Mutual Intelligibility. [was Re: Misrepresenting others' views]

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>Odegard at means.net writes:

>But if you, the modern linguist, did a word-for-word
>phonemo-grammatico-lexical analysis, you'd see it was the *same* language.

-- no, you'd see it was a closely related language.  That is, after all, how
you _get_ new languages -- dialect divergence.

>The question becomes pointed when you also ask if the language of the
>Makedones was really 'Greek'.

-- probably a closely related but distinct language, or an extremely
divergent Greek dialect, a somewhat arbitrary distinction; but we don't have
enough information to be sure and probably never will.  The other evidence --
personal names, religious practice -- would seem to indicate that the
Makedones proper were fairly close to Greek.  In any case, their upper class,
by Alexander's time, were bilingual in Macedonian and standard Greek, roughly
as the Russian aristocracy used to be in Russian and French.

(It's a pity we have even less on Molossian (Epirote) and so forth.  My own
guess, which is no more than that, is that there was a fringe of
related-to-Greek languages around the northern edge of Greece proper, a relic
of the folk-movements which originally brought proto-Greek south from the
Balkans.  Phyrgian seems, on what scanty evidence we have, to have stood in
some close relationship to Greek -- eg., use of a cognate of "wannax" for
"king".)

>What happens when there are major grammatical innovations, but of a such
>transparent nature that the next-door cognate has no problems understanding it
>(e.g., collapsing locative ablative and instrumental into dative+preposition)?
>My answer is they are separate languages, inasmuch as both speakers will
>regard the other's speech as 'ungrammatical'.

-- If the two dialects are perfectly mutually comprehensible, it is, to be
frank, absurd to regard them as separate languages.