What pairs or groups of languages are so similar that they can be understood by their respective speakers?
January 24, 2011 8:27 AM Subscribe
My Spanish-speaking friends say that they don't have much problem understanding and conversing with Italians and Portuguese speakers.
What other pairs or groups of languages are so similar that they can be understood by their speakers in the same way? Danish and Swedish perhaps? Dutch and Afrikaans? Polish and Czech?
I would also guess that French and Belgian are pretty close.
There's no such language. Ignoring smaller minority languages, Belgians speak Flemish, which is a variant of Dutch, or French, with a noteworthy German minority.
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:43 AM on January 24, 2011 [3 favorites]
There's no such language. Ignoring smaller minority languages, Belgians speak Flemish, which is a variant of Dutch, or French, with a noteworthy German minority.
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:43 AM on January 24, 2011 [3 favorites]
Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. Does not include Finnish (which is apparently some weird language derived from absolutely no other language on the planet) or Dutch (which is unintelligible to just about everyone except the Dutch*).
* - and certainly not English speakers, as Burhanistan suggests.
posted by Grither at 8:43 AM on January 24, 2011 [2 favorites]
* - and certainly not English speakers, as Burhanistan suggests.
posted by Grither at 8:43 AM on January 24, 2011 [2 favorites]
My boyfriend is fluent in Farsi. From what I understand, the overlap there is mostly in the written language. He can read Arabic with almost no problem, and understand a few of the spoken words. There's also some word overlap with Kurdish and Turkish and French, but not nearly enough to converse easily.
posted by phunniemee at 8:45 AM on January 24, 2011
posted by phunniemee at 8:45 AM on January 24, 2011
Apparently, Swedish and Estonian was a big political point during the Cold War. I think it was one-way too: Swedes would claim not to understand Estonians because they were on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but Estonians would admit to understanding Swedish.
Czech and Slovakian, although that may be more because almost all speakers prior to our generation were bilingual because they lived in the same country.
Hindi and Urdu, for obvious reasons.
Notably, many of what the PRC officially recognize as dialects are actually separate languages (completely unintelligible, sometimes even deriving from separate families) but it's considered a unifying feature to say we all share a language.
posted by d. z. wang at 8:46 AM on January 24, 2011
Czech and Slovakian, although that may be more because almost all speakers prior to our generation were bilingual because they lived in the same country.
Hindi and Urdu, for obvious reasons.
Notably, many of what the PRC officially recognize as dialects are actually separate languages (completely unintelligible, sometimes even deriving from separate families) but it's considered a unifying feature to say we all share a language.
posted by d. z. wang at 8:46 AM on January 24, 2011
Slavic languages from the same branch of their subfamily are likely to have a high degree of intelligibility.
My own experience is with Russian and Ukrainian, which share most of their syntax and lexis. The phonology of both is very similar, and there are regular one-to-one correspondences in case endings and such.
Success at being understood depends on a bunch of factors. Situational factors that make understanding more difficult include ambient noise, topic of conversation, and rate of speech. There are also social factors that matter, such as how much effort the listener is willing to put in trying to understand the other speaker. For instance, in Russia and in parts of Ukraine, Ukrainian is a language of low prestige. Some Russians and Russian-speakers claim that they just "can't understand" Ukrainian, much like people in the US can claim that they "don't understand" double negatives, or that ain't ain't a word they know.
posted by Nomyte at 8:47 AM on January 24, 2011 [1 favorite]
My own experience is with Russian and Ukrainian, which share most of their syntax and lexis. The phonology of both is very similar, and there are regular one-to-one correspondences in case endings and such.
Success at being understood depends on a bunch of factors. Situational factors that make understanding more difficult include ambient noise, topic of conversation, and rate of speech. There are also social factors that matter, such as how much effort the listener is willing to put in trying to understand the other speaker. For instance, in Russia and in parts of Ukraine, Ukrainian is a language of low prestige. Some Russians and Russian-speakers claim that they just "can't understand" Ukrainian, much like people in the US can claim that they "don't understand" double negatives, or that ain't ain't a word they know.
posted by Nomyte at 8:47 AM on January 24, 2011 [1 favorite]
I can't find it right now, but this has definitely been asked before.
posted by fire&wings at 8:48 AM on January 24, 2011
posted by fire&wings at 8:48 AM on January 24, 2011
Best answer: Also, wikipedia has an article on mutual intelligibility that contains a list, broken down to separate intelligibility in written and/or spoken forms.
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:48 AM on January 24, 2011 [3 favorites]
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:48 AM on January 24, 2011 [3 favorites]
I speak a little Spanish, and between that and my English, I could make out Belizean Creole well enough to know what was being said.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:48 AM on January 24, 2011
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:48 AM on January 24, 2011
Breton and Cornish, and Irish and Scottish Gaelic, due to their common roots.
posted by MuffinMan at 8:49 AM on January 24, 2011
posted by MuffinMan at 8:49 AM on January 24, 2011
French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian are all Romance languages (directly derived from Latin) so those fluent in one of those languages supposedly have an easier time grasping the others.
posted by thewestinggame at 8:50 AM on January 24, 2011
posted by thewestinggame at 8:50 AM on January 24, 2011
Notably, many of what the PRC officially recognize as dialects are actually separate languages (completely unintelligible, sometimes even deriving from separate families) but it's considered a unifying feature to say we all share a language.
This is also true of Arabic. Same written form throughout a whole lot of countries, even when the "dialects" are so dissimilar as to be mutually unintelligible. But for cultural and religious reasons, and because the written form is consistent, they're all called "Arabic" while a lot of less-common languages in Europe have more in common, but are referred to as different languages rather than dialects.
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:52 AM on January 24, 2011
This is also true of Arabic. Same written form throughout a whole lot of countries, even when the "dialects" are so dissimilar as to be mutually unintelligible. But for cultural and religious reasons, and because the written form is consistent, they're all called "Arabic" while a lot of less-common languages in Europe have more in common, but are referred to as different languages rather than dialects.
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:52 AM on January 24, 2011
I believe that Serbian and Croation are identical, except that one is written in the Latin alphabet and the other in the Cyrillic alphabet.
posted by Melismata at 8:55 AM on January 24, 2011
posted by Melismata at 8:55 AM on January 24, 2011
d. z. wang: Czech and Slovak are "separate languages" for political reasons. Prior to independence, they formed a part of the same gradual continuum. For other languages-in-name-only, see Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin.
Estonian forms a continuum with Finnish. Both are Finno-Ugric languages, which also includes Hungarian and a number of smaller languages spoken by ethnic minorities in the Russian Federation. Throughout a part of its history, Finland formed a territory within the Kingdom of Sweden. Although there is still a Swedish-speaking minority, it's not for reasons of language similarity.
posted by Nomyte at 8:57 AM on January 24, 2011 [1 favorite]
Estonian forms a continuum with Finnish. Both are Finno-Ugric languages, which also includes Hungarian and a number of smaller languages spoken by ethnic minorities in the Russian Federation. Throughout a part of its history, Finland formed a territory within the Kingdom of Sweden. Although there is still a Swedish-speaking minority, it's not for reasons of language similarity.
posted by Nomyte at 8:57 AM on January 24, 2011 [1 favorite]
An old friend of mine who studied linguistics told me that it was sort of a standard line in linguistics classes that "a language is just a dialect with an army".
You can find a lot of information about the relationship between languages on Wikipedia. Here's the page for Romance Languages (which includes Spanish, Portuguese and Italian). It doesn't explicitly say which of those languages are mutually intelligible, but most of them are to some degree.
When I used to hang out with the exchange students in Brazil, testing mutual intelligibility in our native languages was a nerdy if common thing to do. One that surprised us was that the Danish students and the Afrikaans-speaking South Africans could understand some of each other's comments. Dutch and Afrikaans was expected, but Danish was kind of a surprise.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:58 AM on January 24, 2011
You can find a lot of information about the relationship between languages on Wikipedia. Here's the page for Romance Languages (which includes Spanish, Portuguese and Italian). It doesn't explicitly say which of those languages are mutually intelligible, but most of them are to some degree.
