Re: [tied] Germanic

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "fournet.arnaud" <fournet.arnaud@...>
wrote:

>
> Mutual understandability is a concept hard to handle.
> Examples :
> 1. Danish people are said to understand Swedish
> but Swedes are said to hardly understand Danish.

That is the general opinion in Stockholm and environs. I recall a
satirical program on Swedish state TV where the host during a phone
interview with a Danish colonel in Iraq told him to 'spit out the
porridge so we can understand you' (it's the uvular R in Danish and
Scanian that annoys them).

> My personal experience is that I can read Dutch and Spanish
> and understand a high percentage of what is written
> even though I have never studied these languages at school.
>
> I think open-minded-ness, personal skills, context, gestures,
> peri-linguistic pragmatics features enable understandibility
> to arise in conditions where it is not obviously possible,
> from a "pure" linguistic point of view.

For some reason, the idea that two different written languages can be
mutually comprehensible freaks people out.
It takes some practice. In a recent survey among people who commuted
between Denmark and Sweden on the Øresund bridge, 65% said language
was not a problem.


Torsten