work, the belief held by some linguists that he was the originator of the aphorism may have its explanation in this speculative process.
Similarly, because the Yiddish version is in such wide circulation, the aphorism is often regarded as an expression of specifically Yiddish ethos. If this is in fact a correct assessment, a Yiddish speaking high school teacher with a particular interest in linguistics might very well have coined it. On the other hand, such a person might equally easily have come across it in some other context. Either way, there is no particular reason to expect an earlier Yiddish published source to turn up, but the francophone origin remains to be thoroughly investigated. Without suggesting there to be anything particuIarly scholarly about it, I scanned several of Meillet's books in which the aphorism might be likely to appear line by line looking for it without success. He was, however, a prolific writer and it would have taken a good deal of luck for that approach to lead anywhere. It is also worth noting that a number of people actively hunted for the source of the Weinreich citation before it was finally located in a not particularly obscure place.  --futhark 14:16, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Meillet

message: The present title of this article ("Language-dialect aphorism") strikes me as hiding a vivid statement behind a clumsy academic title. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:58, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Any suggestions for a less stodgy alternative? --futhark 09:11, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, move it to Language is a dialect with an army and navy. We have far more clumsier titles on Wikipedia, and it's popular enough to be a likely search subject. Duja 08:05, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Title

message: Language-dialect aphorism → Language is a dialect with an army and navy – There's no reason to hide the popular saying behind the pseudo-scientific title. The new title would be a likely search term, and I found the article using Google (!) rather than the Wikisearch.Duja 08:24, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposal

message: :Add *Support or *Oppose followed by an optional one-sentence explanation, then sign your opinion with ~~~~
*Support as nominator Duja 08:24, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Survey

message: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" appears to be considerably more common in English writing than the literal but slightly awkward-sounding "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" (which we have the article at now).  The former by far predominates in Google Scholar and Google Books.  Should we move it?--Pharos (talk) 01:23, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: repetition of the infinite article is more idiomatic in modern English, but leaving it out is not entirely wrong. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:A9F5:84:8E1F:3489 (talk) 15:20, 6 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  More common form in English 

message: As written, the article is an essay intended to show, in great detail, that Max Weinrich is not the originator of the aphorism "A language is a dialect with an army and navy".  The point is so belabored that the article title probably ought to be "Max Weinrich is not the originator of the aphorism 'A language is a dialect with an army and navy'".  Nietzche didn't say God is dead either, except through a character, but that article doesn't focus soley on the fact that Nietzche wasn't saying it himself.  It mentions the fact, and goes on to talk about the larger meaning and context of the phrase.  Should not this article do the same thing?
In particular, I submitted that the sentence in the introduction, 
The aphorism is often incorrectly attributed to the Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich, who published but did not coin it. 
to 
The aphorism was first published by the Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich.  
Both are true, but the former seems to me to be insisting on an point of questionable importance, almost as if it were to say 
The aphorism was first published by the Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich, who despite being Jewish did not keep kosher.  
(I have no idea if he did or not, but even if he did, it's not really the central point.)  User:Futhark undid my edit on the grounds that "calling attention to the misattribution is a primary purpose of this article".  Well, the article goes on to spend eight paragraphs expounding on this minor point, which I would submit is about as relevant as saying that Nietzche didn't directly say "God is dead".  It may be an interesting point, to some, but it is not really that central to the quote's significance that it was in indirect speech.
Ultimately, then the question is, does the aphorism "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" really have an encyclopaedia article on it because of the significance of who didn't say it first?  --194.98.58.121 (talk) 15:06, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: If the article is as overworked an exposition of a trivial subject as you assert, it becomes all the more important to summarize its salient point in the lead paragraph. The reader for whom that is sufficient can then ignore the rest of the article. Readers who are interested in greater detail will hopefully not find the rest of the text quite as irksome as you seem to. It is not about who didn't say something. It is about the details of what despite everything is a very frequently quoted and very frequently misattributed statement. That in turn results in it being taken as specifically about Yiddish and not of a general sociolinguistic phenomenon. Rectifying this misperception is by no means without encyclopedic value. --Futhark|Talk 18:01, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree entirely with User:194.98.58.121.  It is just bizarre to say that "calling attention to the misattribution is a primary purpose of this article".  After all, we're not talking about a case like Let them eat cake, where Marie-Antoinette did not utter the phrase at all as far as anyone can tell, or a case like Iron curtain, where the phrase had currency in a variety of public contexts for decades before Churchill's speech (which nonetheless is pivotal to the modern meaning of the phrase). As for the phrase being taken as being specifically about Yiddish, this is the first I hear of that interpretation.  In any case, there is nothing in the article that indicates that the phrase is less about Yiddish -- quite the contrary! The auditor (to use the article's language) in fact was referring specifically to the Yiddish situation and Weinreich summarizes the comment as "this wonderful formulation of the social plight of Yiddish"! --Macrakis (talk) 15:25, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I have tried to tighten up the wording in the article and minimize the original research phrasing, while keeping the full substance of previous contributions.  Comments? --Macrakis (talk) 02:26, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Article's purpose

