# Mutual intelligibility among Germanic languages



## Dymn

I have the impression that between the three biggest European families Germanic languages are the ones which have a lowest mutual intelligibility among themselves. Then Romance would follow and finally Slavic.

I'd like to know if you also would rank them like this but first of all we should discuss which degree of mutual intelligibility there's among Germanic languages.

Even though the official branching separates the West Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch) and the North Germanic (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic) if I were to do the classification of these modern languages I'd separate English from Dutch and German.

So, in a nutshell, what degree of intelligibility do you think there is among Germanic languages? Are perhaps Romance languages more intelligible for Anglophones than Dutch and German despite their (strongest) common origin?


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## Unoverwordinesslogged

Where did Scots go?

Germans can't even understand Swiss and Austrian.


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## Dan2

There are huge differences in mutual intelligibility (MI) depending on which pairs of languages you consider.  For ex., in the Germanic family, Norwegian and Swedish have far greater MI than Norwegian and English.  In Romance, compare Spanish/Italian and Spanish/Romanian.  So are you asking, "If you _averaged _over all pairs of languages in each group..."?

Also: I assume you are asking about intelligibility in _spoken _language.  The facts are different for written language.  (A monolingual American would get much more from a French newspaper than a German one. (But even for French true intelligibility would be low.))

As for the actual MI's within each branch: there have been a lot of threads about this.


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## Unoverwordinesslogged

An monolingual German would get much more from BOTH an American poem(written) and song(spoken) than anything in French and other languages from the south.


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## berndf

Diamant7 said:


> Even though the official branching separates the West Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch) and the North Germanic (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic) if I were to do the classification of these modern languages I'd separate English from Dutch and German.


I agree. English has taken two or three different turns too many to be regarded as sharing the level of closeness with other West Germanic languages than those do among themselves.


Diamant7 said:


> Even though the official branching separates the West Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch) and the North Germanic (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic) if I were to do the classification of these modern languages I'd separate English from Dutch and German.


Icelandic is a somewhat special story. Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are quite close to West Germanic languages because of their large lexicon of Low German loans. That makes Danish or Swedish very easy to reads for a German, especially one who is familiar with Low German. Understanding and speaking is a different story. The differences in phoneme realization make it rather difficult to identify a spoken word that is easily recognized in writing. Phonetically, Danish is probably the most difficult of the northern languages. Would you identify this and this as cognates? I certainly wouldn't. In writing with some background knowledge maybe, but not pronounced.


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## fdb

“Classification” and “mutual intelligibility” are two different issues. Classification is based on shared innovations. Mutual intelligibility involves many other factors, including loanwords (as Bernd has mentioned). English is Low Germanic and thus closer to Dutch than Dutch is to (High) German. Dutch and German speakers can just about understand each other, but other factors are involved here, such as the fact that most Dutch people learn German in school, and that most Northern Germans have some exposure to Low German dialects. English speakers do not normally understand Dutch or German, but all Dutch and most Germans understand English perfectly, for reasons that have nothing to do with linguistic classification.


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## Dan2

You make very important points, fdb, but just in the interest of focusing on the topic as defined by the OP:


fdb said:


> “Classification” and “mutual intelligibility” are two different issues.


Right, but the OP clearly understands this, even suggesting that Romance languages may be more intelligible to English speakers than other Germanic languages are.  (Actually, I believe that aside from artificially slow speech with carefully selected vocabulary, NO foreign language has any significant degree of MI with English.)


fdb said:


> ... but all Dutch and most Germans understand English perfectly, for reasons that have nothing to do with linguistic classification.


Right, but the question at hand is, for ex., how well would a monolingual Dutch speaker understand English, not how well does the average resident of present-day Netherlands understand English.  The fact that Dutch speakers with no exposure to English are a rare species simply means that this cell of the OP's matrix will be a hard one to fill.

In my first post I suggested ways in which I thought the topic needed to be better defined.  Here's another important consideration, the old "dialect with an army and navy" issue.  In the Nordic forum, at least one native-Scandinavian linguist has said that Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are simply a continuum of dialects, which we refer to with three distinct names only because of national boundaries; and in fact (my words) there are Norwegian dialects N1 and N2, and Swedish dialect S, such that N1 is closer to S than it is to N2.  So we'd be within our rights to collapse these three "languages" into "Scandinavian", in which case the "average pairwise MI" of Germanic would be much lower than with recognition of the traditional three languages.

Similarly for Romance, where we'd have to make decisions about Aragonese, Galician, Sicilian, etc.

In fact, people often define two dialects as separate languages only if they are NOT mutually intelligible.  If we accept that definition then the answer to the OP question is that the languages of each of the families have zero MI!

But I don't think a simple "are they mutually intelligible?" test suffices to define "languages".  First of all, the degree of mutual intelligibility varies greatly with speaking style and subject matter.  I've never studied Portuguese, but I've heard news broadcasts in that language where my level of understanding was very high (based on my knowledge of Spanish) and rapidly-spoken informal conversations where I've understood nothing.  Assuming native speakers of Spanish have similar experiences, are Spanish and Portuguese mutually intelligible?  Then there's the old "visit each village between Berlin and Amsterdam" paradox (excellent MI between adjacent towns, so at no point reason to talk about different languages... but Berlin and Amsterdam are _not _MI).

For all these reasons, while I find Diamant7's question, and this whole issue of mutual intelligibility, very interesting, I think his question is close to impossible to answer in a rigorous way.


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## Gavril

Just today, I overheard someone say that he has to get his wife to "translate" for him when he hears English spoken in a different accent than his. (He and his wife both seemed to be American.) An exaggeration, no doubt, but there are probably some speakers for whom this isn't far from the truth.


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## Ben Jamin

Diamant7 said:


> I have the impression that between the three biggest European families Germanic languages are the ones which have a lowest mutual intelligibility among themselves. Then Romance would follow and finally Slavic.


Your gradation is quite arbitrary, and almost impossible to prove right or wrong. Concerning Slavic languages: you have pairs like Czech and Slovak with approx. 90% of intelligibility, and pairs like Polish and Bulgarian with may be 10%, compared to for example Spanish and Italian (approx. 50%), or French and Romanian (maybe 5%). How can you infer which group has a higher lever of intelligibility?


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## merquiades

From the point of view of English speaking people no foreign languages are intelligible if they do not study them formally.  As far as reading, sometimes you can get the gist in written French because so much vocabulary is shared (58% Latin and French).  When you study German some links become apparent over time,  Ich komme/ I come, but you need a formal class to undo all those turns that have separated them.

I have seen a Dutch speaker understand spoken German as spoken by Austrians.  They did not understand her though when she spoke in Dutch.  Having studied a bit of both, they have a similar feel to them, the grammar especially, also the vocabulary, yet sometimes Dutch has a more English looking word than German does.

The Scandinavian languages have high mutual intelligibility; Norwegian and Danish share a written standard

For Slavic languages, a Ukrainian national told me that Russian and Ukrainian are so close that sometimes she doesn't know which word is Russian and which Ukrainian.  The pronunciation diverges though, and noticeable, but even there, some people speak Russian with Ukrainian pronunciations, while others Ukrainian with Russian pronunciation.  In general she said in Kiev she doesn't really even notice which language someone is speaking because everyone understands both perfectly.  They are intertwined.   This might be the best sign of a mutual understanding between languages.
I remember reading that Czech and Slovak are accepted for each other on their respective television/ radio networks.

@Diamant7 , there was a thread open here about German-Dutch-Scandinavian mutual intelligibility.  Maybe you can find the answers you are looking for.


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## Ben Jamin

Individual differences between people can vary enormously, so taking single persons as examples proves nothing. If you take two randomly chosen speakers of one language and expose them to a language from the same "family" then there is a chance that one of them will say "I understand almost everything" and the other "I understand nothing".


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## Unoverwordinesslogged

Diamant7 said:


> I have the impression that between the three biggest European families Germanic languages are the ones which have a lowest mutual intelligibility among themselves. Then Romance would follow and finally Slavic.
> 
> I'd like to know if you also would rank them like this but first of all we should discuss which degree of mutual intelligibility there's among Germanic languages.
> 
> Even though the official branching separates the West Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch) and the North Germanic (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic) if I were to do the classification of these modern languages I'd separate English from Dutch and German.
> 
> So, in a nutshell, what degree of intelligibility do you think there is among Germanic languages? Are perhaps Romance languages more intelligible for Anglophones than Dutch and German despite their (strongest) common origin?



I don't believe you know or understand Icelandic to know how well it is or is not understood by other Germanic speakers, to include it in your agenda.

Has for 'intelligible' I would add that has an English 'mothertunger', I understand other Germanic placenames and their wordbits far more than Romance placenames, even though I go out of my way to understand Romance placenames. Nevertheless though, I bet most everyday mothertongue English speakers would not see the alikeness between say stead/sted and German 'stadt' and Danish 'sted' - thats because most folk on the British Islands are just not into stuff like that unlike say your average Euro or Americun.

Also, you are forgetting the European obsession with 'purity' and how may times the words borne from Sub-Loirean tongues like French, Latin, Greek and other Romance and fremd words have been cleansed from other west Germanic speech. Whereas English, if anything has only been interested in anything but its inborn wordhoard.

Lastly, I would add, even though you feel English speakers understand better Romance speakers than Germanic speakers, what I witnessed whilst camping is, how the group of British and Dutch youngsters so effortlessly got on much more naturally with one another than the French group of youngsters. The Germanic speakers (British and Dutch) were so much more confident and carefree.


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## Nino83

Dan2 said:


> Similarly for Romance, where we'd have to make decisions about Aragonese, Galician, Sicilian, etc.



Except French and Romanian, the other Romance languages are different in some consonant clusters (for example Latin _pl, kl_ and _fl_ are _ʃ_ in Portuguese, _ʎ_ in Spanish, _pj, kj, fj_ in Central Italian languages, _kj, kj, ʧ_ in Neapolitan and Sicilian) but only few consonants (not clusters) differ (for example Western Romance merged _ke/i, tj, s_ in _s_, except Peninsular Spanish, except Andalusia, which retained the difference between _θ_ and_ s_), if we exclude some intervocalic lenition/sonorization (which don't pose great problems, _fado/fato_ or _ato/atto_) while in Germanic languages the differences are greater.  

So if you know that _llove_ = _piove_ then when a Spanish will say _llano_ it's not so difficult to guess that this word is _piano_. In the other cases the words are simply the same (_casa, peso, hora/ora, cuando/quando_) or very similar (_bueno/buono, viento/vento, tiempo/tempo_).  

But I think that the main difference is about vocabulary and syntax. 
The sentence structure is very different in English, "Scandinavian" and Dutch/German, while in Romance languages it is identical and if you add that the great part of vocabulary is the same, you can conclude that MI is pretty high.  

Also a lot of expressions are the same (for example, _non vedo l'ora di vederti, no veo la hora de verte, não vejo a hora de te ver, je ne vois pas l'heure de te voir = I can't wait to see you_).  

So, seeing this similarity between the languages spoken in different Romance countries, it is probable that the situation of Sicilian, Neapolitan, Aragonese, Leonese and Galician is similar to that between Norwegian and Swedish.  
Among these languages, what changes most is the pronunciation of unstressed vowels.  



Dan2 said:


> For all these reasons, while I find Diamant7's question, and this whole issue of mutual intelligibility, very interesting, I think his question is close to impossible to answer in a rigorous way.



I agree. We can make comparisons between two languages at once.  
For example, we could ask if there are two Germanic languages (apart the Scandinavian ones) that have more MI than, for example, Spanish and Galician-Portuguese (Galician, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese) or between Spanish and Italian or Tuscan and Sicilian.


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## killerbee256

Maybe, maybe Dutch and Standard German.


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## Gavril

The mutual intelligibility of Romance languages is probably increased (hugely) by the number of words that have been reimported from Latin, after the initial waves of sound change and semantic shift in each language. E.g. common Spanish words like _rápido, quieto _and_ próximo_ are much closer to their Italian equivalents than they would be if they were part of the oldest stratum of vocabulary.

The Germanic languages don't have an equivalent of Latin in this sense, so they are at a disadvantage in their potential for mutual intelligibility. There was once an active process of importing Low German words into Scandinavian, but there isn't anymore, and there is no tradition in e.g. English and German of introducing old Gothic words into their vocabularies.

Latin itself (maybe along with Greek) seems to be the main source of new shared vocabulary in the Germanic languages: cf. Eng. _accept_ : German _akzeptieren_, E. _plausible_ : G. _plausibel_, E. _analysis_ : G. _Analyse, _etc.


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## merquiades

Gavril said:


> Latin itself (maybe along with Greek) seems to be the main source of new shared vocabulary in the Germanic languages: cf. Eng. _accept_ : German _akzeptieren_, E. _plausible_ : G. _plausibel_, E. _analysis_ : G. _Analyse, _etc.


 I would add that the hundreds of cases when a Romance word has not been imported into English but not into German, etc. make communication more difficult:  difficult -schwer, salmon- Lachs, television - Fernseher, train - Zug, table - Tisch, dentist - Zahnarzt, mountian - Berg.


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## Nino83

Gavril said:


> The mutual intelligibility of Romance languages is probably increased (hugely) by the number of words that have been reimported from Latin, after the initial waves of sound change and semantic shift in each language. E.g. common Spanish words like _rápido, quieto _and_ próximo_ are much closer to their Italian equivalents than they would be if they were part of the oldest stratum of vocabulary.



Also with words of popular origin, similarity is great.
Vowels are the same (with the exception of the diphthongization of /è, ò/ in closed syllables in Spanish), if we exclude consonant clusters like _pl, kl, fl,_ (in initial and medial position) and _lj, bj, dj, kt, ks_ (in medial position), you find that all initial consonants (except _f > h_ in Spanish) are the same, most consonants in intervocalic position too.
Some example:
equal: _la*v*ar, ca*s*a, di*c*e, a*l*a, a*m*ar/a*m*are, bue*n*o/buo*n*o, co*r*azon/cuo*r*e_
sonorized: _ami*g*o/ami*c*o, la*d*o/la*t*o, sa*b*er/sa*p*ere_
dropped: _creer/cre*d*ere, liar/le*g*are_

Do you find a similar situation between German and "Scandinavian", Dutch and "Scandinavian", "Scandinavian" and German, Dutch and German, English and German (it is a serious question, not rhetorical)?


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## Gavril

Nino83 said:


> Also with words of popular origin, similarity is great.
> Vowels are the same (with the exception of the diphthongization of /è, ò/ in closed syllables in Spanish), if we exclude consonant clusters like _pl, kl, fl,_ (in initial and medial position) and _lj, bj, dj, kt, ks_ (in medial position), you find that all initial consonants (except _f > h_ in Spanish) are the same, most consonants in intervocalic position too.



The differences you mention could add up to quite a bit of difficulty in mutual understanding, when taken together (and when combined with semantic change).

For example, can you easily find the Italian equivalent of Spanish _sendos_ (I'm not sure if Italian has one) and thereby guess what _sendos_ means?



> _ co*r*azon/cuo*r*e
> creer/cre*d*ere
> liar/le*g*are_



Of the pairs you listed, I can imagine these ones especially causing problems for a monolingual Romance speaker, though of course it's hard to put myself in that person's shoes.



> Do you find a similar situation between German and "Scandinavian", Dutch and "Scandinavian", "Scandinavian" and German, Dutch and German, English and German (it is a serious question, not rhetorical)?



Roughly speaking, it seems to me that shared consonants are relatively easy to identify between Germanic languages, whereas the vowels have drifted much further apart in each sub-branch. For example, the vowel "i" in English (high unrounded front vowel) can correspond to [e] (_sea_ : G. _See_), [au] (_dream_ : _Traum_), [ø] (Norwegian _drøm_ "dream") and more besides this in other Gmc. languages.

The biggest "problem consonant" across the Germanic languages may be [g], especially in non-initial position: compare German _Sorge_ vs. English _sorrow_, G. _tragen_ vs. E. _draw_, G. _Sieg_ vs. Norwegian _seier_, Icelandic _tryggur_ "loyal" vs. G. _vertrauen_ "trust"


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## berndf

Gavril said:


> Roughly speaking, it seems to me that shared consonants are relatively easy to identify between Germanic languages


Not always. See my example above about the fate of the /t/ in _gate_ in Danish and German. The loss of the English <gh> obscures a good deal of cognates which would otherwise be absolutely trivial, _light-Licht, knight-Knecht, though-doch, ..._


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## ger4

Gavril said:


> [...] The biggest "problem consonant" across the Germanic languages may be [g], especially in non-initial position: compare German _Sorge_ vs. English _sorrow_, G. _tragen_ vs. E. _draw_, G. _Sieg_ vs. Norwegian _seier_, Icelandic _tryggur_ "loyal" vs. G. _vertrauen_ "trust"


I'd like to add that in Danish, -k- has undergone a similar process after some vowels, as in 'to calculate, reckon' :  Dutch _rekenen_ /-k-/,  Swedish _räkna_ /-k-/,  Danish _regne_ /'ʁɑjnə/ - the spelling has changed from -k- to -g- but the change in pronunciation has gone even further to /j/, affecting the preceding vowel (forming a diphtong).

