Talk:Mutual intelligibility

message: Why the hell are there some very ARBITRARY numbers given for Russian? It's based on only one study which cites no reliable sources and the percentages seem highly unlikely, especially when it comes to the written forms of languages (East Slavic and some South Slavic languages are written in the Cyrillic alphabet while all West Slavic languages are written using the Latin one so a person with no exposure to one of these scripts would understand almost nothing). The methodology of this study and the person who wrote the paper are also highly unreliable (the dude, Robert Lindsay, claims that he's an "independent linguist", whatever that means (I think it simply means that he represents "alternative" linguistics which is comparable with alternative medicine)). For example, let's take a look at the following part:
"70% Russian intelligibility of written Polish, and 25% of oral Polish
70% Russian intelligibility of written Czech, and 4% of oral Czech".
How can written Russian be mutually intelligible with written Polish and Czech if they are all written in different scripts? Also, how come is oral Polish more intelligible with Russian if Czech actually borrowed a lot of Russian vocabulary during the national revival to make Czech more Slavic while Polish didn't care much for some stupid, arbitrary purity and kept borrowing words from Latin, French, and German indiscriminately? Also, I know that my opinion probably doesn't matter but as a native Polish speaker, before I started learning Russian, I understood close to nothing of spoken Russian, especially when it was spoken fast. I also had to learn the script from scratch to understand what's written and learn the rules as the Russian Cyrillic alphabet isn't particularly phonemic.
As for the South Slavic group, I can see why it could be a little more intelligible to a Russian speaker with no prior knowledge but only in terms of vocabulary. Certainly not in terms of phonology and especially grammar. The most striking example is Bulgarian and Macedonian which are unintelligible even to other South Slavic languages as the Eastern subbranch of South Slavic developed quite independently from the Western one. Bulgarian and Macedonian are, first of all, part of the Balkan Sprachbund and have been greatly influenced by Greek, Albanian, Romanian and Turkish, especially in their syntax. They are so different from all the other Slavic languages that if not for common vocabulary and phonological features, they could be superficially thought of as belonging to a different Indo-European family IMO. They have lost all of their declensions in nouns and adjectives (except for the vocative case for singular nouns but even this vestigial case seems to be used less and less these days, e.g. borrowed names don't usually have a vocative form) - so they have retained only the nominative as the unmarked case of all nouns and the vocative as a special form of some nouns, which is in sharp contrast to all the other Slavic languages which have 6-7 grammatical cases. Bulgarian is almost like English for that matter as it also marks nominal relationships without changing the noun (i.e. it uses the synthetic construction "preposition + noun in the nominative", just like English or French). Uniquely for Balto-Slavic languages, Bulgarian and Macedonian have also developed articles (the indefinite article being an unmarked noun while the definite one is suffixed to the noun), with Macedonian taking it further and having three different degrees of proximity to the speaker. In contrast to these innovations, they are visibly more conservative than the other Slavic languages in their verbal conjugations as they have retained such tenses/aspects as the aorist, imperfect etc. Even more than that, they have developed verbal particles indicating "witness moods" (in other words, they have more grammatical moods than an average Indo-European language). This makes Bulgarian and Macedonian almost completely unintelligible to other Slavic speakers.
Both South and West Slavic groups have some kind of fixed stress patterns (Polish on the penultimate syllable, Czech and Slovak on the first, Macedonian interestingly on the ante-penultimate). This is completely different from Russian which has flexible stress, resulting in vowel reduction (I admit that this feature makes Russian very hard for me to understand at times).
I suggest that we either find a better study that would focus mostly on the similarities between Russian and other East Slavic languages (d'uh), or at least remove the South and West branches from this comparison with Russian. Shumkichi (talk) 16:46, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Have removed, the source isn't reliable. – Thjarkur (talk) 10:16, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  The weird numbers in Russian 

message: That's not proper English. Possible are:
One study concluded that when considering written language,
and
One study concluded that, concerning written language,
2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:A9F5:84:8E1F:3489 (talk) 15:02, 6 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  One study concluded that when concerning written language 

