Talk:George Perkins Marsh

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Seperate page for Caroline Marsh

Why is his wife's work (Caroline Marsh) listed as part of his biography? The works that consern him make snese but some are her own works, why not give her, her own page. It seems the proper thing to do.

Scandinavian a language?

"...write fluently in Scandinavian and half a dozen other European languages." Don't think it ever was a language, more like a geographic entity... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.205.103.159 (talk) 17:01, 29 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Technically, no, Scandinavian is not a language. But, as a matter of distinction (and I'm sure a Swede or Dane will argue against this for nationalistic reasons, the languages of Norway, Sweden and Denmark are very similar and mutually intelligible, meaning if you speak one, you will have little to no difficulty understanding a person who speaks the other. Its a bit like saying you speak Austrian or Swiss instead of just saying you speak "German" - your dialect and spelling or grammar points might be different, but communication between these three won't be significantly difficult. I can't remember if the term Sprachtsbund applies here. At any rate, we tend to call Chinese one language, when in fact Cantonese and Mandarin are about as mutually intelligible as African American Vernacular English and Dutch...you'll get about one word in 10 if you're lucky.

Anyhow, I actually wanted to remark that it seems as though the paragraph discussing his autodidactic abilities with language got split, as a comment about his specialty in Icelandic (the most distantly related languages in the Scandinavian group) is way at the end of the paragraph. So, to make it more functional and comprehensible to the non-linguist, maybe say "Scandinavian languages, especially Icelandic, which was his specialty." Or something to that effect. One of these days I'll stop being an armchair wikipedian and get a full fledged account to edit and create pages... 65.34.170.130 (talk) 17:52, 9 December 2012 (UTC)Tom in Florida[reply]