Talk:Nestram-Kostenar dialect

Same old, same old

Before everybody again goes off into the same old edit-warring mode about these and similar additions: what I stated here at Talk:Prilep-Bitola dialect almost exactly three years ago is still true. The whole "is it Bulgarian" issue is a useless WP:COATRACK issue when projected on these individual dialect articles. Of course, Bulgarian dialectology traditionally sees all Macedonian as part of Bulgarian; hence the fact that it also regards this particular dialect as Bulgarian is redundant and trivial. Nothing is won by importing this POV obsession in each and every subarticle.

More specifically about the present case, Todor's edit also seems to imply there is some substantial disagreement over whether dialect X is to be classified as part of dialect Y or as separate. Worse, the way it is worded, it makes it appear as if that disagreement were somehow connected to whether you are looking at it from a Bulgarian or a Macedonian POV perspective. That is, of course, nonsense. As a matter of principle, all classifications of dialects into these kinds of taxonomic hierarchies are superficial conventions and quite extraneous to what dialectology actually does. Nobody in linguistics cares about "how many" different dialects there are, or whether two neighbouring areas are "part of" each other. Making up taxonomies like this is just about the most boring and uninformative thing you can do when discussing dialects.

People who write dialect articles need to de-focus from these classification schemes and focus on actual substance: linguistic structure. The thing we need to ask about is not: is dialect X part of dialect Y, but: by what linguistic features does X differ from Y?

So, please, what isogloss runs between Nestoria and Kastoria? Everything else is boring nonsense. Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:46, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

To make a point based on your original allegory: why is it okay to describe all of the Golden Delicious in question as pears and never as oranges when they are incontestably apples (for a lack of a better link)?

As for linguistic differences, I have no access to the cited work in Macedonian so I am unable to expand the article in this respect. — Toдor Boжinov — 14:01, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

You got the allegory wrong: if you want to stick with the logical levels, they are "incontestably fruit", but that's too vague and too general. As for why it's okay to chose one perspective over the other: predominant opinion in present-day scholarship. As you perfectly well know, the view that denies separateness of Mkd is today a thoroughly isolated viewpoint (outside Bulgaria). We've rehashed this hundreds of times. "Undue weight", period. Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:20, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

It has got nothing to do with describing "all" of the dialects as Macedonian and not as Bulgarian. The majority are Macedonian, and in Eastern Macedonia/Thrace they slowly blend into Bulgarian. Where mainstream linguists classify the "Slavic dialects" as Bulgarian that is mentioned as such on the article. Instead the incessant references to "Bulgarian" being spoken in R. Macedonia/West Greek Macedonia/Albania leads to some users justifying edits on what they themselves know is incorrect (but only to push an agenda). Todor, you would know how incorrect the edit was (from what I'm aware Bulgarians says "hladno" and not "ladno"), but I don't blame the user for making it based on the somewhat misleading information at Bulgarian dialects. Lunch for Two (talk) 14:22, 13 September 2011 (UTC)