Re:Why isn't 'American' a Language?
by gambiting on Thursday July 16, 2015 @04:31AM
(#9895989)
When Czechoslovakia split into Slovakia and the Czech Republic, they also split the languages into two, even though they are virtually identical.
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That's not true, otherwise it wouldn't be called "Czechoslovakia" - the name itself implies there's a Czechia and a Slovakia
What isn't true? That the two languages are incredibly similar? There's less difference between them than between American and British English. Some words are pronounced differently, and they have different words for certain things, but it's no different than Americans saying elevators and British people saying lifts. Same thing.
This is actually not true. The two languages are incredibly similar but nevertheless quite different. Quite more so than American and British English. They are different to the point where many young Czechs do not actually understand Slovak very well (well, this is a bit exaggerated, however I was surprised by kids that were just staring at me until I started speaking in Czech when asking for directions). Slovak people tend to speak Czech somewhat better because they are (or at least were) exposed to the language more. At least in my time no movies, books etc. were translated to Slovak.
Czech and Slovak have also quite a lot of differences in grammar (for example Czech have one more case in their declination system).
I tried to find how different they are, is this "virtually identical"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Slovak_and_Czech
Apparently "present-day standard Slovak wasn't codified until the 19th century." Then it's not something invented after the breakup.
They have different letters. It's the equivalent of British English lacking the letter "h" and American English not having "ng" as a digraph.
What kind of logic is that? Are you saying names of countries always correspond directly to distinct languages? There are thousands of languages not corresponding to country names and vice versa.
You're technically correct, the best kind of correct. But fact is, usually two distinct people will try to tell their language apart from their neighbors. See: Serbian/Bosnian/Croatian (all three based on the Shtokavian dialect, not even a different dialect of the same language)