Updates to Athabaskan notes

[Arnaud Fournet]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Harald Hammarström
To: ATHAPBASCKAN-L at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2011 9:16 PM
Subject: Re: Updates to Athabaskan notes


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.

***

Another major issue is that some cultural areas have a very integrative 
approach of what is the same language.
Many speakers of Arabic and Chinese do not understand each other but they 
nevertheless think they speak the same "language".

A.
***





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.