question from student re Russian vs. Ukrainain language

[Paco]

Dear all,

In making comparisons like these you do have to keep things like lexicon, morphology, phonology etc. etc. relative.  Spanish and Portuguese have a rather high percentage (around 90%) of lexical and morphological similarity, but the phonological differences are dramatic -- so much so that a sister language with a more dissimilar lexicon and morphology (for example, Italian, at around 83%-85%) is more intelligible to a Spanish speaker in  conversation.  If you were to restrict your question to reading comprehension, then the similarity between Portuguese and Spanish becomes salient.  You also have to take into account the direction of intelligibility.  It is frequently said that Brazilian Portuguese speakers comprehend Spanish more than the other way around.

Francisco Picon

On Mar 22, 2012, at 2:44 PM, J.Golubovic wrote:

> I don't have any particular reference to offer, but I am working on mutual intelligibility of Slavic languages and very loosely (since I am not working on east Slavic languages at the moment), Czech and Slovak are too closely related, a better analogy would perhaps be German-Dutch. 
> 
> Jelena
> 
> On 22.03.12, Stefan Pugh <stefan.pugh at WRIGHT.EDU> wrote:
>> 
>> This is also amateurish, but I'd say Czech vs. Slovak, BUT add a large lexical component to one (say Slovak) not
>> shared by the other one... appr. 30% of the total.   However, Spanish-Portuguese works, as long as you still add
>> the lexical component!
>> 
>> Stefan
>> 
>> On 3/22/12 1:54 PM, Anne L Lounsbery wrote:
>> 
>>>  
>>> Hello all,
>>>  
>>> I realize that this is both an “amateurish” question and a loaded one, but because a student is asking me and I have no answer for her, I thought I’d present her question to the list:  “How different are the Russian and Ukrainian languages? As different as, say, Spanish is from Portuguese? Mandarin Chinese from Cantonese?”
>>>  
>>> What might be a good analogy to offer here?
>>>  
>>> Thanks.
>>>  
>>> --Anne
>>>  
>>> Anne Lounsbery
>>> Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Study
>>> Department of Russian & Slavic Studies
>>> New York University
>>> 19 University Place, 2nd floor
>>> New York, NY 10003
>>> (212) 998-8674
>>>  
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