Updates to Athabaskan notes

[Harald Hammarström]

I think those reasons are not devastating.

The first, while of course valid, just makes it a little more practical work
to get an intelligibility judgment.

It is also true that mutual intelligibility isn't an equivalence relation,
but does that make it unsuitable? You can at least
count the number of "languages" in a set of varieties where mutual
intelligibility is known for every pair, in the following
way. Give a color to every variety such that no two varieties which are
mutually unintelligible get the same colour. There
will be a unique minimum number of colours required, and every such
colouring yields a possible constellation of
languages over varieties (which all have the property you like: "If two
varieties are not mutually intelligible, they are not
varieties of the same language"). There's a paper about this:
Hammarström, Harald. (2008) Counting Languages in Dialect Continua Using the
Criterion of Mutual Intelligibility. * Journal of Quantitative
Linguistics*15(1). 34-45.

A potentially worse problem is that people might not answer yes/no as to
intelligibility, but give a degree answer.

all the best,

H


2011/1/2 Bill Poser <billposer2 at gmail.com>

> I don't think that reports of mutual intelligibility are a valid basis for
> considering two speech varieties to be the same language, for two reasons.
> One is that such reports do not necessarily reflect the intrinsic
> intelligibility of the two varieties. All too often, they mean that
> so-and-so, a speaker of A, also understands B. This may, however, be due to
> at least passive bilingualism. Only if one really knows that the report
> means that a speaker of A can understand B without prior exposure are such
> reports to be taken seriously.
>
> More importantly, intelligibility is not suited for this purpose because it
> is not an equivalence relation: it is not transitive. That is, for purposes
> of classification, it should be true that if A and B are mutually
> intelligible and B and C are mutually intelligible then A and C are mutually
> intelligible. It is, however, false as one can easily find chains where
> mutual intelligibility obtains between neighbors but more distant varieties
> are not mutually intelligible.
>
> If two varieties are not mutually intelligible, they are arguably not
> varieties of the same language, but the mere fact that two varieties are
> mutually intelligible is not a valid basis for concluding that they are
> varieties of the same language.
>
>
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