When I used to hang out with the exchange students in Brazil, testing mutual intelligibility in our native languages was a nerdy if common thing to do. One that surprised us was that the Danish students and the Afrikaans-speaking South Africans could understand some of each other's comments. Dutch and Afrikaans was expected, but Danish was kind of a surprise.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:58 AM on January 24, 2011
I speak Dutch and I can understand Afrikaans perfectly, though not speak it. I also understand Frisian, which is a language spoken in the northern provinces of The Netherlands. Flemish is a Dutch dialect, not a separate language. Most Dutch speakers can also understand German pretty well.
I'd venture that most of us understand English quite well too, not because the language is so similar but rather because of the exposure from popular culture. Not so the other war around though, in my experience most English speakers find Dutch impossible to understand.
posted by monospace at 9:12 AM on January 24, 2011
I'd venture that most of us understand English quite well too, not because the language is so similar but rather because of the exposure from popular culture. Not so the other war around though, in my experience most English speakers find Dutch impossible to understand.
posted by monospace at 9:12 AM on January 24, 2011
Anecdata: my mother's first language is Finnish and I know she regularly chatted in Finnish with an Estonian-speaking friend with no unsurmountable problems understanding the different languages. To my ear, Estonian sounds like a shorthand version of Finnish, leaving the ends off many words.
This article indicates Finnish and Estonian are not mutually intelligible but others beg to differ.
posted by thatdawnperson at 9:17 AM on January 24, 2011
This article indicates Finnish and Estonian are not mutually intelligible but others beg to differ.
posted by thatdawnperson at 9:17 AM on January 24, 2011
Because of all the borrowed characters, pretty much anyone with a native fluency in Japanese can at least get the gist of something written in Chinese. That's not the case for the spoken languages, of course.
And the first time I encountered written Portuguese, I thought it was terribly misspelled Spanish. (In my defense, I was in Japan at the time, and at that point didn't know about Japan's sizable Brazilian immigrant population.)
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:21 AM on January 24, 2011
And the first time I encountered written Portuguese, I thought it was terribly misspelled Spanish. (In my defense, I was in Japan at the time, and at that point didn't know about Japan's sizable Brazilian immigrant population.)
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:21 AM on January 24, 2011
Apparently, Swedish and Estonian was a big political point during the Cold War. I think it was one-way too: Swedes would claim not to understand Estonians because they were on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but Estonians would admit to understanding Swedish.
Swedes don't understand Estonian because it is a language completely unrelated to Swedish.
Estonians, like Finns, may have been forced to learn Swedish as a second language (both countries have a small Swedish speaking minority.)
posted by three blind mice at 9:25 AM on January 24, 2011 [2 favorites]
Swedes don't understand Estonian because it is a language completely unrelated to Swedish.
Estonians, like Finns, may have been forced to learn Swedish as a second language (both countries have a small Swedish speaking minority.)
posted by three blind mice at 9:25 AM on January 24, 2011 [2 favorites]
Danes can understand Swedes but Swedes have a hard time understanding Danes (they say they sound like they've got a mouth full of marbles).
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:25 AM on January 24, 2011
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:25 AM on January 24, 2011
in my experience most English speakers find Dutch impossible to understand.
This is absolutely true. I was just talking about this the other day with some fellow Americans who'd also been to the Netherlands; we all felt strongly that because Dutch has a cadence and rhythm that resembles English, with a subjectively similar vowel-consonant interaction, the difficulty of getting any of it is much more apparent than with languages that are more dissimilar. We all had similar stories of constantly feeling like we could almost understand something, then realizing we had absolutely no clue when we thought about it.
posted by Tomorrowful at 9:26 AM on January 24, 2011 [2 favorites]
This is absolutely true. I was just talking about this the other day with some fellow Americans who'd also been to the Netherlands; we all felt strongly that because Dutch has a cadence and rhythm that resembles English, with a subjectively similar vowel-consonant interaction, the difficulty of getting any of it is much more apparent than with languages that are more dissimilar. We all had similar stories of constantly feeling like we could almost understand something, then realizing we had absolutely no clue when we thought about it.
posted by Tomorrowful at 9:26 AM on January 24, 2011 [2 favorites]
The family of my Russian friend and the family of my Polish friend have very few problems understanding each other in their respective languages.
posted by saradarlin at 9:26 AM on January 24, 2011
posted by saradarlin at 9:26 AM on January 24, 2011
Some of the minor Romance languages are even more closely aligned with their nearest major-language neighbors than, for example, Spanish and Portuguese--e.g., Galician (very similar to Portuguese, with 3.2 million speakers) or Catalan (more than 9 million speakers, closer to French than to Castillian Spanish, but also more intelligible to Spanish-speakers than French).
You might be interested in the concept of a "dialect continuum"--the Wikipedia page has many examples. Basically, when a single source language spreads out geographically and breaks up into dialects over time--and given enough time/separation into distinct languages--the dialects/languages that are geographically closer may be mutually intelligible, while the ones at the far ends may not be.
posted by SomeTrickPony at 9:27 AM on January 24, 2011
You might be interested in the concept of a "dialect continuum"--the Wikipedia page has many examples. Basically, when a single source language spreads out geographically and breaks up into dialects over time--and given enough time/separation into distinct languages--the dialects/languages that are geographically closer may be mutually intelligible, while the ones at the far ends may not be.
posted by SomeTrickPony at 9:27 AM on January 24, 2011
A woman once told me that Roma(nian) and Italian are pretty close.
posted by rhizome at 9:28 AM on January 24, 2011
posted by rhizome at 9:28 AM on January 24, 2011
Well, another datapoint that contradicts your Spanish friends' experience: I have had two native Spanish speakers (one Mexican and one Columbian) state that despite the similarities between Spanish and Portuguese in the written form (and both being Romance languages), they could not understand spoken Portuguese at all. I believe that in both cases there experience was with Brazilian Portuguese. One related that if she were standing next to two Italians, she could pretty much understand their conversation based on context and similarities with spoken Spanish, but given a similar situation with two Portuguese speakers and she'd be hard-pressed to have a clue. My Mexican friend worked in an art gallery in Mexico City and had to call a gallery in Sao Paolo. She and her cohort in Brazil had to speak English as she couldn't understand anything that he was saying in Portuguese and he couldn't understand Spanish.
posted by kaybdc at 9:35 AM on January 24, 2011
posted by kaybdc at 9:35 AM on January 24, 2011
My Mom's friend is Japanese-American and speaks fluent Japanese (as well as English), and she can also understand Spanish fairly easily. She says she has trouble speaking it, though. My Dad used to speak Czech fluently (his parents spoke it exclusively when he was growing up) and could also speak and understand a lot of Russian.
posted by Oriole Adams at 9:48 AM on January 24, 2011
posted by Oriole Adams at 9:48 AM on January 24, 2011
To further develop the Scandinavian perspective, in reading, Norwegian and Danish are close, and Swedish a little different, but as a spoken language, official Norwegian seems to me a little easier to 'get' from a Swedish perspective than Danish. No idea how it feels the other way round.
For me, a foreigner who learned Swedish from scratch at 31, both Danish and Norwegian have remained a bit of a problem, in fact.
posted by Namlit at 9:56 AM on January 24, 2011
For me, a foreigner who learned Swedish from scratch at 31, both Danish and Norwegian have remained a bit of a problem, in fact.
posted by Namlit at 9:56 AM on January 24, 2011
A lot of Dutch is similar to English, even when you don't know at first glance.
"Ik herenner Oma." = "I can remember Grandma." Now say the English in fast, casual slang: "I c'n r'm'em'r Grandma." That and the Dutch sound very alike.
Or a little proverb sort of thing: "Een goed begin is het halve werk" = "Well-begun is half done."
AIUI, Frisian is even closer to English than Dutch.
posted by jgirl at 10:04 AM on January 24, 2011
"Ik herenner Oma." = "I can remember Grandma." Now say the English in fast, casual slang: "I c'n r'm'em'r Grandma." That and the Dutch sound very alike.
