4 ms·
"Dialect" here means mutually intelligible. Mutual intelligibility is a fuzzy threshold, incidentally. I was in Spain once hanging out with an Italian guy. The
by DFHippie 5y ago
"Dialect" here means mutually intelligible. Mutual intelligibility is a fuzzy threshold, incidentally. I was in Spain once hanging out with an Italian guy. The Spanish speakers around could make sense of his Italian but he couldn't make sense of their Spanish. I think the essential problem was that they were more interested in understanding him than he was in understanding them, so they put in more effort.
- angelzen 5y agoHypothesis: The Italian guy might have a better chance of picking up Spanish if the Spaniards were to speak a bit slower than usual :) Especially at the fuzzy mutual intelligibility boundary, a lower communication speed helps. Italian syllables/minute: 405 Spanish syllables/minute: 526 https://irisreading.com/average-reading-speed-in-various-languages/ https://irisreading.com/average-reading-speed-in-various-lan...
- thaumasiotes 5y agoWouldn't speaking speed be a more relevant metric than reading speed?
- angelzen 5y agoCorrect. They correlate though. In practice going half speed would probably be better, giving the brain time to recognize the unusual dialect. Italian: 6.99 syllables per second Spanish: 7.82 syllables per second https://thelanguagenerds.com/2019/list-of-the-fastest-spoken-languages-in-the-world https://thelanguagenerds.com/2019/list-of-the-fastest-spoken...