Name of Scandinavian Language in United Scandinavia?

If we are going to be technically accurate, Portuguese is on the borderline of a dialect of Spanish. Or vice versa if you prefer. The standard is that only 15% of the words can have a different origin. And this is defined by frequency of words actually used, not total words in the dictionary.

So if the Nordic Languages are closer than the Spanish languages, then all Nordic languages are one language, and we are just using the old Yiddish saying. "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
I don't think linguists actually use arbitrary percentages as standards, do they?
 
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I don't actually think linguists use arbitrary percentages as standards, do they?

Of course Scandinavians speakers are pretty honest about East Scandinavian (including Bokmål aka Dano-Norwegian) being one language. The dialect of Norwegian spoken in Oslo and the dialect of Swedish spoken in Trelleborg are both closer to the dialect of Danish I speak, than the Danish dialect spoken in South Jutland.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
I don't actually think linguists use arbitrary percentages as standards, do they?

Many don't. But the ones that I have seen that try to use a rational (math based) system seem to hover around the 15% threshold.

And to me this makes sense. Just to take an example, I believe that Corsican has around 20% different words origin than French. Why is Corsican a dialect and Portuguese a separate language? This is an attempt to answer this type questions.

And it is not without its problems. While Portuguese Portuguese is just barely a Spanish dialect, Brazilian Portuguese is not. Then we get into the whole issue of language chains that run from the heavily Italianize Argentinian Spanish to Brazilian Portuguese.

And yes, I know the real answer is an "Army and a Navy". If the Napoleonic Wars had seen Corsica given to some Italian state and Portugal annexed by Spain, then things would be reversed.
 
Many don't. But the ones that I have seen that try to use a rational (math based) system seem to hover around the 15% threshold.

And to me this makes sense. Just to take an example, I believe that Corsican has around 20% different words origin than French. Why is Corsican a dialect and Portuguese a separate language? This is an attempt to answer this type questions.

And it is not without its problems. While Portuguese Portuguese is just barely a Spanish dialect, Brazilian Portuguese is not. Then we get into the whole issue of language chains that run from the heavily Italianize Argentinian Spanish to Brazilian Portuguese.

And yes, I know the real answer is an "Army and a Navy". If the Napoleonic Wars had seen Corsica given to some Italian state and Portugal annexed by Spain, then things would be reversed.
Corsican isn't even a Langue d'oil, though, and is part of the Italian language family, so I don't see how that reinforces your point.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Corsican isn't even a Langue d'oil, though, and is part of the Italian language family, so I don't see how that reinforces your point.

Yes, that is true. But then step back and tell a French man that Napoleon was the Greatest Ethnic Italian General of the modern era. Maybe all time. Then watch the sparks fly. Once nationalism gets involved, we just don't use word correctly/consistently. If we can take the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and identify an officer as a "Great Czech officer", then we should be able to do the same with Napoleon. But I assure you that if you put this on a board with a bunch of Frenchmen, a flame war will erupt.

Or it you don't like the Napoleon example. Ask the French government what % of its population is Italian? Or what % of its population first language is Italian.
 
Yes, that is true. But then step back and tell a French man that Napoleon was the Greatest Ethnic Italian General of the modern era. Maybe all time. Then watch the sparks fly. Once nationalism gets involved, we just don't use word correctly/consistently. If we can take the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and identify an officer as a "Great Czech officer", then we should be able to do the same with Napoleon. But I assure you that if you put this on a board with a bunch of Frenchmen, a flame war will erupt.

Or it you don't like the Napoleon example. Ask the French government what % of its population is Italian? Or what % of its population first language is Italian.

I mean, Napoleon was uniquivocally ethnically Corsican. He also crowned himself emperor of the French and although I haven't asked him I'm pretty sure he considered himself to be French. Ethnicity =/= Nationality, nor does native language. The French government does not track ethnicity in that way, but apparently roughly 10% of Corsicans speak Corsican as a first language.

Also I'm highly skeptical of your saying Spanish and Portuguese are borderline the same language. Granted most of the Portuguese speakers I know are Brazilian but even so, I speak and understand Spanish (sort of); I cannot understand their spoken Portuguese except for very very occasional words or phrases, most of which I have actually learnt at some point. Italian is much closer to Spanish - I can listen in Spanish and get the gist about half as often as I can in Spanish. Before I learned Spanish I was somewhere in between listening to Spanish in French (I'm not a native speaker and my accent is apparently very odd but I am more or less fluent). I feel it would be a very brave linguist to claim that French and Spanish are the same language.

The definition I had heard used most often is mutual intelligibility. My own rule of thumb for this would be - if two people have another language in common as a second language, is it easier for them to talk in their own languages to each other or to use the common language? By this definition Swedish and Danish are different languages (at least based on the Swedes and Danes I knew), with Norwegian being more or less in between, forming a Scandinavian continuum.

What is the percentage similarity between Corsican and Italian by the way? And to consider the thread topic, between the 3/4 Scandinavian languages/standard forms?
 
Yes, that is true. But then step back and tell a French man that Napoleon was the Greatest Ethnic Italian General of the modern era. Maybe all time. Then watch the sparks fly. Once nationalism gets involved, we just don't use word correctly/consistently. If we can take the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and identify an officer as a "Great Czech officer", then we should be able to do the same with Napoleon. But I assure you that if you put this on a board with a bunch of Frenchmen, a flame war will erupt.

