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You are not a real polyglot if... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4717 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 81 of 299 17 October 2013 at 2:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's a dialect of Dutch that is on a divergent end of the spectrum. If I were to live in Brugge however and I would have to integrate with the local people, I'd add in more local slang and pronunciation - however that's not the status quo what people do when moving around the Low Countries. When I lived in Brussels I spoke Dutch and added in a Flemish term every now and then because well Flemish people need to know what you mean, but those differences are equivalent to sidewalk or pavement in English. If you are speaking Dutch to someone outside of your dialect group (in my case, someone who doesn't speak Hollandic, and I guess Brabantian although I only passively understand that dialect to some extent) you always speak standard Dutch. Dialects aren't used for writing, they're only spoken. No one expects you to learn West-Flemish if you go to Ostende, nor do they expect you to learn Grunn if you go to Groningen. People will speak standard Dutch with the local accent, much like someone from Newcastle will speak more Geordie when they're talking to family than when they're talking to someone from Kent or Durban. It's Dutch, just another variant, get used to how they say things and take note of some vocab elements that differ, and be a man and learn to understand the variant. I had trouble understanding my own grandparents because they spoke another dialect, it's life. Learn it passively then, the dialects are mutually intelligible. Should you want to learn to speak the dialect, then that would just be considered really weird by 99% of people. But throwing in some local slang might open a few doors. I.e. if I moved to Den Bosch I'd just say "houdoe" for goodbye. By the way using local dialect when you're not a local just sounds disingenuous in Dutch. People call what they speak Dutch still. The bottom line - you can understand any other Dutch speaker if you speak standard Dutch (no matter whether you use the Belgian or Dutch vocabulary). Everything else is exposure-based. It's not a different language because you have to prick your ears up every now and then, be a good human being and not a lazy respectless buttock and if you're somewhere where they talk dialect just expose yourself and get used to it. 95/100 times in the Netherlands they will weaken the dialect for outsiders anyways. Edited by tarvos on 17 October 2013 at 2:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5440 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 82 of 299 17 October 2013 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Much of this debate centers on this idea of mutual intelligibility, i.e. a speaker of one variety can understand
the speaker of another variety to some extent. This is essentially a passive skill. It is not the same as mutual proficiency, i.e. the ability to speak a different variety of the language. It seems to me that the main reason we have been arguing here is that one position says that what distinguishes a language form a dialect is a threshold of mutual unintelligibility. Therefore, Breton is a separate language from French because it derives from a different language family. Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin are the same language because of a very high degree of mutual intelligibility. We thus have to define some kind of threshold of mutual intelligibility to distinguish between language and dialect. I see the logic of this approach that I would call a historical or maybe philogenetic (how's that for a neologism?). One of the problems of this approach is that one can debate just what we mean by intelligibility, epecially in the spoken language. The written standard language rarely poses a problem in terms of a good level of so-called understanding. But even here we can raise questions about what exactly do people from different cultures and countries really understand when reading, for example, newspapers from another country. It's questionable how much people from Quebec understand a French newspaper like Le monde unless they have some or a lot of knowledge about French culture, geography and institutions such as the legal system. The reverse is true of course. The situation becomes worse when you look at the spoken language, especially when you look at the informal or colloquial registers. Québécois films often have to be subtitled in France. Québéois often complain about American films ot TV shows that are dubbed in France because they are often incomprehensible. When I hear some British speakers of English, notably some football players, I have great difficulty understanding them. I'm not speaking about the Queen of course. But I recall a trip to Manchester where I could hardly understand what the people on the bus were saying. My approach to the question of language vs dialect is to look beyond the question of origins and mutual intelligibilty and look at political and social status. A language is a dialect that has attained a level of prestige, administrative use or simply a role of label for an ethnic or national group. In this sense, mutual intelligibility is not really relevant. Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are distinct languages because they relate to distinct countries and nations even though there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility. Finnish is a distinct language because it is the language of a distinct country and it is very different linguistically. To come back to our infamous question about the languages of the former Yugoslavia, I recognize that the languages are probably totally mutually intelligible. But that is not the point. Following a painful conflict and a long history of ethnic strife, four distinct countries were born and each country gave its name to its local variety of the previously common language. We now have four national or official languages. I would expect that these languages will evolve separately and deviate from each other with time. I also think that people of these countries would be offended if we tell them that their language is not really a language but a dialect of Serbo-Croatian. The other big question here is of course what does it mean to say that one speaks languages that are closely related. I won't repeat myself or what others have said so well. Speaking - as opposed to only understanding - related languages is not necessarily easy. I don't think that all Scandinavians can "speak' the other languages. So, to come back to our fellow who claims either here on HTLAL or on his CV to be a polyglot because he speaks Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian and Montenegrin, I don't see a problem or any attempt to hoodwink anybody. I would be more impressed if he had put Russian, Inuit, Mandarin and Afrikaans, but I don't see a big problem. Edited by s_allard on 18 October 2013 at 5:50am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4263 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 83 of 299 17 October 2013 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If we seriously want the "polyglot" thing to have any sort of use, we could devise an algorithm to calculate an index of "polyglotness" thus;
Let us define "polyglot" to be someone with the polyglot index value of 5.1< The index value of each language (not counting one's native one) is calculated thus; First step: (1 - x) times linguistical dissimilarity coefficient, where "x" is lexical similarity. Linguistical dissimilarity coefficients; 1 for languages of the same subgroup [f.e. North-Germanic languages] 2 for languages of the same branch [f.e. Germanic languages] 3 for languages of the same family (f.e. Indo-European languages] 4 or 5 for languages of other families depending on if both languages employ for example agglutination or not Calculate each new language consequentially from the base of the known language that is closest to the one being calculated. So let's calculate a few indexes. (Guess who) Native language: Danish Reported known languages: French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Catalan, Esperanto, Romanian Let us group these: -IE --Germanic ---Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish --Romance ---French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian -Constructed languages --Esperanto Let's pretend that lexical similarity of all Germanic languages exceeds 50% and that lexical similarities of Romance languages exceed 70%. Disclaimer: All of these lexical similarities are invented and have no connection to the real world whatsoever First pair Danish-Swedish (1 - 0,90) x 1 (same subgroup) = 0,1 Danish-German (1 - 0,70) x 2 (same branch) = 0,6 German-Dutch (1 - 0,90) x 1 (same subgroup) = 0,1 Dutch-English (1 - 0,60) x 1 (same subgroup) = 0,8 English-French (1 - 0,27) x 3 (same family) = 2,19 French-Italian (1 - 0,89) x 1 (same subgroup) = 0,11 Italian-Spanish (1 - 0,82) x 1 (same subgroup) = 0,36 Spanish-Portuguese (1 - 0,89) x 1 (same subgroup) = 0,11 Italian-Catalan (1 - 0,87) x 1 (same subgroup) = 0,26 Italian-Romanian (1 - 0,77) x 2 (same branch) = 0,46 Esperanto ????? [didn't think of a model for these, let's call this one a 1] These calculations result in a polyglot index of 6,09; hence we can draw the conclusion that this person indeed is a polyglot. Another: Native language: Finnish Reported known languages: English, Swedish -Uralic --Finnic ---Finnish -IE --Germanic ---English ---Swedish Finnish-Swedish (1 - 0,1) x 4 (completely different systems) = 3,6 Swedish-English (1 - 0,6) x 2 (same branch) = 0,8 Result; 4,4; conclusion: this person is not a polyglot. Possible problems; -this does not take into consideration at all how proficient the person is or claims to be in any of the languages. -the coefficient is way out of balance -does not take into consideration the intrinsic difficulty of each language such as morhpological complexity, lexical complexity and such Strengths; -it is not possible to be a "polyglot" (according to the index) without knowing at least three languages (the biggest possible index value of two languages is exactly 5) This is all just play and not serious as I still have the same disdain towards the word but if we're going to keep the word in our vocabulary, we at least need a system or an agreement to end the constant bickering. Edited by Henkkles on 17 October 2013 at 4:44pm 10 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4854 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 84 of 299 17 October 2013 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