Or a little proverb sort of thing: "Een goed begin is het halve werk" = "Well-begun is half done."
AIUI, Frisian is even closer to English than Dutch.
posted by jgirl at 10:04 AM on January 24, 2011
Best answer: I second Wikipedia's mutual intelligibility article, but here's a Language Log article about Chinese languages that covers some of the complexities of what makes a separate language a separate language.
Azerbaijani and Turkish had some significant differences but they're still mutually intelligible. Like, British English uses "boot" for "trunk" and "rubber" for "rainboot" but we still know what they mean. Azerbaijani was my second language and I can read Turkish, but it's harder for me to understand it spoken because the accent is so different. Meanwhile, Turks can understand me when I speak Azerbaijani. A third related language is Turkmen, which is supposedly closer to Azerbaijani than Turkish, but an Azeri friend told me Turkmen sounds too fast for her to understand.
posted by sarling at 10:05 AM on January 24, 2011
Azerbaijani and Turkish had some significant differences but they're still mutually intelligible. Like, British English uses "boot" for "trunk" and "rubber" for "rainboot" but we still know what they mean. Azerbaijani was my second language and I can read Turkish, but it's harder for me to understand it spoken because the accent is so different. Meanwhile, Turks can understand me when I speak Azerbaijani. A third related language is Turkmen, which is supposedly closer to Azerbaijani than Turkish, but an Azeri friend told me Turkmen sounds too fast for her to understand.
posted by sarling at 10:05 AM on January 24, 2011
Dutch is kinda halfway between German and English. Knowing both German and English, I can read Dutch quite easily, but I can't understand a word of spoken Dutch. To me, it sounds like German with a totally crazy accent. I have the same experience that Tomorrowful describes when I hear Dutch: I feel like I should be able to understand it, but I just don't.
posted by mandanza at 10:06 AM on January 24, 2011
posted by mandanza at 10:06 AM on January 24, 2011
Portuguese and Spanish are close, but knowing one definitely does not totally understandable. I know fluent speakers of both languages who only pick up the gist, or some words, in the other language. Same with Portuguese and Italian. With a bit of practice, my high-school Spanish allows me to read a bit of Portuguese (let's say I can understand 80% of what I'd understand in Spanish) but I find it challenging to understand spoken Portuguese, no matter what dialect (personally, having learned Spanish, I find that a mainland Portuguese dialect is easiest to understand, then Azorean, and Brazilian is hardest for me).
Serbian and Croatian are the same spoken language, but Serbian is written in the Cyrillic, and Croatian is written in the Roman alphabet. I'm pretty sure SerboCro and Slovenian have enough similarity for speakers of one to understand the other, too.
posted by pseudostrabismus at 10:11 AM on January 24, 2011
Serbian and Croatian are the same spoken language, but Serbian is written in the Cyrillic, and Croatian is written in the Roman alphabet. I'm pretty sure SerboCro and Slovenian have enough similarity for speakers of one to understand the other, too.
posted by pseudostrabismus at 10:11 AM on January 24, 2011
Dutch is more difficult to master that both Germans and the English think. It is a completely separate language with its own rules, but a few conspicuous overlaps.
[dare I point out that it is "herinner" and "de week"]
posted by Namlit at 10:17 AM on January 24, 2011 [1 favorite]
[dare I point out that it is "herinner" and "de week"]
posted by Namlit at 10:17 AM on January 24, 2011 [1 favorite]
I once worked at a language school where there were French-speaking and Spanish-speaking instructors. They were able to work together to translate a document from Portuguese to English, but they were unable to do it by themselves.
Another interesting language pair has to be Korean and Japanese. Although the two languages are supposedly not related at all, they share a similar (at least on the surface) grammatical structure, and a whole lot of compound words (with minor differences in pronunciation that are pretty easy to master) derived from Chinese. However, Japanese speakers cannot understand Korean speakers, and the same goes the other way.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:20 AM on January 24, 2011
Another interesting language pair has to be Korean and Japanese. Although the two languages are supposedly not related at all, they share a similar (at least on the surface) grammatical structure, and a whole lot of compound words (with minor differences in pronunciation that are pretty easy to master) derived from Chinese. However, Japanese speakers cannot understand Korean speakers, and the same goes the other way.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:20 AM on January 24, 2011
Best answer: I'm Dutch, and I can also understand Afrikaans pretty well. Frisian too. Those English speakers who have read older English works (especially old English) tend to have an easier time of it, because they have words in their vocabulary that date back to older Germanic ancestor languages and that have survived in Dutch and Frisian.
English and Dutch are not mutually comprehensible. As Tomorrowful said, English speakers overhearing a Dutch conversation will have the irritating feeling that they almost get it. A neurologist friend of mine compared it to people with temporary/permanent language aphasia, you feel that you totally recognise the language without being able to understand it at all.
One of the reasons for this is that they're both Germanic languages with similar vowel/consonant structures (exceptions are the theta sound at the beginning of the and the gutturals which English and Dutch have respectively). They also have very similar grammars, both being Germanic languages which have lost their case systems. Most sentences can be translated between the two languages by word for word translation without becoming obviously incorrect or changing their meanings.
The main dialects families of Arabic are Iraqi, the Syrian-Jordanian-Lebanese-Palestinian, Khaliji (Gulf), Egyptian, and the Maghrebi dialects. Apart from the Maghrebi dialects which are nigh-on incomprehensible to other Arabs, they maintain a good deal of mutual comprehensibility. This is kind of hard to measure though, because these dialects don't exist in isolation for two reasons:
1) All educated Arabs learn written Arabic and the spoken Modern Standard Arabic that goes with it
2) News is broadcast in standard Arabic on the radio and TV
3) Lebanese and Egyptian films and TV are so widely watched that those dialects are comprehended everywhere (especially Egyptian) and in fact slang now enters Gulf Arab dialect through this medium.
I guess you could count the Arabic dialects though.
Arabic and Persian are not related at all and are not mutually comprehensible, but there are many Arabic loanwords in Parsi. Parsi is written like Urdu in a slightly modified Arabic script, so an Iranian or a Pakistani can read an Arabic sign phonetically but doesn't necessarily know what it says.
Urdu and Hindi are very similar languages and have only split into two distinct languages rather than a continuum of related dialects as a result of Partition. They are mutually comprehensible, but they are drifting apart. Urdu speakers form new scientific/technical terms from Arabic roots and Hindi speakers from Sanskrit. These two languages thus fill similar prestige language neologism wells that Greek and Latin do for Europeans.
Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian are exactly the same language and only "split" very recently.
posted by atrazine at 10:29 AM on January 24, 2011 [1 favorite]
English and Dutch are not mutually comprehensible. As Tomorrowful said, English speakers overhearing a Dutch conversation will have the irritating feeling that they almost get it. A neurologist friend of mine compared it to people with temporary/permanent language aphasia, you feel that you totally recognise the language without being able to understand it at all.
One of the reasons for this is that they're both Germanic languages with similar vowel/consonant structures (exceptions are the theta sound at the beginning of the and the gutturals which English and Dutch have respectively). They also have very similar grammars, both being Germanic languages which have lost their case systems. Most sentences can be translated between the two languages by word for word translation without becoming obviously incorrect or changing their meanings.
The main dialects families of Arabic are Iraqi, the Syrian-Jordanian-Lebanese-Palestinian, Khaliji (Gulf), Egyptian, and the Maghrebi dialects. Apart from the Maghrebi dialects which are nigh-on incomprehensible to other Arabs, they maintain a good deal of mutual comprehensibility. This is kind of hard to measure though, because these dialects don't exist in isolation for two reasons:
1) All educated Arabs learn written Arabic and the spoken Modern Standard Arabic that goes with it
2) News is broadcast in standard Arabic on the radio and TV
3) Lebanese and Egyptian films and TV are so widely watched that those dialects are comprehended everywhere (especially Egyptian) and in fact slang now enters Gulf Arab dialect through this medium.
I guess you could count the Arabic dialects though.
