Re: OT: Icelandic help
| From: | Benct Philip Jonsson <melroch@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, May 5, 2008, 15:22 |
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2008/5/5 Krista Casada <kcasada@...>:
> I speak some Arabic and a little Russian; in both those
> languages the speaking speed seems much easier on
> beginners than in Spanish. In Arabic, though, that
> advantage to learners is probably erased by the
> bewildering phonemic, morphological, and lexical variety
> among spoken dialects, which is probably the most
> daunting I've ever run across. Krista
Under different cultural conditions I doubt anyone would
hesitate to call the different Arabic varieties different
languages any more than with different Germanic languages.
It's the same story as with Chinese: a culturally dominant
classical written language. Imagine if Bible Gothic had
acquired that status among the Germanic peoples, and there
you have it! Or if Latin had not lost the status among the
Romance languages, of course...
/BP