message: Well, German is taught in Dutch secondary schools, but not the other way around! So, in theory, most Dutch people should have been exposed to at least two years of high-school German. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:A9F5:84:8E1F:3489 (talk) 15:08, 6 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dutch people are more exposed to German than vice versa 

message: See , at least Chittagonian, sylheti are easily the same I think a lot if these languages are also mutually intelligible. --Greatder (talk) 14:57, 9 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bengali & Assamese 

message: The article should include a section about mutual intelligibility of different sign languages. From what I understand, most sign languages are not mutually intelligibility, even if the spoken languages are. (i.e. British sign language and American sign language are different.). --217.149.171.189 (talk) 21:53, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made. Sundayclose (talk) 00:08, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I dont want a specific change to be made, it was just a suggestion for someone more knowledgeable to take care of. --217.149.171.189 (talk) 00:17, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Take care of what? If you want something done to the article, you need to provide reliable sources. Sundayclose (talk) 14:36, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I just wanted to point out that this article doesn't mention sign langauges at all and that some info about them should maybe be added by someone who is able to do so. I'm not in a position to add anything myself since I don't have any knowledge about the subject. --217.149.171.189 (talk) 03:12, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: That's fine, but without a source it's unlikely to happen. This article does not have a lot of traffic. People are more likely to add something if a source is provided. Sundayclose (talk) 16:56, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: 217...  Thanks for your suggestion, which is a perfectly reasonable one. If someone with knowledge of the topic comes along, s/he'll know sources. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 20:23, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Same comment: it should be done as soon as someone with adequate knowledge appears. Perhaps 217 could ask for help in Talk:Sign language, for instance. --Jotamar (talk) 18:35, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

text: It isn't necessary to keep the tag up for this reason. This talk section is sufficient to alert editors that the article can potentially be improved in this regard. —Alalch E. 11:43, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sign languages 

message: Is it within the scope of this article to add smaller languages like Luxembourgish, or languages without nationwide prominence like Low German and Sorbian? Luxembourgish might have significant mutual intelligibility with Standard German and partial with Dutch. Low German would have a significant mutual intelligibility with Dutch and maybe Standard German too. Sorbian might have mutual intelligibility with Polish, Czech and Slovak. 77.248.154.112 (talk) 17:26, 17 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Certainly, but not without appropriate references. —Alalch E. 08:41, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

text: Good question, not easy to come up with an answer for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps first on the list is that with thousands of languages to deal with potentially, which families does it make sense to choose to examine in detail -- Paman family of Australia? Germanic? Southern Athabascan? Possibilities could be narrowed down by limiting the choices to only those for which mutual intelligibility has been studied empirically, a requirement that would at least require good sourcing now missing for. e.g., the divisions of the Romance listing, valid to some extent as a very rough sort of overall typology, but suspect in some points re mutual intelligibility. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 16:12, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should we add Luxembourgish, Low German and Sorbian? 

message: The more serious the reader, the more helpful it would be to have this statement fleshed out. As is it's not very helpful, raises questions rather than answering them. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 00:28, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed, it would be helpful to flesh out this part. -Vipz (talk) 03:48, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  others have suggested that these objections are misguided, as they collapse different concepts of what constitutes a "language" 

message: What is "uniform" intended to mean in the statement "Zulu [...] the first three are often considered to be dialects of a uniform Zunda language? In four decades+ of doing Linguistics, I don't believe I've ever encountered a uniform language -- certainly not one consisting of identifiable dialects. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 18:27, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I have no idea what it means either. I checked out the reference and it doesn't even mention the Zunda language, let alone a "uniform" one. – Treetoes023 (talk) 18:45, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I've deleted the claim. Perhaps someone with secure knowledge of the situation can chime in with something coherent. Doesn't seem necessary for this article, though. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 19:05, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "dialects of a uniform Zunda language"?