Mutual intelligibility

[Cire]

It's a kind of interesting phenomenon I think. For me being a native Swedish speaker, I can more-or-less communicate with a little effort with both Norwegian and Danish people, which I think is pretty neat. On the other hand, it can feel a bit amusing, no offense to my neighbours from Norway and Denmark. To me, Norwegian sounds like a more melodic and happy version of Swedish, while Danish sounds like a more mushy and badly articulated variant. I feel this is rather fun in a non-mean way of course.
I read that the similar thing is true for many other languages, would be interesting to hear other Doomworlders experience on this! :)

[kuchitsu]

Belarussian and Ukrainian sound like someone took Russian and distorted every word to make them sound funny. Same is partially true for Czech, Polish, etc.

[Cire]

Hah, yeah, that sounds great!
I personally think such things are really funny. I'm rather open minded when it comes to jokes. I almost never take offense if someone jokes with regardless of what. I've learned to be a bit more careful joking about some things though. There seems to be a fine line between joking and bullying sometimes. And bullying sucks!

[Dragonfly]

In the UK alone there's so many 'variants' of the English language; this comes down to regional accents. Compare Brits from such as Cornish (Those from Cornwall). I also find these diversities of the same language interesting.

I also find it interesting listening to people who's mother tongue isn't English talk in English (Something I'm actually impressed by. Sometimes you can't tell, others you really can. One notable example is most Polish people I've met cannot pronounce my name properly as it starts with a J - Instead of "Josh" they pronounce it closer to "Yawsh".

[Cire]

I Think you would love to hear me talk then! I can express myself without too much trouble in English, but I still have a typical Nordic accent. It's the same with names that start with J in Sweden too. I really have to Think careful when pronouncing John or Joke - otherwise they could be mistaken for Yawn and Yoke! ;)
It's because the J letter is pronounced more like Yee in Swedish. In English it's more like Djay (I don't mean like D-Jay, lol!) for us. And we also have a lot of "variants" of Swedish too. I live in the west coast of Sweden only 100 km from the border to Norway. I Think the part I live in (Bohuslän) used to be part of Norway a few 100 years ago IIRC, and I notice a huge difference in dialect between different generations. My grandparents almost sounds half-Nowegian to me, even using some Words that are more commonly used there. I kind of saddens me a bit that this seems to be dying out, at least here in Sweden, going towards a more unified Swedish, mostly influenced by our Capitol city Stockholm I belive.
Fun fact: I live in Sweden, I have 200 km to Norway's Capitol city Oslo and 600 km to our own Capitol city! :D

[Kontra Kommando]

http://eurotalk.com/blog/2013/02/08/so-did-you-know-you-can-speak-greek/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English



English is a very interesting language, and I find it fitting that many people in the EU speak it, basically as a de facto pan-European language. Its a Germanic language, but 58% of the vocabulary comes from Romance languages.

[Li'l devil]

I guess I'll ask my question here.

I, as a not-native English speaker, was always interested - what kind of English should I speak, British or American?
At school they taught us the British variant, but it appears to be that the majority uses American..

[Tristan]

Dragonfly said:

In the UK alone there's so many 'variants' of the English language; this comes down to regional accents. Compare Brits from such as Cornish (Those from Cornwall). I also find these diversities of the same language interesting.

imo the Cornish accent sounds silly most of the time :) Even worse for me, I've started slipping from my neutral British accent all round to a definite westcountry slur on some words (such as life being more like loife). Not pleased :P

[dew]

Kontra Kommando said:

English is a very interesting language, and I find it fitting that many people in the EU speak it, basically as a de facto pan-European language. Its a Germanic language, but 58% of the vocabulary comes from Romance languages.

Yeah, to me English is the actual Esperanto. Unlike that forced and unnatural construct, English is a proper slut of a language and takes it from any incomer without complaining. Even better, it's the simplest widespread language I know of grammar-wise, so one is able to communicate at a basic level very quickly. The only confusing part is pronunciation, because any rule has a ton of exceptions and many words follow their original language to a varying degree.

[kuchitsu]

English is a bit underwhelming compared to Russian. It seems much less expressive and more stiff or something... it's hard to explain. This could be simply because I'm much worse at English than Russian. However, I'm even worse at Japanese, and yet I see it as an incredibly colorful language with so many interesting ways to spice up what you're saying.