A similar example would be a cognate with English 'sake', Swedish sak /-k/, Danish sa_g_ /sæ:ʔj/.>>

In a compound like _sagfører_ , 'solicitor',   >> the  pronunciation of -a- as /æ:/ changes to a shortened vowel /ɑ/ which in turn seems to affect the following consonant - spelt -g- but pronounced /w/ instead of /j/--> /ˈsɑwˌføːʌ/. Quite confusing...

---
Edit: There is a thread about mutual intelligibility within the North Germanic languages >> 

Edit (2)... and another one: >> The discussion is in English, except for #46 (partly in Norwegian) and a reply in #54 - in Danish.


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## berndf

Holger2014 said:


> Quite confusing...


That is probably a good description of anything to do with Danish phonology from the perspective of a non-Dane.


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## Nino83

Gavril said:


> Roughly speaking, it seems to me that shared consonants are relatively easy to identify between Germanic languages, whereas the vowels have drifted much further apart in each sub-branch.



Then, if we let apart English (whose vowels changed too much), is it possible for a German to understand spoken Dutch or spoken Swedish like an Italian can understand spoken Spanish? I.e can they have a very basic conversation?


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## Gavril

Nino83 said:


> Then, if we let apart English (whose vowels changed too much), is it possible for a German to understand spoken Dutch or spoken Swedish like an Italian can understand spoken Spanish? I.e can they have a very basic conversation?



The vowel-divergences within Germanic are not restricted to English. Compare the following:

German Herz : Swedish hjärta
Dutch dier : Sw. djur
G. teuer : Norwegian dyr
Dutch zee : Norw. sjø
G. Haus : Norw. hus
G. gehen : Sw. gå

I'm leaving out Danish from this comparison because it seems to have gone down a path all its own.

I'm not an expert, but I think mutual intelligibility between Scandinavian and German/Dutch is limited; how limited compared to Spanish <-> Italian, I'm not sure. German and Dutch seem phonetically closer to each other (especially in the vowels) than either is to Scandinavian.


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## Penyafort

Gavril said:


> The mutual intelligibility of Romance languages is probably increased (hugely) by the number of words that have been reimported from Latin, after the initial waves of sound change and semantic shift in each language. E.g. common Spanish words like _rápido, quieto _and_ próximo_ are much closer to their Italian equivalents than they would be if they were part of the oldest stratum of vocabulary.
> 
> The Germanic languages don't have an equivalent of Latin in this sense, so they are at a disadvantage in their potential for mutual intelligibility. There was once an active process of importing Low German words into Scandinavian, but there isn't anymore, and there is no tradition in e.g. English and German of introducing old Gothic words into their vocabularies.
> 
> Latin itself (maybe along with Greek) seems to be the main source of new shared vocabulary in the Germanic languages: cf. Eng. _accept_ : German _akzeptieren_, E. _plausible_ : G. _plausibel_, E. _analysis_ : G. _Analyse, _etc.



I concur with that opinion.

I'd say the rather large number of vowels and often their instability makes it a bit more difficult to detect cognates in the Germanic family. This, in the Romance languages, is mostly a feature of French, sometimes of Portuguese. Which is why they are often the hardest spoken ones to grasp for other Romance speakers.

The many shifts of the vowels in English, added to the high level of loanwords from non-Germanic sources, makes it even more obvious.


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## Ben Jamin

Penyafort said:


> I concur with that opinion.
> 
> I'd say the rather large number of vowels and often their instability makes it a bit more difficult to detect cognates in the Germanic family. This, in the Romance languages, is mostly a feature of French, sometimes of Portuguese. Which is why they are often the hardest spoken ones to grasp for other Romance speakers.
> 
> The many shifts of the vowels in English, added to the high level of loanwords from non-Germanic sources, makes it even more obvious.


I would add that disappearance of consonants in French is even a greater hindrance to intelligibility. Example: "eau", "beau", "maux".


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## Nino83

Ben Jamin said:


> I would add that disappearance of consonants in French is even a greater hindrance to intelligibility. Example: "eau", "beau", "maux".



This is why I started #13 with these words: 



Nino83 said:


> Except French and Romanian[...]


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## luitzen

I would say that for a fair comparison some lesser well known languages in between and/or similar to the bigger well known languages should also be considered. Afrikaans, for example is very similar to Dutch. Then there's the Frisian languages that have a lot in common with Dutch, German, Low German, English and to a lesser degree Scandinavian languages. Finally there's the Low German language which is very similar to German and Dutch and forms a dialect continuum with these languages. I would say that it is true that, traditionally, all neighbouring villages from Amsterdam and Berlin understood each other, but that due to the decline of Low German the border between the Netherlands and Germany has, more and more, become a language border.

I would like to add that while in Sweden I saw a roadsign that read hastighetskontroll. In Dutch there is the word _haast_ (hurry, haste). The word _haastig_ means_ hastily_,_ hasty_. We could add the suffix _-heid_ to it. Although that word does not really exsit, it would be understood to meaning something like _'hurriness'_, the state of being in a hurry. _haastigheidscontrole _would be a check whether you are in a hurry or not.


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## Scholiast

Greetings all


luitzen said:


> Afrikaans, for example is very similar to Dutch


I vividly remember, in a London pub I used to frequent, observing a conversation between a Dutch patron and a bartender whom I knew to be South African. Naturally curious, when an opportunity arose, I politely asked how easily they understood each other, and the Dutchman's response was that understanding the barman was quite easy, but like listening to someone from the 17th century.
Σ


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## Self-taught

Gavril said:


> Just today, I overheard someone say that he has to get his wife to "translate" for him when he hears English spoken in a different accent than his. (He and his wife both seemed to be American.) An exaggeration, no doubt, but there are probably some speakers for whom this isn't far from the truth.


As you say this is an exaggeration and when we talk about mutual intelligibility in this forum I take for granted that we refer to MI for people who have some idea about foreign languages. We can't refer to people who can't understand people from even his/her own country, and in my opinion I wouldn't be proud at all to say something like what that man you heard said.

To go on with the topic, I speak english, dutch and german and without studying any scandinavian language I can understand some sentences or loose words in any of these languages be they written or spoken. I have the advantage that I work in tourism and often have to speak with scandinavians and I use to hear them talk to each others. Anyway, I can't say that I understand these languages at all, but I can say that if any day it happened to my mind to learn any of them it wouldn't take me long to speak it in a basic to normal level. In that case I'd personally choose swedish. I like the sound of it very much.


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## Self-taught

Nino83 said:


> Do you find a similar situation between German and "Scandinavian", Dutch and "Scandinavian", "Scandinavian" and German, Dutch and German, English and German (it is a serious question, not rhetorical)?



From my traveler's phrase book in scandinavian languages, and searching from the swedish version:

Hej= Hi!, Tack så mycket/Thanks so much, Godmorgon/Good morning/Morgen, Godmiddag/good midday/afternoon, du/german Du, fru/german Frau, harr/german Herr, etc...
If we take sentences: Varifrån kommer du?/Where do you come from?/literally: where from come you?
Var kan jag köpa en biljett?/dutch: waar kan ik een (french: billet) kopen?
Hur lång tid tar flyget/literally: how long time takes the flight?
Jag skulle vilja ha ett enkelrum/dubbelrum/literally: I shall want have one single room/ double room.
Jag tänker stanna en dag/vecka/literally: I think (of) stay(ing) one day/week.
Hur mycket kostar det per natt/person/How much costs this per night/person.

There are many more examples, but knowing english, dutch and german lets you learn scandinavian languages with ease.

About german, dutch and english. I learned english when I was a young teen. I learned dutch at the age of 28 and many words are the same or similar but the grammar was hard, though. After learning dutch german was easy.


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## Nino83

Self-taught said:


> There are many more examples, but knowing english, dutch and german lets you learn scandinavian languages with ease.



Yes, they are similar.
English, Swedish, Dutch, Icelandic, German:
a good day, en god dag, en goede dag , (einn) góður dagur, ein guter Tag
a good night, en god natt, en goede nacht, (ein) góð nótt, eine gute Nacht
a good animal, ett gott djur, en goed djer, (eitt) gott dýr, ein gutes Tier

Icelandic and German declensions are similar:
góður góðan góðs góðum (m. s.)  góð góða góðrar góðri (f. s.) góðir góða góðra góðum (m. pl.)
guter guten guten* gutem (m. s.) gute gute guter guter (f. s.)  gute gute guter guten (pl.)

Probably, except the case system, the greatest differences are between English and the other Germanic languages for vocabulary and between *some* Germanic languages and High German in pronunciation.

*In German, the genitive inflection /s/ in masculine and neuter singular is on the noun.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> and between Germanic languages and High German in pronunciation.


Is High German not a Germanic language?
The phonetically most idiosyncratic (continental) Germanic language is certainly Danish and not High German.


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> Is High German not a Germanic language?



I added "some" 



berndf said:


> The phonetically most idiosyncratic (continental) Germanic language is certainly Danish and not High German.



Yes, Danish first, High German second (dag/Tag, dier/Tier, maken/machen).


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> Yes, Danish first, High German second (dag/Tag, dier/Tier, maken/machen).


That is spelling. *Reading *Danish is piece of cake. Try to understand *spoken *Danish with its complex system of allophones. There is practically no letter that doesn't have a weird allophone in at least some contexts.


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> That is spelling. *Reading *Danish is piece of cake. Try to understand *spoken *Danish!



Impossible! (for me)


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> Impossible! (for me)


For me too.


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## Nino83

But I don't speak any Germanic language (except English).
Anyway it wouldn't be so difficult to transcribe spoken Swedish, maybe it is the language with the most clear pronunciation.


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## Gavril

Self-taught said:


> As you say this is an exaggeration and when we talk about mutual intelligibility in this forum I take for granted that we refer to MI for people who have some idea about foreign languages.



What do you mean by "hav[ing] some idea about foreign languages"? When we ask about MI between X and Y, the "baseline" for this question (as I understand it) is how well speakers of X with *no* prior knowledge of Y, or foreign languages related to Y, will understand a spoken sample of Y, and vice versa.


----------



## berndf

Nino83 said:


> Anyway it wouldn't be so difficult to transcribe spoken Swedish, maybe it is the language with the most clear pronunciation.


Yes, probably. But it has also its pitfalls. E.g. length phonemicity. German has it only with vowels and it really matters only in stressed syllables and Italian has only consonant length phonemicity and only intervocalically whereas Swedish has it everywhere. And then there are those pitch stress minimum pairs like _ánden=the duck_ and_ ànden=the spirit_.


----------



## Nino83

berndf said:


> Yes, probably. But it has also its pitfalls. E.g. length phonemicity. German has it only with vowels and it really matters only in stressed syllables and Italian has only consonant length phonemicity and only intervocalically whereas Swedish has it everywhere. And then there are those pitch stress minimum pairs like _ánden=the duck_ and_ ànden=the spirit_.



Ah, ok, so maybe Icelandic would be a bit more easy (no vowels length phonemicity, no pitch accent).  

A little question. Has Swedish unstressed long vowels?


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## Self-taught

Gavril said:


> When we ask about MI between X and Y, the "baseline" for this question (*as I understand it*) *is how well speakers of X with *no* prior knowledge of Y, or foreign languages related to Y*, will understand a spoken sample of Y, and vice versa.


In that case my comment is not valid at all.
Nevertheless, there's a contradiction between the title of the thread (mutual intelligibility *among germanic languages*) and your words that I marked in black (speakers of X with *no* prior knowledge of Y, or foreign languages *related to Y*).
Following your example If I speak only spanish it is obvious that I won't understand a single word in russian, though both languages have quite a lot of words in common and many words which are similar. But if I learn the cyrillic alphabet I'll be able to spot these words that the two languages have in common, like Луна= Luna (moon). As I say spanish and russian share many words but the accent many times makes these words, like Луна and Luna, mixed with other words that don't resemble at all, to not be understood by the listener.


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## Dan2

berndf said:


> The phonetically most idiosyncratic (continental) Germanic language is certainly Danish and not High German.


Danish among the Germanic languages seems to be a bit like French among the Romance: when one ignorantly comes to them from other members of the family, Danish and French seem so strange and "abbreviated" that one marvels that ordinary human beings can learn to speak and understand them.  The difference is that most of us have learned French at one point or another and long ago came to grips with its weirdness (and to appreciate its beauty).  Danish hasn't played _quite _as important a role in European history and culture.


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## ger4

Another parallel with French is the fact that some numbers are based on a vigesimal system - which makes it hard to understand them even for speakers of closely related languages...
50 = Danish _halvtreds_ (Swedish femtio)
60 = Da. _tres_ (Sw. sextio)
70 = Da. _halvfjerds_ (Sw. sjuttio)
80 = Da. _firs_ (Sw. åttio)
90 = Da. _halvfems_ (Sw. nittio)

The final -s is a slightly shortened form of _sindstyve_ ('by twenty'), so _firs_ (80), originally means four by twenty.


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## Gavril

Nino83 said:


> Probably, except the case system, the greatest differences are between English and the other Germanic languages for vocabulary and between *some* Germanic languages and High German in pronunciation.



The differences in vocabulary between Icelandic and all other Germanic languages are pretty massive, I think.

For example, here is some basic vocabulary that (to my knowledge) is not shared between Icelandic and any other Gmc. language:

"understand": Icel. _skilja_ - Swedish _förstå_, German _verstehen_, etc.
"to be able to": Icel. _geta_ - Sw. _kunna_, G. _können_
"to try": Icel. _reyna_ - Danish. _forsøge,_ G. _versuchen_
"to touch": Icel. _snerta_ - Danish _røre_, G. _berühren_
"thing, object": Icel. _hlutur_ - Norwegian _ting_, Germ. _Ding_, etc.
"thing, matter": Icel. _mál_ - Norwegian _sak_, G. _Sache_
"part": Icel. _hluti_ - Norw. _del_, G. _Teil_

And then, of course, there is the conscious policy of keeping out foreign words from Icelandic and using neologisms for technical terminology: _sími _"telephone", _útvarp_ "radio", _steinsteypa_ "concrete (= building material)", _tvistur_ "diode", etc. etc.

I'd venture to guess that there is less mutual intelligibility between monolingual Icelandic speakers and monolingual speakers of any other Germanic language (except maybe English) than there is within the latter group. This could be difficult to test, though, because Icelandic speakers generally (maybe mandatorily?) learn at least one of the Scandinavian languages, and those that learn German often do so after having established a "background" of Scandinavian.


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## Nino83

Gavril said:


> The differences in vocabulary between Icelandic and all other Germanic languages are pretty massive, I think.
> 
> I'd venture to guess that there is less mutual intelligibility between monolingual Icelandic speakers and monolingual speakers of any other Germanic language (except maybe English) than there is within the latter group. This could be difficult to test, though, because Icelandic speakers generally (maybe mandatorily?) learn at least one of the Scandinavian languages, and those that learn German often do so after having established a "background" of Scandinavian.



But is this due to the great influence of Middle Low German on Danish (and Norwegian) and Swedish?
Maybe Icelandic retains more vocabulary of Old Norse origin while Danish and Swedish have a lot of loanwords from Middle Low German.

I think that the most important question is this: is there any national standard (official) Germanic language having more than 80% of lexical similarity?
For example, according to some studies, lexical similarity is 89% between French and Italian, the same between Spanish and Portuguese, 87% between Italian and Catalan, 85% between Spanish and Catalan, 82% between Italian and Spanish, 75% between Spanish, Portuguese and French.

It seems that in the Germanic family there is less lexical similarity.


----------



## Gavril

Nino83 said:


> But is this due to the great influence of Middle Low German on Danish (and Norwegian) and Swedish?



Probably so, to some extent. But it doesn't make these vocabulary differences any less real.

Sometimes, there are words shared between only some of the Scandinavian languages (not all three) and Icelandic: e.g. "to ask (a question)" is _spyrja_ in Icelandic, _spørre_ in Norwegian and _spørge_ in Danish, but _fråga_ in Swedish.



> I think that the most important question is this: is there any national standard (official) Germanic language having more than 80% of lexical similarity?



I'm not sure, but the best candidates for this degree of similarity would probably be Swedish/Danish/Norwegian.


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## Nino83

In this work they chose the 100 most common words from the British National Corpus that are frequent in a newspaper and, in general, in reading.

http://www.let.rug.nl/gooskens/pdf/publ_peterlang_2013c



> For each of the 100 words we provided a context to make sure the translators (native speakers of each of the languages who translated the words from English) knew the correct meaning. For example, the word "form" has different meanings such as ‘questionnaire,’ ‘shape’ or ‘to shape something.’ By putting the word in the sentence ‘You have to fill out this form today,’ the translator knows which meaning is used.



