LL-L: "Language varieties" 05.JUL.2000 (01) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: Criostoir O Ciardha [paada_please at yahoo.co.uk]
Subject: LL-L: "Language varieties" 04.JUL.2000 (01) [E]

Dear all,

Thank you, John, for your contribution. I presume the
'sceptic' of your e-mail address also applies to your
experience as a linguist! *laughs* I believe to a
certain extent that academia requires a regular influx
of new ideas - no matter how inadvised they are.

> I accept that it is often said that [Old] Norse and
> Old English were not
> that different, and even that speakers of each
> language could understand
> the
> other. But is this true?
>
> 1. In "The Life and Times of the English Language"
> Robert Claiborne writes:
>
> "the two languages were quite similar (they had been
> separated for less
> than
> a thousand years); they may even have been mutually
> intelligible in part."

I believe that the differences in Old Norse and Old
English so far as I can determine are mainly
syntactical and micro-grammatical; I reiterate that in
the situation described in my extract, the two
speakers would not be able to register quantity but
nonetheless be able to communicate, no matter how
imperfectly or inefficiently.

One innovation of Old English that Norse did not
develop was the lenition of [sk] to [sh], cf: Ingelsk:
English, fisk: fish, skirt: shirt and so on. Norse
appears more archaic and yet lacks the complicated
inflections - so far as I know - of Old English.

> 2. The two sentences given as examples appear to me
> very different. Can we
> assume that a "ciepend" and a "kaupmathr" without
> linguistic training would
>
> recognise the similarity of the spoken forms? Can we
> assume that
> intelligibility would be as great if talk turned to
> old women? (I commented
>
> once before on the  exaggeration of the similarity
> between English and
> Frisian by careful selection of terms.)

I think this is largely an orthographical contention.
For example the verb 'selle' in Old English has its
cognate 'selja' in Old Norse, a phonetic difference of
little real consequence. Indeed, to return for a
moment to Slavic language examples, this semi-vowel
distinction marks the differences between Serbian and
Croatian - where 'bread' is 'hljeb' (cf: hlaf in Old
English) in Serian but Croatian 'hleb'; Serb. 'mljeko'
('milk') but Croat. 'mleko' - but by no means makes a
speaker of the Serbian variant of Serbo-Croat
unintelligible to a speaker of Croatian. Indeed,
Serbo-Croat speakers have three variants which on the
surface appear vastly different but which are
nonetheless easily understood. In the Stokavski
variant, 'what?' is 'sto?'; in Kajkavski it is 'kaj?'
and in cakavski it is 'ca?'. Rarely does this cause
problems. Therefore many of the phonetic
idiosyncracies of Old Norse could not be claimed to be
a barrier against understanding; just perhaps a small
obstacle.

The second issue is that is that mutual
intelligibility would not have been immediate based
upon two people meeting and speaking two different
languages to each other. The whole theory of
comprehension between Old English and Old Norse
speakers is based on the premise that both individuals
had some patience and a willingness to make a little
effort to be understood. This makes such cognates as
waegn:vagn easily comprehended with patience. And,
presumably, if an issue of trade is at stake, patience
will prevail. One cannot ignore the sociolgical
environment of the time, nor the fact that many
speakers of both Old English and Old Norse -
particularly in the transitional zones of speech -
would have been bilingual in both tongues; to argue
that every single Norseman or Anglo-Saxon knew no
English or Norse respectively ignores the experience
of a number of bilingual communities, including the
present Plautdietsch and Frisian-speaking areas of the
Lowlands.

Similarly, many speakers in England would have been
multilingual in their own variants of the above
languages as well as perhaps other variants within
their own vicinities; if there is evidence of Frisian
settlement in the Danelaw no doubt a Frisian would
speak the Frisian of her or his home, the local
variant of Norse, the formal Norse of the Sagas, Old
English and perhaps variants of that as well. I point
to my own experiece where I speak my own language but
also Standard English.

> 2a. Since my knowledge of both Old Norse and Old
> English is very limited, I
>
> should be interested to know what versions of the
> languages the examples
> are
> in. I assume the first is classical Icelandic of the
> 14th century and the
> second is standardised Wessex, based on Alfred's 9th
> century usage.