[Demonologist]

Russian foul language is unmatched, you can construct self-existent sentences using only obscene words, heh (and spam the whole internet with those, right). Surely an opportunity I miss in English.

[Zed]

I can understand written Portuguese (maybe up to 80-90%), but the spoken language is another story (I can barely understand anything) because of the "colorful" pronunciation, it sounds like they are singing...:). On the other hand, Spanish "variations" are insignificant: there are a lot of people on a lot of countries that speak Spanish, and I can communicate perfectly with every one of them. But I know this is not about variations of the same language, but rather other mutually intelligible languages, but as I said, as a Spanish speaker, I can only understand written Portuguese (and Italian, but not as much).

And I love English, I wish I could actually live (at least for a while) in an English-speaking country/region, I really, really need more practice.

[Cire]

ChekaAgent: I have about the same experience. I don't usually Think about it, but I Believe I'm using a mix of them both.
Kontra Kommando and dew: I agree, English seems to be the de-facto International language.
kuchitsu: Hard to say, I feel the same about Swedish and English. I can express myself a bit better in Swedish, because I know more Swedish Words than English ones, even though I know English has a lot more than Swedish does. I also feel more secure when speaking Swedish, especially live, because I started to learn Swedish from birth and didn't start Learning English in school until about when I was about 10.

[dew]

kuchitsu said:

English is a bit underwhelming compared to Russian. It seems much less expressive and more stiff or something... it's hard to explain. This could be simply because I'm much worse at English than Russian. However, I'm even worse at Japanese, and yet I see it as an incredibly colorful language with so many interesting ways to spice up what you're saying.

English is super-abstract compared to slavic languages. And yes, it's much more rigid and doesn't really contain the mangling of words we consider normal. Spanish does have some of that and btw, Spanish swearing can also be wonderfully rich. Languages and their subtleties are great, but the sheer simplicity of English makes it the perfect tool of international communication - exactly because it doesn't get so ridiculously finnicky. It does lack some of the playfulness that's used in friendly banter, heated swearing or the language of love, though. :)

[Cire]

About swearing, it's interesting that English Words are sexually related while in at least Swedish they're more Hell related.

[Jon]

ChekaAgent said:

I guess I'll ask my question here.

I, as a not-native English speaker, was always interested - what kind of English should I speak, British or American?
At school they taught us the British variant, but it appears to be that the majority uses American..

It depends on your audience and intent, but in the absence of a compelling reason to do otherwise, if you learnt British English, use British English.

[Aliotroph?]

If you're not speaking in slang I don't think it matters what variant of English you use aside from your accent. Regional accents cause a lot of confusion, even when they're really close to one that's more mainstream.

[Dragonfly]

I don't think you can strictly learn only British English or American English anymore, since they've become a very blended thing. American English is winning the battle so to speak, I believe this to be because of the sheer amount of American media available worldwide.

Eris Falling said:

imo the Cornish accent sounds silly most of the time :) Even worse for me, I've started slipping from my neutral British accent all round to a definite westcountry slur on some words (such as life being more like loife). Not pleased :P

Lol! Thanks for the laugh, heh. Yeah, Cornish always had sounded peculiar to me, hence why I used that as an example. The Essex accent always had me screwing my face up, but having had a 18 month relationship with a girl from Essex I got used to it. Essex 'chavs' though... Eugh.

By Neutral British I am curious where you mean? I personally have lived in Surrey most of my life, and the southern side of Greater London for the rest of it, so to me that's "Neutral British" but I'm sure some would contest that!

[Jon]

Dragonfly said:

I don't think you can strictly learn only British English or American English anymore, since they've become a very blended thing.

No they haven't.

Dragonfly said:

American English is winning the battle so to speak, I believe this to be because of the sheer amount of American media available worldwide.

[citation needed]

Dragonfly said:

By Neutral British I am curious where you mean? I personally have lived in Surrey most of my life, and the southern side of Greater London for the rest of it, so to me that's "Neutral British" but I'm sure some would contest that!

