Merger of mutually intelligible languages

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Isfendil
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Re: Merger of mutually intelligible languages

Post by Isfendil »

qwed117 wrote:
Isfendil wrote:I do not know for certain but don't all Romance languages in the Southwestern Mediterranean form a dialect continuum?
Not to my knowledge. This would include Catalan, Sardinian, Genoese, French, Occitan, Italian, Neapolitan, and many distinct languages.
No but I heard that in each village from one language to another there are intermediate dialects that connect these separate languages.

Also, unrelated, but to comment on Arabic: I know an Arabic speaker who was raised in the Egyptian school system. She firmly asserts that at least the western asian dialects of Arabic are all mutually intelligable and she equated them with various accents of english to show me how she thought they were different from hers.

Furthermore, Maltese in basic vocabulary is still fully intelligable with speakers of Tunisian arabic as they themselves often state, although they are often ignored for some reason... At any rate, if the speaker knows Italian then it is almost entirely possible for them to understand and even speak Maltese.

Granted, in the Arabic world everyone learns Classical Arabic anyway so there's no reason for the dialects to reconverge.
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Re: Merger of mutually intelligible languages

Post by Salmoneus »

Isfendil wrote:
qwed117 wrote:
Isfendil wrote:I do not know for certain but don't all Romance languages in the Southwestern Mediterranean form a dialect continuum?
Not to my knowledge. This would include Catalan, Sardinian, Genoese, French, Occitan, Italian, Neapolitan, and many distinct languages.
No but I heard that in each village from one language to another there are intermediate dialects that connect these separate languages.
You may be referring to the old saying that in 1800 you could walk from Paris to Lisbon without noticing a change in language from one village to the next.

It may well be true, if you'd picked the right route. But the same isn't true today, I don't think, due to centralisation and standardisation of languages. For instance, in 1800 you'd have gone from Catalan to the closely-related Occitan, and it's very believable that speakers on the border of Catalan and Occitan would have spoken an intermediate form. But today, Catalan is more standardised, and entire dialects of Occitan have been wiped out, and most of those former Occitan villages now speak a form of French.
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Isfendil
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Re: Merger of mutually intelligible languages

Post by Isfendil »

Salmoneus wrote:
Isfendil wrote:
qwed117 wrote:
Isfendil wrote:I do not know for certain but don't all Romance languages in the Southwestern Mediterranean form a dialect continuum?
Not to my knowledge. This would include Catalan, Sardinian, Genoese, French, Occitan, Italian, Neapolitan, and many distinct languages.
No but I heard that in each village from one language to another there are intermediate dialects that connect these separate languages.
You may be referring to the old saying that in 1800 you could walk from Paris to Lisbon without noticing a change in language from one village to the next.

It may well be true, if you'd picked the right route. But the same isn't true today, I don't think, due to centralisation and standardisation of languages. For instance, in 1800 you'd have gone from Catalan to the closely-related Occitan, and it's very believable that speakers on the border of Catalan and Occitan would have spoken an intermediate form. But today, Catalan is more standardised, and entire dialects of Occitan have been wiped out, and most of those former Occitan villages now speak a form of French.
Sigh... I had almost tricked myself into forgetting that French fascism exists...

What about in Spain or Italy itself?
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Re: Merger of mutually intelligible languages

Post by Vlürch »

I know this is from two years ago, but...
Xonen wrote:
*Estonian and Finnish
Where do people keep getting this misconception? Yes, lots of Estonians understand Finnish, but that's largely because the older generations grew up watching Finnish television (it being vastly preferable to their own Soviet-approved channels, from what I understand), and the younger ones often learn Finnish because it's seen as good for one's job-getting prospects and stuff (and relatively easy to learn, of course). But no, the languages are not mutually intelligible.
This. Also, it doesn't work the other way at all; for the average Finn, Estonian is complete gibberish. It honestly sounds like a really drunk person with severe "challenges" trying to speak Finnish, and the number of false friends is basically greater than the number of true friends. The grammar is overall similar, but Estonian has palatalisation, different vowel harmony (or does it even have any vowel harmony at all?), etc.
Isfendil wrote:What about in Spain or Italy itself?
I thought it was a lot worse in Spain, that even Catalans don't speak Catalan anymore except for a minority; according to Wikipedia, only 35.6% have it as their native language. In Italy, doesn't every small town still have its own unique dialect to this day that isn't mutually intelligible with other dialects?
Isfendil wrote:I heard that in each village from one language to another there are intermediate dialects that connect these separate languages.
I've heard the same thing, and it's probably still true to some extent if we're talking about the smallest possible villages in the most remote corners of Europe that have never been affected by the fuckbuttery of linguistic policies. I once read somewhere that there were still like a dozen unclassified languages spoken in Europe, but that was probably referring to divergent dialects that haven't been researched enough to conclusively place in the otherwise extinct continuums and are only spoken by old people, and my memory isn't that great, so I'm probably mixing something up...
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Re: Merger of mutually intelligible languages