I believe the two versions I quoted were the forms of
both languages (i.e., Old Norse and Mercian Old
English given the area of contact) used in the time of
Alfred the Great, and certainly not classical
Icelandic!

> 3. Further to 2, even if the printed words are
> similar, was the
> pronunciation? Consider the difficulty of
> understanding some regional
> accents even when the speaker is using standard
> vocabulary and grammar.

This is a very valid point. Local variants of
'literary' languages such as Old Norse were probably
massively divergent. Similarly, variant Norse is
unlikely to have been written down, in uch the same
way that I am unable to transcribe my own variant and
must use standard English instead. However, the
divergence may have meant Norse becoming closer in
pronunciation to Mercian English or Wessex English or
wherever, not just divergence in the opposite
direction. Phonology is usually the final aspect of a
language to change and therefore judging by the
pronunciation of Norse-derived variants today it would
appear that Old Norse in England did not grow
substantially closer - at least in pronunciation - to
Old English. The nature of Norse pronunciation in
England may be understood through close analysis of
Norse borrowings into English, perhaps?

> 4. Further to 2, the Slavonic languages are very
> similar to a linguist but
> the degree of mutual intelligibility seems to be low
> for native speakers. I
>
> offer two pieces of anecdotal evidence from Polish
> speakers I have talked
> to.
> a) One thought that Russian - unlike Polish - was
> not a Slav language.
> b) Another could see no connexion between the Polish
> word "chleb" and the
> Bulgarian "Xlab", both meaning "bread".

I have no desire to counter anecdotal evidence, but
there is no evidence that the Slavic languages are
"very similar to a linguist but [that] the degree
of mutual intelligibility seems to be low for native
speakers." One has to look at the sociological context
of Russian-Polish and Bulgarian-Polish when
understanding the above evidence.

I should make clear that I have a number of Bosnian
friends and although I could not speak Serbo-Croat
when I first met them, I was able to make myself
understood using the small amount of Russian I then
knew. Similarly, I have no difficulty reading any
Slavic language because I know a little Russian and
Serbo-Croat; further, I once spoke Serbo-Croat to a
Slovenian and she presumed I was speaking Slovene, so
great was the degree of mutual comprehension between
the two languages.

I was recently reading the excellent 'The Smallest
Slavonic Nation' - focusing on the Sorbs of Lusatia -
and I found to my surprise that my minute knowledge of
Polish and Czech enabled me to proceed a fair way
through the Sorbian text without difficulty. Also, I
read a UNESCO book of Sorbian-language poetry and once
again proceeded without any major obstacle to basic
understanding. In 'The Smallest Slavonic Nation' the
author points out that a Soviet diplomat visiting
Lusatia was amazed that he could understand Sorbian
but pointed out that minor differences in the values
attached to cognates produced ridiculously humourous
encounters. For example, the Sorbian cognate of the
Russian word for 'prince' - I forget it exactly - had
been downgraded to mean 'Mister' so that to a Russian
speaker 'Mister X' became 'Prince X'. The diplomat was
astounded: "In Mother Russia I am only 'comrade' but
here I am a prince!"

Until next time,

Criostoir.

----------

From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject: Language varieties

Criostoir,

Even though Slavic is not within the focus of Lowlands-L, I have to add
that my experience with Sorbian (apparently the language of some of my
ancestors) is similar to yours.  I am pretty sure that this would apply to
most "linguists"if they delt with Western Slavonic, be they academic
researchers or people who casually acquired the ability to process sound
shifts and thus to recognize cognates between related languages.  The same
applies within Germanic.  Most of us here on this list fall into one of
these categories, and I venture to say that we are a part of a fairly small
minority and ought not lose sight of this apparent fact.  Our own ability
ought not lead us to taking it for granted in all people, to fail to
understand that most people have not acquired this ability and struggle
with even the slightest of differences, even with "accents" in their own
language, even with etymological relationships within their own languages
that to you and me seem ridiculously clear.  I cannot speak for John Tait,
but I understood him as referring to this when he said,

> 4. Further to 2, the Slavonic languages are very
> similar to a linguist but
> the degree of mutual intelligibility seems to be low
> for native speakers.

Regards,

ReinhardRon

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