The Catholic Church this week won court endorsement of its right to sack teachers of religion [i. e. Catholicism] when it disapproves of their lifestyle, even though they’re contracted to and paid by the government. El Mundo felt this was logical as religion is an optional subject. Which seemed a reasonable point. El Pais, though, felt the Church should have no rights over state employees. Which seemed even more reasonable.

On some whim or other, I decided to ask Wikipedia about the difference between a language and a dialect. Here’s the answer:- There are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing ‘languages’ from ‘dialects’, although a number of paradigms exist, which render sometimes contradictory results. The exact distinction is therefore a subjective one, dependent on the user's frame of reference. . . Depending on political realities and ideologies, the classification of speech varieties as dialects or languages and their relationship to other varieties of speech can be controversial and the verdicts inconsistent. . . As you will appreciate, this was of little help in deciding whether Galician is a dialect of Spanish. Or Portuguese. Or vice versa. Or both. The answer is clearly Yes and No. Which will please some. But not others. Or possibly everyone. I suspect I was righter than I knew when I wrote it all depends where you’re standing [and who you’re facing] when the question is posed.

For obvious reasons, the Spanish are pretty non-militaristic these days. So the death of the first female soldier in Afghanistan naturally led to louder-than-ever calls for the return of all troops there. Ironically, I read a few weeks ago the Spanish army is now bigger than it’s ever been. Given the aforesaid anti-militarism, I was rather left wondering why. After all, you don’t need that many soldiers to occupy islands off the Moroccan coast. And military coups have long been out of fashion. But, be all that as it may, it was sad to see the funeral of the young woman being used as the latest political football between the increasingly antagonistic major parties.

It was even sadder to read she was Galician and the latest of the 11 Gallegos to die in the Middle East. Out of a Spanish total of 18. Her death naturally received a great deal of local prominence but I couldn’t help feeling this contrasts hugely with the lack of importance given to the relentless toll of teenage road deaths here. One grieving mother asked this week why they didn’t close the bars at 2am. Answer came there none. But, then, there’s never been a response to the even more acute question of why they don’t station police outside the major discos in the early hours of Saturday and Sunday. Not yet politically acceptable, I guess.

Finally, here’s a little example - for those really interested - of the language/dialect dilemma. The rest of you can log off now. . . English and Serbo-Croatian illustrate the point. English and Serbo-Croatian each have two major variants (British and American English, and Serbian and Croatian, respectively), along with numerous lesser varieties. For political reasons, analyzing these varieties as "languages" or "dialects" yields inconsistent results: British and American English, spoken by close political and military allies, are almost universally regarded as dialects of a single language, whereas the standard languages of Serbia and Croatia, which differ from each other to a similar extent as the dialects of English, are being treated by many linguists from the region as distinct languages, largely because the two countries oscillate from being brotherly to being bitter enemies. . . . Similar examples abound. Macedonian, although mutually intelligible with Bulgarian, certain dialects of Serbian and to a lesser extent the rest of the South Slavic dialect continuum is considered by Bulgarian linguists to be a Bulgarian dialect, in contrast with the international view, and the view in the Republic of Macedonia which sees it as a language in its own right.

This, of course, is ridiculous. It is simply not true that I’ve been speaking a dialect of something all my life. Xoan Carlos is right; Wikipedia is crap. I speak English and the Americans speak badly. As do most Brits.