The percentage of non-cognates for Italian is: 6% Portuguese, 10% Catalan, 12% French and Spanish, 22% Romanian, i.e if we exclude Romanian, lexical smilarity is between 88% to 94%.

Swedish: 6% Danish, 12% German, 15% Dutch, 31% English
German: 14% Dutch 16% Swedish 21% Danish 34% English
English: 34% Swedish 37% Dutch 39% German 41% Danish
Danish: 4 Swedish 14% German 17% Dutch 30% English
Dutch: 10% German 20% Swedish 22% Danish 32% English

So, divergences under 15% are:
Swedish: with Danish, German and Dutch
Danish: with Swedish  and German
German: with Dutch
Dutch: with German
English: all above 30%


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## Dan2

Very interesting data, Nino - thanks for posting it!


> For example, the word form has different meanings such as ‘questionnaire,’ ‘shape’ or ‘to shape something.’


I read this sentence twice and without really understanding it.  Then it hit me: Your quote didn't mean
the word form (la forma della parola)
but
the word "form" (la parola "form").
Maybe this post will save others from the same confusion...

[Ambiguity from failure to quote or italicize is not uncommon on WRF.  I should be keeping a list of examples for their entertainment value.  Things like:
Is there an existential adverb in English? (Actually, a question about the word "there")
How do you say I want to read it in German? (As a question in the German forum)
(More often the sentence is not, strictly speaking, ambiguous, just annoying:
If when and if are both wenn in German, if I want to say when I write in German when I'm tired ...]


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## Nino83

Dan2 said:


> the word "form"



Edited!


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## luitzen

Nino83 said:


> Yes, they are similar.
> English, Swedish, Dutch, Icelandic, German:
> a good day, en god dag, en goede dag , (einn) góður dagur, ein guter Tag
> a good night, en god natt, en goede nacht, (ein) góð nótt, eine gute Nacht
> a good animal, ett gott djur, en goed djer, (eitt) gott dýr, ein gutes Tier


Let me correct this for you:

English, Swedish, Dutch, Icelandic, German:
a good day, en god dag, een goeie dag , (einn) góður dagur, ein guter Tag
a good night, en god natt, een goeie nacht, (ein) góð nótt, eine gute Nacht
a good animal, ett gott djur, een goed dier, (eitt) gott dýr, ein gutes Tier

West Frisian:
in goeie dei
in goeie nacht
in goed dier

But I'm curious why you included a good animal. Sounds a bit weird to me.


----------



## berndf

Nino83 said:


> A little question. Has Swedish unstressed long vowels?


God, I find this question already extremely difficult to answer for my own language. I wouldn't dare voicing an opinion about the situation in Swedish.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> The percentage of non-cognates


I am not sure how meaningful these numbers are for mutual intelligibility. For that the ease or difficulty with which cognates can be identified is equally important (the paper analyses "orthographic distance" as well).  While some are quite obvious (examples from German vs. English):
_Wasser - water
Bruder - brother
Vater - Father_

many others would need etymological training to identify them (especially if complicated by prefixes and suffixes, in differing compounds the common part is underlined):
_gleich - like
gestern - yesterday
genug - enough
doch - though_


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## Scholiast

Greetings all


berndf said:


> I am not sure how meaningful these numbers are for mutual intelligibility. For that the ease or difficulty with which cognates can be identified is equally important





berndf said:


> many others would need etymological training to identify them


This is surely right. I suspect that this phenomenon is in a radical (or philosophically absolute) sense unquantifiable, because all our linguistic experiences are different and personal, and vary between written and spoken usage. Apart from the anecdote in #28, I can cite a couple (among scores) of moments of discovery or sudden understanding which defy rigorous analysis:
"_Methinks_ I am a prophet new-inspired..." - watching a (school-) production of _Richard II_ some years ago, I suddenly realised (which, I suspect, even quite a few Shakespeare specialists don't know even now) that this is fossilised A-S, compare Germ. "Mich dünkt es...".
Visiting Copenhagen in the 1990s I passed a restaurant advertising a "Børnemenu" (_vel. sim._), and (as a Scot) recognised the "bairn" in the "Children's Menu" (but few English-English speakers would do so).
And even as a young man, singing the mediaeval English carol, _Adam lay y-bounden_, I could spot the Germanic participial form _gebunden._
But to make connexions like these, we need (literally) incalculable, and rather randomly leased [/z/], contextual knowledge and experience, as well as some elementary understanding of how languages are more or less systematically related to each other.
I'm sorry this is so _unwissenschaftlich_, but that is in a way my point: even at the most basic lexical level (never mind syntax) mutual intelligibility depends on too many variables to be susceptible to "scientific" analysis.

Σ


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## ger4

Scholiast said:


> [...] Visiting Copenhagen in the 1990s I passed a restaurant advertising a "Børnemenu" (_vel. sim._), and (as a Scot) recognised the "bairn" in the "Children's Menu" [...]


Is Scots - in comparison with English -  generally closer to the Northern Germanic languages?  Trying to read some articles on the Scots version of Wikipedia I had that impression (though words like _fell_ and _dale_ also seem to occur further south). Even the intonation of Scottish English seems to be slightly similar to Danish...


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## Scholiast

Greetings again


Holger2014 said:


> Is Scots - in comparison with English - generally closer to the Northern Germanic languages?


In some phonological and lexical things, yes. "sair"/_sehr _biblical English "sore" as in "sore afraid" is an obvious example. But I doubt that there is any systematic rule for identifying them.
Σ


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## myšlenka

Nino83 said:


> A little question. Has Swedish unstressed long vowels?


No. Stress and syllable weight go hand in hand in Swedish, i.e. long vowels must be stressed.


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## berndf

myšlenka said:


> No. Stress and syllable weight go hand in hand in Swedish, i.e. long vowels must be stressed.


Well the problem I have also in my own language are words like _tesil_ (_tea sieve_). The stress is on the first syllable and the /i:/ is shortened to [ i ] but the distinction between /i:/ and /ɪ/ is still manifest in the qualitative difference between [ i ] and [ ɪ ].


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## myšlenka

berndf said:


> Well the problem I have also in my own language are words like _tesil_ (_tea sieve_). The stress is on the first syllable and the /i:/ is shortened to [ i ] but the distinction between /i:/ and /ɪ/ is still manifest in the qualitative difference between [ i ] and [ ɪ ].


I am sure you aware about the fact that _tesil_ is a compound. Stress is assigned on different prosodic levels (word, phrase, clause etc) and the basic assumption in Norwegian phonology at least (I would be suprised if Swedish was any different) is that the second part of compounds do carry primary stress on an underlying level.


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## berndf

The shortening effect takes nevertheless place in compound words too. It is even more clear in adverbial then in nominal compounds. But there I don't have a Swedish example handy. A German example would be _zurück _which is pronounced [tsu'ʁʏk] and neither [tsu:'ʁʏk] or [tsʊ'ʁʏk]. Given that textbook tell you one have the choice between /u:/ and /ʊ/, what is that now phonemically? /tsu:'ʁʏk/ or /tsʊ'ʁʏk/? Or is /u/ a phoneme in its own right? I am sure you'll find similar example in Swedish.


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## Self-taught

Dutch and german are quite similar to swedish:

Jag ättar frukost långsamt.
Ik eet ontbijt langzaam
Ich eße Frühstuck langsam

Hon borstar sig tänderna schnabbt
Zij borstelt haar tanden snel
Sie putzt sich die Zähne schnell

Jog oppnär dörren och går ut
Ik (**open de deur*) en ga uit. Here the correct verb is *opendoen*.
Ich öffne die Tür und gehe aus

Jag träffar en vän
Ik tref een vriend
Ich treffe einen Freund.

Vi ser på kläderna
Wij kijken (zien) naar kleren
Wir schauen (sehen) an Kleidungen


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## Nino83

luitzen said:


> But I'm curious why you included a good animal. Sounds a bit weird to me.



It was the first neuter noun I've found. One masculine, one feminine and one neuter.



berndf said:


> Well the problem I have also in my own language are words like _tesil_ (_tea sieve_). The stress is on the first syllable and the /i:/ is shortened to [ i ] but the distinction between /i:/ and /ɪ/ is still manifest in the qualitative difference between [ i ] and [ ɪ ].



It is the same in English.
Canepari, Oxford dictionary and other dictionaries write _lady_ ['leɪd*i*] and _influenza_ [infl*u*'enzʌ].
I.e at the end of the word or in hiatus, these vowels are tense and short.



berndf said:


> _gleich - like - lik - lik - likur
> genug - enough - nog - nok -nógur
> doch - though - do - dock - þó_



This is why I mentioned High German in that post.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> This is why I mentioned High German in that post.


And why? I don't get your point.


Nino83 said:


> It is the same in English.
> Canepari, Oxford dictionary and other dictionaries write _lady_ ['leɪd*i*] and _influenza_ [infl*u*'enzʌ].


This is true for all Germanic language, I should say. But in English, length phonemicity is in some dialects completely and in some dialects almost gone and the quality difference is more important anyhow.


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> And why? I don't get your point.



That, at least in writing, it is easier to guess that _lik_ is _like_ than _gleich_ (and in the spoken form it is more difficult, [ɡlaɪç]).


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> That, at least in writing, it is easier to guess that _lik_ is _like_ than _gleich_ (and in the spoken form it is more difficult, [ɡlaɪç]).


That is one in three. For the other two it is, at least for me, easier to guess through German than through English.


----------



## Nino83

berndf said:


> This is true for all Germanic language, I should say. But in English, length phonemicity is in some dialects completely and in some dialects almost gone and the quality difference is more important anyhow.



Yes, but if you say that the vowel is *long* it is a bit ambiguous. It is a short vowel with a different quality. 
It seems that it happens only with high vowels. For example, in English only with /i/ and /u/. 
Is it the same in German (only with /i/, /u/ and /y/)?


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## luitzen

Nino83 said:


> It was the first neuter noun I've found. One masculine, one feminine and one neuter.


Ah ok. And which word is masculine and which one is feminine?


----------



## Nino83

luitzen said:


> Ah ok. And which word is masculine and which one is feminine?



Tag (German), dagur (Icelandic): masculine (common gender in Swedish, Danish/Norwegian, Dutch) 
Nacht (German), nótt (Icelandic): feminine (common gender in Swedish, Danish/Norwegian, Dutch)  

Why have you corrected _goed_? In the wiktionary it is said that _goei_ is an alternative informal version of _goed_.  
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/goei#Dutch


----------



## Copperknickers

Holger2014 said:


> Is Scots - in comparison with English -  generally closer to the Northern Germanic languages?  Trying to read some articles on the Scots version of Wikipedia I had that impression (though words like _fell_ and _dale_ also seem to occur further south). Even the intonation of Scottish English seems to be slightly similar to Danish...



Doric (i.e. North-East) Scots is heavily influenced by Norse. Western Scots less so, probably equal to Northern English dialects. Scotland was never conquered by the Vikings remember, unlike Northern England, excepting a few settlements on the East Coast and the islands, which were all Gaelic speaking up until fairly recently. Or Norse, in the case of Shetland - if you want to hear a truly North Germanic variety of Scots then look for a Youtube video called 'Thelma's reading in broad Shetland accent'.

English:           Even then you saw what was before me.'
Shetland Scots: Even den du sa fit wis afore me.'
Swedish:          Även då du såg vad som var före mig.


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## luitzen

Nino83 said:


> Why have you corrected _goed_? In the wiktionary it is said that _goei_ is an alternative informal version of _goed_.
> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/goei#Dutch



You're right, correction was maybe not really necessary. I was imagining that I'm wish somebody a good day or night and saying _goeie _would make it a bit more informal.

Anyway, you can replace _goede_ with _goeie_, but _goed _cannot become _goei_.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> Yes, but if you say that the vowel is *long* it is a bit ambiguous. It is a short vowel with a different quality. It is a short vowel with a different quality.


That is exactly my problem. A short vowel never has the same quality as a long vowel in a stressed syllable. If, e.g. I head a short _a_ with the quality of a long _a_ I can't be sure which one is meant.
When one says _Bohle_ with a short [o] people would hear _Bulle_. In unstressed syllables it is different. The same vowel that would be perceived as /ʊ/ in _B*u*lle_ would be perceived as an _o_-type phoneme in _Hall*o*_. But which one is it then? /o:/ or /ɔ/. I personally perceive it as a long _o_ but the _o_ in _Christ*o*ph_ as a short one, even if pronounced with exactly the same length.


----------



## luitzen

Self-taught said:


> Dutch and german are quite similar to swedish:
> 
> Jag ättar frukost långsamt.
> Ik eet ontbijt langzaam
> Ich eße Frühstuck langsam
> 
> Hon borstar sig tänderna schnabbt
> Zij borstelt haar tanden snel
> Sie putzt sich die Zähne schnell
> 
> Jog oppnär dörren och går ut
> Ik (**open de deur*) en ga uit. Here the correct verb is *opendoen*.
> Ich öffne die Tür und gehe aus
> 
> Jag träffar en vän
> Ik tref een vriend
> Ich treffe einen Freund.
> 
> Vi ser på kläderna
> Wij kijken (zien) naar kleren
> Wir schauen (sehen) an Kleidungen


Some corrections:

- Ik eet ontbijt langzaam.
Technically correct, but really weird. Better: _Ik ontbijt langzaam._ Or: _Ik eet mijn ontbijt langzaam._​*- *Zij borstelt haar tanden snel.
Zij poetst haar tanden snel.​*- *Ik (**open de deur*) en ga uit. Here the correct verb is *opendoen*.
_Ik open de deur en ga naar buiten._ (Yes you could use opendoen, but it is not better at all.)​*- *Ik tref een vriend.
It depends if you randomly meet a friend or whether you plan to meet him. In general, one would NOT use the verb _treffen_ for this. It should either become: _Ik ontmoet een vriend._ Or something like: _Ik heb met een vriend afgesproken_.​- Wij kijken (zien) naar kleren.
I don't know why you put zien between brackets here, but you really can not use _zien_ it here. Grammatically, the sentence is correct, but nobody would say it like this. Better would be: _Wij gaan shoppen._ Or: _Wij zijn (aan het) shoppen._​


----------



## Dan2

Nino83 said:


> It is the same in English.
> Canepari, Oxford dictionary and other dictionaries write _lady_ ['leɪd*i*] and _influenza_ [infl*u*'enzʌ].
> I.e *at the end of the word or in hiatus*, these vowels are tense and short.


Are you predicting then that the /i/ vowel of "ladies" (because not at the end of the word) would be different from that of "lady"?  I don't perceive it that way.


Nino83 said:


> It is a short vowel with a different quality.
> It seems that it happens only with high vowels. For example, in English only with /i/ and /u/.


In terms of length and tenseness, I don't really see a difference between the final vowels of "lady" and "Zulu" on the one hand, and of "relay" and "Nino" on the other.  (Please feel free to try to convince me otherwise. )


----------



## killerbee256

I think "a good animal" is a good example, as it shows how romance loans and semantic shift has distanced English from it's close relatives. As the cognate to _dur, dier, dýr_ and _tier_, deer now only refers to a specific group of animals.


----------



## Nino83

berndf said:


> When one says _Bohle_ with a short [o] people would hear _Bulle_. In unstressed syllables it is different. The same vowel that would be perceived as /ʊ/ in _B*u*lle_ would be perceived as an _o_-type phoneme in _Hall*o*_. But which one is it then? /o:/ or /ɔ/. I personally perceive it as a long _o_ but the _o_ in _Christ*o*ph_ as a short one, even if pronounced with exactly the same length.



Wow! Are you saying that if you pronounce a stressed long /e:/ short in German it can be confused with an /ɪ/, like in Vulgar Latin?
Are /e:/ and /ɪ/ so similar in quality in German?



Dan2 said:


> Are you predicting then that the /i/ vowel of "ladies" (because not at the end of the word) would be different from that of "lady"?  I don't perceive it that way.



Oh, no, no, no. 
"Lady" and "ladies" have the same vowel, _,_ the /s/ is a plural inflection and doesn't modify the vowel.
But when the vowel is not in absolute final position in the singular, then there is [ɪ] like in "crisis, thesis" and so on.



Dan2 said:


> In terms of length and tenseness, I don't really see a difference between the final vowels of "lady" and "Zulu" on the one hand, and of "relay" and "Nino" on the other.  (Please feel free to try to convince me otherwise. )



http://seas3.elte.hu/VLlxx/nadasdy.html

Jones, Gimson, W.Lewis, Upton, Roach, Wells
"seedy"   i:—i  

Many dictionaries transcribe these vowels as short vowels.
Don't you find that in _seedy _the first /i/ is longer than the second one?

N.B.
"Nino" is the short form of "Antonio" and English speakers pronounce the last vowel [o̯ʊ] while it should be a short [o].
But if what Bernd has said about German is true, he can use his long /i/ for the first vowel and his short German [ʊ] for the last one, for the correct Italian pronunciation.