Post by qwed117 »

Italy is worse because it refuses to have any of its languages recognized. It's a fight, well after just recognization, as the act of speaking a local language can get you blacklisted from teaching classes. (At least, that was the case up until the 1970s). Sardinian is fucked because the more prestigious languages are supported so that they can cannibalize each other and fall to Italian.
Spoiler:
My minicity is [http://zyphrazia.myminicity.com/xml]Zyphrazia and [http://novland.myminicity.com/xml]Novland.

Minicity has fallen :(
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Re: Merger of mutually intelligible languages

Post by Davush »

Isfendil wrote: Also, unrelated, but to comment on Arabic: I know an Arabic speaker who was raised in the Egyptian school system. She firmly asserts that at least the western asian dialects of Arabic are all mutually intelligable and she equated them with various accents of english to show me how she thought they were different from hers.
I'm not exactly sure what is included in 'Western Asian' dialects, but the dialects of the Levant are mostly mutually intelligible. Egyptian is familiar to most of the Arab world because of the amount of media exposure people have had.

The North African, Gulf and South Arabian dialects are not really intelligible to those who haven't been exposed to them. Gulf dialects are becoming more widely understood because of a lot of popular Kuwaiti and Emirati TV series.

There's also the question of just 'how dialectical' the speaker is. For example, Gulf and Iraqi dialects when spoken using 'pure' dialectal forms are quite unintelligible to the rest of the Arabic-speaking world. But, when a gulf speaker goes to Egypt, s/he would probably speak something like an 'informal' MSA or an 'Egyptianised' form of their native dialect. Basically, there is a bit of levelling when two speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects come together. It's rarely full MSA in informal settings, more like a koiné of sorts.
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Re: Merger of mutually intelligible languages

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Vlürch wrote:The grammar is overall similar, but Estonian has palatalisation, different vowel harmony (or does it even have any vowel harmony at all?
Standard Estonian has no vowel harmony; some dialects do. But then, Savonian dialects of Finnish also feature palatalization and some truly wacky vowel changes, and yet they are mutually intelligible with Standard Finnish (well, at least mostly). Systematic phonological differences have surprisingly little effect on intelligibility, at least until a lot of them have accumulated; even Estonian might still be at least sort of intelligible to us if that was all there was to it. However, differences in vocabulary destroy mutual intelligibility quite quickly. For example, speakers of Kven-Meänkieli have only been isolated from Finnish for a couple of centuries, and speak something that is phonologically almost identical to northern dialects of Finnish - and yet they find standard Finnish difficult enough to consider it a different language.
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Re: Merger of mutually intelligible languages

Post by Vlürch »

Xonen wrote:
Vlürch wrote:The grammar is overall similar, but Estonian has palatalisation, different vowel harmony (or does it even have any vowel harmony at all?
Savonian dialects of Finnish also feature palatalization and some truly wacky vowel changes, and yet they are mutually intelligible with Standard Finnish (well, at least mostly).
Weird. My dad's side of the family is from Savo and around and I've never heard any palatalisation. /ʃ/ and /t͡ʃ/ in some words, etc. and insertion of [j] between some vowels or after consonants sometimes, yeah, which might sometimes include palatalisation (for example, if "kiersin", standardly [kie̯rsin], is pronounced more like [kjærsin] or [kʲeæ̯rɕin] or whatever), but I don't think I've ever heard any of them pronounce anything with proper palatalisation in the sense that it would happen by itself without affecting vowels as well. Then again, it's been years since I've spoken to my grandma and my grandpa is dead, and the last time I saw any of my cousins was at least two years ago (and even then it was very briefly), so yeah, I don't socialise much and could be missing out on all the epic palatal action. [>:|]

Also, even though my mum's side of the family is partially from Karelia, there is literally no way for any to understand any of the more distinct Karelian dialects, let alone the Karelian language (which I guess is technically not a single language, and it's not like there is even a clear line where Karelian dialects of Finnish end and Karelian language begins beyond politics, so...) as evident from some documentary that was once on TV about some Karelian old people; they were on the Finnish side of the border and their speech was apparently considered intelligible enough for all the standard Finnish-speakers that no subtitles were available, but neither me nor my mum understood even half of what they were saying. I mean, a part of it was because they were old as fuck, since they even threw some [ɬ~ɮ] around as if their shit was Mongolian, but still.