message: I remember first seeing this decades ago in an older book (1960s or older) on (I think) historical linguistics (it had tables of Indo-European sound correspondences). The saying was attributed to someone with a German name and a noble title, presumably a diplomat, in the 19th century. I wish I could remember more details. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:06, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible lead 

message: :
The first "translation" is absurdly loose, and no improvement on the literal. Any objection to dropping it? —Tamfang (talk) 06:35, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not a translation. It's the title as it appears in the English language table of contents in the publication, itself. --Futhark|Talk 13:04, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  So YIVO Bleter had a bi-(or multi-)lingual ToC? That could be put more explicitly. —Tamfang (talk) 23:54, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Many Yiddish publications produced in the USA have some form of English language title sheet. I see nothing noteworthy about YIVO Bleter having a separate English table of contents but if it is worth mention, nonetheless, there would probably be more appropriate articles for doing so than this one. The separate Indication of an English language title for a non-English article is otherwise consistent with basic principles of bibliographic control and, again, not noteworthy in itself. --Futhark|Talk 00:42, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  beyond paraphrase 

message: It's great that we have a section quoting the original text in Yiddish and a romanised transliteration, but it's pretty much unintelligible to anyone who doesn't understand Yiddish. Could we perhaps get a translation? ansh666 04:30, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Um, the translation is in the main body of the article as a block-quote: "A teacher at a Bronx high school ... Yiddish to a large audience." The Yiddish text is introduced with "Here is <the> passage from the 1945 text..." --Macrakis (talk) 04:42, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: See, as a non-Yiddish speaker, I wouldn't have known that. The text introducing the two different passages make no link between them. I'll update it to make it more clear. Thanks, ansh666 04:50, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not a Yiddish speaker either, BTW. And I don't think the full Yiddish text (in both Hebrew script and transliteration!) belongs in the article at all. But I do think it's clear that this is the text of the 1945 speech. --Macrakis (talk) 14:03, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  The last section 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Some have been in the article for a long time, but raw Google Books links ("https://books.google.com/books?id=n2DfEmr2g0YC&pg=PA24" or whatever), with no indication of the book's title or author, are not good citations in themselves... AnonMoos (talk) 15:31, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: references

message: Last month, the characterization of this phrase as "a quip or humorous adage" was replaced with just "an adage", removing its description as facetious, with the edit summary "citations are provided so that readers can verify the facts. someone here seems to have been under the impression that they need to cite the way the facts are stated, down to individual words". It's not the wording that's at issue, it's the characterization of the phrase. Variants that have been used in this article include "a description" (as though it was serious), "an adage" (as though it was a "traditional maxim" or it "expressed a general truth"), a "quip" (emphasizing its wittiness), etc. Given the lack of agreement on how to characterize the phrase, it seems useful to have reliable sources.  It also turns out, if you look in places like Quora, that many people (probably high school kids, but...) don't realize that it's intended to be humorous or flippant, and not a scientific description of the difference between a dialect and a language. So it's worthwhile spending the effort to describe it accurately, and to have sources for that description so that we're not expressing our personal preferences. In fact, I'd say that the current language (which I think I introduced) is a bit too tame. There are good sources for calling it a facetious wisecrack  / definition  / etc. --Macrakis (talk) 12:14, 5 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Weinreich characterized the passage as a "wonderful formulation of the social plight of Yiddish." He cited it in order to convey it to a large Yiddish-speaking audience following the Holocaust. There was nothing the least bit humorous about that context or facetious in his intent. --Futhark|Talk 13:00, 5 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: That may be your interpretation of Weinreich's "wonderful formulation". But we have plenty of reliable sources saying that it is a humorous or facetious phrase, which of course makes sense since it is incorrect if taken literally. --Macrakis (talk) 21:45, 5 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: To communicate both what it is, and that it is not literal, I would suggest "satirical aphorism".--Pharos (talk) 04:29, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Quip/adage

message: This phrase literally explains what's happening in the Serbo-Croatian speaking area. Standard varieties, now described "languages" of Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are all based on a single dialect, Shtokavian, and 100% mutually intelligible, but these "languages" were created after secession from a common country, i.e. got their own army and navy. Chakavian and Kajkavian are very little mutually intelligible with Shtokavian, but they get grouped under the "Croatian dialect" moniker because they're spoken within this country and don't have their armies and navies. If anyone competent could research and write about this in the article, that would be a great addition. -Vipz (talk) 12:15, 7 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Anybody knowledgeable to write about Serbo-Croatian? 

message: In this edit,  added the category :Category:Political quotes. I'm not sure that's appropriate; the quote is about the status of languages. Thoughts? --Macrakis (talk) 00:40, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I was thinking about some of the categories applied to Language politics but then found that :Category:Political quotes exists. I think it is justified because Weinreich is reminding that the distinction between language and dialect is often a political statement rather than just a statement of linguistics. They are not linked to in the article, but the questions about Arabic language and its dialects, Chinese language and its dialects, Serbocroatian and its multiple names/standards, how different the North Germanic languages are, are political questions in a great degree. --Error (talk) 01:01, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: "Political" quote?