Reply #18: People argue endlessly about dialect vs. language.

[Lionel Mandrake]

I don't know of any generally agreed-upon principles by which to distinguish dialects from languages. Therefore, I try to use common sense on a case by case basis. A few examples follow:

Chinese characters were adopted by the Japanese for a completely different spoken language. China has many spoken dialects (or are they separate languages?) that are mutually unintelligible, but they can read each others' newspapers (more or less).

Portuguese is generally considered a different language from Spanish; certainly they sound different when spoken. It's interesting that you found you could read a Portuguese detective story. I wonder if you could read Italian just as easily.

I have had similar experiences with Dutch and German. Written Dutch looks to me like mostly German with an admixture of English. I can sort of make it out. I think that Plattdeutsch is closer to Dutch than it is to Hochdeutsch (as a spoken language). I think that Yiddish is just a dialect of German, not a separate language. They are mutually intelligible, although Yiddish has a lot of Hebrew loan-words which most Germans wouldn't understand.

Serbo-Croation is one spoken language with two writing systems (just the opposite of Chinese). The Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet, which goes along with their Eastern Orthodox religion. The Croats use the Latin alphabet, which goes along with Roman Catholicism.