Re: CHAT: Multi-Lingos

callanish wrote:

> 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, people in general tolerate amazing deviations from preferred phonology:
Mandarin sans tones is still basically intelligible.

If anything, the problem is that Swedish and Norwegian differ so much in lexis,
since lexically Norwegian is basically Danish.  When Norwegians and Danes talk,
they may have trouble understanding what is *said*, but generally understand
what is *meant*; Norwegians and Swedes, vice versa.

> 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!
I think essentially all Chinese movies are subtitled.

> 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.
Plausible.  "Bread, butter, and green cheese/Is good English and good Friese."
Scots stands between them (though closer to English of course, just as West
Frisian is now closer to Dutch).

> I say we should make everyone in the world learn Icelandic and make that the
> "official Germanic language of the world" ;-)
How about Yiddish?  It is even more flexible than English in absorbing
vocabulary.

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