Re: [tied] Linguistic measurements

On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 00:41:38 +0200, Davius Sanctex <gruposdavius@...>
wrote:

>[Miguel] it's easy for a Portuguese-speaker to understand Spanish, but for an untrained Spanish-speaker, it's relatively difficult to understand Portuguese.
>----
>[Davius] What is the reason for this, Miguel?
>
>Is the reason alike that this one: For any Peninsular Spanish speaker is relatively easy to re-learn correctly any variety of American Spanish, because the main phonetical differences consists of mergings, but I really know very few latin americans that could reproduce without errors "th/s" alternances of Peninsular (and that have merged in America).

Mergers indeed would seem to be easier for speakers of a non-merging
dialect.

I haven't really thought about all the consequences for intelligibility and
learnability (not the same thing) of mergers, splits, losses and changes.

Portuguese shows a greater number of losses in comparison to Spanish.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...