What is definitive, Hemingway contends, is "voice": what Twain himself called dialect.
It is called dialect - not the regional speech understood by speakers of the same general language, but the arcane argot of the radio dial.
Chinese exists in a number of varieties that are popularly called dialects but that are usually classified as separate languages by scholars.
But calling dialects curious is hardly the right way to begin.PATRICK EBERHARDTLeuven, BelgiumTackledSIR Your article on "Word games and game words" (June 14th) fails to mention the best gem of all from soccer: "back to square one".
It was in this book that he tried to tackle many of the myths about Chinese, asserting, for example, that the speech forms in China commonly called dialects are actually distinct languages quite different from Mandarin.
It has already been pointed out that no two persons speak exactly alike, and, within the area of all but the smallest speech communities (groups of people speaking the same language), there are subdivisions of recognizably different types of language, called dialects, that do not, however, render intercommunication impossible or markedly difficult.
Jillian Cavanaugh: My first research project was in the Italian town of Bergamo, looking at how attached people were to the local language, which some call a dialect but that I view as a distinct language.
It's called "eye dialect," the spelling expressing the sound of the sloppy, deliberately slurred pronunciation.
Immersed in the swagger of young men bruising their way down corridors, we become quickly fluent in what TS Eliot called "the dialect of the tribe".
A SUNY Purchase dance graduate who performed with Julie Atlas Muz, Ms. Sperber approaches the notions of movement and space from an interestingly brainy-sounding perspective, in a program called "The Dialect of Outside In".