----------



## Self-taught

luitzen said:


> Some corrections:
> 
> - Ik eet ontbijt langzaam.
> Technically correct, but really weird. Better: _Ik ontbijt langzaam._ Or: _Ik eet mijn ontbijt langzaam._​*- *Zij borstelt haar tanden snel.
> Zij poetst haar tanden snel.​*- *Ik (**open de deur*) en ga uit. Here the correct verb is *opendoen*.
> _Ik open de deur en ga naar buiten._ (Yes you could use opendoen, but it is not better at all.)​*- *Ik tref een vriend.
> It depends if you randomly meet a friend or whether you plan to meet him. In general, one would NOT use the verb _treffen_ for this. It should either become: _Ik ontmoet een vriend._ Or something like: _Ik heb met een vriend afgesproken_.​- Wij kijken (zien) naar kleren.
> I don't know why you put zien between brackets here, but you really can not use _zien_ it here. Grammatically, the sentence is correct, but nobody would say it like this. Better would be: _Wij gaan shoppen._ Or: _Wij zijn (aan het) shoppen._​


Hi, Luitzen.

Thank you for your post. I'm replying your poits:
1/ I wrote Ik eet ontbijt langzaam in order to show the resemblance between the two languages. Another thing is whether it can be technically correct or not.
2/ Poetst is the correct one indeed, but again I tried to show that there are similar words to learn swedish easily. If I don't speak swedish I can rely on the word Borstel (brush) and from there remind the verd in swedish.
3/ I thought it was the other way around, that opendoen was better than open de deur. I thought that this one was a too literally translation from english. Thank you for correcting me.
4/ Yeah, treffen in dutch is too meet an acquaintance by chance, for instance, on the street. Ontmoeten and afspreken are used for meeting up.
5/ Here I put zien in brackets regarding the sentence in swedish, Vi ser på kläderna, to show that ser is zien though in this sentences kijken is the correct one for this sentence.

I repeat that my intention was to show that we can rely on other words to learn another language in spite that they don't mean exactly the same in both languages.


----------



## Dan2

Nino83 said:


> "Lady" and "ladies" have the same vowel, _,_ the /s/ is a plural inflection and doesn't modify the vowel.
> But when *the vowel* is not in absolute final position in the singular, then there is [ɪ] like in "crisis"


*The *vowel? What vowel?  The second vowels of "lady" and "crisis" are not the same vowel.


Nino83 said:


> then there is [ɪ] like in "crisis, thesis" and so on.


No, sometimes there is [ɪ] ("crisis"), sometimes there is [i] ("Pisces"), sometimes there is [ə] ("circus"), and so on.

Nino, are you talking about the _history _of English or about present-day English?  I assumed "present-day" because you say things like "this happen*s*".  Sure, the second vowels of "lady" and "crisis" may at one time (even still, in some dialects) have been the same. with only the vowel of "lady" (because it's final) having become [i].  Interesting historical development.  But now it simply has the same phoneme as "bee", as far as I can see (in standard American English and according to the Oxford and Cambridge online dictionaries for BrEng).  Or do you have evidence that "lady" and "crisis" have the same phoneme in present-day English?

Also, Nino, you implied that it's only for high vowels that we see unstressed tense vowels; I gave you examples of mid vowels where we see the same thing ("relay", "Nino") and you referred us to http://seas3.elte.hu/VLlxx/nadasdy.html . I don't see the relevance of this paper from its abstract, and given its length, I would ask you where the paper addresses this issue.

Anyway, I would simply say that in standard present-day English (as described in the Amer and Brit dictionaries), there are, in final unstressed position, only tense vowels, not only for high vowels but also for mid vowels.  Is that not an adequate description?


----------



## Nino83

Dan2 said:


> *The *vowel? What vowel?  The second vowels of "lady" and "crisis" are not the same vowel.



I said that _lady_ and _ladies_ have the same vowel, [i].



Nino83 said:


> "Lady" and "ladies" *have the same vowel*, the /s/ is a plural inflection and doesn't modify the vowel.





Nino83 said:


> But when *the vowel is not in absolute final position in the singular*, then *there is [ɪ]* like in "crisis, thesis" and so on.



Then I've said that when it (the vowel "i") is in absolute final position in the singular, the vowel ("i") is tense also in the plural (lady, ladies).
When the vowel ("i") is not in absolute final position in the singular, it ("i") is lax (crisis, thesis).



Dan2 said:


> No, sometimes there is [ɪ] ("crisis"), sometimes there is [i] ("Pisces"), sometimes there is [ə] ("circus"), and so on.



I'm speaking only about unstressed [i] and [ɪ], i.e when it is written "i" or "y".



Dan2 said:


> But now it simply has the same phoneme as "bee"



But dictionaries say that the vowel of "lad*y*" is shorter than that of "b*ee*".The quality is the same, but they differn in length.
Bernd was saying that this phenomenon is present also in German.



Dan2 said:


> Also, Nino, you implied that it's only for high vowels that we see unstressed tense vowels; I gave you examples of mid vowels where we see the same thing ("relay", "Nino")



I'm speaking about monophthongs. You mentioned two diphthongs.


----------



## Dan2

We're in agreement about the phonetics of _lady/ladies_.  My last post had nothing to do with that.


Nino83 said:


> When the vowel ("i") is not in absolute final position in the singular, it ("i") is lax (crisis, thesis).


But there's no [i] in syll 2 of _crisis/thesis.  _On what basis do you call this vowel an "i"?  Can I say that _crisis _has the vowel "ɔ", but it's pronounced as a high front lax vowel?


Nino83 said:


> I'm speaking only about unstressed [i] and [ɪ], i.e* when it is written* "i" or "y".


I thought we were talking about phonetics.  Why does it matter how it's written?  Are you talking about English _spelling _rules?  That's a completely different topic, Nino.


Nino83 said:


> But dictionaries say that the vowel of "lad*y*" is shorter than that of "b*ee*".The quality is the same, but they differn in length.


That's also true of "beat": the vowel is much shorter than in "bee", but is perceived to have exactly the same quality.  Vowel length varies in a complex way, having to with stress, surrounding consonants, etc.


Nino83 said:


> I'm speaking about monophthongs. You mentioned two diphthongs.


I don't think that that's significant.  I think /u/ tends to be diphthongal, maybe /i/ also to some degree.  /e/ and /o/ are monophthongs in some dialects.  I don't think this dialectal variation affects the general pattern.


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## berndf

Dan2 said:


> Sure, the second vowels of "lady" and "crisis" may at one time (even still, in some dialects) have been the same. with only the vowel of "lady" (because it's final) having become _._


This is because open syllables cannot contain lax vowels. For similar reasons, [ɪ] isn't possible in German open syllables either. It must have been so at least since the lengthening in open stressed syllables which was an innovation that happened in both languages. Interesting that this [ i ] in _lady _didn't develop into [aɪ] in the GVS which suggest that prior to the GVS the unstressed [ i ] in unstressed syllables (_lad*y*_) should be considered phonemically different from [i:] in stressed syllables (_b*y*_).


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## Nino83

The fact is that the final vowels in "grandma, outlaw" are transcribed with length markers while the final vowel in "lady, ladies" isn't.  
Does anyone know why?


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## Gavril

Gavril said:


> Sometimes, there are words shared between only some of the Scandinavian languages (not all three) and Icelandic: e.g. "to ask (a question)" is _spyrja_ in Icelandic, _spørre_ in Norwegian and _spørge_ in Danish, but _fråga_ in Swedish.



Also, some basic words are shared only with non-North Germanic languages: e.g. Icelandic _eitthvað_ "something" appears to be cognate with German _etwas_ "something", whereas Scandinavian has _noget _(Da.) /_något _(Sw.) / _noe_ (Norw.) for this meaning. The Scandinavian words are seemingly cognate with Icelandic _nokkuð _"some, any" (neuter sg.).


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## ger4

Another surprising similarity between Icelandic, Norwegian-Nynorsk and German is the verb _verða/verte _which seems to be used similarly to German _werden_, while the other North Germanic languages,  including Norwegian-Bokmål, have _bli(ve)._
verda---Icelandic-English
verte--Nynorsk
verda---Icelandic-German


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## Dan2

berndf said:


> This is because open syllables cannot contain lax vowels.


You mean in English, right?  (This isn't is a universal.)  And even in English we have schwa in final position.


berndf said:


> Interesting that this [ i ] in _lady _didn't develop into [eɪ] in the GVS which suggest that prior to the GVS the unstressed [ i ] in unstressed syllables (_lad*y*_) should be considered phonemically different from [i:] in stressed syllables (_b*y*_).


You mean "didn't develop into [aɪ]", right?  In any case, I agree, that's a nice piece of evidence about the vowel of _lad*y*_ at the time of the GVS.  I'd just like, in these discussions, to keep historical developments and descriptions of the current language clearly distinct.  In the English in MY head, one has to regard the second vowels of _lady _and _crisis _simply as different phonemes (or present a convincing argument as to why they are not).


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## berndf

Dan2 said:


> You mean in English, right?


Yes, of course.


Dan2 said:


> You mean "didn't develop into [aɪ]", right?


Typo corrected.


----------



## Dan2

Nino83 said:


> The fact is that the final vowels in "grandma, outlaw" are transcribed with length markers while the final vowel in "lady, ladies" isn't.  Does anyone know why?


(Are transcribed in modern _British _dictionaries.  American dictionaries don't show a length distinction between the two vowels of _needy_ or _seedy_, for ex.)

I have a thought about this - I wonder if this [i] is a "compromise" transcription: If they used [i:] RP speakers with [ɪ] would protest that the two vowels of _needy _aren't identical.  If they used [ɪ] the rest of the world would complain that that's simply the wrong vowel.  Using [i] doesn't overly offend either side.  As I pointed out above, I think the vowel of _beat _can be shorter than that of _lad*y*_, so I really don't think the length distinction shown is to be taken literally.


----------



## berndf

Dan2 said:


> Are transcribed in modern _British _dictionaries. American dictionaries don't show a length distinction between the two vowels of _needy_ and _seedy_, for ex


AmE dictionaries usually don't mark for length at all.


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## Dan2

berndf said:


> AmE dictionaries usually don't mark for length at all.


Right, and are none the worse for it.  (I.e., nothing that you need to know about what phonemes the word contains is missing.)

I think the modern British dictionaries have taken the view that the traditional long vowels must be represented as long, either as diphthongs, if the degree of diphthongization is considered significant enough, or with the length symbol if not.  And because they use IPA-like symbols, for the English-as-a-foreign-language student with an interest in phonetics, the modern British dictionaries are superior to the traditional American dictionaries, I concede.  But for Americans who want to know the correct pronunciation of a word, the American dictionaries have everything they need, without the need to learn IPA.


----------



## Gavril

Nino83 said:


> The fact is that the final vowels in "grandma, outlaw" are transcribed with length markers while the final vowel in "lady, ladies" isn't.
> Does anyone know why?



The second syllables of_ grandma_ and _outlaw_ may be marked as long because these words are compounds: -_ma _is a shorter form of _mama_, and _law_ exists as an independent word.

By the way, I grew up pronouncing _grandma_ as ['græn(d).mʌ]. I'm from the west coast of the US.


----------



## Dan2

Gavril said:


> The second syllables of_ grandma_ and _outlaw_ may be marked as long because these words are compounds: -_ma _is a shorter form of _mama_, and _law_ exists as an independent word.


I've tried to think of some polysyllabic words ending in /a/ or /c/ that are not compounds but it's not easy.  "rickshaw" is the best I could do, and it does have [ɔ:] in the British dictionaries.  "scrimshaw", "Utah", and "Warsaw" aren't listed.  "tomahawk" (probably equally relevant) has [ɔ:] or [a:].  So I suspect that the answer to Nino's question is that that's simply how these dictionaries list every occurrence of these phonemes: they view long vowels as long wherever they occur (with the exception of the "lady" vowel, for which I suggested an explanation above).


Gavril said:


> _grandma_ as ['græn(d).mʌ]


Right, final schwa is very common in the US.  Not sure if you mean the /d/ is optional - to me pronouncing it just seems wrong.  In fact, you also hear the /n/ dropped too: [græmə].


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## Nino83

Dan2 said:


> they view long vowels as long wherever they occur (with the exception of the "lady" vowel, for which I suggested an explanation above).



You compared the vowel of "beat" with that of "lady", but it is not a correct method. Also the vowel in "bag" or that in "car" (in AmE) could have the same length of the vowel in "beat", but this doesn't make /æ/ and /ɑ/ long.

You have to compare the vowel of "b*e*" with that of "lad*y*", i.e when they are in the same "environment", open syllable.
Phonologists say that the vowel of "lady" is shorter than that of "be" (the quality of the vowel is the same).
This is why they write it without length marks.

About the fact that AmE lost phonemic length, it is true but often this concept is misunderstood when it is said that /eɪ/ and /oʊ/ are monophthongal. These vowels are *really* monophthongal only in a small part of the US (Duluth, Minnesota) and in some central province of Canada, but they are *always* long (not short, like Scottish "m*a*te" and "b*o*at").

It seems that the vowel of "lad*y*" is tense and short(er than stressed /i:/ in open syllables), at least in British English, and it is similar to what happens in the German word "Teesieb".
But you can say that I'm wrong (like phoneticians) if you say that for you the vowels in "lad*y*" and "zul*u*" are as long as those in "b*e*" and "t*oo*".


----------



## Scholiast

Greetings all once more

Two observations.

First, where English is concerned, or for that matter modern German, I'm not sure that the attempt to distinguish between "long" and "short" vowels is very helpful. It's not just because these are stress-languages, rather than quantity-languages. It's rather because (especially in BrE) the incalculable range of impure vowels and contextually determined phonetic and rhythmic variations simply defy analysis. Behold Dame Edith Evans' "A handbag?" (There was a long vowel if ever).

Secondly, there are also even in AmE (not to speak of "Strine") so many regional variations (the first and third syllables of "Mississippi" can be made to rhyme with the surname of Golda Meir), but no-one from Connecticut would do that. Or sound remotely like a taxi-driver from Brooklyn...

Σ


----------



## Nino83

Scholiast said:


> First, where English is concerned, or for that matter modern German, I'm not sure that the attempt to distinguish between "long" and "short" vowels is very helpful. It's not just because these are stress-languages, rather than quantity-languages. It's rather because (especially in BrE) the incalculable range of impure vowels and contextually determined phonetic and rhythmic variations simply defy analysis. Behold Dame Edith Evans' "A handbag?" (There was a long vowel if ever).



This is why it is better to compare vowel length in similar environments. I'd compare _snowc*a*t_ (unstressed before /t/) with _c*a*t_ (stressed before /t/), not with _c*a*d_, _c*a*r_. 

In this figure there are some length measurements. As you can see, before the same consonant, the long vowel is twice longer than the short vowel in RP, i.e the same consonant has the same effect on vowel length.  
https://notendur.hi.is/~peturk/KENNSLA/02/PLATES/i-length.GIF


----------



## Dan2

Nino83 said:


> You compared the vowel of "beat" with that of "lady", but it is not a correct method. Also the vowel in "bag" or that in "car" (in AmE) could have the same length of the vowel in "beat", but this doesn't make /æ/ and /ɑ/ long.


Did you mean same length as "beat" (as you wrote) or "bee"?  The vowel of "bag" or "car" would tend to be much longer than the vowel of "beat".
> but this doesn't make /æ/ and /ɑ/ long.
"long" in what sense?  These two vowels tend to be very long phonetically.  Please say why you want to call them "short".


Nino83 said:


> You have to compare the vowel of "b*e*" with that of "lad*y*", i.e when they are in the same "environment", open syllable.


But that's not the same environment.  In "be" the vowel is stressed, in "lady" unstressed.


Nino83 said:


> Phonologists say that the vowel of "lady" is shorter than that of "be"


Even after taking into account the stress difference?  If so, then if you have a reference or two, I'd be interested to see their reasoning.


Nino83 said:


> It seems that the vowel of "lad*y*" is tense and short(er than *stressed */i:/ in open syllables),


Again, we would *expect *the unstressed vowel to be shorter.

Something else that I think is relevant, Nino:  Earlier, when I pointed out that unlike "crisis", "Pisces" has /i/, you replied,


Nino83 said:


> I'm speaking only about unstressed [i] and [ɪ], i.e *when it is written "i" or "y".*


So presumably you regard words like "coffee" and "Yankee" as ending in a phoneme different from "lady" and "seedy".  Yet in standard Amer Eng and in the dialects described by the modern British dictionaries, all of these words have the same vowel quality and vowel length.  I'd be interested in your comments on this.

Request: When you say a vowel is "long" or "short", please make it clear (if not already from context) whether you mean
- tends to be relatively long (short) acoustically compared to other vowels
OR
- is long (short) in a phonemic analysis of a language that classifies each vowel phoneme as either long or short.
Thanks.


