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Transparency & mutual intelligibility | ||
Tags: Transparency | Linguistic relationships | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| sumabeast Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6927 days ago 212 posts - 220 votes  Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 1 of 20 26 April 2007 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I always found this subject interesting but could never experience first hand, because as a native English speaker I think no other language comes as close to enable mutual intelligibility.
not like being a native Spanish speaker and being able to understand Italian or Portuguese without any study. or like being a native Russian speaker and being able to understand Serbian, Ukranian, or Polish, or Czech without study or like being a native Swedish speaker and understanding Norwegian or Danish. For us English speakers we simply can't enjoy this and don't know the experience. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 20 26 April 2007 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It seems to depend on how you define "language"
For example, would you consider Scots and English to be mutually intelligible? Some people treat Scots as a dialect of English. Others treat them as separate languages. I once heard spoken Frisian and while I could understand bits and pieces, I couldn't make much sense of the rest. England's relative isolation from other Germanic languages and non-Germanic influences on English haven't helped in improving its mutual intelligibility with Dutch, German, Frisian, Danish etc. For the Slavonic languages, it really depends on the situation to find out how much a monolingual speaker of one Slavonic language could understand of another Slavonic language. For example, I suspect that some Russians grasp Czech as well as I can grasp Frisian. Beyond the obvious clusters of Czech-Slovak or Bulgarian-Macedonian, I wonder how much Slavs understand the other cognate languages. Does getting the gist of something (even if it happens less than 50% of the time) count as "understanding"? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6551 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 3 of 20 26 April 2007 at 9:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yes, Chung makes a good point. I once had a flight with an Irish guy. Very nice guy, but I couldn't understand him at all. This is the worst it's ever been with a fellow English speaker. I bet studying that "accent" would be somewhat like a Spanish speaker studying Italian, dificulty wise.
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| sumabeast Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6927 days ago 212 posts - 220 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 4 of 20 30 April 2007 at 4:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well I've heard that the Slavic languages have a very high degree of mutual intelligiblity among eachother.
what hinders this sometimes is cultural ego or cultural biases between speakers who don't like the idea that their tongue is so close to another as to allow a high degree of understanding of that language, so they put up linguistic blocks and insist that they cannot understand the other's speech. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 20 30 April 2007 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is very true about people who speak mutually intelligible languages. If people want to erect barriers, there's not much that outsiders can do. A friend told me a story that when she was in Slovakia for an interview, she asked if she could use Czech since she didn't know Slovak and that it was normal for Czechs and Slovaks to use their own languages when dealing with each other because of the high mutual intelligibility. The Slovak interviewer refused and insisted that she use Slovak. She had to bow out of the interview. Another time, I heard of a story about a Serb who was on vacation in Croatia (I can't remember if this was during the communist days or in the tense time shortly after the wars in the 1990s). At a restaurant, the Serb used his native word "hleb" for 'bread' instead of the Croatian word "kruh". The waiter suddenly gave him the cold shoulder even though up to that point, the Croat and Serb understood each other perfectly. To boot, because of the dominance of the Serbian standard during the communist era, it'd be hard to believe that the Croatian waiter hadn't learned what 'hleb' meant - so I highly doubt that the waiter could plead ignorance. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| virgule Senior Member Antarctica Joined 6841 days ago 242 posts - 261 votes Studies: Korean | Message 6 of 20 01 May 2007 at 11:49am | IP Logged | |||||
There used to be a language called Serbocroatian... now we have Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and even Montenegrin. Well, to quote Max Weinreich: A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot. (A language is a dialect with an army (and a navy).) What I find interesting is also how spelling reforms are used to mark linguistic difference. Both in Scandinavia and former Yugoslavia... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 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 7 of 20 01 May 2007 at 2:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
When you mention Scandinavia,I suppose it is a reference to the Norwegian situation with two very different and competing writing standards. I don't see anything else up here that ressembles the situation in the former Yugoslavia. In Denmark we have had some spelling reforms, and besides "Dansk Sprognævn" occasionally make minor changes in the spelling proposed in their dictionary "Retskrivningsordbogen". But there is no intention of splitting up the Danish language behind these changes. I don't know much about the spelling history of Swedish, but I suppose it is the same situation there. Only Norway has experienced a comparably dramatic split in the spelling situation, when Ivar Aasen established an alternative spelling based on dialects in Western Norway. But even the most ardent proponents of Nynorsk have (as far as I know) not tried to split the Norwegian language into two, but rather to drag the whole language towards a less Danish-influenced position by proposing an alternative standard as far removed from Bokmål as possible. So far the majority or Norwegians continue to write a Bokmål standard which is very close to Danish. But this is misleading, because as soon as even Bokmål-writers start to speak it becomes clear the spoken language is much further from Danish than the written standard suggests. And Nynorsk is so far removed from both standard Danish and standard Swedish that most people outside Norway have problems understanding it. Edited by Iversen on 01 May 2007 at 3:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 8 of 20 01 May 2007 at 3:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
Strictly speaking the differences between standard Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian extend beyond spelling differences (and choice of diction). Admittedly changes in vocabulary or spelling are the easiest ones to make as both linguists and zealous dillentantes can more easily get into the act instead of fooling around with morphology. There are some differences in vocabulary and a few in grammar but the differences are rather comparable to those between American and British English. No one in his or her right mind could deny the very high mutual intelligibility between the three. Then again, we have to wonder whether the differences between Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian really lead to being able to call them separate languages. They're definitely different, but whether they're different enough to be called separate languages is much less clear. Again what sumabeast posted is true. Sometimes speakers of speech or language X will refuse to understand speakers of speech or language Y for cultural or political reasons even though speeches/languages X and Y have very high mutual intelligibility anyway. For the record this is not restricted to Serbo-Croatian/Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Such voluntary isolation can happen whenever there is animosity between speakers of any cluster of mutual intelligible languages/forms of communication. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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