[Corpora-List] Similar words have similar sounds

[maxwell]

On Tue, 9 Mar 2010 01:51:23 +0600, "Yuri Tambovtsev" <yutamb at mail.ru>
wrote:
> linguists should decide when we must consider two languages to be
closely
> related, that is, to establish the threshold of mutual intelligibility.
> ...
> Surely, it is not 27% or even 34%, as the case with Hanty, Mansi and
> Hungarian. In my opinion, it should not be less than 70%. 

I don't think you can reliably establish mutual intelligibility on the
basis of "similar" vocabulary (even if you were to define "similar") or
similar sound systems, because there are other things that go into
intelligibility.  Among these are grammatical shifts, and semantic shifts
of the sort that might not show up on a word list (like "lift" in British
English used to mean "elevator" in American English, as well as the common
meaning--provided of course such shifts were multiplied across larger
ranges of vocabulary).  In other words, vocabulary and sound changes are
only a portion of the changes that might inhibit mutual intelligibility.

The only reliable test for mutual intelligibility is mutual
intelligibility, and that can be (as Angus B. Grieve-Smith pointed out in
postings earlier today) hard to measure because of other influences ("I
don't *want* to understand those despicable people"--or for that matter,
"Of course I understand them, do you think I'm stupid?").  We rely on
lexical similarity only when we haven't been able to test mutual
intelligibility.

   Mike Maxwell

_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora