Can Parent and Daughter co-exist?

[Rick Mc Callister]

	Last summer I showed a Scottish-Nicaraguan movie called Carla's
Song to my advanced 4th semester Spanish students. While they could
understand most of the Spanish without relying on the subtitles, except for
a few cusswords they were completely lost trying to understand the
Glaswegians. Several students asked me what language they were speaking and
why they cussed in English instead of their own language.
	I've never seen this degree of bewilderment when Spanish and
Portuguese speakers get together.
	It definitely defies conventional notions of language separation

[snip]

>I once met a couple of fellow hikers on the
>Appalachian Trail in western North Carolina.  They were from Scotland
>speaking English.  I was from Utah speaking English.  Yet there was less
>than 50% mutual comprehensibility.  We finally resorted to the common
>context, hand signals, and a very slowly spoken "Swadesh list" of forms to
>"communicate".  Were we actually speaking the "same language"?  I've
>observed Spanish speakers and Portuguese speakers doing the same thing with
>about the same level of success, yet they are considered to be speaking two
>languages.
[snip]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701