Paul Alesu wrote:
> It seems to me that the "linguistic distance" should be the same even
> if the "linguistic effort" may be different. It's harder to walk the
> same distance uphill than downhill.
> The asymmetric "linguistic effort" by itself should not make defining
> a "linguistic distance" impossible.
>
> Paul Alesu
Should this asymetry have something with the descendence to do? A
plastic example won't work too well but let us assume as follow: there
ia father and his child. The child understand the language of the father
because he is growing up with the language.The language of the child
becomes a moderne one, a lot of new words are coming in, it develop
itself. The language of the father remain the same. Thus, the father
will hardly understand the language of his child. But the child should
still understand the language of his father. In this manner one can say
the speaker of the old language is not able to understand the speaker of
the new language;Can into this manner be explained the asymetry of the
linguistic effort?
alex