Arabic and Persian are not related at all and are not mutually comprehensible, but there are many Arabic loanwords in Parsi. Parsi is written like Urdu in a slightly modified Arabic script, so an Iranian or a Pakistani can read an Arabic sign phonetically but doesn't necessarily know what it says.
Urdu and Hindi are very similar languages and have only split into two distinct languages rather than a continuum of related dialects as a result of Partition. They are mutually comprehensible, but they are drifting apart. Urdu speakers form new scientific/technical terms from Arabic roots and Hindi speakers from Sanskrit. These two languages thus fill similar prestige language neologism wells that Greek and Latin do for Europeans.
Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian are exactly the same language and only "split" very recently.
posted by atrazine at 10:29 AM on January 24, 2011 [1 favorite]
[dare I point out that it is "herinner" and "de week"]
Certainly.
My point still stands.
posted by jgirl at 10:33 AM on January 24, 2011
As noted upthread, Italian and Romanian.
I speak pretty crappy Italian but remember being surprised that I could understand live TV coverage of Ceausescu's fall. I've been told Romanian is closer to Latin than even Italian, but that might be just an old wive's tale.
posted by CunningLinguist at 10:44 AM on January 24, 2011 [1 favorite]
I speak pretty crappy Italian but remember being surprised that I could understand live TV coverage of Ceausescu's fall. I've been told Romanian is closer to Latin than even Italian, but that might be just an old wive's tale.
posted by CunningLinguist at 10:44 AM on January 24, 2011 [1 favorite]
Best answer: There's a lot of overstating the case in this thread.
Every language that's been mentioned here that I have any experience with (except for Hindi and Urdu) is definitely not mutually intelligible. English and Dutch, no way. None of the more widely spoken Romance languages are, either. Anyone who says French and Spanish are mutually intelligible has never heard either language spoken. Or maybe doesn't know what "mutually intelligible" means.
Those English speakers who have read older English works (especially old English) tend to have an easier time of it, because they have words in their vocabulary that date back to older Germanic ancestor languages and that have survived in Dutch and Frisian.
This might not be apparent to someone whose native language isn't English, but Old English is not mutually intelligible with Modern English. Any English speaker who wants to understand Old English has to learn it as a foreign language. Saying that English speakers who have studied Old English will find studying Dutch easier is sort of like saying English speakers who have studied Spanish will have an easier time with Portuguese. Sure, but it has nothing to do with English, at all.
posted by Sara C. at 10:53 AM on January 24, 2011 [6 favorites]
Every language that's been mentioned here that I have any experience with (except for Hindi and Urdu) is definitely not mutually intelligible. English and Dutch, no way. None of the more widely spoken Romance languages are, either. Anyone who says French and Spanish are mutually intelligible has never heard either language spoken. Or maybe doesn't know what "mutually intelligible" means.
Those English speakers who have read older English works (especially old English) tend to have an easier time of it, because they have words in their vocabulary that date back to older Germanic ancestor languages and that have survived in Dutch and Frisian.
This might not be apparent to someone whose native language isn't English, but Old English is not mutually intelligible with Modern English. Any English speaker who wants to understand Old English has to learn it as a foreign language. Saying that English speakers who have studied Old English will find studying Dutch easier is sort of like saying English speakers who have studied Spanish will have an easier time with Portuguese. Sure, but it has nothing to do with English, at all.
posted by Sara C. at 10:53 AM on January 24, 2011 [6 favorites]
My boyfriend is fluent in Farsi. From what I understand, the overlap there is mostly in the written language. He can read Arabic with almost no problem
This doesn't indicate anything about mutual intelligibility; as someone literate in English, I can 'read' Italian, Polish, Turkish, Malay, Lakota, or Swahili, but it doesn't do me much good.
Finnish (which is apparently some weird language derived from absolutely no other language on the planet)
Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric family and thus related to Estonian, Hungarian, and Saami (among other lesser-known languages).
posted by threeants at 10:58 AM on January 24, 2011 [2 favorites]
This doesn't indicate anything about mutual intelligibility; as someone literate in English, I can 'read' Italian, Polish, Turkish, Malay, Lakota, or Swahili, but it doesn't do me much good.
Finnish (which is apparently some weird language derived from absolutely no other language on the planet)
Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric family and thus related to Estonian, Hungarian, and Saami (among other lesser-known languages).
posted by threeants at 10:58 AM on January 24, 2011 [2 favorites]
This might not be apparent to someone whose native language isn't English, but Old English is not mutually intelligible with Modern English. Any English speaker who wants to understand Old English has to learn it as a foreign language.
Yes, I should have made that more explicit. I'm actually sort of half-basing that on my experience as someone with English and Dutch as my simultaneously acquired first languages learning Old English.
posted by atrazine at 11:00 AM on January 24, 2011
Yes, I should have made that more explicit. I'm actually sort of half-basing that on my experience as someone with English and Dutch as my simultaneously acquired first languages learning Old English.
posted by atrazine at 11:00 AM on January 24, 2011
I don't get why there's so much guessing and second-hand anecdata in this thread. Answers to this question are pretty close to objective; if there's much room for disagreement and finagling, two languages are really not mutually intelligible.
posted by threeants at 11:02 AM on January 24, 2011 [3 favorites]
posted by threeants at 11:02 AM on January 24, 2011 [3 favorites]
Your friends are perhaps exaggerating. What's probably going on is that they're probably in a cosmopolitan-ish context, where people are used to making an effort for each other. This goes both ways: the speaker tries to be clear in their accent and words, speaking slowly and avoiding slang expressions; the listener makes an effort and relies on their practice to convert words-that-sound-similar into words that they know.
Without practice, people don't know how to speak clearly for a foreign speaker, and don't realise at all (in spoken language) that the thing might actually be similar/the same as what they know. I speak Portuguese (as a second language): as someone used to learning languages, it took a few hours of concentrated effort to turn Spanish from a wall of noise into something I could begin grabbing onto.
It's taken a lot longer to understand it when native speakers from the same country are speaking it among themselves, and I still haven't got to the point where I can consistently speak Spanish rather than a Portunhol (a mix of the two). Some Spanish-only-speakers can understand me perfectly when I speak this; people less used to / able to deal w linguistic difference need a lot of help (from me saying it again, or from other people).
posted by squishles at 11:06 AM on January 24, 2011
Without practice, people don't know how to speak clearly for a foreign speaker, and don't realise at all (in spoken language) that the thing might actually be similar/the same as what they know. I speak Portuguese (as a second language): as someone used to learning languages, it took a few hours of concentrated effort to turn Spanish from a wall of noise into something I could begin grabbing onto.
It's taken a lot longer to understand it when native speakers from the same country are speaking it among themselves, and I still haven't got to the point where I can consistently speak Spanish rather than a Portunhol (a mix of the two). Some Spanish-only-speakers can understand me perfectly when I speak this; people less used to / able to deal w linguistic difference need a lot of help (from me saying it again, or from other people).
posted by squishles at 11:06 AM on January 24, 2011
Best answer: I am surprised at the misinformation in this post:
I can't find the cite, but I was told in an old linguistics class that two languages in the north Atlantic (Icelandic and Danish perhaps?) were pretty much the same language, but that nationalism prevented them from admitting it. I would also guess that French and Belgian are pretty close.
Belgian isn't a language. There is a lot of vocabulary shared between the Scandinavian languages, but Icelandic is more different from Swedish, Norwegian and Danish than those three are from each other.
Dutch and English.
If you compare passages side by side, there are some similarities. But really, the original poster's idea of "that they don't have much problem understanding and conversing" - no way. Except most Dutch people speak English!
Does not include Finnish (which is apparently some weird language derived from absolutely no other language on the planet)
Finnish is a cousin of two national languages - Estonian and Hungarian - as well as many smaller languages. There's no mutual intelligibility between Hungarian and Finnish, but there's a lot of similar vocabulary between Finnish and Estonian. Not sure about mutual intelligibility, but they're close.
