On Mon, 23 Jun 2003 09:53:49 -0500, Paul Alesu <
rpales@...>
wrote:
>Is there any kind of method to measure the differences between
>languages?
>Anything like "linguistic distance"?
Not in any exact sense.
A curious feature of linguistic distance (or at least '"mutual"
intelligibility') is that it's not commutative: it's easy for a
Portuguese-speaker to understand Spanish, but for an untrained
Spanish-speaker, it's relatively difficult to understand Portuguese.
So the distance between Spanish and Portuguese is greater than the distance
between Portuguese and Spanish...
I suppose that rules out any _simple_ formulas for calculating linguistic
distance.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...