Do you even know how different Danish and Swedish really are? I don't get that impression from what you're writing. While written Danish is intelligible for people who know Swedish or Norwegian, oral Danish is very difficult to understand (except of some basic phrases). Nynorsk isn't that easy either. It's closer to Icelandic and Faroese than to Swedish and Danish. Edited by Josquin on 17 October 2013 at 5:25pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4263 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 85 of 299 17 October 2013 at 5:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's not that easy to say. Languages consist of many things. Nynorsk still has gone through the same bender as all continental NG languages; in terms of inflection, Nynorsk is miles closer to Danish than it is to Icelandic. Considering phonological inventory it hasn't gone through the same changes as Swedish has, so there it is more archaic and closer to the more archaic languages. My point is; it's not that black and white. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7166 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 86 of 299 17 October 2013 at 5:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm trying to determine whether these comments are facetious or earnest, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. There's no problem with using terms such as "Belgian French", "Metropolitan French" or "Québecois". However these refined terms don't imply that they represent different languages (i.e. less than highly mutually-intelligible communicative codes). As to BCMS/SC, the official designations are now indeed "Bosnian", "Croatian", "Montenegrin" and "Serbian" (or "BCS" per the Intertional Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Netherlands). However a change in nomenclature doesn't signify a substantive change in the underlying grammar, lexis, syntax and phonology. As for what I have called it, I've used "Serbo-Croatian" (holdover of the "bad old days" of Yugoslavia ("bad old days" for nationalists I guess) but still familiar to some outsiders), "BCMS/SC" (politically correct/incorrect acronyms but also to show that I openly excise the emotions and politics from what is a matter of linguistic classification) "Neo-Shtokavian-Ijekavian" in reference to the same dialectal basis that was chosen by Bosnian, Croatian, Montengerin and Serbian language codifiers) when dealing with people with at least a modicum of knowledge of Slavonic linguistics (including native speakers). A frequent exchange that I have whenever I hear ex-Yugoslavs say something like Chung! Ale govoriš dobro bosnanski/hrvatski/crnogorski/srpski! (Chung! You speak Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian well!) is Ne! Govorim samo malo novoštokavsko-ijekavski! Ovaj jezik nije bosanski, ni hrvatski, ni crnogorski, ni srpski (I speak only a bit of Neo-Shtokavian-Ijekavian. This language is not Bosnian or Croatian or Montenegrin or Serbian) to illustrate that I care little about nationalist sentiment and that I'm not interested in incorporating puristic prescriptions that signal that I identify more with one ethnic group/nation/tribe over the others. When it comes to a resume, I'd be OK with a candidate putting down just one of "Serbo-Croatian", "Bosnian", "Croatian", "Montenegrin" or "Serbian" not 4 or even all 5 of them. I'd be naive to think that I'd have a Yugoslav polyglot on my hands any more than I should be wowed by someone who puts down "French, Acadian and Walloon" rather than "French, Acadian French and Belgian French" where the latter have a lower chance of deceiving the uninformed observer. 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7166 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 87 of 299 17 October 2013 at 6:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
I might not laugh at you actually depending on how you apply the term "Flemish". If by "Flemish" you refer to Algemeen Belgisch Nederlands (i.e. a variant of Dutch), and so by using a different name you hope to pull a fast one, then I would laugh at you. If however by "Flemish" you refer to a lect that's non-standard and best analyzable in dialectology as something in "West-Vlaams" then I wouldn't laugh. The linguistic divergence and associated reduction of mutual intelligibility from standard Belgian or standard Netherlandish Dutch is too great to wish it or politicize it away. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5344 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 88 of 299 17 October 2013 at 7:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Will I be the first one in this thread to say "A language is a dialect with an army?" :-) Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 17 October 2013 at 7:04pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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