Re: A New Accent, Political Boundaries and Accents,

> Date:         Tue, 21 May 2002 07:51:26 -0400
> From: John Cowan <jcowan@...>
>
> Lars Henrik Mathiesen scripsit:
>
> > Cultural/ethnic/religious barriers can divide standard languages as
> > well, sometimes to the point that colloquial languages achieve mutual
> > unintelligibility. For instance: Serbian and Croatian, Hindi and Urdu.
>
> Well, I don't think we have mutual unintelligibility here; in fact,
> I can't think of any examples of twinned standard languages without
> geographical separation that are truly mutually unintelligible.
> That would require a degree of social apartheid that makes the
> caste system look like nothing.
I see I was unclear --- I didn't mean that Serbian and Croatian were
that different. Although I've seen examples where parallel texts
shared very few words, that was probably a contrived effect.

But are colloquial Hindi and Urdu really intelligible to monoglot
speakers of the other language? Urdu is essentially Hindi with most of
the Prakrit-derived lexicon replaced by Arabic loans... or so I've
been told.

(Though many or most speakers of either language can probably get by
in the other as well --- that will tend to muddy the picture).

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)

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