----------



## Dan2

Scholiast said:


> Greetings


Howdy...


Scholiast said:


> ... in AmE ... so many regional variations (the first and third syllables of "Mississippi" can be made to rhyme with the surname of Golda Meir)


I'm having trouble with this, Σ.  For one thing, doesn't syll 3 of "Mississippi" have either an /s/ or a /p/ (depending on whether the word is pronounced with 4 or 3 syllables)?  But in any case, what pronunciation of "Meir" do you have in mind?  Thanks.


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## Scholiast

Well howdy, Mister.



Dan2 said:


> ...doesn't syll 3 of "Mississippi" have either an /s/ or a /p/ (depending on whether the word is pronounced with 4 or 3 syllables)?



You bet your laaaaf it derz.

More seriously: linguistic and philological science is being discussed here, but does not the point remain that English, in all its multifarious spoken and written forms, is too complex for even the best phonological scholars to pin down?

OK, we have the IPA, much used (and sometimes abused) in these pages, but, fruitful though it may be for some purposes, it can never reproduce the pitching of even the shortest "English" phrases. Never mind - in English or German or our other cognate tongues - the length or shortness of syllables.

More thoughts crowd in, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Σ


----------



## Nino83

Dan2 said:


> Request: When you say a vowel is "long" or "short", please make it clear



I'm not using the (often misleading) "historical" English terminology. The vowels in "high, mate, boat" are not "long i, a, o" but are diphthongs.
long: iː uː (ɜː ɑː ɔː ɛː in British English)
short: æ e ɪ ɒ ʊ ʌ
_back_ [bæk] (short) _bag_ [bæˑg] (lengthened)
_be_ [biː] (long) _beat_ [biˑt] (shortened)

In the figure I posted in #92 the vowels of _leap_ (tense) and _lid_ (lax) have the same length (12.3 vs. 14.7 centiseconds). Anyway the first one is called "long" and the second one is called "short" because in the same environment iː is twice longer than ɪ.



Dan2 said:


> But that's not the same environment. In "be" the vowel is stressed, in "lady" unstressed.
> [...]words like "coffee" and "Yankee"[...]



This discussion started when Bernd, speaking about length phonemicity in Swedish, said that "German has it only with vowels and *it really matters only in stressed syllables *and Italian has only consonant length phonemicity and only intervocalically whereas Swedish has it everywhere."
Then I asked him if in Swedish length phonemicity matters also in unstressed syllables.
We saw that it happens only in compound words, where there is a *secondary stress* (like in the English words _grandma_ and _outlaw_).
Apart from that, in German it happens also in loan words, like _sofa_ and _allegro_, that are pronounced [ˈzoːf*a*] and [*a*ˈleːgr*o*], i.e there are *tense* (in quality) *short* (in length) vowels, while English reduces the vowel, that becomes *lax* and *short* in unstressed position, _sofa_ [ˈsoʊf*ə*] _allegro_ [*ə*ˈlegroʊ], or mantains the vowel *tense* and *long*, _allegro_ [əˈlegr*oʊ*].

But, in some cases, the vowel in unstressed position is *tense* and *short*. This happens in _be_ vs. _lady (maybe, coffee, Yankee)_ and in _too_ vs. _zulu_ and, in British English, in _girl_ vs. _better_, where the final vowel is [i], [u] and [ɜ].
It seems to me that in these cases there are *tense* (in quality) *short* (in length) vowels in both German and English.


----------



## Scholiast

Good evening Nino

I admire your immense and articulate scholarship, but sorry, you are, at some length, writing nonsense.

Although of Scots extraction, I can "do" RP English (and switch comfortably between the home patter and the "RP") - but perhaps it were wiser not to go there. The main point which seems not to have been taken on board yet, is that like birdsong, human languages have infinite, and infinitesimal, gradations of pitch, contextual nuance and emphasis, which may be analysed, but never completely explained or reduced to systematic philological order.

With all regards, therefore, I think this is not quite the right tree to be barking up.

Σ


----------



## Nino83

Scholiast said:


> The main point which seems not to have been taken on board yet, is that like birdsong, human languages have infinite, and infinitesimal, gradations of pitch, contextual nuance and emphasis, which may be analysed, but never completely explained or reduced to systematic philological order.



Ok, after this digression about the "magic" world of tense short unstressed vowels (without understanding why dictionaries transcribe the vowels of _ver_*y* and _bett_*er* without length marks), we can continue speaking about mutual intelligilibty among German languages.


----------



## Dan2

Scholiast said:


> ... AmE ... the first and third syllables of "Mississippi" can be made to rhyme with the surname of Golda Meir ...


Sorry for my question, Σ; I should have realized sooner that this was just hyperbole.


Scholiast said:


> Good evening Nino
> 
> I admire your immense and articulate scholarship, but sorry, you are, at some length, writing nonsense.


Although I disagree with Nino on several points of detail and methodology, I far more strongly disagree with this statement (which might, were it not for the RP cadences that come through even in the written medium, be moderator-deleted as an infraction of WRF rule 7...).


Scholiast said:


> The main point ... is that ... human languages have infinite, and infinitesimal, gradations of pitch, contextual nuance and emphasis, which may be analysed, but never completely explained or reduced to systematic philological order.


I think you're overlooking the fact that all branches of science deal with inherently "messy" data.  The trick in doing science is to see through the mess to the underlying principles.

With respect to the kind of thing Nino is interested in, I would suggest you consider the following.  In spite of the "infinite gradations" you talk about, the words "bee", "beat", and "needy", no matter at what speed or in what tone spoken, seem to me, as a native speaker of English, to all contain the same vowel.  At soon as we turn to "bit" or "bait", I perceive distinctly different vowels.  We can call each of these distinct perceptions "phonemes".

Now "beat", for example, also includes "b" and "t" phonemes.  As I work my way through a long list of English words, writing down each new "phoneme" as I come across it, I will find that after discovering about 40 of them, I stop finding new ones, no matter how many additional words I consider.  Can you concede that that is an interesting discovery?  Another American doing the same exercise, even though his voice quality and speaking style may vary greatly from mine, will produce essentially the same list.  Surely that is significant, wouldn't you say?  Out of all the "noise" of "infinite gradations" we discover a very finite, very discrete, set of units, agreed to across speakers.

If _you _perform the same task, Σ, your list will show a few significant differences.  Can you admit that trying to discover how and why those differences arose is an interesting endeavor?

If in fact you concede the various points I make above, then Nino's interest in analyzing the sounds systems of dialects of present-day English and tracking historical developments, is, you will have to concede, far from "nonsense".


----------



## Scholiast

Greetings all

In immediate response to Dan2's contribution #99: "Ich bin verklagt, und muss bestehen" - but I fear that, in line with Nino83's suggestion [#98]...


Nino83 said:


> ...we can continue speaking about mutual intelligilibty among German languages.


...to do so adequately would veer even further off topic.
Σ


----------



## Unoverwordinesslogged

Holger2014 said:


> Is Scots - in comparison with English -  generally closer to the Northern Germanic languages?  Trying to read some articles on the Scots version of Wikipedia I had that impression *(though words like *_*fell*_* and *_*dale*_* also seem to occur further south)*. Even the intonation of Scottish English seems to be slightly similar to Danish...



There are the Scottish fieldnames: C_ampsie Fells_ and _Nithsdale_ but nevertheless the words _fell_ and _dale_ (themselves) happen far far far moreso in northern England, though (like occuring in Scotland) they can also occur further south in England somewhat.


----------



## Lugubert

Self-taught said:


> Dutch and german are quite similar to swedish:
> 
> Jag ättar frukost långsamt.
> Ik eet ontbijt langzaam
> Ich eße Frühstuck langsam
> 
> Hon borstar sig tänderna schnabbt
> Zij borstelt haar tanden snel
> Sie putzt sich die Zähne schnell
> 
> Jog oppnär dörren och går ut
> Ik (**open de deur*) en ga uit. Here the correct verb is *opendoen*.
> Ich öffne die Tür und gehe aus
> 
> Jag träffar en vän
> Ik tref een vriend
> Ich treffe einen Freund.
> 
> Vi ser på kläderna
> Wij kijken (zien) naar kleren
> Wir schauen (sehen) an Kleidungen



Some Dutch comments were made, so, late to the party, some Swedish notes:

1) Jag äter frukost långsamt. Version above would sound strange and incorrect, but should be totally comprehensible.

2) Hon borstar tänderna snabbt. i.e. "the teeth", not "her teeth". "Use your hands" vs. "Använd händerna" etc. etc. and no reflexive like German.
Fun fact: Finnish Swedish would use 'washes', not 'brushes': Hon tvättar tänderna snabbt.

3) Jag öppnar dörren och går ut. More like typos above.

4) OK

5) Vi ser på kläder. Cf. the other versions: also indefinite, not _de kleren/die Kleidungen._


----------



## Self-taught

Lugubert said:


> Some Dutch comments were made, so, late to the party, some Swedish notes:...


It's alright, but please read my post #75 on page 2.

I'm not going to go on with this topic, since my point was to just show how similar these languages can be and not to try to demonstrate that they are "the same", and in exchange what I get here is some peoples' reactions just trying to defend their national identity by negating my examples. Proof of that some people don't read properly what I say is that I already said that my examples were intended to show these similarities, but still "late to the party" I keep on getting new replies about things that I have already explained.
If I tell you that in swedish the verb for to speak is talar I can also tell you that with the aid of the dutch noun Taal, which means language, I will remember this swedish verb. A false friend? Yes, but to speak and language are related words.

By the way, I took these examples in swedish from a youtube vid made by a swede, not imagined by myself.


----------



## Lugubert

Self-taught said:


> some peoples' reactions just trying to defend their national identity by negating my examples.



I hope this comment doesn't address my corrections above. Far from negating your examples, I think your point is rather strengthened as the examples still mainly stand after proof-reading by a Swede.

Swedish infinitive _speak_ is tala, not talar, which is present. Still works as a false friend. And Swedish _tal_ is 'speech'.


----------



## Self-taught

Dear Lugubert. We are talking about two different things. I speak about similarities, words that can help, etc... and you focus on grammar, which is not my point. Since you find my point rather strengthened I'd better give up, because it means that we're not gonna agree at all.
Have a nice day.


----------



## Lugubert

Self-taught said:


> Dear Lugubert. We are talking about two different things. I speak about similarities, words that can help, etc... and you focus on grammar, which is not my point. Since you find my point rather strengthened I'd better give up, because it means that we're not gonna agree at all.
> Have a nice day.



I focus on grammar? No, I focus on correct examples, regardless of whether they address isolated words or syntax.


----------



## Self-taught

It's been proven that you and I don't have mutual intelligibility. Trevligt att träffas!


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## Gavril

Gavril said:


> Sometimes, there are words shared between only some of the Scandinavian languages (not all three) and Icelandic:



Besides vocabulary, certain pronunciation features of (standard) Danish also seem closer to Icelandic than to the rest of continental Scandinavian.

For example, at least word-initially, standard Danish pronunces "g" and "k" as velars before all vowels (not just back vowels): _gøre_ "to do" and køre "to drive" are thus pronounced with initial [g] and [k], not [j] and [ʃ]/[ɕ] as in Swedish and Norwegian.

Also, Danish and Icelandic both retain word-initial palatal clusters like _tj_- and _dj_- that have coalesced into single consonants in much of the mainland (e.g. _tjære_ "tar" is pronounced with initial [tj] in standard Danish, but its equivalent in Swedish is pronounced with [ɕ]).

_sj_- is the only such cluster that seems to have generally coalesced in Danish: e.g. the placename _Sjælland_ is pronounced with initial [ɕ]. In Icelandic, this sequence (_sjór_ "sea", _sjö_ "seven" etc.) seems to vary between [sj] and [ʃ] or similar, depending on the speaker or region.


----------



## Dymn

This thread was open a year and a half ago, but many of the answers off-topicked and I gave up reading everything. Now that I've read all (almost all...) of them, thank you.

Now, I think that my initial doubt was the similarity among these languages (in all aspects: phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary). I obviously know -and knew back then- that they are different concepts but for some reason I expressed my idea as "mutual intelligibility".

My idea - Germanic being the least cohesive family out of the big three European ones - was based on observations like different gender systems (masculine-feminine-neuter, or common-neuter, or all genders merged), different forms or not for number and person in conjugations (German has them, English only keeps _-s_ and in the verb to be, Swedish lost them), the existance or not of declension (ok, apart from the genitive), suffixes for definite articles in Swedish, etc. as well as some important lexical issues like English borrowing a lot of vocabulary from Latinate sources while German and others relying on internal derivation through inherited stems. Perhaps we can find more basic differences in phonological grounds.

My point is that Romance languages (excluding Romanian and other Balkan-Romance varietes) don't present as many internal divergences. And neither does the Slavic family (perhaps Bulgarian being a bit of an exception too).

So perhaps I thought that Germanic languages weren't as similar among themselves as Romance and Slavic languages.



Dan2 said:


> There are huge differences in mutual intelligibility (MI) depending on which pairs of languages you consider. For ex., in the Germanic family, Norwegian and Swedish have far greater MI than Norwegian and English. In Romance, compare Spanish/Italian and Spanish/Romanian. So are you asking, "If you _averaged _over all pairs of languages in each group..."?


I know that comparing various languages is much more complicated than comparing a pair of them, but by no means is impossible. For extreme examples, I think we agree that Turkic languages aren't as diverse as Indo-European languages. Or that English dialects are more cohesive than Chinese "dialects".



Dan2 said:


> NO foreign language has any significant degree of MI with English.)


With the exception of Scots, I agree.



Gavril said:


> The mutual intelligibility of Romance languages is probably increased (hugely) by the number of words that have been reimported from Latin, after the initial waves of sound change and semantic shift in each language. E.g. common Spanish words like _rápido, quieto _and_ próximo_ are much closer to their Italian equivalents than they would be if they were part of the oldest stratum of vocabulary.
> 
> The Germanic languages don't have an equivalent of Latin in this sense, so they are at a disadvantage in their potential for mutual intelligibility. There was once an active process of importing Low German words into Scandinavian, but there isn't anymore, and there is no tradition in e.g. English and German of introducing old Gothic words into their vocabularies.
> 
> Latin itself (maybe along with Greek) seems to be the main source of new shared vocabulary in the Germanic languages: cf. Eng. _accept_ : German _akzeptieren_, E. _plausible_ : G. _plausibel_, E. _analysis_ : G. _Analyse, _etc.





merquiades said:


> I would add that the hundreds of cases when a Romance word has not been imported into English but not into German, etc. make communication more difficult: difficult -schwer, salmon- Lachs, television - Fernseher, train - Zug, table - Tisch, dentist - Zahnarzt, mountian - Berg.



I think these are excellent points. Not only does English make an extensive use of Latinisms, thus distancing itself from other Germanic languages; but Germanic languages who use Germanic roots use their own ones, since there is no common ancient mother tongue as Latin is to Romance languages. Therefore, you have _traducir, traduire _and _tradurre _in Sp, Fr & It; but _translate _in En, _übersetzen _in De and _översätta _in Sw, so both factors make the Germanic languages less cohesive when it comes to non-core vocabulary.



Nino83 said:


> Swedish: 6% Danish, 12% German, 15% Dutch, 31% English
> German: 14% Dutch 16% Swedish 21% Danish 34% English
> English: 34% Swedish 37% Dutch 39% German 41% Danish
> Danish: 4 Swedish 14% German 17% Dutch 30% English
> Dutch: 10% German 20% Swedish 22% Danish 32% English
> 
> So, divergences under 15% are:
> Swedish: with Danish, German and Dutch
> Danish: with Swedish and German
> German: with Dutch
> Dutch: with German
> English: all above 30%



I find this really helpful. In some way, the morphological divergence that I have commented some paragraphs above is similar to the lexical divergence. The percentage of non-cognate words between English and all other Germanic languages is similar or even higher than between Romanian and all other Romance languages.

However, I suppose this corpus, based on the press, includes many non-core and learned words, which are more subject to politicohistorical factors. Otherwise I don't know how to explain that Spanish has more cognates with Catalan than with Portuguese. So I guess this exaggerates a bit the difference between English and other Germanic languages.


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## Luigi Terrio

Gavril said:


> there is no tradition in e.g. English and German of introducing old Gothic words into their vocabularies.


We should. I could see that becoming a fan community thing like Anglish. Replace all Latin with Gothic, call it Ginglish.


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## luitzen

> My point is that Romance languages (excluding Romanian and other Balkan-Romance varietes) don't present as many internal divergences. And neither does the Slavic family (perhaps Bulgarian being a bit of an exception too).





> With the exception of Scots, I agree.


You're idea what exceptions are significant and should be taken into account seems to be fairly subjective to me. It looks like you use them to arrive at a conclusion you already formed.

