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You are not a real polyglot if... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5339 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 73 of 299 17 October 2013 at 8:09am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, there was a reason why I opened this thread in the first place. I have seen posts from people claiming that Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are so close that they can hardly be considered different languages. Curiously enough, the posters rarely list all those languages themselves. And like I mentioned earlier, you do not always know how to deal with languages that you passively know so well, but that you cannot master actively. When I first listed both Danish and Swedish as my languages when I registered here, it was not in the wish to be a fraud, but simply because I felt I knew them so well, that it would be very strange not to list them. However one of my first questions on this site was related exactly to how you deal with those types of languages. To list them or not to list them, that was the question :-) I ended up removing Danish, since I have no active skills there, but I have kept Swedish, because I use it now and then - presumably with a heavy Norwegian accent, but still Swedish. Yesterday I spoke with the Director General of the Finnish railways who said that he did not understand Norwegian, but he understood "Scandinavian". Knowing full well that Danish would be even more incomprehensible to him than Norwegian, I realised that to him "Scandinavian" meant Swedish, and we continued speaking in Swedish, where he had no problem understanding what I said. I am much more impressed by a Norwegian who can speak fluent Danish than one who is fluent in English or German, and nothing Brad Pitt has done in his career impressed me as much as when he suddenly spoke Jamaican English in a role where he played the devil. We should not underestimate the challenge of a similar language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4712 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 74 of 299 17 October 2013 at 8:52am | IP Logged | |||||
No it is because Breton is so distantly related to anything French (it's in another IE- branch) that it has feck all to do with French. The reason it is called a language and not a dialect is because it ISN'T. RELATED. TO. FRENCH. any more than Russian is. The ethnic minority of Bretons happen to speak this language, but it would be a different language even if all its speakers were stone dead. 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5413 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 75 of 299 17 October 2013 at 9:29am | IP Logged | |||||
Same as Tarvos here. I don't understand this whole passage when applied to Breton. Isn't being "linguistically very different" the main point in distinguishing languages or have I missed something during the last few years ? 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4712 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 76 of 299 17 October 2013 at 10:29am | IP Logged | |||||
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Furthermore I'd be laughed out of the room if I said I could speak Flemish. And there are
many dialects in Flanders (and elsewhere) that do not resemble standard Dutch at all. (Although Dutch as a written language is one and the same thing with some sidewalk/pavement differences in vocabulary for each unit of the Taalunie - Belgium, Suriname and the Netherlands share a union but in Belgium and Suriname some words may be used differently, particularly in Belgium). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 77 of 299 17 October 2013 at 11:30am | IP Logged | |||||
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The 'politic' definitions of languages (as opposed to dialects) has something to do with the way the authorities intend to deal with the thing in question. I have never heard about official curricula that purported to teach the pupils dialects, they always refer to languages. And if you for political purposes want to teach (and promote) something which is as different as possible from the thing taught by a neighbouring country in its schools then you may be tempted to promote a former dialect to the status of language, whether or not this is warranted through intercomprehensibility and other scientific arguments or not.
But the fun doesn't stop there. Some commonly accepted dialects of a certain language X have probably never diverged from the commonly accepted protolanguage - X may have been a dialect bundle from the beginning, or maybe even a language bundle or a chaotic meeting between wawes from different branches within a language tree. For instance the sound changes that are used to differentiate High and Low German occurred so early that High German today ought to be put into one group and Low German together with Dutch in another. Yet the situation today is that Low German in is death throes has been creeping ever closer to High German so that it today functions as a dialect of High German in the same way as Kölsch or Sterian or the Swiss German dialects. Another problem with the idea about soundshifts as defining branches and twigs is that there are are morphological features which run counter to the established definitions. For instance the 'Danish' dialects spoken in Jutland only have prepositioned definite articles (a or æ) like English (the), whereas the dialects spoken on the Danish islands got a definite article even before 'Danish' separated from Old Norse. So you could say that in this important respect the Jutish dialects never have been part of the Danish language. Or inversely that Danish morphologically never has been a unified language, but always just a dialect bundle or a bundle of closely related, but separate languages. But we don't do that - even the most ardent Westjyde or Synnejyde blindly accept that their old dialects are dialects of Danish. But if we had had a bitter civil war as in the old Yugoslavia then you might hear claims that they were true languages as much as Swedish or Faroese (or Bosnian). Quite clearly the whole question of a looking for a clear separation line between languages and dialects is a lost battle. We have a number of clear clases (Navaho and Swedish are definitely different languages), but the more you dig down into the underground the more confusion you create. For me as a language learner there is another criterion: if I just want to be able to read and mayby orally understand some texts then I don't have to be able to draw a line between their medium and other related dialects or languages. As long as I can understand those texts I use methods which are typical for the way we normally deal with dialects. However when I decide to learn some variant actively I need to learn exactly what is and what isn't part of that variant - and the methods I then use will be those I normally would use on languages - only whith the difference that it probably will be easier because I already know something similar. So if I ever decided to learn Synnejysk (the dialect sproken in Southern Jutland) I would in case of succes definitely want to list it on my language list, even though it would be an easily won prize item. But I wouldn't put Frisian there even though (with some difficulty) can read most texts I have seen in the Frisian dialects because I can't produce a simple sentence by myself in any of them. Edited by Iversen on 17 October 2013 at 4:24pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4833 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 78 of 299 17 October 2013 at 1:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
But on the other hand, if, say, you went to live in West Flanders for an extended period, you might take up the challenge of learning to speak exactly like the people there. I understsand it's a relatively distinct form of Flemish/Dutch and doesn't sound much like standard Dutch, although the vocab and grammar is presumably much the same. The situation would be similar (as I understand it) to that of Cristin and Swedish or Danish). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4833 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 79 of 299 17 October 2013 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
Exactly analogous to English vs Welsh. Only related by loan words and words both have borrowed from Latin or French. Breton is of course, closer to Welsh than it is to French, since they are part of the same IE branch. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5267 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 80 of 299 17 October 2013 at 1:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If Portuguese and Spanish are the "same" language, then I must be really stupid for having spent almost three years trying to get Portuguese right. The languages are considered to be 80% similar, but the devil lies in the 20% that is different. The 20% difference looms even larger in everyday speech where common words in Spanish are often rarely used in Portuguese. Portuguese is indeed a separate language.
Having this experience of learning and trying to perfect (or, rather, trying to "get it right") a related language can be nerve-wrackingly difficult. I have major respect for anyone who can speak closely related languages well. If you can speak Dutch, German, Swedish and Danish or the Romance languages to a high level, it doesn't make you any less of a polyglot in my eyes than if you could speak completely unrelated languages. The word "polyglot" simply means many languages. Yes you get a discount from learning a related language. No doubt about that and I'm extremely grateful, but there is still a heck of a lot of work to do and many times the similarities can be just slightly different enough to drive you crazy. The skills of getting a closely related language right and maintaining the differences without confusion and mixing is a difficult task in itself, completely worthy of my respect. Edited by iguanamon on 17 October 2013 at 1:53pm 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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