My boyfriend is fluent in Farsi. From what I understand, the overlap there is mostly in the written language. He can read Arabic with almost no problem,
This makes zero sense. They're not even in the same language family. Farsi is much closer to English than Arabic. Sure, they share some words from adoptions and religion, but the idea that you can read Arabic if you know Farsi is a total joke. He's conning you.
Apparently, Swedish and Estonian was a big political point during the Cold War. I think it was one-way too: Swedes would claim not to understand Estonians because they were on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but Estonians would admit to understanding Swedish.
Again, bullshit. Two different language families entirely. Swedish is a Germanic language in the Indo-European family, Finnish is a Finnic language in the Finno-Igric family. They are not even remotely related.
Here's the page for Romance Languages (which includes Spanish, Portuguese and Italian). It doesn't explicitly say which of those languages are mutually intelligible, but most of them are to some degree.
This is not really true, even if a lot of vocabulary is similar. Portuguese and Spanish are similar enough that a lot can be understood. Romanians can understand a lot of some Italian varieties, though the opposite is less true. (This is because Romanian has a lot of the same vocabulary as Italian, but it has a lot of synonyms from Slavic languages, Hungarian, etc. So a higher percentage of Italian words have cognates in Romanian than the other way around. Plus there are some odd grammatical differences in Romanian which are less understandable to Italians than the other way around.)
I have had two native Spanish speakers (one Mexican and one Columbian) state that despite the similarities between Spanish and Portuguese in the written form (and both being Romance languages), they could not understand spoken Portuguese at all.
Spanish in Spain and Portuguese in Portugal are more mutually intelligible than some of the more distant varieties would be. Often, even speakers of (European) Spanish or Portuguese have a hard time understanding the varieties from former places of colonization.
Serbian and Croatian are the same spoken language, but Serbian is written in the Cyrillic, and Croatian is written in the Roman alphabet. I'm pretty sure SerboCro and Slovenian have enough similarity for speakers of one to understand the other, too.
Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are basically the same language. They're completely mutually intelligible, although there are real differences in vocabulary and certain aspects of pronunciation. It's the war that "made" them separate languages. But Slovenian is different enough that I can't understand more than about 5% of it. (I'm a native Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian speaker.) A lot of the Slavic languages are vaguely mutually intelligible - Czech and Slovak, Ukrainian and Russian, and so on.
I've been told Romanian is closer to Latin than even Italian, but that might be just an old wive's tale.
Romanian has some Latin vocabulary which would be recognizable to the ancient Romans, but which Italian has lost. The opposite is true as well. But what makes Romanian closer to Latin than Italian is that it retains a lot of "Latin" grammar. The vocative case, affixing definite articles to the ends of nouns, that sort of thing . . . which every other Romance language has lost. I never studied Latin, but I was amazed at how much more Latin I could read after Romanian, much more so than when I studied Italian (or French or Spanish, which I've also studied.)
Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian are exactly the same language and only "split" very recently.
I was excited when the first "Bosnian" / English dictionary appeared. I'd previously used a Croatian / English one. Then I realized it was the EXACT same dictionary, just labeled differently. And I do mean "exact" - they only changed the cover. The typesetting and page numbers and every single letter was the same.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 11:20 AM on January 24, 2011 [11 favorites]
I can't find the cite, but I was told in an old linguistics class that two languages in the north Atlantic (Icelandic and Danish perhaps?) were pretty much the same language, but that nationalism prevented them from admitting it. I would also guess that French and Belgian are pretty close.
Belgian isn't a language. There is a lot of vocabulary shared between the Scandinavian languages, but Icelandic is more different from Swedish, Norwegian and Danish than those three are from each other.
Dutch and English.
If you compare passages side by side, there are some similarities. But really, the original poster's idea of "that they don't have much problem understanding and conversing" - no way. Except most Dutch people speak English!
Does not include Finnish (which is apparently some weird language derived from absolutely no other language on the planet)
Finnish is a cousin of two national languages - Estonian and Hungarian - as well as many smaller languages. There's no mutual intelligibility between Hungarian and Finnish, but there's a lot of similar vocabulary between Finnish and Estonian. Not sure about mutual intelligibility, but they're close.
My boyfriend is fluent in Farsi. From what I understand, the overlap there is mostly in the written language. He can read Arabic with almost no problem,
This makes zero sense. They're not even in the same language family. Farsi is much closer to English than Arabic. Sure, they share some words from adoptions and religion, but the idea that you can read Arabic if you know Farsi is a total joke. He's conning you.
Apparently, Swedish and Estonian was a big political point during the Cold War. I think it was one-way too: Swedes would claim not to understand Estonians because they were on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but Estonians would admit to understanding Swedish.
Again, bullshit. Two different language families entirely. Swedish is a Germanic language in the Indo-European family, Finnish is a Finnic language in the Finno-Igric family. They are not even remotely related.
Here's the page for Romance Languages (which includes Spanish, Portuguese and Italian). It doesn't explicitly say which of those languages are mutually intelligible, but most of them are to some degree.
This is not really true, even if a lot of vocabulary is similar. Portuguese and Spanish are similar enough that a lot can be understood. Romanians can understand a lot of some Italian varieties, though the opposite is less true. (This is because Romanian has a lot of the same vocabulary as Italian, but it has a lot of synonyms from Slavic languages, Hungarian, etc. So a higher percentage of Italian words have cognates in Romanian than the other way around. Plus there are some odd grammatical differences in Romanian which are less understandable to Italians than the other way around.)
I have had two native Spanish speakers (one Mexican and one Columbian) state that despite the similarities between Spanish and Portuguese in the written form (and both being Romance languages), they could not understand spoken Portuguese at all.
Spanish in Spain and Portuguese in Portugal are more mutually intelligible than some of the more distant varieties would be. Often, even speakers of (European) Spanish or Portuguese have a hard time understanding the varieties from former places of colonization.
Serbian and Croatian are the same spoken language, but Serbian is written in the Cyrillic, and Croatian is written in the Roman alphabet. I'm pretty sure SerboCro and Slovenian have enough similarity for speakers of one to understand the other, too.
Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are basically the same language. They're completely mutually intelligible, although there are real differences in vocabulary and certain aspects of pronunciation. It's the war that "made" them separate languages. But Slovenian is different enough that I can't understand more than about 5% of it. (I'm a native Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian speaker.) A lot of the Slavic languages are vaguely mutually intelligible - Czech and Slovak, Ukrainian and Russian, and so on.
I've been told Romanian is closer to Latin than even Italian, but that might be just an old wive's tale.
Romanian has some Latin vocabulary which would be recognizable to the ancient Romans, but which Italian has lost. The opposite is true as well. But what makes Romanian closer to Latin than Italian is that it retains a lot of "Latin" grammar. The vocative case, affixing definite articles to the ends of nouns, that sort of thing . . . which every other Romance language has lost. I never studied Latin, but I was amazed at how much more Latin I could read after Romanian, much more so than when I studied Italian (or French or Spanish, which I've also studied.)
Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian are exactly the same language and only "split" very recently.
I was excited when the first "Bosnian" / English dictionary appeared. I'd previously used a Croatian / English one. Then I realized it was the EXACT same dictionary, just labeled differently. And I do mean "exact" - they only changed the cover. The typesetting and page numbers and every single letter was the same.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 11:20 AM on January 24, 2011 [11 favorites]
Even the original framework posed is problematic:
I speak fluent Spanish, on the odd occassion I MIGHT have a tiny problem with a few words from some small place in South America somewhere, but while I understand the majority of what is said in BRAZILIAN Portuguese (prob due to Portenyol influences and accent & cadence) and can get about 50% of what is said if the Italian is relatively generic I simply cannot get Portuguese from the north or the rural areas. To be honest I thought the first time the person was asking me something in Hungarian (this was in Tras Os Montes)
(I speak German & English and can get about 20% of Dutch, more if I know what the topic is as a datapoint)
Portuguese people on the other hand understand Spanish wonderfully in my expereince but partly there is a cultural & economic imperative at work. They were poorer and needed the jobs.