Well, I'm fairly certain no Finnic language could ever have any lateral fricatives even if some Uralic languages like Forest Nenets do have them, especially nothing close to Finnish. Then again, Komi-Permyak supposedly has a bilabial trill, which... well...
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Re: Merger of mutually intelligible languages

Post by Xonen »

Vlürch wrote:
Xonen wrote:
Vlürch wrote:The grammar is overall similar, but Estonian has palatalisation, different vowel harmony (or does it even have any vowel harmony at all?
Savonian dialects of Finnish also feature palatalization and some truly wacky vowel changes, and yet they are mutually intelligible with Standard Finnish (well, at least mostly).
Weird. My dad's side of the family is from Savo and around and I've never heard any palatalisation. /ʃ/ and /t͡ʃ/ in some words, etc. and insertion of [j] between some vowels or after consonants sometimes
The thing that in writing is represented by <j> after a consonant in words like tulj, vesj, mänj etc. is palatalization, at least historically (see eg. here). Perhaps some modern-day Savonians have started actually pronouncing a post-consonantal [j] in such positions, although at least personally I find such a thing really difficult to articulate.

As for /ʃ/ and /t͡ʃ/, those are typical in Karelian, but where do they occur in Savonian?
(for example, if "kiersin", standardly [kie̯rsin], is pronounced more like [kjærsin] or [kʲeæ̯rɕin] or whatever)
Again, not a typical Savonian feature, at least according to the literature; rather, you should get keänsin or kiänsin for Standard käänsin (kiärsin for kiersin would, instead, be a typical Southwestern form, but in that case, the /k/ should probably not be palatalized).

Then again, I'm mostly going by what I've read on the subject, and that can be a few decades out of date, as well as largely based on the field notes of a few individual researchers... Maybe we'd need someone to do a big new phonetic study of Finnish dialects in the 21st century, with proper measuring equipment and whatnot.
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Re: Merger of mutually intelligible languages

Post by Vlürch »

Xonen wrote:is palatalization
Eh.
Xonen wrote:As for /ʃ/ and /t͡ʃ/, those are typical in Karelian, but where do they occur in Savonian?
Well, I don't really know if anyone in my family speaks any actual "dialects" rather than some weird ass mixture, but like, my dad pronounces (and his dad pronounced) some words with /ts/ in them with [t͡ʃ], and I personally even have some difficulty telling where syllables separate in words with "ts" in them; if I say "metsä", it's either [me.t͡ʃæ~met.t͡ʃæ~met͡ʃ.t͡ʃæ] or [met.tæ~me.tːæ~met.tːæ~metː.tæ~metː.tːæ]. Usually the latter, which is weird because no one I know pronounces it like that and it's western as fuck... but I can't get rid of it, it's just the easiest pronunciation of the word for me. If I try to pronounce the "ts" as /ts/, it'll come out as [me.t͡sæ~met.t͡sæ~met͡s.t͡sæ] and no matter what, I just can't pronounce it [met.sæ] naturally. It's not a big difference, of course, and doesn't even have any potential for being misunderstood as any other word, but the thing with every word with /ts/ is that it feels really weird for my tongue to articulate the /t/ and /s/ separately.

...maybe I was Swedish in a past life. :roll:
Xonen wrote:
(for example, if "kiersin", standardly [kie̯rsin], is pronounced more like [kjærsin] or [kʲeæ̯rɕin] or whatever)
Again, not a typical Savonian feature, at least according to the literature; rather, you should get keänsin or kiänsin for Standard käänsin (kiärsin for kiersin would, instead, be a typical Southwestern form, but in that case, the /k/ should probably not be palatalized).
Interestingly, if I say "käänsin" instinctionally in a non-standard "dialectal" way, it is something like [kʲiæ̯nsin~kʲeæ̯nsin]... but I mean, I've grown up in Helsinki with only summers in Savonranta until gradually less and less as I was 15-18, and I make sure to speak as standardly as I can even with my closest relatives because they also do that, as does literally everyone else. Any kind of "dialectal" things feel really embarrassing, so... yeah, my super relaxed speech would probably just be a mix of stuff I've caught in the random embarrassing non-standard slips from everyone. [:P]
Xonen wrote:Then again, I'm mostly going by what I've read on the subject, and that can be a few decades out of date, as well as largely based on the field notes of a few individual researchers... Maybe we'd need someone to do a big new phonetic study of Finnish dialects in the 21st century, with proper measuring equipment and whatnot.
Yeah, it'd be interesting and useful if someone did something like that, but you know... no one has any interest in Finnish dialects, especially when they're taught to be wrong since kindergarten and kids are "corrected" if they pronounce anything in a non-standard manner... [D;]
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