I'm looking forward to all your subsequent threads, Lynn!
To the amusement of the class, one of the boys - naturally - asked what "je suis froid" (literally "I'm cold") would mean in this case, which the teacher chose not to answer. XD
And of course, I can't forget my Spanish teacher's cautionary story against Babelfish and its counterparts, which she repeated at the beginning of every semester: how one student, told to write a short essay about the Manhattan Project, put it through an online translator and came up with an essay about the Manhattan cocktail. (I'm not quite sure how "project" changed to "cocktail", but there you go.)
I took a course a year and a half ago called "Learning English as a Second Language", which brought up the issue of adult language acquisition vs. children's language acquisition. It's certainly a broad and interesting topic.
Just what is the difference between a dialect and a language, anyway?
I'm eager to hear what you have to say about this! Usually, the given distinction (in an intro course) is that dialects are mutually comprehensible, thus considered to be of the same language, and when they grow so far apart that they are no longer mutually comprehensible, they become different languages (as in the case of Spanish, French, and Italian, which all developed as dialects of Latin).
This is what I was taught first, and filed it into the back of my head as irrefutably logical fact. Until another (probably more sociolinguistics-oriented) professor came up with a whole different story: that languages are no more than dialects with political power. For instance, there are French dialects in some rural parts of France which are not mutually comprehensible with more urban French. Similarly, there are European languages which are, for the most part, mutually comprehensible, yet are still considered very separate. Just one more on the endless list of highly debatable linguistic topics!
Julie