[True fact: I once asked a Professor in Spain where I could pick up some "clases particulares" of Portuguese cos I wanted to learn it and he said "try the local brothel!" ]
posted by Wilder at 11:22 AM on January 24, 2011
I speak fluent Spanish, on the odd occassion I MIGHT have a tiny problem with a few words from some small place in South America somewhere, but while I understand the majority of what is said in BRAZILIAN Portuguese (prob due to Portenyol influences and accent & cadence) and can get about 50% of what is said if the Italian is relatively generic I simply cannot get Portuguese from the north or the rural areas. To be honest I thought the first time the person was asking me something in Hungarian (this was in Tras Os Montes)
(I speak German & English and can get about 20% of Dutch, more if I know what the topic is as a datapoint)
Portuguese people on the other hand understand Spanish wonderfully in my expereince but partly there is a cultural & economic imperative at work. They were poorer and needed the jobs.
[True fact: I once asked a Professor in Spain where I could pick up some "clases particulares" of Portuguese cos I wanted to learn it and he said "try the local brothel!" ]
posted by Wilder at 11:22 AM on January 24, 2011
Dutch + English mutually intelligible? From personal experience, no. I lived in Antwerp for a while and had to put a fair bit of work into learning Flemish (local dialect of Dutch).
My quadrilingual Belgian ex-girlfriend said that Dutch and Flemish people had no trouble conversing, but that they had recognizably different accents and some variations in word usage. She also said that Afrikaans was basically understandable, but she wouldn't consider it the same language; it sounded to her like a baby-talk version of Dutch.
posted by Mars Saxman at 11:40 AM on January 24, 2011
My quadrilingual Belgian ex-girlfriend said that Dutch and Flemish people had no trouble conversing, but that they had recognizably different accents and some variations in word usage. She also said that Afrikaans was basically understandable, but she wouldn't consider it the same language; it sounded to her like a baby-talk version of Dutch.
posted by Mars Saxman at 11:40 AM on January 24, 2011
"My Mom's friend is Japanese-American and speaks fluent Japanese (as well as English), and she can also understand Spanish fairly easily. She says she has trouble speaking it, though."
Are you saying Japanese and Spanish are mutually intelligible?! Wha?
I think a definition of mutually intelligible needs to be incorporated into the question, because there's a lot of weirdness going on in these answers. Kudos to Dee Xtrovert for straightening things out.
posted by keep it under cover at 11:52 AM on January 24, 2011 [2 favorites]
Are you saying Japanese and Spanish are mutually intelligible?! Wha?
I think a definition of mutually intelligible needs to be incorporated into the question, because there's a lot of weirdness going on in these answers. Kudos to Dee Xtrovert for straightening things out.
posted by keep it under cover at 11:52 AM on January 24, 2011 [2 favorites]
Urdu and Hindi are definitely mutually intelligible, although depending on how formal the context, the level of intelligibility decreases, because of what atrazine points out above, i.e. that neologisms in each language are usually taken from Arabic or Farsi for the former and Sanskrit for the latter.
If you can read the Farsi script you can read the Arabic script. This does not mean that you understand the words. Like anyone who understands what I am writing here can "read German" without understanding anything they are reading.
Urdu and Farsi are often quite mutually intelligible, but it depends on how erudite the Urdu speaker is. Much of Urdu poetry is pretty much in Farsi, so anyone who is well-versed (no pun intended) in classical Urdu poetry has a pretty easy time of it with Farsi. I have heard many Farsi speakers comment that they find spoken Urdu pretty easy to understand, also.
posted by bardophile at 11:57 AM on January 24, 2011
If you can read the Farsi script you can read the Arabic script. This does not mean that you understand the words. Like anyone who understands what I am writing here can "read German" without understanding anything they are reading.
Urdu and Farsi are often quite mutually intelligible, but it depends on how erudite the Urdu speaker is. Much of Urdu poetry is pretty much in Farsi, so anyone who is well-versed (no pun intended) in classical Urdu poetry has a pretty easy time of it with Farsi. I have heard many Farsi speakers comment that they find spoken Urdu pretty easy to understand, also.
posted by bardophile at 11:57 AM on January 24, 2011
I've heard that Old English is really pretty close to Old Icelandic and the other Old Norse languages, and that there'd be a lot of pan-Germanic mutual intelligibility. The prof said the difference wouldn't be as different than, say, lazy Savannah English and slum Jamaican: mostly accent, cadence, and the like.
posted by LucretiusJones at 12:17 PM on January 24, 2011
posted by LucretiusJones at 12:17 PM on January 24, 2011
I've heard that Old English is really pretty close to Old Icelandic and the other Old Norse languages
Maybe this would have something to do with spelling vs. pronunciation, but having seen Old English and a few Old Norse languages written out, I'm going to say no. And certainly no to the idea that they would have been closer to each other than a US Southern drawl is to Caribbean-accented English.
Maybe they might have been as close to each other as English is to West Indian Patois? Because I have that same "I should be able to understand, but... no" thing with Patois that others describe with Dutch. In other words, they are by definition not mutually intelligible.
posted by Sara C. at 12:32 PM on January 24, 2011
Maybe this would have something to do with spelling vs. pronunciation, but having seen Old English and a few Old Norse languages written out, I'm going to say no. And certainly no to the idea that they would have been closer to each other than a US Southern drawl is to Caribbean-accented English.
Maybe they might have been as close to each other as English is to West Indian Patois? Because I have that same "I should be able to understand, but... no" thing with Patois that others describe with Dutch. In other words, they are by definition not mutually intelligible.
posted by Sara C. at 12:32 PM on January 24, 2011
Every language that's been mentioned here that I have any experience with (except for Hindi and Urdu) is definitely not mutually intelligible. English and Dutch, no way. None of the more widely spoken Romance languages are, either.
I'm Italian and I have very little trouble understanding Spanish, spoken or written. Most Spanish speaking people have no trouble understanding me, especially if I speak in the Venetian dialect, rather than in the official Italian, of Tuscan origin.
posted by francesca too at 1:12 PM on January 24, 2011
I'm Italian and I have very little trouble understanding Spanish, spoken or written. Most Spanish speaking people have no trouble understanding me, especially if I speak in the Venetian dialect, rather than in the official Italian, of Tuscan origin.
posted by francesca too at 1:12 PM on January 24, 2011
But that's not "all Romance languages". That's "A specific dialect of Italian and Spanish". It would also probably depend what sort of Spanish you speak - it's unlikely that a Sicilian and a Puerto Rican are going to be able to have a conversation with each speaker with only their native dialects.
I studied Spanish for many years, and that definitely informs my ability to get by in Italy - especially in terms of written language. When I was at an archaeological site in Peru, I accidentally joined an Italian language tour (long story), and I did OK. So I hear your point, definitely. You just can't generalize to "all Romance languages are mutually intelligible", which someone upthread insisted.
(FWIW, having studied Spanish, I still can't make heads or tails of the Venetian dialect.)
posted by Sara C. at 1:22 PM on January 24, 2011
I studied Spanish for many years, and that definitely informs my ability to get by in Italy - especially in terms of written language. When I was at an archaeological site in Peru, I accidentally joined an Italian language tour (long story), and I did OK. So I hear your point, definitely. You just can't generalize to "all Romance languages are mutually intelligible", which someone upthread insisted.
(FWIW, having studied Spanish, I still can't make heads or tails of the Venetian dialect.)
posted by Sara C. at 1:22 PM on January 24, 2011
I was taught Yiddish growing up and I was surprised how easily I was able to understand German.
posted by duddes02 at 1:27 PM on January 24, 2011
posted by duddes02 at 1:27 PM on January 24, 2011
Maybe this would have something to do with spelling vs. pronunciation, but having seen Old English and a few Old Norse languages written out, I'm going to say no. And certainly no to the idea that they would have been closer to each other than a US Southern drawl is to Caribbean-accented English.
Actually, they were quite similar. (I've even sat with (obviously, modern day!) Icelandic friends who are able to make out a giant percentage of Beowulf written in Old English, with no special training - Icelandic is the language that's changed least from the days of Old Norse.)
