IE and Substrates and Time

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

Sheila Watts <sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

>>So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is required
>>for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and more than 2000 years
>>for them to be so large as to prevent communications, i. e., to require one
>>party to learn the other's language before communication can take place, if
>>both are members of the same general speech community.

>This seems to me to be too broad a generalisation to work in any useful
>way. A lot depends on exposure
> [...]
> It seems to me that trained linguists tend to overemphasise wildly the
>ease with which ordinary people will understand a spoken language in real
>time - not a written document over which they can pore, but an utterance at
>which you only get one chance.

But this works both ways.  An unintelligible written document
does not rephrase itself, while an interlocutor will try again
until he's understood (if it's in his own interest, of course).

A lot indeed depends on exposure, but the interesting cases from
a historical linguistic point of view are by definition the cases
where a lot of mutual exposure is involved.

In the case of late OE / late ON it's often said that the two
languages were "very close" and mutually intelligible.  My own
exposure to ON is negligible (and I can't say I'm fluent in OE),
but it seems to me that such claims are exaggerated.  West and
North Germanic had already been diverging for quite some time a
thousand years ago.

But if those claims are made, it's not because the people making
them are trained linguists, but it's because the *evidence* shows
a degree of interaction between the two languages that can only
be explained if there was indeed a fair amount of mutual
intelligibility.  But this mutual intelligibilty was probably not
"automatic" as in the case of two dialects of teh same language,
but the result of lots of exposure.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam