4 ms·

This is a song in Ladino. Ask any person fluent in Spanish if they can understand it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t2NYMTs_20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?

This is a song in Ladino. Ask any person fluent in Spanish if they can understand it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t2NYMTs_20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t2NYMTs_20 To me, a fluent Spanish speaker, it sounds like a Spanish person with a foreign accent. The pronunciation and grammar sounds a little bit off (with respect to Spanish), but otherwise I can understand this 100%.

pjmlp 6y ago
Same here, and if you speak German, the same applies to Yiddish.
- yorwba 6y ago
  LibriVox has recordings of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" translated into many languages, including various Germanic ones. https://librivox.org/the-raven-multilingual-by-edgar-allan-poe/ https://librivox.org/the-raven-multilingual-by-edgar-allan-p... As a native German speaker who also knows English (obviously), I'd rate the comprehensibility of the others as follows: Swedish: understood just a few words Dutch: understood some entire phrases Yiddish: understood entire sentences, but there were still some words I couldn't recognize, which I guess might stem from Hebrew or Slavic languages. (But I did know about some of the more regular sound changes relative to German before, like Augen → Äugen.)
  - kettro 6y ago
    Importantly, there is a difference between comprehension and production. Just because you can mostly understand a language, doesn't mean that it isn't a language in its own right. Yiddish, as an example, has many syntactic differences from German, in addition to its differing vocabulary. Scots is absolutely a different language from English, despite it being intelligible. I can't produce that speech, even with an accent. It has different rules and formations that My English just doesn't have.
  - 29athrowaway 6y ago
    Yes, it's true. There are unique words in Ladino that a Spanish speaker won't be able to identify, but my main takeaway is that modern Spanish and Ladino are mutually intelligible.

pjmlp 6y ago

Same here, and if you speak German, the same applies to Yiddish.

yorwba 6y ago
LibriVox has recordings of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" translated into many languages, including various Germanic ones. https://librivox.org/the-raven-multilingual-by-edgar-allan-poe/ https://librivox.org/the-raven-multilingual-by-edgar-allan-p... As a native German speaker who also knows English (obviously), I'd rate the comprehensibility of the others as follows: Swedish: understood just a few words Dutch: understood some entire phrases Yiddish: understood entire sentences, but there were still some words I couldn't recognize, which I guess might stem from Hebrew or Slavic languages. (But I did know about some of the more regular sound changes relative to German before, like Augen → Äugen.)
- kettro 6y ago
  Importantly, there is a difference between comprehension and production. Just because you can mostly understand a language, doesn't mean that it isn't a language in its own right. Yiddish, as an example, has many syntactic differences from German, in addition to its differing vocabulary. Scots is absolutely a different language from English, despite it being intelligible. I can't produce that speech, even with an accent. It has different rules and formations that My English just doesn't have.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  Yes, it's true. There are unique words in Ladino that a Spanish speaker won't be able to identify, but my main takeaway is that modern Spanish and Ladino are mutually intelligible.