Turkic

[Robert Orr]

There is an Indo-European parallel to the items below (alleged homogeneity
of Turkic)
I will  take the liberty of quoting myself (adapted)

[ Moderator's note:
  The following two paragraphs are quoted from a posting by Stefan Georg,
  dated 10 Feb 2000, quoting in turn one from Larry Trask, dated 6 Feb 2000.
  Just to keep everything clear.
  --rma ]

>> Indeed.  Uyghur is one of the most divergent Turkic languages, and a
>> glance through a comparative vocabulary of the Turkic languages reveals
>> a very modest proportion of shared vocabulary between Turkish and Uyghur.

> Well, this isn't "Altainet", but, while Larry is right that the degree of
> "mutual intelligibility" of the Turkic languages is often overemphasized,
> the scene depicted is not as inconceivable as it may seem.

>From the point of view of internal heterogeneity Slavic is surprisingly
uniform.  Reading texts in an unknown Slavic language based on one's
knowledge of another using a good dictionary is far less daunting (and
entails much less of a sense of futility!) than in many other language
groups.  In this context one might take issue with statements that hint that
it is erroneous to say that learning to read a new Slavic language based on
knowledge of another is "not a very daunting task", or that confronted with
a passage in, e.g., Czech, Polish, or Serbo-Croatian, based on a knowledge
of, e.g., Russian alone, "you will probably have great difficulty doing more
than figuring out what the passage is about, if that."  However, for a
hypothetical unknown language, "figuring out what [a] passage is about" with
no prior knowledge is already a tremendous step forward.  As an illustration
of this point one only has to contrast the degree of internal uniformity
within Slavic with that in, e.g., Germanic.  This point will be grasped
simply by attempting to read a page of Faroese with only a knowledge of
English or German as a guide, and then juxtaposing the result with a
comparison of any two Slavic languages.