Re: CHAT: Multi-Lingos

Hæ, Óskar! Hvernig liður þér?


>> It can be fun to hear someone speak in one lingo, and the
>> person they are talking to answer in another. It can be
>> interesting..
Certainly! It's even more fun to be one of the parties in such a conversation
;-)

> Have you seen Scandinavians? I've commonly heard Danish
> and Swedish speak to each other using their own respective
> languages. Norwegian and Swedish have
> such blurred boundaries that I usually have trouble defining
> dialects from the border.
Interesting. I've seen Swedes and Norwegians doing this, but I've never seen
Swedes/Danes or Norwegians/Danes. I would have thought that the fact of
Danish phonology being so different from Swedish and Norwegian would get in
the way of comprehension, but I was obviously wrong. Silly American, me :-)

> Actually, a whole TV show was based on this; "Kontrapunkt"
> Then, audience from all over the Nordic world enjoyed the show
> with the multiple variations on their mother-tongue,
> "Skandinavisk".
Sounds fascinating! I would love to have seen this. I wish we got foreign
programming here in the US :-(

> I'd like sometime to see a standard version of this lingo,
> actually. Then we could kill, once and for all, the use of English
> among Scandinavians (which is also common).
Hey, I'm all for this. Scandinavian languages rock.

> Another example is the Chinese. I've seen people speaking
> Cantonese and being replied in Mandarin both in front of me
> and in TV.
Haven't seen this "live", but I've seen movies where the dialogue is in
Cantonese but there are still subtitles in Chinese characters, for all the
other Chinese people who don't understand Cantonese but speak some other
variety of Chinese!

Personally, when I was teaching English in the Czech republic, I was involved
in several Czech/Slovak conversations. Those are very common given how close
the two languages are to each other. I also had a couple of Czech/Polish
conversations too. Significantly less mutual intelligibility than
Czech/Slovak, but still quite a bit got across, as long as it was kept fairly
simple.
I've also had a couple of Scottish Gaelic/Manx Gaelic and Scottish
Gaelic/Irish Gaelic conversations; Scottish and Manx are closer to each other
than either is to Irish, so there was more comprehension with the former.

I knew a person (a Scots speaker) at university who went to a minority
languages conference and told me that he had a conversation with a couple of
the Frisian delegates, in which he spoke Scots and the Frisians spoke
Frisian, and he claimed they managed to get quite a bit across to each other.
I wasn't an eyewitness to this, however.

I say we should make everyone in the world learn Icelandic and make that the
"official Germanic language of the world" ;-)

Bless,

Thomas

PS. What's "Thomas" in Icelandic, by the way?