llewellyn wrote:Now we get into deep waters but as you say that linguistics nowadays treats all variations of language as equal "dialects" and that this approach is relativistic: do you mean that this decision to treat all language varieties equally is purely subjective?
No, I mean that the science of linguistics views all forms of language spoken by a community of people as belonging to some dialect or another.
Maybe I got myself in trouble using the word 'relativist' because it actually has a lot of different meanings, in philosophy, physics, or colloquially. I simply mean 'relative' as opposed to a rigid 'absolute' view of language where there are 'proper' forms with all others being 'mere dialects' that are by definition 'improper'.
How can we then say that the traditional approach of stressing the importance (and existence) of the "standard" variety was wrong?
It's wrong in terms of how linguistics views the world. Outside of linguistics, certaitainly there are dialects that are 'standard', and we can recognize them when we see them. There's nothing wrong with a standard, but their identification is arbitrary (and usually is decided based on politics), so it's not in any way linguistically (scientifically) decided. That's the difference.
I would prefer to see science as non-relativist as it would not much make sense to give much importance to mere social convention, a temporary, subjective consensus of the practicioners of "science".
I'm not trying to say that science is 'just like a religion' or that math and physics are purely 'social conventions' any thing dumb like that. But if you're talking about social convention, it's that social convention itself that decided that standard Finnish was standard Finnish -- there's no linguistically compelling reason that any one dialect of Finnish should be the standard...so linguistically they're all dialects.
Of course, I don't really disagree with the modern approach but would think that it has some more objective foundation than mere convention. (Similarily I would say that it is a "non-relativist" and objective fact that the belief in standard form is very strong in any modern literate society and in that way it really does exist whether it makes linguistic sense or not.)
Well, as I stated above I'm drawing a line between our regular day-to-day social convention and the science of linguistics, so in a sense it doesn't matter to us as regular people what linguistics says about it. But the term 'dialect' IS a linguistic term, so linguistic standards must be applied when we talk about it, and by that standard all spoken variations of language are dialects. In colloquial usage people say things like 'oh, they have an accent' (meaning a deviation from the standard)..from a linguistics standpoint, an accent is simply any way of pronouncing words, so all people also have accents like they all have dialects.
Can there be a Standard Dog? Is it expensive to maintain? Perhaps in the future the scientists (genes and stuff) can reverse the breeding process and we have again the Basic Dogs around us. If I ever get a dog, I'll certainly call him "Murre"! 
). I am not aware of any similarities between Swedish and Hungarian though. Hungarian, like Finnish, is quite an "easy" language to read as most letters are pronounced seperately, though I did have problems getting my mouth around some of the vowel sounds. 