I can say this about English being so different from other Germanic languages: most French/Latinate words in English also exist in German or Dutch. Maybe they're not used as much as in English, or have a slightly, often more technical or formal, different meaning, they definitely helped when I was learning English as a kid. You would think the use of the words in the specific context was weird or awkward, but you definitely would understand.

The things that are actually the hardest to understand, and I still struggle with after so many years, are words from Germanic origin and structures that are not of a specific non-Germanic origin.

"hardly", what does it mean? Is it very severe? Is it just enough or just not enough? In what context? Very confusing.
And what about "mirth"? Or such words as "meerkat" and "wildebeest" that are cleary of Dutch/African origin, but are actually different in Dutch?

"art", "music", "nation", "soldier"... no problem


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## merquiades

luitzen said:


> You're idea what exceptions are significant and should be taken into account seems to be fairly subjective to me. It looks like you use them to arrive at a conclusion you already formed.
> 
> I can say this about English being so different from other Germanic languages: most French/Latinate words in English also exist in German or Dutch. Maybe they're not used as much as in English, or have a slightly, often more technical or formal, different meaning, they definitely helped when I was learning English as a kid. You would think the use of the words in the specific context was weird or awkward, but you definitely would understand.
> 
> The things that are actually the hardest to understand, and I still struggle with after so many years, are words from Germanic origin and structures that are not of a specific non-Germanic origin.
> 
> "hardly", what does it mean? Is it very severe? Is it just enough or just not enough? In what context? Very confusing.
> And what about "mirth"? Or such words as "meerkat" and "wildebeest" that are cleary of Dutch/African origin, but are actually different in Dutch?
> 
> "art", "music", "nation", "soldier"... no problem


I'm always trying to find relief in Latin words in German, but am normally frustrated.  I have to learn from scratch.  This week:   ausgeregt (excited),  schildkrote (turtle), kunststoff (plastic), erfindung (invention), künstler (artist)....


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## berndf

A few small mistakes:





merquiades said:


> This week: au*f*geregt (excited), *S*childkrote (turtle), *K*unststoff (plastic), *E*rfindung (invention), *K*ünstler (artist)....


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## Red Arrow

merquiades said:


> I'm always trying to find relief in Latin words in German, but am normally frustrated.  I have to learn from scratch.  This week:   ausgeregt (excited),  schildkrote (turtle), kunststoff (plastic), erfindung (invention), künstler (artist)....


Schildkrote has the word 'shield' in it, Kunststoff has the word 'stuff' in it, Erfindung has the word 'finding' in it. Why are you so frustrated? These words already look like other words you know, why do they HAVE to look like Latin words?


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## Frank78

merquiades said:


> I'm always trying to find relief in Latin words in German, but am normally frustrated.



Be careful when you overdo it you quickly sound posh or scientific. The main difference to Latin words in English is the register.

But there are also old Latin or Romance loans in German which actually appear native Germanic on first sight but in fact they aren't. They have become ordinary every-day words.

For example:

Tisch (discus)
Spiegel (speculum)
Küche (coquina)
Kohl (caulis)
Essig (acetum)
Ziegel (tegula)
Fenster (fenestra)


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## merquiades

berndf said:


> A few small mistakes:This week: au*f*geregt (excited), *S*childkrote (turtle), *K*unststoff (plastic), *E*rfindung (invention), *K*ünstler (artist)....


  Ah, once again I confuse _auf_ and _aus_



Frank78 said:


> Be careful when you overdo it you quickly sound posh or scientific. The main difference to Latin words in English is the register.
> 
> But there are also old Latin or Romance loans in German which actually appear native Germanic on first sight but in fact they aren't. They have become ordinary every-day words.
> 
> For example:
> 
> Tisch (discus)
> Spiegel (speculum)
> Küche (coquina)
> Kohl (caulis)
> Essig (acetum)
> Ziegel (tegula)
> Fenster (fenestra)



It depends on the Latin word and how it is used.  I have read articles in the New York Time that are prohibitive to people who don't know French or Latin.  They say things like_ sans_,_ facile_, _commencement, otium. _Way too highfalutin for the average Joe.  But on the other hand there is no other way to say _fork, plate, chair etc.
_
That list of very old Latin words in German is very very intersting.  I never made the connection with any of those words except _Kohl_ and _Fenster_ which seem transparent to me, but I thought it could have been a coincidence.  It is true that _Spiegel_ and _Küche_ were not so difficult to learn, maybe there was a subconscious connection in my mind.  Otherwise, I would never have connected_ Ziegel_ to _Tegula_  (_toiile, teja_) and _Essig_ to A_cetum_ (ac_eite, aceto_),   So you have helped me learn some words. I did wonder why they didn't rather make up German compounds like *Anschauglas or *Sauerwein which is actually the origin of_ vinegar_ (vin aigre)   _Tisch_ from _Discus_ (tray) I can see how it could have changed meaning to table from _tabula_.



Red Arrow :D said:


> Schildkrote has the word 'shield' in it, Kunststoff has the word 'stuff' in it, Erfindung has the word 'finding' in it. Why are you so frustrated? These words already look like other words you know, why do they HAVE to look like Latin words?


 _Findung_ maybe could point me slightly in the right direction but for the other two no...   Even if I had managed to figure out _art stuff, _in my mind that could neverr have triggered _plastic_ in my mind.  Maybe an ensemble of things for artists like brushes, paints, canvas....


----------



## Delvo

English is such a weirdo in the Germanic family that I, a native Englisher who rarely encounters anything but English, am more likely to understand Spanish or French than German, even after having actually taken classes in German but not in Spanish or French. Why? Not just because English absorbed so much French & Latin vocabulary, but also because of the way it did so, and when. These effects add up to make an average random sample of Spanish/Latin/French feel as if it has more recognizable English cognates in it than an average equivalent sample of German.

The Germanic words we still have are generally said to be more basic and common, but that also makes them more generic, and thus less specific to the subject or the speaker's meaning. A word that shows up everywhere, in sentences with all kinds of meanings, can't tell help you differentiate between one meaning and another. But, for the French & Latin words we have absorbed, the fact that each one is, on average, used less often is because they're more specific to the subject that's being talked about, which makes them more useful for inferring what's being talked about.

Also, most of our French/Latin imports are more recent than the English/German split, which means they haven't had as much time to drift in meaning or for a pair of synonyms to have had one dropped in one language and the other one dropped in the other language. The example "Schildkröte" above illustrates this perfectly. It was suggested that this should be easy to understand as "turtle/tortoise" because it has a cognate of "shield" in it. But English speakers would never see the word "shield" and think "animal's shell/armor", and even if the first part were helpful, the second would be worse. For one thing, even if you are somehow aware that it means "toad", a word with "toad" in it would never lead us toward "turtle" because we don't perceive turtles as toad-like. And even if the looseness of that interpretation weren't an issue, the second part would also still be a classic example of the English-German split: Proto-Germanic had two separate words for "toad", but each descendant language has dropped a different one: German dropped the cognate of "toad", and English dropped the cognate of "Kröte", so neither word now is any more closely related to its modern translation in the other language than it is to its trnslations in Japanese or Zulu or Chippewa. And even after we get as far as putting the pieces "shield" and "toad" together, we'd still have... "shield-toad". Maybe we could convert that idea to something like "armor-toad" or "shell-toad", but that doesn't sound like it describes a turtle. Because there's no such thing as a toad with an actual shell, it sounds like it must refer to some species of toad I'm not aware of with especially thick, tough, dry, stiff skin that somebody simply _called_ a shell.

Meanwhile, what are the French and Spanish words for "turtle/tortoise"... words that begin with "turt-" and "tort-". And this isn't even an especially unique example.


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> Even if I had managed to figure out _art stuff, _in my mind that could neverr have triggered _plastic_


_*Kunst**stoff* = *art*ificial *stuff *_appears quite intuitive to me.

PS: May the problem is that the intuitive meaning of Latinate words is lost in English and English speakers don't associate _artificial_ with _art _any more.


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## Gavril

Arguably, a Finnish speaker would have an easier time (or no more difficulty) than an English speaker in guessing what _Schildkröte_ means, since their word for "turtle" is modelled on the same pattern as the German word (_kilpikonna_ "shield toad"), perhaps via Scandinavian influence. Once they know that _schild-_ is equivalent to their _kilpi-,_ they have an advantage over us.

Another area where the difference between cognates and intelligibility comes up is prefixes/prepositions: the fact that _Erfindung_ contains the same word as _find_ doesn't help me much, unless I have a good sense of what semantics are contributed by the prefix _er_-.

Since I don't think English has an equivalent of _er_-, I'll switch to the example of _vorschlagen_ "suggest, propose": even if I knew beforehand that _schlagen_ meant "strike, hit" and that _vor_- was cognate with Eng. _fore_, I have no idea how I would piece together the meanings "in front/forward" and "hitting" to arrive at the meaning "propose".

(Conversely, I would imagine that German/Dutch/Scandinavian speakers have similar trouble with English phrasal verbs like _find out_, or prefixed verbs like _withdraw_, etc.)


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## Delvo

berndf said:


> _*Kunst**stoff* = *art*ificial *stuff *_appears quite intuitive to me.
> 
> PS: May the problem is that the intuitive meaning of Latinate words is lost in English and English speakers don't associate _artificial_ with _art _any more.


I wouldn't have thought of those two as connected, because the meanings are nowhere near each other and the role of "ificial" is muddy. But even if I had, what good would that do with "Kunst"? There's no connection there at all. The Stoff/stuff equivalency doesn't make the "Kunst" go away.

So it's still another layer of needing to know non-cognates in order to decipher compound words with a cognate somewhere else in them. A compound word consisting of a cognate and a non-cognate (compared with familiar English words) still has exactly the same number of non-cognate components in it as an isolated non-cognate non-compound, like "Kunst" alone.

And again, what are the Spanish and French translations for the same thing: "plastico" and "plastique". Those are not only about as close as you can get in those languages to English "plastic", but also obviously related to some other less common but easily related English words or usages like "plastic/plasticity" in general (for something that's fairly easy to change or reshape) and "plastique" (a specific kind of plastic or plastic-like substance that can be used as an explosive).

Forget for a moment about which languages we're talking about here and what else you know of their histories. Imagine giving some hypothetical person who speaks any language out there the translations, in several other languages, for that person's native word "shambala":
1. Sambal
2. Shammaro
3. Chabala
4. Kukazungi

Which one(s) do you expect this person to find the easiest to connect to? How much do you think that answer would change if you told that person that the fourth language, not any of the first three, was actually in some way the most closely related to his/her native one? How much do you think it would change if you pointed out that "zungi" is cognate of a word they could sort-of see as a loose metaphor for some other word for something only tangentially connectable to shambala in his/her own language, while "kuk" was still entirely alien?


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## berndf

Delvo said:


> But even if I had, what good would that do with "Kunst"?


Because _Kunst_ is _art_ and _artificial_ is from _art_. In the Latin root there is nothing "muddy" in _artificial_, it means _made by/with art_ and in Latin this is quite transparent. In addition _artificial_ is _künstlich_ in German which makes the connection even clearer.


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## Red Arrow

I have made a list of Germanic English words that look like a Swedish word, but don't look like a Dutch word.
*



			glad - glad
root - rot
sky - sky
back - back (=backwards), tilbaka
skin - skinn
lock - lock (=cover of a jar)
flock - flock
bold - båld
quick - kvick
after - efter
odd - udda
near - nära
we are - vi är
hit - hitta (=find)
egg - ägg (Dutch: ei)
bare - bar
at - åt
same - samma
home - hem
from - fram (Dutch: van)
tree - träd
belt - bälte
queen - kvinna (=woman)
chicken - kyckling (Dutch: kuiken = chick)
often - ofta
skull - skalle
knife - kniv
law - lag
sale - sälja
bull - bulla
wing - vinge
mistake - misstag
take - ta
freckles - fräknar
ill - illa (=bad)
call - kalla
again - igen
little - liten
wet - våt
		
Click to expand...

*
I should make a similar list with Germanic English words that look like a Dutch word but don't look like a German word.
I am not learning Gerrman but to me it is obvious that it is often very different from English/Dutch.


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## Delvo

berndf said:


> Because _Kunst_ is _art_


And what would make someone who hadn't been told that think of it?


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## merquiades

berndf said:


> Because _Kunst_ is _art_ and _artificial_ is from _art_. In the Latin root there is nothing "muddy" in _artificial_, it means _made by/with art_ and in Latin this is quite transparent. In addition _artificial_ is _künstlich_ in German which makes the connection even clearer.


I'm not sure if even Romance language speakers make the connection between art/arte and artificiel/artificial as the process of creating words in Latin with that suffix is no longer productive.  I know Spanish speakers don't connect _arte_ with _artefacto_ (explosive device).
Anyway I learned Kunst in the meaning as art so it doesn't help me make Kunststoff into plastic


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## Red Arrow

Kunst comes from the verb kunnen (NL) / können (DE) / can (EN).

Dutch - English
Ik kan - I can
U kunt - You can
Ze kan - She can
We kunnen - We can
etc...

Kunst = something you can do/make = art


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## berndf

Delvo said:


> And what would make someone who hadn't been told that think of it?


If you don't know any German at all maybe not because the connection between _art_ and _artificial_ is too weak in English. If you know some basic German, in particular the adjective _künstlich_, it wouldn't be that difficult. Admittedly, there art other theoretically possible interpretations but the meaning _artificial material_ is quite straight forward.


----------



## Delvo

berndf said:


> In the Latin root... in _artificial_, it means _made by/with art_


...which doesn't make sense to modern English ears because "art" doesn't mean something you can use to build something else; it just means something created for aesthetic pleasure, like a painting or statue or embroidery or maybe music. The older meaning which your etymology relies on is still known, but only in archaic fossilized phrases; it's not what comes to mind from just the word "art" itself.

And even if we did look at the word "art" and think of its older meaning from back when it meant something more like "craft":
1. That would still tell us nothing at all about the entirely unrelated "Kunst".
2. You would still only have made a case that we could figure out a word from Latin, not one from Proto-Germanic.
3. I just walked into another English-German clash without even planning to, by bringing up "craft", which looks & sounds like a German word with a completely different meaning... sort of like "gift"...


----------



## berndf

merquiades said:


> Anyway I learned Kunst in the meaning as art so it doesn't help me make Kunststoff into plastic


Did you know the adjective _künstlich_? And, btw, the component _Kunst- _is productive in German, _immitation leather_ is _Kunstleder_, manmade light sources are collectively known as _Kunstlicht_, etc.


----------



## Delvo

berndf said:


> If you don't know any German at all maybe not


Well, the not-knowing-the-other-language thing is the whole point when the subject is "mutual intelligibility". Of course you can understand any language if you learn it, but that phrase refers to understanding one without learning it, based entirely on its relationship with another. And "art::Kunst" just isn't an example in which that can possibly happen.



berndf said:


> because the connection between _art_ and _artificial_ is too weak in English.


The problem of "Kunst" for English-speakers has nothing to do with "artificial". All that matters is the complete lack of any similarity between "art" and "Kunst". That's what "mutual intelligibility" would be, and it just isn't there. Some third word from some third language with some other meaning & pronunciation is entirely irrelevant.

You appear to be working by analogy, but analogy of constructions between phonetically dissimilar words isn't mutual intelligibility. (And the additional uses of "Kunst" in compound words show that even the analogy isn't a good one.)


----------



## Delvo

berndf said:


> the component _Kunst- _is productive in German, _immitation leather_ is _Kunstleder_, manmade light sources are collectively known as _Kunstlicht_, etc.


...which just makes "Kunst" not only completely unlike "art" in both sound and spelling, but also not even a very good translation for the meaning either. There is no way the English word "art" could ever possibly even be imagined (by a native speaker) serving in such a thoroughly un-art-like role. This only takes "art/Kunst" even *farther* from ever facilitating or being an example of mutual intelligibility.


----------



## merquiades

berndf said:


> Did you know the adjective _künstlich_? And, btw, the component _Kunst- _is productive in German, _immitation leather_ is _Kunstleder_, manmade light sources are collectively known as _Kunstlicht_, etc.


Just learned it recently.  I guess I will come not to see "_kunst_" not as the root but as a by-product of anything human made/ man made/ artificial.  That is really a new philosophical issue for me, but illuminating....   I don't think English speakers naturally see the concept of _art _and _artificial_ related in anyway.


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## Red Arrow

I have always wondered if native English speakers are somewhat able to understand this song.

The refrain goes like this:
*De liefde voor jou is diep zo diep
Dieper dan de diepste zee
De liefde voor jou is diep zo diep
Wilder dan de wildste, dieper dan de diepste zee*

I think the biggest problem with mutual intellegibility here is that English speakers never hear Belgian Dutch so they have no idea what looks like what. Pretty much like how most people here wouldn't even understand the Swedish word 'regering', which is called 'regering' in Dutch.


