IE and Substrates and Time

[Sheila Watts]

>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).

This is true, of course, and a good point. But see below.

(snip)
>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.

Roger Lass and I once had an interesting discussion on the question of
mutual intelligibility of OE and ON, which neither of us thought was likely
in any widespread sense. There are textual references to interactions in
whichOE and ON speakers seem each to have spoken his own language (e.g. in
'The battle of Maldon'), but these are works of literature rather than
history. Even if we take them at face value, we cannot know whether such
exchanges really occurred, how much each party understood of what the other
said, whether they had interpretative help and indeed, how much contact
each had had with the language of the other before the events descirbed in
the text.

I think the problem I had with Rich Alderson's original posting was that I
thought it posited rather too undifferentiated a view of what mutual
intelligibility means. We need to distinguish between 'so intelligible that
tow speakers can just hold a conversation straight off', 'intelligible
enough for speakers to make themselves understood if they really want to'
'intelligible enough for speakers to convey very simple messages when there
is a very high degree of need.' And the boundary between language
acquisition through contact and language learning also seems to me to be a
fuzzy one.

In conclusion, I still think it's an oversimplification to try to talk
about time depths at which mutual intellgibility can be predicted. Modern
related language and dialects show us that this is a very complex issue.

Best wishes
SheilaWatts
_______________________________________________________
Dr Sheila Watts
Newnham College
Cambridge CB3 9DF
United Kingdom

phone +44 1223 335816

[ Moderator's comment:
  I agree with what Sheila Watts has to say on the subject.  What I originally
  responded to was the notion that such communication must be rejected based on
  a relatively short time frame, which I hope we can agree is also simplistic.
  --rma ]