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At 23:20 +0100 2006-03-23, Håvard Hjulstad wrote: >The concept of a "compromise dialect between a >number of other languages" (as stated in the >proposal) is quite interesting from a linguistic >point of view. Does it mean that N'Ko is some >sort of macrolanguage? No. It's a literary language. Imagine that there were a Runic orthography that people who spoke Bokmål, Nynorsk, Danish, and Swedish all used. Or just imagine English. Many English-speakers' spoken language is very far indeed from the written standard. (A favourite example is the word "pedal" as pronounced by an American, which rhymes perfectly with the word "pearl" as pronounced by a Scot.) >The use of "literary dialect" may possibly >misleadingly suggest that N'Ko isn't an >individual language in its own right. People speak Bambara and Mandinka and Djula. Those languages may be written (in Latin for instance), but N'Ko is also a language and it differs from them. It's probably originally a "trade dialect", that is, a compromise that people speaking those languages made for mutual intelligibility. Now, however, it has its own script and orthography, dictionaries and such. It's a entity in its own right, distinct from Bambara and Mandinka and Djula and the other languages in the family. -- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com