Delvo said:


> English is such a weirdo in the Germanic family that I, a native Englisher who rarely encounters anything but English, am more likely to understand Spanish or French than German, even after having actually taken classes in German but not in Spanish or French. Why? Not just because English absorbed so much French & Latin vocabulary, but also because of the way it did so, and when. These effects add up to make an average random sample of Spanish/Latin/French feel as if it has more recognizable English cognates in it than an average equivalent sample of German.


Well, let's try children books with very basic sentences. I think it is much easier for Americans to guess the meaning of a Dutch children book than a Spanish one.


> The Germanic words we still have are generally said to be more basic and common, but that also makes them more generic, and thus less specific to the subject or the speaker's meaning. A word that shows up everywhere, in sentences with all kinds of meanings, can't tell help you differentiate between one meaning and another. But, for the French & Latin words we have absorbed, the fact that each one is, on average, used less often is because they're more specific to the subject that's being talked about, which makes them more useful for inferring what's being talked about.


Very true.


Delvo said:


> "craft"


Cognate with German 'Kraft'.
Witch*craft* = Hexerei
Magical power = Zauber*kraft *(Dutch 'toverkracht' or 'magische kracht')


Delvo said:


> ...which just makes "Kunst" not only completely unlike "art" in both sound and spelling, but also not even a very good translation for the meaning either. There is no way the English word "art" could ever possibly even be imagined (by a native speaker) serving in such a thoroughly un-art-like role. This only takes "art/Kunst" even *farther* from ever facilitating or being an example of mutual intelligibility.


When did anyone try to say that 'Kunst' looks like the English word 'art'?


----------



## berndf

Delvo said:


> The problem of "Kunst" for English-speakers has nothing to do with "art/artificial". All that matters is the complete lack of any similarity between "art" and "Kunst". That's what "mutual intelligibility" would be, and it just isn't there. Some other word from some other language is entirely irrelevant.


That is not the context of Merc's comment. He knows what _Kunst_ means just didn't get the connection with _artificial_.


Delvo said:


> Well, the not-knowing-the-other-language thing is the whole point when the subject is "mutual intelligibility".


If you know absolutely nothing about a language, there is no such thing as "mutual intelligibility" at all. You need to develop at least some minimum acquaintance with a related language to start to understand it. The question is how much acquaintance you need to to be able to fill in the rest based on your own language. Sure it is more difficult to establish such understanding between English and German than, e.g., between Dutch and German.


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## Dymn

Romance languages and English form many new words by borrowing them directly from Latin.

The setback? Since the vast majority of learners of these languages has zero knowledge of Latin, deriving or deducing the meaning from the form itself turns really difficult and obscure and cannot be done without a proper experience with etymology. No average Romance (let alone English) speaker will realise that _art _and _artificial _are related, nor it will notice that this _-fic- _in there is related to _facer _"to do" (which itself has many forms in modern Romance languages and doesn't exist as a verb in English).

Or let's take a look at "plastic". I have no idea where it comes from. Apparently the ultimate source is Ancient Greek _plássein _"to mold, form". Good luck finding somebody who can make the connection.

Now, there's a (perhaps bigger?) advantage. That is creates large stocks of uniform vocabulary in these languages. English _plastic_, French _plastique_, Spanish _plástico_. English _artificial_, French _artificiel_, Spanish _artificial_. Sometimes, you don't even have to look them up, you simply deduce that _-ial _is _-iel _in French and very likely just by changing the ending a given word will exist with the same meaning. Learning vocabulary from Latin is really easy and that's why Romance speakers get frustrated when getting to grips with German. They (we) are used to learning English/French/Spanish which all make extensive use of Latinisms and German requires an extra effort that we don't need when we face other languages in our limited cluster.

The fact that German vocabulary can be broken down into pieces and the origin is more clear in its form is of great help, but an Anglo-Romance speaker will definitely be much more familiar with "Plastik" than "Kunststoff", even if he understands what "Kunst" and "Stoff" mean. That's also why phrasal verbs are one of the main nightmares for Romance learners of English, of course.


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## Hulalessar

berndf said:


> If you know absolutely nothing about a language, there is no such thing as "mutual intelligibility" at all. You need to develop at least some minimum acquaintance with a related language to start to understand it.



But does "mutual intelligibility" not mean the abilty to understand a language you have not previously encountered?


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## Red Arrow

Hulalessar said:


> But does "mutual intelligibility" not mean the abilty to understand a language you have not previously encountered?


Well, this thread would be rather pointless, then. Only Scandinavians would be able to talk about that.
I am very sure that someone from Leuven (my city) and someone from Berlin would never be able to understand each other if both are monolingual.


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## Dymn

As I said the other day,



Dymn said:


> Now, I think that my initial doubt was the similarity among these languages (in all aspects: phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary). I obviously know -and knew back then- that they are different concepts but for some reason I expressed my idea as "mutual intelligibility".



Now I can't change the title, but anyway feel free to discuss anything about the similarities and differences among the Germanic family.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> But does "mutual intelligibility" not mean the abilty to understand a language you have not previously encountered?


You may define it this way, definitions are arbitrary. But I would find such a concept rather uninteresting and hardly worth the discussion because already relatively minor sound shifts may render a dialect practically unintelligible whereas a very short time of "tuning" your ear is often sufficient to overcome the problem.


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## Frank78

merquiades said:


> I'm not sure if even Romance language speakers make the connection between art/arte and artificiel/artificial



That really surprises me because it's so obvious. Especially if you see art (a product of culture) and nature as opposites. Thus things like "artificial intelligence" are man-made.


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## Red Arrow

Exactly. Anything made by men is considered art. The art of pottery, the art of butchery, the art of architecture, the art of information processing, ... (I am literally summing up things I found on Google)

Why would making plastic suddenly not be considered art?! Then try make it yourself, thankless Americans, if it's such an easy and unskilled practise!


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## Delvo

Red Arrow :D said:


> The art of pottery, the art of butchery, the art of architecture, the art of information processing, ... (I am literally summing up things I found on Google)


"The art of ___" is a fossil phrase. It does not reflect what the word "art" means in modern English.


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## merquiades

Frank78 said:


> That really surprises me because it's so obvious. Especially if you see art (a product of culture) and nature as opposites. Thus things like "artificial intelligence" are man-made.


I know it is probably hard for you not to believe it.   Maybe it is because you all feel this obviously deep connection between _Kusnt_ and _Kunstlich, and Kunststoff _all having that _Kunst- _prominently at the beginning.  Maybe you see _art_ everywhere or you have some kind of feeling _art_ is _artificial_.  
_Art _with _arty_, _arsy_, _artlike, artist, artisan, artwork, artistic, artful_ is felt to have this connection.  But not _artificial_ which is probably defined by everyone as "not real, not natural".  But there is no feeling really that _art _is unreal or unnatural or otherwise _artificial_.  An _artist_ might well dispute that all with you.  There is no general connection between _artificial_ sweetener (man made),  fine _arts_ (man made),  plastic (man made).   I never recall hearing anyone talk about it either. We even sometimes say _plastic arts_ which I suppose for you is "_art stuff art_".

A couple more examples of English-German breakdown.
_öffentlicher Fernsprecher
Fernsehsendung
Fernsehturm_
Anyone not having studied German will not have any idea what that is about.  I know now that _Fern_- is some old Germanic prefix meaning "far away":  so "speak far away", "see something sent from afar", and "tower to see far".  But it's not innate for me to know all that.  As far as I know there are no English words with that prefix...
Compare that to Portuguese, for instance...
O telefone público
O programa de televisão
A torre de radiodifusão


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## Gavril

I think the "art"-words are another example where the divide (lexically/semantically speaking) between English vs. Continental European is more significant than the divide between Germanic and Latin/etc. Plenty of non-Germanic languages also have a clear lexical connection between "skill"/"craft" and "art" that is lacking in normal English usage:

Finnish _taide_ "art" / _taito_ "skill",
Slovenian _umetnost_ "art" / _umeten_ "artificial", etc.
Russian _iskusstvo_ "art" / _iskusnyi _"skillful"

(Then again, English has the adjective _artful_, which is clearly based on the "skill"/"craft" meaning of the term. But _artful_ isn't a very common word, and if there were no dictionary to tell me otherwise, I would probably guess that it meant "artistic" or similar.)


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## Delvo

Hulalessar said:


> But does "mutual intelligibility" not mean the abilty to understand a language you have not previously encountered?





Red Arrow :D said:


> Only Scandinavians would be able to talk about that.


I rarely encounter a Scandinavian language, and usually don't understand what I'm hearing. But there have been some cases when I hear Scandinavian lines in a movie and can understand... but only if I'm listening in German. My limited understanding of Scandinavian languages goes almost entirely through what I've learned of German. This makes me suspect that Germans could understand more Scandinavian speech than I can.


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> But it's not innate for me to know all that. As far as I know there are no English words with that prefix...
> Compare that to Portuguese, for instance...
> O telefone público
> O programa de televisão
> A torre de radiodifusão


_Fernsprecher = far speaker, telephone = far voice_.
_Fernsehen = far seeing, television = far seeing._
Where is the problem?

Seriously, German is full of loan translations from Latin and Greek and often has the originals as well and educated Germans are usually aware of the etymology of Latin and Greek loan words. This way have to do with the big emphasis on classical languages in traditional higher education. Even though only a small minority of students today learn Latin and Greek, we still usually learn the etymology of foreign words in school.


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## Frank78

Delvo said:


> This makes me suspect that Germans could understand more Scandinavian speech than I can.



No, I can maybe guess one word in a sentence in Danish or Swedish. 

The only language where that works is Dutch, Red Arrow's song is thoroughly understandable to me.


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## berndf

Frank78 said:


> No, I can maybe guess one word in a sentence in Danish or Swedish.


Danish is quite impossible because of the funny pronunciation. That required serious effort learning. Swedish is much easier in this respect. But reading is not too difficult.


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## Hulalessar

berndf said:


> You may define it this way, definitions are arbitrary. But I would find such a concept rather uninteresting and hardly worth the discussion because already relatively minor sound shifts may render a dialect practically unintelligible whereas a very short time of "tuning" your ear is often sufficient to overcome the problem.



Whatever one may think of it, Wikipedia is a good place to start. Here is its definition of "mutual intelligibility":

_In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort.
_
That is in accordance with what I have always understood mutually intelligibility to mean. Asking if varieties A and B are mutually intelligible is not the same question as asking how closely related A and B are. The definition allows your very short time for attuning the ear, but not a lot more. The fact that there may be correspondences and cognates is rarely if ever helpful in immediate understanding. If you allow too much you reach the point where any two genetically related languages will be deemed mutually intelligible.


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## Red Arrow

Delvo said:


> I rarely encounter a Scandinavian language, and usually don't understand what I'm hearing. But there have been some cases when I hear Scandinavian lines in a movie and can understand... but only if I'm listening in German. My limited understanding of Scandinavian languages goes almost entirely through what I've learned of German. This makes me suspect that Germans could understand more Scandinavian speech than I can.


I was talking about mutual intelligibility between Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. I'm not always talking about your language.
But anyway, English has lots of Scandinavian vocabulary, but if you have troubles with Schild/shield, you will also have problems with ill/illa etc.


Gavril said:


> (Then again, English has the adjective _artful_, which is clearly based on the "skill"/"craft" meaning of the term. But _artful_ isn't a very common word, and if there were no dictionary to tell me otherwise, I would probably guess that it meant "artistic" or similar.)


"The art of ..." clearly refers to a skill, but Delvo said it doesn't count.


Frank78 said:


> The only language where that works is Dutch, Red Arrow's song is thoroughly understandable to me.


Literally every word in that text looks like an English word. You might have more difficulties with other texts.

I am probably not allowed to post cartoon intros here, but today I tried to compare my Italian and German skills and I think they are equal despite having learned German at school for one year.

-Dutch and English version: I understood everything
-French version: I understood almost everything
-German version: Es war einmal so lange Zeit, als ich, Meister der ???, Terror, in ein fermen Land (in a big country/land?), Samurai, ein magische Schwehrd, letzte Slag, Zeitportal, Zukomst
-Italian version: molto tempo, terra, il maestro, forze del malo, stupido, samurai, magica, combat, prima (at first?), porta del tempo, futuro, constrastare (contrasts?), realisazi
(I don't know how to write Italian so just use your imagination  I only know z = ts/dz like in pizza, that's about it)

Both series of words give you about the same information, but I am sure the German series would be shorter without having learned the basics in school.
The Romanic languages (f.i. French and Italian) indeed look more like each other than the Germanic languages (f.i. Dutch and German).

EDIT: I do think Italians will find it harder to understand French because of liaison.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> Whatever one may think of it, Wikipedia is a good place to start. Here is its definition of "mutual intelligibility":
> 
> _In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort.
> _
> That is in accordance with what I have always understood mutually intelligibility to mean. Asking if varieties A and B are mutually intelligible is not the same question as asking how closely related A and B are. The definition allows your very short time for attuning the ear, but not a lot more. The fact that there may be correspondences and cognates is rarely if ever helpful in immediate understanding. If you allow too much you reach the point where any two genetically related languages will be deemed mutually intelligible.


I think if you ask _n _linguists for a _precise _definition of _mutual intelligibility_ you get _n_ different answers. Historically, _mutual intelligibility_ has been proposed as a linguistic criterion for distinguishing _languages_ and _dialect_. Since linguists have generally moved away for the idea that the should be possible to find a purely linguistic definition of what constitutes a _language_ in opposition to _dialect_, most linguists today show only very limited interest in this criterion. Here is a list of common problem they encounter when trying to find precise definition.


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## Delvo

Red Arrow :D said:


> I was talking about mutual intelligibility between Swedish, Norwegian and Danish.


Yes... and... ?



Red Arrow :D said:


> I'm not always talking about your language.


Umm... what?!



Red Arrow :D said:


> if you have troubles with Schild/shield


Umm... what?!


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## kiwismightfly

As an English native speaker I can understand written Afrikaans without difficulty, but have difficulty understanding a Geordie accent


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## Hulalessar

kiwismightfly said:


> As an English native speaker I can understand written Afrikaans without difficulty, but have difficulty understanding a Geordie accent



I feel I need to ask what other languages you know and what exposure you have had to Afrikaans. I cannot speak any Germanic language other than English and I find Afrikaans almost totally opaque.


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## merquiades

> Benewens blanke en bruin Afrikaanssprekendes word Afrikaans deur die meeste etniese groepe in Suid-Afrika as 'n tweede (of selfs derde) taal gepraat. Westelike Suid-Afrika (d.w.s. die provinsies Noord- en Wes-Kaap en die westelike streke van die Vrystaat) is tans 'n oorwegend Afrikaanstalige gebied; 'n groot segment van Afrikaanses in die gebied is Kleurlinge.



I just copied this random sentence from Afrikaans Wikipedia.  We'll see what I can get

Blanke (white from French)?,  So brown?   Afrikaanspeakers (sprechendes from German), word  die meeste (the most... die meiste from German) ethnic...  so the biggest ethnic group in South Africa as.... tweede twenty?).......  West South Africa....  the provinces north..... West Cape....  western.................   Afrikaanstalige gebied  (Afrikaan.... from German gebiet/ region)...  segment...... of Afrikaans... in the areda of Kleeurlinge

So white and brown Afrikaans-speaking people, the biggest ethnic group in West or North provinces of South Africa, in the Cape area and in the area surrounding Kleulinge.....

Not much and without Geman and French even less.


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## kiwismightfly

Hulalessar said:


> I feel I need to ask what other languages you know and what exposure you have had to Afrikaans. I cannot speak any Germanic language other than English and I find Afrikaans almost totally opaque.


I come from Wellington, New Zealand. At my high school of about 1200 kids, 48 different languages were spoken as first languages. Mostly, people spoke the major island languages (Maori, Samoan, Tagalog, Indonesian, Niuean, Tongan),  the major Asian languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean), or Russian, Spanish, Hindi or Afrikaans. We also had a smattering of other languages from all over the world, including various middle eastern ones, the romance languages, the Nordic languages, minor Asian languages..... just about everything really.
I am fairly fluent in French -I've been learning for five years, but I have almost no understanding of German and struggle to make anything out from either spoken or written German. I only have the odd phrases I've learnt from learnt from tourists, which makes up a very patchwork vocabulary. Afrikaans, however, just seems to make sense to me. When I hear it spoken, it's a little like listening to pidgin English, and I have the weirdest feeling of understanding the gist of what is spoken, without recognizing any particular words. I understand it about as well as I can understand spoken Spanish or Italian by piggybacking off French. With written Afrikaans, I can get most of it. A South-African friend of mine pinned a maritime safety poster up on the wall of our sea scout hall. This is a rough approximation: Waneer yu go long salwater, yu mas kari em sefti ekwipment. I know this sentence holds a lot of loan words, which makes it easier, but I still find written Afrikaans much more intelligible than German.


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> Blanke (white from French)?


Precisely the other way round. French _blanc _is a loan from Old Frankish, the language from which Dutch evolved which in turn is the language from which Afrikaans evolved.