Or it you don't like the Napoleon example. Ask the French government what % of its population is Italian? Or what % of its population first language is Italian.

French people generally focus more on nationality (either you are a French citizen, or you aren't). Napoléon was born on French soil, so he is considered French.

No one considers the Corsican language to be the same as French though. It's clearly much closer to Italian (though still quite distinct from that, too). Here is the beginning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in French:

Tous les êtres humains naissent libres et égaux en dignité et en droits. Ils sont doués de raison et de conscience et doivent agir les uns envers les autres dans un esprit de fraternité.

And here is it in Corsican:

Nascenu tutti l'omi liberi è pari di dignità è di diritti. Anu a ragione è a cuscenza è li tocca à agisce trà elli di modu fraternu.

And in Italian:

Tutti gli esseri umani nascono liberi ed eguali in dignità e diritti. Essi sono dotati di ragione e di coscienza e devono agire gli uni verso gli altri in spirito di fratellanza.
 
French people generally focus more on nationality (either you are a French citizen, or you aren't). Napoléon was born on French soil, so he is considered French.

No one considers the Corsican language to be the same as French though. It's clearly much closer to Italian (though still quite distinct from that, too). Here is the beginning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in French:

Tous les êtres humains naissent libres et égaux en dignité et en droits. Ils sont doués de raison et de conscience et doivent agir les uns envers les autres dans un esprit de fraternité.

And here is it in Corsican:

Nascenu tutti l'omi liberi è pari di dignità è di diritti. Anu a ragione è a cuscenza è li tocca à agisce trà elli di modu fraternu.

And in Italian:

Tutti gli esseri umani nascono liberi ed eguali in dignità e diritti. Essi sono dotati di ragione e di coscienza e devono agire gli uni verso gli altri in spirito di fratellanza.
To add on top of that, you could reformulate the Italian part to look like the Corsican one even more, although it would be a weird way to say it.
 
(as to the OP)

Much depends on when the unification occurs. In the Middle Ages were are looking at a situation where the language of the Court takes priority and whatever name is used there sticks.

1800s? AKA the time of Romantic Nationalism? Expect a revival of Norse as a name and at least a token attempt at leveling the difference between the continental North Germanic variants.
 
The definition I had heard used most often is mutual intelligibility. My own rule of thumb for this would be - if two people have another language in common as a second language, is it easier for them to talk in their own languages to each other or to use the common language? By this definition Swedish and Danish are different languages (at least based on the Swedes and Danes I knew), with Norwegian being more or less in between, forming a Scandinavian continuum.
Yesterday in Denmark, I spoke Swedish to two Danish 40-year-olds without problem, but I had to switch to Danish-ish to get a 20-year-old to understand me. Anyway, apart from 400 frequent words or so, Danish and Swedish could be written the same and often are.
 
To add on top of that, you could reformulate the Italian part to look like the Corsican one even more, although it would be a weird way to say it.
That Corsican sentence is fully intelligible (though odd-sounding) to an average Italian even in that form. And yes, it would be possible to rephrase that in Italian in closer ways. (That sentence is, I assume, in "standard" Corsican; I would have some more trouble making sense of the equivalent in Gallurese, a vernacular used in Northern Sardinia that is very closely related to Corsican but took influence from the highly divergent Sardinian).
Note that someone from my region of Italy would not necessarily be able to easily understand the same sentence in a North Italian "dialect" (nevermind Sardinian, that almost nobody in their right mind would dispute to be its own language).
I probably could with some effort, because of my knowledge of several other Romance languages and linguistic training (but it depends; I cannot normally make sense of Friulan for instance, which many Italians still regard as a dialect despite belonging to a fairly distinct branch of Romance and having an ortographyc norm quite unlike standard Italian). Neapolitan and Sicilian can also be quite a challenge to an Italian speaker from other areas of the country. The point is that speakers of all these varieties are used to use standard Italian, or an approximation thereof, as their interregional/formal/official linguistic register. In many parts of peninsular Italy, the two varieties are not that much different, things change in much of the North (though vernaculars are receding a lot in most Emilia and Lombardy) parts of the South, and the islands.
Basically. Italian is somewhat of a lingua-franca formed across the High Middle Ages as a middle ground among the various vernaculars of the peninsula, mostly on the basis of the Tuscan varieties (without some of their more salient features not used elsewhere). Corsican is a somewhat divergent Tuscan vernacular, introduced there by the Pisans and overlaid with "standard" Italian as the written norm until the French conquest. So it is somewhat simplistic but basically accurate to say that, from a linguistic standpoint, Corsican is a dialect of Italian. (This is not technically true anymore under a political, or even sociolinguistic, perspective, insofar Corsican is now overlaid by French as the written official norm used in Corsica). Still, Corsican turns out to be closer to standard Italian than many Italian varieties that are normally (and more or less incorrectly) regarded as "dialects".
The politics of these things are quite intertwined with the purely linguistic aspect, it can get messy.
And since @BlondieBC mentioned that: I am a native Italian speaker; I speak and read decent Spanish, but sometimes I recur to English to interact with Spanish speaker because it's quicker. Spanish and Italian are actually very close, they share a generally similar grammar and relativaly similar phonology, lexicon is also largely shared, but we really look a lot more similar on the written page than we are in actual speech. I am under the impression that this is true between Sanish and Portuguese as well (I understand some written, but not spoken, Portuguese too).
 
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