I quote:
Overwhelmingly the two languages show the same word-order patterns - as do the other Old Germanic languages, at least as far as can be determined from the fragments which have survived. It has long been recognised that Old English and Old Icelandic have a high proportion of common lexis and very similar morphology, yet the convention has been to emphasise the differences between the two as representatives respectively of the West and North sub-families of Germanic. (. . . ) Old English and Old Iceland were sufficiently close to be mutually comprehensible.
also:
Old Norse was mutually intelligible with Old English, Old Saxon and Old Low Franconian. It gradually evolved into the modern North Germanic languages: Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish.'
also:
The similarity between Old Norse and Old English led, in the situation of daily contact which obtained during the Viking period in the north of England, to grammatical borrowings from the former into the latter language. For instance, the plural pronouns of English begining in th-, i.e. they, them, their are of Scandinavian origin as is the plural of the verb be, i.e. are.
also:
Here's a poem by Egill Skallagrímsson:
Old English:
Þæt mælede mín módor
þæt me scolde ceapian
flæge and fægra ára,
faran aweg wið wícingum,
standan úppe in stefnan,
stíeran deorne cnear,
faran swá tó hæfene,
héawan man and óðer.
Old Icelandic/Old Norse:
Þat mælti mín móðir,
at mér skyldi kaupa
fley ok fagrar árar,
fara á brott með víkingum,
standa upp í stafni,
stýra dýrum knerri,
halda svá til hafnar
höggva mann ok annan.
Much more similar than many modern, mutually intelligible languages are.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 1:30 PM on January 24, 2011
Actually, they were quite similar. (I've even sat with (obviously, modern day!) Icelandic friends who are able to make out a giant percentage of Beowulf written in Old English, with no special training - Icelandic is the language that's changed least from the days of Old Norse.)
I quote:
Overwhelmingly the two languages show the same word-order patterns - as do the other Old Germanic languages, at least as far as can be determined from the fragments which have survived. It has long been recognised that Old English and Old Icelandic have a high proportion of common lexis and very similar morphology, yet the convention has been to emphasise the differences between the two as representatives respectively of the West and North sub-families of Germanic. (. . . ) Old English and Old Iceland were sufficiently close to be mutually comprehensible.
also:
Old Norse was mutually intelligible with Old English, Old Saxon and Old Low Franconian. It gradually evolved into the modern North Germanic languages: Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish.'
also:
The similarity between Old Norse and Old English led, in the situation of daily contact which obtained during the Viking period in the north of England, to grammatical borrowings from the former into the latter language. For instance, the plural pronouns of English begining in th-, i.e. they, them, their are of Scandinavian origin as is the plural of the verb be, i.e. are.
also:
Here's a poem by Egill Skallagrímsson:
Old English:
Þæt mælede mín módor
þæt me scolde ceapian
flæge and fægra ára,
faran aweg wið wícingum,
standan úppe in stefnan,
stíeran deorne cnear,
faran swá tó hæfene,
héawan man and óðer.
Old Icelandic/Old Norse:
Þat mælti mín móðir,
at mér skyldi kaupa
fley ok fagrar árar,
fara á brott með víkingum,
standa upp í stafni,
stýra dýrum knerri,
halda svá til hafnar
höggva mann ok annan.
Much more similar than many modern, mutually intelligible languages are.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 1:30 PM on January 24, 2011
I was taught Yiddish growing up and I was surprised how easily I was able to understand German.
Opposite for me - I'm amazed at how much Yiddish I understand, from my German studies and from my native Slavic word-stock, plus odds and ends from languages like Hungarian. Learn a few of the more often-used words that aren't Germanic or Slavic, and it's almost like getting to understand an extra language for free.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 1:32 PM on January 24, 2011
Opposite for me - I'm amazed at how much Yiddish I understand, from my German studies and from my native Slavic word-stock, plus odds and ends from languages like Hungarian. Learn a few of the more often-used words that aren't Germanic or Slavic, and it's almost like getting to understand an extra language for free.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 1:32 PM on January 24, 2011
Slightly off topic, but I lived in Germany as a child though I am British and, specifically, Scottish in upbringing. A friend and I (who also understands German), having never even heard Swedish being spoken before were able to sit and watch this Swedish film with barely a glance at the subtitles. Swedish sounds to me like German spoken with intonation and pronunciation common to spoken Scottish. It also seems to share a lot of words from the Scots vernacular.
posted by dougrayrankin at 2:28 PM on January 24, 2011
posted by dougrayrankin at 2:28 PM on January 24, 2011
French and Haitian Creole
For what it's worth, I speak good French and can't understand Creole at all, beyond picking out a word here and there.
posted by CunningLinguist at 3:02 PM on January 24, 2011
For what it's worth, I speak good French and can't understand Creole at all, beyond picking out a word here and there.
posted by CunningLinguist at 3:02 PM on January 24, 2011
My South African friend, whose mother tongue is Afrikaans, can understand both written and spoken Dutch with not much difficulty. However, when listening to a Dutch speaker, he may not be able to spell all the words he hears.
Also, while my friend's Afrikaans would be comprehensible to a Dutch speaker, his speech would sound broken or childish. That's because there are many ways in which Afrikaans grammar is simpler than that of Dutch, its parent language. For example, Afrikaans verbs do not conjugate differently according to the subject, and Afrikaans doesn't have grammatical gender like Dutch does.
So the two languages are mutually comprehensible, for the most part, but the Dutch speaker is on higher ground when it comes to understanding the other speaker because he won't find the Afrikaans language nearly as orthographically or grammatically complex as his own.
posted by datarose at 3:31 PM on January 24, 2011
Also, while my friend's Afrikaans would be comprehensible to a Dutch speaker, his speech would sound broken or childish. That's because there are many ways in which Afrikaans grammar is simpler than that of Dutch, its parent language. For example, Afrikaans verbs do not conjugate differently according to the subject, and Afrikaans doesn't have grammatical gender like Dutch does.
So the two languages are mutually comprehensible, for the most part, but the Dutch speaker is on higher ground when it comes to understanding the other speaker because he won't find the Afrikaans language nearly as orthographically or grammatically complex as his own.
posted by datarose at 3:31 PM on January 24, 2011
Not in a spoken way, but due to the use of kanji in both languages, many students at the university I taught at in China took Japanese to fill their non-English language requirement. While the kanji in the PRC has been simplified, it's still close enough for the students to understand it with little difficulty. Taiwan, from what I understand, doesn't use the simplified characters, so the overlap there is even more pronounced.
The one main difficulty seemed to be the various readings in Japanese, which are divided into two groups, one of which is descended from the original Chinese readings of the character. The other, originally Japanese reading is what caused most problems, or so I was told.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:48 PM on January 24, 2011
The one main difficulty seemed to be the various readings in Japanese, which are divided into two groups, one of which is descended from the original Chinese readings of the character. The other, originally Japanese reading is what caused most problems, or so I was told.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:48 PM on January 24, 2011
Swedish, Danish and the two varieties of Norwegian, are mutually intelligible. Not perfectly, but if you're say Danish then it's assumed you can study at university in Swedish.
Afrikaans and Dutch as mentioned above. And I've also heard it's easier for Dutch speakers to understand Afrikaans than the other way round.
Xhosa and Zulu are mutually intelligible. (Both are spoken in South Africa.)
I don't often think of Scots as a separate language (only because I am vague on where you draw the boundaries for languages) but I agree that it's mutually intelligible with English.
Also to note, not all varieties of English are mutually intelligible (well at least not without considerable effort) and I have met French people who claim not to understand francophone Quebecois.
I believe it takes some effort to make yourself understood between very similar language pairs. It's not exactly like speaking to a native speaker of your own language. I bet it's much harder for a non-native speaker.
posted by plonkee at 4:49 PM on January 24, 2011
Afrikaans and Dutch as mentioned above. And I've also heard it's easier for Dutch speakers to understand Afrikaans than the other way round.
Xhosa and Zulu are mutually intelligible. (Both are spoken in South Africa.)