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## Frank78

berndf said:


> Precisely the other way round. French _blanc _is a loan from Old Frankish, the language from which Dutch evolved which in turn is the language from which Afrikaans evolved.



Do you know why the decendant of "albus" vanished and almost all Romance languages use "blanc(o)/bianco/branco"? Even those which weren't under Frankish influence? Only in Romanian it's still "alb".


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## merquiades

kiwismightfly said:


> This is a rough approximation: Waneer yu go long salwater, yu mas kari em sefti ekwipment. .


  I am very very far from knowing Afrikaans, but your sentence seems to me to be highly anglicized Afrikaans so that English speakers can get it.   I ran "When you go along saltwater, you must carry safety equipment, and got this.  _*wanneer jy gaan saam soutwater, moet jy die veiligheidstoerusting dra._  I put the astericks because there is no way I will trust google.

@berndf It is indeed very puzzling that all the Romance languages would replace the Latin _alb _with a Frankish word.  So no cognate of _blanc _in standard German?   Even the earliest texts in Spanish have _blanco.  _For this change to be so sweeping perhaps it had even entered Late Vulgar Latin?


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## berndf

Frank78 said:


> Do you know why the decendant of "albus" vanished and almost all Romance languages use "blanc(o)/bianco/branco"? Even those which weren't under Frankish influence? Only in Romanian it's still "alb".


It would still be from Frankish. To my knowledge Frankish and its decedents is the only Germanic group where the root _blank- _has pushed aside the root _hwit-_ to describe the concept of_ white_. The Frankish conquest f Gaul happened at a time when the VL dialect continuum was still more or less intact and Frankish loans could very well have spread over the entire continuum.


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## Penyafort

Frank78 said:


> Do you know why the decendant of "albus" vanished and almost all Romance languages use "blanc(o)/bianco/branco"? Even those which weren't under Frankish influence? Only in Romanian it's still "alb".



When that happens it is usually because the Germanism had already entered the Latin language in its spoken medieval variety as _blancu(s)_, probably after the split with Romanian but not necessarily, as it could have vanished later, like _blavo/blao _did in the west of Iberia in favour of _azul._

Descendants from _albus _exist in all the Romance languages but at a formal/literary level or in fossilized forms.


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> So no cognate of _blanc _in standard German?


Sure, but in other Germanic languages, like German, the root _blank-_ exists as well. But the modern meanings are virtually never _white_. It means either _shining _(e.g. German) or _pale, bleak _(e.g. Swedish). These notions are of course all very similar, but _blank _as the regular word for _white _is a Frankish peculiarity.


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## Red Arrow

Delvo said:


> Yes... and... ?
> 
> Umm... what?!


I recommend you to read the previous posts again 

I said: _Only Scandinavians would be able to talk about that. _(talking about mutual intelligibility between Norwegian, Danish and Swedish)
Then you disagreed with me and said there is no mutual intelligibility between English and any Scandinavian language.
Then I said I wasn't talking about English.
Then you said 'What?'.


> Umm... what?!


I meant the general meaning of 'you', but never mind. It looks like you are doing your best to disagree with me. I'm okay with that.


merquiades said:


> I just copied this random sentence from Afrikaans Wikipedia.  We'll see what I can get
> 
> Blanke (white from French)?,  So brown?   Afrikaanspeakers (sprechendes from German), word  die meeste (the most... die meiste from German) ethnic...  so the biggest ethnic group in South Africa as.... tweede twenty?).......  West South Africa....  the provinces north..... West Cape....  western.................   Afrikaanstalige gebied  (Afrikaan.... from German gebiet/ region)...  segment...... of Afrikaans... in the areda of Kleeurlinge
> 
> So white and brown Afrikaans-speaking people, the biggest ethnic group in West or North provinces of South Africa, in the Cape area and in the area surrounding Kleulinge.....
> 
> Not much and without Geman and French even less.


Generally speaking, Afrikaans vocabulary is just Dutch vocabulary *without* most of its loanwords from French, Latin and English.

*English - Dutch - Afrikaans*
computer - computer - rekenaar
laptop - laptop - skootrekenaar
thriller - thriller - riller (literal translation)
string - string - amperbroekkie
burn-out - burn-out - yuppiegriep
tabasco - tabasco - brandbeksous
metro - metro - moltrein
scooter - scooter - bromponie
DJ - dj - plaatjoggie
rapper - rapper - kletsrymer
to lift - (mee)liften - duimgooi
jogging suit - jogging - sweetpak
chameleon - kameleon - verkleurmannetjie
etc.

Afrikaans is almost as puristic as Icelandic, just not in the classic Romanic vs Germanic way. They simply don't like new words and keep recycling older ones. (which I kind of like, to be honest) For instance 'moltrein' stands for 'mole train'.


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## Frank78

Red Arrow :D said:


> burn-out - burn-out - *yuppiegriep*



Fabulous.


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## Hulalessar

kiwismightfly said:


> Waneer yu go long salwater, yu mas kari em sefti ekwipment.



Like Merquiades I know no Afikaans, but I have seen enough examples so that my immediate reaction was that that is not Afrikaans; I certainly would never have identified it as Afrikaans. No online translator I have found recognises it as Afrikaans. If anything it looks like a caricature of a pidgin. However, I may be wildly wrong.


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## Stoggler

kiwismightfly said:


> Waneer yu go long salwater, yu mas kari em sefti ekwipment.



Apart from the first word (which is a Dutch and Afrikaans word) that is an English-based creole, very reminiscent of Tok Pisin and Bislama (inter alia), or at least an attempt to ape one.  Having studied Dutch and subsequently learned a little Afrikaans, it bares no resemblance to actual Afrikaans.


----------



## kiwismightfly

Stoggler said:


> Apart from the first word (which is a Dutch and Afrikaans word) that is an English-based creole, very reminiscent of Tok Pisin and Bislama (inter alia), or at least an attempt to ape one.  Having studied Dutch and subsequently learned a little Afrikaans, it bares no resemblance to actual Afrikaans.


It may be that the Afrikaans I have seen written is quite outdated, and perhaps poorly written by white south Africans who didn't fully understand the language. A friend of mine showed me a bunch of old scouting diagrams and camp-craft books written in Afrikaans, but as he never really learned it in school, neither of us would really know if it was well written or not. Having looked at some more Afrikaans online, it does seem that what I read was heavily anglicized. When I get a chance I will try to find out when and where they were written, and take a photo of the boating safety poster for you all.


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## Delvo

Red Arrow :D said:


> I said: _Only Scandinavians would be able to talk about that. _(talking about mutual intelligibility between Norwegian, Danish and Swedish)
> Then you disagreed with me and said there is no mutual intelligibility between English and any Scandinavian language.


I suggested that there might be some between Scandinavian languages and _German_.


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## Wilma_Sweden

Delvo said:


> I suggested that there might be some between Scandinavian languages and _German_.


Sure, the German vocabulary is of course on many occasions similar enough for you to get the gist of a text, but German grammar and vocabulary are still too different. As a Swedish native speaker, I may understand up to 30% of a German text, but 90-95% of a Danish or Norwegian text.


----------



## Red Arrow

Delvo said:


> I suggested that there might be some between Scandinavian languages and _German_.


Oh, okay then.


Wilma_Sweden said:


> Sure, the German vocabulary is of course on many occasions similar enough for you to get the gist of a text, but German grammar and vocabulary are still too different. As a Swedish native speaker, I may understand up to 30% of a German text, but 90-95% of a Danish or Norwegian text.


I expected you would find it easier to read Dutch. Many words are written exactly the same. (Although I think Norwegian looks the most like Dutch) This must have been some Low-German/Dutch influence in Scandinavia, I suppose.


----------



## Wilma_Sweden

Red Arrow :D said:


> Oh, okay then.
> 
> I expected you would find it easier to read Dutch. Many words are written exactly the same. (Although I think Norwegian looks the most like Dutch) This must have been some Low-German/Dutch influence in Scandinavia, I suppose.


Dutch looks as foreign to me as German, and Norwegian doesn't look any more like Dutch than the other Scandinavian languages, IMO. There was a great number of German words imported to Swedish in the Hanseatic period, but I am unsure what version of German that would have been.


----------



## Stoggler

Wilma_Sweden said:


> There was a great number of German words imported to Swedish in the Hanseatic period, but I am unsure what version of German that would have been.



Mostly Low German


----------



## merquiades

berndf said:


> It would still be from Frankish. To my knowledge Frankish and its decedents is the only Germanic group where the root _bank- _has pushed aside the root _hwit-_ to describe the concept of_ white_. The Frankish conquest f Gaul happened at a time when the VL dialect continuum was still more or less intact and Frankish loans could very well have spread over the entire continuum.


It would appear that_ guerra/ guerra/ war_ is another one of these Frankish words that managed to displace _bellum _in every language but not in standard German _krieg
_


> _Guerre_ (1000) du vieux-francique *werra (« querelle »), qui supplanta, en latin populaire, le latin classique _bellum_ (« guerre »), confondu avec l’adjectif _bellus_ (« beau »), devenu très fréquent après avoir lui-même supplanté le classique _pulcher_ (« beau »). Le francique est apparenté au latin _versus_ (« opposé »). Il est apparenté à l’allemand _ver-wirren_ (« embrouiller »).


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## Frank78

merquiades said:


> It would appear that_ guerra/ guerra/ war_ is another one of these Frankish words that managed to displace _bellum _in every language but not in standard German _krieg_



Because the original sense was not "war". Why should German replace "Krieg" by a word which does not mean war?

"Guard" is another loan from Germanic but that has been reloaned into German: "Garde" which means approximately the same as "Wache".


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## berndf

Frank78 said:


> *Because the original sense was not "war"*. Why should German replace "Krieg" by a word which does not mean war?


It is. The original OHG meaning of _krieg _was _stubbornness _whereas _uuerra _contained the notions of _fight _and _conflict_. For _uuera _to develop into the meaning _war _as it actually did in English would have been perfectly logical. By contrast, _krieg _to develop this meaning as it did in German is far less obvious.


----------



## Luigi Terrio

Red Arrow :D said:


> I have always wondered if native English speakers are somewhat able to understand this song.
> 
> The refrain goes like this:
> *De liefde voor jou is diep zo diep
> Dieper dan de diepste zee
> De liefde voor jou is diep zo diep
> Wilder dan de wildste, dieper dan de diepste zee*


Native Anglophone who has never studied Dutch here. I listened to the song before reading the lyrics. First time I heard the refrain I didn't understand but it sounded like someone slurring English words so my brain was recognizing the closeness. The next time it played my brain made the adjustments and I heard it as "The life _ is deep so deep, deeper than the _." After looking at the lyrics the rest is very obvious and from context I could change life to love.


----------



## Red Arrow

Wilma_Sweden said:


> Dutch looks as foreign to me as German, and Norwegian doesn't look any more like Dutch than the other Scandinavian languages, IMO. There was a great number of German words imported to Swedish in the Hanseatic period, but I am unsure what version of German that would have been.


Sorry for this late response, but Norwegian definitely has more Dutch looking words than Swedish.

finne (vinden)
pleiebarn (pleegkind)
melkeveien (melkweg)
ovn (oven)
artisjokk (artisjok) => this word definitely comes from Dutch
ravn (raaf)
foreløpig (voorlopig)
svangerskap (zwangerschap)
flau (flauw)
nevo (neef)
nysgjerrig (nieuwsgierig)
at falde i søvn (in slaap vallen)
koffert (koffer)
løpe (lopen)
bakkenbarter (bakkebaarden)
teppet (tapijt)
angst (angst)
såpe (zeep)

The Swedish equivalents look a lot less like Dutch words.

EDIT: I am not sure, but I think the Norwegian word for everyone is "alle man" just like in my dialect of Dutch. In Swedish, it's simply "all".

(I have never learned Norwegian so please forgive the mistakes in this post  )


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## berndf

Red Arrow :D said:


> but Norwegian definitely has more Dutch looking words than Swedish.


Only in so far as Dutch looks similar to Low German where Swedish, Norgewian and Danish got the lion's share of their West Germanic loans from.


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## Scholiast

Greetings all

A footnote:


Frank78 said:


> Do you know why the decendant of "albus" vanished and almost all Romance languages use "blanc(o)/bianco/branco"? Even those which weren't under Frankish influence? Only in Romanian it's still "alb".


I'm sure there's a philological 'rule' here, but I don't know it. It is, however, almost axiomatic that the further removed speakers are from contact with the parent language, the more conservative they are, both in vocabulary and morphology. This applied in antiquity (for example) to Spanish, as opposed to Italian, speakers of Latin, and even today the Spanish verb-system preserves more of the classical language than modern Italian does. Dacia (Romania) was until relatively recently relatively remote from the demographic influences which transformed Vulgar Latin into the western Romance tongues.

Σ


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## Ben Jamin

Red Arrow :D said:


> Sorry for this late response, but Norwegian definitely has more Dutch looking words than Swedish.
> 
> finne (vinden)
> pleiebarn (pleegkind)
> melkeveien (melkweg)
> ovn (oven)
> artisjokk (artisjok) => this word definitely comes from Dutch
> ravn (raaf)
> foreløpig (voorlopig)
> svangerskap (zwangerschap)
> flau (flauw)
> nevo (neef)
> nysgjerrig (nieuwsgierig)
> at falde i søvn (in slaap vallen)
> koffert (koffer)
> løpe (lopen)
> bakkenbarter (bakkebaarden)
> teppet (tapijt)
> angst (angst)
> såpe (zeep)
> 
> The Swedish equivalents look a lot less like Dutch words.
> 
> EDIT: I am not sure, but I think the Norwegian word for everyone is "alle man" just like in my dialect of Dutch. In Swedish, it's simply "all".
> 
> (I have never learned Norwegian so please forgive the mistakes in this post  )


(Almost) all these Norwegian words are loans from Low German coming from Hanseatic merchants that in a period dominated all commerce in Norway. By the way, there are many more of such words, I belive many hundreds. There are also many direct loans from Dutch in Norwegian, like "orlogskip" and "orlogkaptein".


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## Red Arrow

Ben Jamin said:


> There are also many direct loans from Dutch in Norwegian, like "orlogskip" and "orlogkaptein".




My point was that Norwegian seems to have borrowed more Low German loanwords than Swedish. I didn't know they also had many direct loans from Dutch.

Do Norwegians even know what 'orlog' is? Or is it like the Dutch word 'ombudsman'? A common word, but we have no idea what 'ombud' means, let alone that it's actually Swedish


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## Ben Jamin

Red Arrow :D said:


> My point was that Norwegian seems to have borrowed more Low German loanwords than Swedish. I didn't know they also had many direct loans from Dutch.
> 
> Do Norwegians even know what 'orlog' is? Or is it like the Dutch word 'ombudsman'? A common word, but we have no idea what 'ombud' means, let alone that it's actually Swedish


I think that even people that understand the Norwegian words originating from Dutch mostly don't know what "orlog" (oorlog) is, if they are not interested in etymology.


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## Wilma_Sweden

Red Arrow :D said:


> My point was that Norwegian seems to have borrowed more Low German loanwords than Swedish. I didn't know they also had many direct loans from Dutch.
> 
> Do Norwegians even know what 'orlog' is? Or is it like the Dutch word 'ombudsman'? A common word, but we have no idea what 'ombud' means, let alone that it's actually Swedish


I am not at all sure who has borrowed the most from low German, the Swedes or the Norwegians? Many of the Norwegian words you listed as similar to Dutch are almost exactly the same in Danish as in Norwegian, but often different in Swedish. My Swedish dictionary lists some different etymologies, though: koffert in Swedish is a loanword from German, who borrowed it from French coffre. Örlog- in Swedish is described as a loan from Low German orlich/orloch, since the 13th century. In Swedish it is still in use, but only as part of different compound nouns in the realm of naval warfare, such as örlogsskepp (warship), örlogsbas (naval base) etc. The Norwegian counterpart is said to be imported from Dutch oorlog (source: Norwegian Wiktionary) and I'd be interested to see what the Danish etymological dictionaries say about Danish 'orlog', but alas I haven't found one online.


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## berndf

Wilma_Sweden said:


> I'd be interested to see what the Danish etymological dictionaries say about Danish 'orlog', but alas I haven't found one online.


The same Middle Low German source you quoted for Swedish. And you might be pleased to learn, the ODS *is* available online:

orlog — ODS


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## Wilma_Sweden

berndf said:


> The same Middle Low German source you quoted for Swedish. And you might be pleased to learn, the ODS *is* available online:
> 
> orlog — ODS


Thanks! I find it odd having different sources for the same word in all three Scandinavian languages... I'm sure there is a historical reason in there somewhere...?


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## berndf

I would take the wiki-etymology with a grain of salt, especially as it is lacking references.


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## Wilma_Sweden

berndf said:


> I would take the wiki-etymology with a grain of salt, especially as it is lacking references.


I thought as much - finally found A. Torps etymologiske ordbok online, also stating Low German!


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