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<div><font face="Comic Sans MS">Sandra,</font></div>
<div><font face="Comic Sans MS">I wish I was not retired but still
teaching my 'minority languages' course - I could use your comments
as a good example of the 'literature-as-criterion' argument. You are
absolutely right, of course - but can you draw a clear line between
"literature which counts" and "literature which doesn't
quite make it" in this respect?</font></div>
<div><font face="Comic Sans MS">Where would you put, e.g., Friulian,
which almost every Italian outside Friulia calls a dialect of Italian
(even though it is apparently closer to French than to Italian - but
they don't know that): it had a huge literature in the Middle Ages but
virtually nothing since. Does that literature, which has been far from
"abounding in great writers" for centuries, qualify it as a
"language"?</font></div>
<div><font face="Comic Sans MS">What about speech-varieties with only
oral literature?</font></div>
<div><font face="Comic Sans MS">Were e.g. Mohawk and Apache not
languages until the Mohawks and Apaches learned to read and
write?</font></div>
<div><font face="Comic Sans MS">And so on ...</font></div>
<div><font face="Comic Sans MS">And if the Aragonese want to call
their way of communicating a "language", why not let them?
They may, given some encouragement, produce a Nobel prize winner in
their own literature one day.</font></div>
<div><font face="Comic Sans MS">Cheers, Tom</font></div>
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<div>+++++++++++++++++++++++<br>
Tom Priestly<br>
9215-69 Street<br>
Edmonton AB<br>
Canada T6B 1V8<br>
phone 780-469-2920<br>
fax 780-492-9106<br>
e-mail: tpriestlashaw.ca<br>
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