Yup, me for one. I have in my mind's ear a strong memory of a friend from Guildford (Mystican for those with long memories; he designed the current DW theme, fact fans!) and it's very much accented. People tend to hear their local accent as neutral. A true neutral accent is either someone trained to speak specifically like that (such as received pronunciation) or from someone who has moved around a lot and didn't get "hooked" (my Dad is some such person, who's Father was in the Army and they moved frequently).

[Kontra Kommando]

Parlo poco italiano, perché fatto le lezioni a la università. Ma, dimenticato tanto parole.

[Li'l devil]

Kontra Kommando said:

Parlo poco italiano, perché fatto le lezioni a la università. Ma, dimenticato tanto parole.

Я нихуя не понимаю!

[Kontra Kommando]

I find the root meaning of words to be interesting as well. Like the word "Disaster", which is greek for "Bad Star"; Dus Aster. It gets its meaning from ancient astrology.

ChekaAgent said:

Я нихуя не понимаю!

Spoiler

I speak a little Italian, because I took lessons in university. But, I forgot a lot of words.

[Cynical]

Cire said:

About swearing, it's interesting that English Words are sexually related while in at least Swedish they're more Hell related.

The thing about English swearing is that a lot of the ones with religious origins, as well as a lot of the more evocative ones that Dew was lamenting the lack of, are no longer considered profane. Now we're just left with the sexual and the scatological.

[Demonologist]

[BigDickBzzrak]

You know, after the Yugoslavian Civil Wars of the 90-s 4 countries decided that each of them has its own language. As a result, I can speak 4 languages since the age of 3-4. Beat that.

[Quast]

ChekaAgent said:

I, as a not-native English speaker, was always interested - what kind of English should I speak, British or American?
At school they taught us the British variant, but it appears to be that the majority uses American..

Aside from slang terms, accent and the spelling of a few words, there really isn't much difference.

It's exactly the same scenario with spanish spoken in spain and spanish spoken throughout latin america.

[MrFlibble]

dew said:

Yeah, to me English is the actual Esperanto. Unlike that forced and unnatural construct

In defence of Esperanto and other constructed languages, I would like to emphasise that they're only "artificial" up to the point when people start speaking them. There is no evidence that the fundamental workings of the brain are different for a constructed language when compared to natural languages (of course the manifestation of these in the cortex will differ depending on the order and time of acquisition, grammar etc., but the principles are the same).

The reasons why English became the world language of today are primarily political and not related to its structure. There was a relatively brief period when French was used for international communication, and before that was Latin - an "artificial" language for Europe then, as there were no native speakers of Latin at the time anymore.

dew said:

Even better, [English]'s the simplest widespread language I know of grammar-wise, so one is able to communicate at a basic level very quickly.

While it may indeed be easy to attain basic command of English, its grammar is no less complicated than that of any other language (at least, in the Indo-European family). It's just a question of the level at which complexity is found. For example, English did away with Indo-European nominal inflection entirely, but grammatical meanings are expressed on the syntagmatic level (i.e. the way words are combined, their sequence etc.). At the same time, the verb retains many of its Indo-European tense forms, while in Russian for instance this has morphed into a tense + aspect combo while tense inflections proper ceased to exist. Both languages are capable of expressing the same meanings, but the appropriate forms are different in each language.

ChekaAgent said:

I, as a not-native English speaker, was always interested - what kind of English should I speak, British or American?
At school they taught us the British variant, but it appears to be that the majority uses American..

That is entirely up to your own personal preference. That's the advantage we non-native speakers have: we can consciously choose any form of a foreign language we like (or even better, combine them at will), while as native speakers we're basically stuck with what we got, although of course a native speaker can and will adapt to a different norm of the mother tongue if this is socially (or for any other reason) desirable.

[Jon]

bzzrak said:

You know, after the Yugoslavian Civil Wars of the 90-s 4 countries decided that each of them has its own language. As a result, I can speak 4 languages since the age of 3-4. Beat that.

I holidayed just outside Dubrovnik last year and learned a little bit about your shared history. Lovely place, too!

[kuchitsu]

Here is a very strange English imo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerima

"In English, it calls itself Nerima City."

How the hell can a ward call itself...

[Tetzlaff]

bzzrak said:

You know, after the Yugoslavian Civil Wars of the 90-s 4 countries decided that each of them has its own language. As a result, I can speak 4 languages since the age of 3-4. Beat that.

Did the former Yugoslavian countries abandon Serbocroatian?