I don't often think of Scots as a separate language (only because I am vague on where you draw the boundaries for languages) but I agree that it's mutually intelligible with English.
Also to note, not all varieties of English are mutually intelligible (well at least not without considerable effort) and I have met French people who claim not to understand francophone Quebecois.
I believe it takes some effort to make yourself understood between very similar language pairs. It's not exactly like speaking to a native speaker of your own language. I bet it's much harder for a non-native speaker.
posted by plonkee at 4:49 PM on January 24, 2011
Good examples of what you're talking about tend to go one way: a Portuguese native speaker will understand a lot of Spanish but not be able to reply; likewise, any native Afrikaans speaker can understand me, but I'll be damned if I cant make out half of what they're saying (same goes for Flemish or Masstrichtse).
posted by digitalprimate at 5:04 PM on January 24, 2011
posted by digitalprimate at 5:04 PM on January 24, 2011
All the Turkic languages are on a spectrum from Turkish.
Farsi amd Tajik.
posted by k8t at 5:57 PM on January 24, 2011
Farsi amd Tajik.
posted by k8t at 5:57 PM on January 24, 2011
Best answer: One of the things muddling the question of intelligibility is that it depends not only on similarity but also exposure, which again often goes mainly one way (depending on factors such as minority vs majority, cultural dominance, politics, media... even the use of subtitles vs dubbing).
WRT Finnish and Estonian: during the Cold War, the neighboring Estonians would often be able to watch Finnish TV broadcasts - for many the only western TV they had access to which made it very popular. As a result, Estonians who grew up behind the Iron Curtain often had a very good grasp of Finnish - whereas we Finns just thought their language was hilarious, because it sounded so much like ours but you just didn't understand a word. Then again, the potential for rather easy intelligibility is definitely there, once you learn the major grammatical differences and some vocabulary (and memorize the list of false friends which would get you a sausage when you order a Danish pastry and a cobblestone in stead of an omelette). The pronouns are similar, as are most of their cases and the general syntax. So, purely as anecdata, after just a few weekly hours on an Estonian language course, I only needed a dictionary to be able to make pretty neat translations of modern Estonian poetry (whereas I'm still not sure I could do that from English).
There's something similar going on between European Portuguese and Spanish (both of which I've studied). The Portuguese learn a lot of Spanish due to contact through business, travel and the media (theirs is also subtitled and not dubbed as in Spain). They tend to develop a pretty good idea of what the differences are, mostly understand a lot and sometimes they (think they) can speak/mimic Spanish without any formal study (although I've known Spaniards who found these attempts aggravating). The Spanish, on the other hand, often don't understand their Western neighbors at all, because although grammatically and vocabulary-wise quite similar, the pronunciation of Continental Portuguese is very different (to an untrained ear it sounds almost Slavic). That said, the Spaniards and Italians I knew in Portugal learned the language in a fraction of the time required by, say, speakers of Germanic languages with no prior experience in Romance languages.
I also studied Swedish at school, and most other Scandinavian languages are intelligible to me in their written form (probably with the exception of Icelandic, although I haven't tried), and some dialects I also understand fairly comfortably when spoken. When communicating with each other, I've seen Scandinavians sometimes resort to what they've referred to as "Skandinaviska", some kind of approximation of a clearly pronounced common language everyone's supposed to get - although in my experience it's closer to Swedish and e.g. the Danes have to make a bigger effort to get understood.
And a bit more anecdata: when I first started studying Dutch (which I now speak fluently), I was once googling some random topic and came across an interesting website written in what I at first glance thought was some kind of weird Dutch dialect (I was able to read it), and only a moment later realized was Afrikaans. When traveling in South Africa, I definitely noticed that many Afrikaans speakers were able to understand a lot of Dutch (e.g. spontaneously chiming in after overhearing our conversations), but they still preferred to speak English with us. My overall impression was that in a pinch, I'm pretty sure we would've been able to communicate using Dutch and Afrikaans only.
That said, differences due to dialect can be huge within a language. Officially, Belgian Flemish is the same language as Dutch spoken in the Netherlands. I speak both, and have met many Dutch people who seem to consider the Belgian variant to be a different language, which I personally think is nuts. It boils down to how one defines intelligibility. Enough to get your tank filled and to buy a coke? To be able to have a conversation about local history? To get a punny joke, or realize when you're being insulted? Didn't the American audience need subtitles for Trainspotting?
posted by sively at 2:58 AM on January 25, 2011 [4 favorites]
WRT Finnish and Estonian: during the Cold War, the neighboring Estonians would often be able to watch Finnish TV broadcasts - for many the only western TV they had access to which made it very popular. As a result, Estonians who grew up behind the Iron Curtain often had a very good grasp of Finnish - whereas we Finns just thought their language was hilarious, because it sounded so much like ours but you just didn't understand a word. Then again, the potential for rather easy intelligibility is definitely there, once you learn the major grammatical differences and some vocabulary (and memorize the list of false friends which would get you a sausage when you order a Danish pastry and a cobblestone in stead of an omelette). The pronouns are similar, as are most of their cases and the general syntax. So, purely as anecdata, after just a few weekly hours on an Estonian language course, I only needed a dictionary to be able to make pretty neat translations of modern Estonian poetry (whereas I'm still not sure I could do that from English).
There's something similar going on between European Portuguese and Spanish (both of which I've studied). The Portuguese learn a lot of Spanish due to contact through business, travel and the media (theirs is also subtitled and not dubbed as in Spain). They tend to develop a pretty good idea of what the differences are, mostly understand a lot and sometimes they (think they) can speak/mimic Spanish without any formal study (although I've known Spaniards who found these attempts aggravating). The Spanish, on the other hand, often don't understand their Western neighbors at all, because although grammatically and vocabulary-wise quite similar, the pronunciation of Continental Portuguese is very different (to an untrained ear it sounds almost Slavic). That said, the Spaniards and Italians I knew in Portugal learned the language in a fraction of the time required by, say, speakers of Germanic languages with no prior experience in Romance languages.
I also studied Swedish at school, and most other Scandinavian languages are intelligible to me in their written form (probably with the exception of Icelandic, although I haven't tried), and some dialects I also understand fairly comfortably when spoken. When communicating with each other, I've seen Scandinavians sometimes resort to what they've referred to as "Skandinaviska", some kind of approximation of a clearly pronounced common language everyone's supposed to get - although in my experience it's closer to Swedish and e.g. the Danes have to make a bigger effort to get understood.
And a bit more anecdata: when I first started studying Dutch (which I now speak fluently), I was once googling some random topic and came across an interesting website written in what I at first glance thought was some kind of weird Dutch dialect (I was able to read it), and only a moment later realized was Afrikaans. When traveling in South Africa, I definitely noticed that many Afrikaans speakers were able to understand a lot of Dutch (e.g. spontaneously chiming in after overhearing our conversations), but they still preferred to speak English with us. My overall impression was that in a pinch, I'm pretty sure we would've been able to communicate using Dutch and Afrikaans only.
That said, differences due to dialect can be huge within a language. Officially, Belgian Flemish is the same language as Dutch spoken in the Netherlands. I speak both, and have met many Dutch people who seem to consider the Belgian variant to be a different language, which I personally think is nuts. It boils down to how one defines intelligibility. Enough to get your tank filled and to buy a coke? To be able to have a conversation about local history? To get a punny joke, or realize when you're being insulted? Didn't the American audience need subtitles for Trainspotting?
posted by sively at 2:58 AM on January 25, 2011 [4 favorites]
Tibetan and Bhutanese according to MrTaff... the Tibetan husband.
posted by taff at 4:17 AM on January 25, 2011
posted by taff at 4:17 AM on January 25, 2011
Response by poster: Thank you for your answers everyone!
Plenty of useful (and perhaps not so useful stuff) there.
posted by jonesor at 10:43 AM on January 26, 2011
Plenty of useful (and perhaps not so useful stuff) there.
posted by jonesor at 10:43 AM on January 26, 2011
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posted by Gilbert at 8:39 AM on January 24, 2011