6 ms·

> Consider that "spanish" and "italian" are officially separate languages, while the US and Scotland both officially speak "english". The terminology won't help

by javert 11y ago

> Consider that "spanish" and "italian" are officially separate languages, while the US and Scotland both officially speak "english". The terminology won't help you predict which pair has an easier time communicating. I'm not certain, but that doesn't sound right to me. I'm pretty sure Americans and Scots have a far easier time communicating than someone who only speaks Italian and someone who only speaks Spanish. (Assuming Scottish accents that are reasonably mainstream, not an extreme outlier.) If I'm wrong, I'd like to be enlightened.

alistairSH 11y ago
I'm Scottish by birth, but was raised in the US. I don't have a problem with any of the Scottish accents, but American friends consistently have trouble understanding Glasgow patter and certain highland accents. Heck, I add a roommate in college who needed captions for Trainspotting! That said, it tends to be as much a vocabulary problem as the accent itself. Lot's of colloquialisms to learn.
kfk 11y ago
Correct. Italian and Spanish can understand each other, but with a lot of effort and keeping communication at a very basic level. This thing that we can speak to each other easily is a myth. That said, we can learn each other languages in a matter of weeks.
- stefantalpalaru 11y ago
  > we can learn each other languages in a matter of weeks Not so fast. Even if you limit yourself to a vocabulary made of the most common 10000 words, you still need a lot more practice to differentiate between nouns that have a gender in Italian and another in Spanish, irregular verbs, idioms, etc. Understanding a language is one thing. Speaking and writing it is a whole new level.
  - douche 11y ago
    Gendering nouns that aren't actually gendered is one of the stupidest concepts humanity has inflicted on itself.
    - stefantalpalaru 11y ago
      It's not. Even Old English had grammatical gender, you just lost it with time, along with proper vowel pronunciation ;-)
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > Gendering nouns that aren't actually gendered is one of the stupidest concepts humanity has inflicted on itself. The objects referred to by nouns aren't inherently gendered, gender is a feature of grammar (sex is a feature of some classes of objects, and fairly recently the grammatical term was adopted as a euphemism for sex by people afraid of the word "sex", and even more recently, inspired by that use, as a name of a social construct associated with, but distinct from, biological sex.) But grammatical genders, while in some languages they have some correlation to sex distinctions, have no necessary relation to them, as gender distinctions may be on other axes entirely. So the whole statement seems based on not understanding what "gender" is at all.
      - throwaway1967 11y ago
        > So the whole statement seems based on not understanding what "gender" is at all. Your parent was just saying gender is unnecessary, and you did not answer anything to disprove that, or to prove that they were once needed. For instance (speaking of Latin), why is Lapis (stone) masculine but Saxum (stone) neuter? The Romans could have chosen to place all new words on the 2nd declension neuter (the simplest) but instead it (Classical Latin) created 3 more 3rd declension variants on top of the existing ones! And it was more productive, in this 3rd declension, in assigning masculine and feminine rather than neutral, which the 3rd declension also supported! So what is the reason for that?
        hugh4 11y ago
        I suspect that sometimes we deliberately complicate our languages to make it harder for the less educated classes to speak them properly, thus creating a larger barrier between us and them.

by javert 11y ago

alistairSH 11y ago

I'm Scottish by birth, but was raised in the US. I don't have a problem with any of the Scottish accents, but American friends consistently have trouble understanding Glasgow patter and certain highland accents. Heck, I add a roommate in college who needed captions for Trainspotting! That said, it tends to be as much a vocabulary problem as the accent itself. Lot's of colloquialisms to learn.

kfk 11y ago

Correct. Italian and Spanish can understand each other, but with a lot of effort and keeping communication at a very basic level. This thing that we can speak to each other easily is a myth. That said, we can learn each other languages in a matter of weeks.

stefantalpalaru 11y ago
> we can learn each other languages in a matter of weeks Not so fast. Even if you limit yourself to a vocabulary made of the most common 10000 words, you still need a lot more practice to differentiate between nouns that have a gender in Italian and another in Spanish, irregular verbs, idioms, etc. Understanding a language is one thing. Speaking and writing it is a whole new level.
- douche 11y ago
  Gendering nouns that aren't actually gendered is one of the stupidest concepts humanity has inflicted on itself.
  - stefantalpalaru 11y ago
    It's not. Even Old English had grammatical gender, you just lost it with time, along with proper vowel pronunciation ;-)
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Gendering nouns that aren't actually gendered is one of the stupidest concepts humanity has inflicted on itself. The objects referred to by nouns aren't inherently gendered, gender is a feature of grammar (sex is a feature of some classes of objects, and fairly recently the grammatical term was adopted as a euphemism for sex by people afraid of the word "sex", and even more recently, inspired by that use, as a name of a social construct associated with, but distinct from, biological sex.) But grammatical genders, while in some languages they have some correlation to sex distinctions, have no necessary relation to them, as gender distinctions may be on other axes entirely. So the whole statement seems based on not understanding what "gender" is at all.
    - throwaway1967 11y ago
      > So the whole statement seems based on not understanding what "gender" is at all. Your parent was just saying gender is unnecessary, and you did not answer anything to disprove that, or to prove that they were once needed. For instance (speaking of Latin), why is Lapis (stone) masculine but Saxum (stone) neuter? The Romans could have chosen to place all new words on the 2nd declension neuter (the simplest) but instead it (Classical Latin) created 3 more 3rd declension variants on top of the existing ones! And it was more productive, in this 3rd declension, in assigning masculine and feminine rather than neutral, which the 3rd declension also supported! So what is the reason for that?
      - hugh4 11y ago
        I suspect that sometimes we deliberately complicate our languages to make it harder for the less educated classes to speak them properly, thus creating a larger barrier between us and them.