Re: OT: semi-OT: bilingual communication

Danny Wier scripsit:

<<it's common for a Chechen to speak Chechen
to an Ingush, and the Ingush to reply in Ingush, and they understand each
other enough to hold an everyday conversation.
Is it possible, or practical, for this to happen in the real world for
speakers of two more different languages? Like I was speaking English to a
Spanish speaker and he'd be speaking Spanish to me.... >>

It's pretty common here in Ukraine to here two people conversating, one in
Russian, and the other in Ukrainian. I even have such an exapmle in my
family, when my Mom talks in Russian to my wife, and she replies her in
Ukrainian, and they seem having no trouble to communicate.

And since both my wife and I are linguists, we sometimes find ourselves
spontaeneously talking one to the other either in a foreign language both
(mostly English), or (less often) in language pairs like Ru-Uk, En-Uk,
He-Ru, Es-En etc. but just exchanging a couple of replics as in the
situation you described (because she doesn't know much Hebrew, and I'm not
fluent in Spanish).

---------------------------------
Pavel Iosad scripsit:

<<I have myself seen our Swedish tutor (the Swedish one, i. e. from
Sweden) talk to the Dane (who teaches Danish, naturally) in Swedish, and
he'd reply to her in Danish. They were speaking pretty fast. When she
said something along the lines of 'These are my students', he broke into
Danish for us, and I think I *could* understand the gist of it even with
my elementary Swedish.>>

A friend of mine is pretty fluent in Norwegian, and when Swedesh guests
visited the college last fall, they could communicate quite well.

Cheers,
Yitzik
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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