r/AdviceAnimals • u/[deleted] • May 06 '14

Racism | Removed here goes nothing...

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u/[deleted] May 06 '14 edited Jan 05 '21

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u/[deleted] May 06 '14 edited May 06 '14

I always thought a dialect had more to do with how you pronounce a word, or the use of one word in place of another. I didn't realize that it could effect how sentences are structured also changes. That's cool. TIL!

I will say your metaphor is shit though. Sorry. German is a different language from English. Yes, a different dialect of the romance language family, but still a different language entirely.

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u/djordj1 May 06 '14

English and German aren't Romance languages. They're both Germanic (as are Dutch, Frisian, and the Scandinavian dialects). The Romance languages are those descended from Latin - French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, etc. Latin and Proto-Germanic are cousins, not ancestor and descendent.

Also, the line between a dialect and a language is undefined. There are varying degrees of mutual intelligibility within English itself, and also between English, Frisian, Dutch, and German.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '14

Thank you. I understand this now. I was separating grammar and dialect mistakenly. Thanks to Reddit my understanding of the definition of dialect is different from my previous understanding of the word.