Chinese is 343 languages?

http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2008/12/27/a-reworking-of-chinese-language-classification/

Same thing, only this time he says Chinese is not one language, but 343 separate languages.

He's basing in un mutual intelligibility. At some X distance of unintelligibility, he says it's a separate language.

Maybe it makes sense, but it seems really weird.

Mutual intelligibility is a tricky thing. If we ignore the written language, then even English could be argued to be more than one language on such grounds -- there are some accents of British English that are very difficult for Americans to understand.

(However, to be fair, the people who speak with such accents can probably understand Americans very easily, simply because American English is heard all over the world, so the mutual unintelligibility is still likely to be only one-way.)

Robert Lindsay is an idiot, who doesn't know the difference between languages and dialects