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From my dad, linguist: "This is the classic example of an L-complex. A chain of mutual intelligibility can be established from Normandy to Sicily and over to P
by samch 9y ago
From my dad, linguist:
"This is the classic example of an L-complex. A chain of mutual intelligibility can be established from Normandy to Sicily and over to Portugal, and in fact across all of Latin America, though Brazil is linked through Portugal and the rest of Latin America through Spain. An L-simplex is a grouping of dialects that are all mutually intelligible. In an L-complex there may be dialects that are not mutually intelligible. But on occasion you find a maximal L-complex that is also an L-simplex. Israel is one. The Basque country is another. But it's rare."
- unscaled 9y agoInteresting terms. I've never came across them in my linguistic study, but I see they were heavily employed by C.F. Hockett, so that might be less exposure to American Structuralism. I want to make a small correction here. Israel is a special case not because all regional dialects are mutually intelligible, but because it has no regional dialects at all (unless you're talking about Arabic, but then it's a far cry from an L-Simplex). This is due to the history of Modern Hebrew in Israel being relatively recent. It only reached a stable grammar with a sizable generation of native speakers in the 1920s and 30s, and until the 60s at least non-native speakers probably outnumbered the native speakers. By then Television was unleashed, and killed whatever budding dialects that existed. Practically speaking, there used to few minor dialectal variations in Jerusalem. It pretty much amounted to about 20-30 words, a default feminine form for the noun 'cat' and a different pronunciation for the number 200. But even these features are barely left in Jerusalem, which had seen large population exchanges.