Is comprehensibility possible across all languages? with Ecolinguist | polýMATHY pódCAST #19

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In some Russian dialects they say слышатъ запах /ˈsɫɨʂətʲ ˈzapəx/ (to hear the smell), which is identical to the Greek Cretan dialect, where the smell is heard, the verb ακούω /aˈkuo/ is used for both hearing and smelling

I was really surprised you said you were studying Sardinian! I understand the difficulty of studying an Italian Dialetto. I have been studying Piedmontese and even tho it has a standard orthography, literature, dictionaries, and learning material, it has been sooo difficult to find these resources hidden around the internet. So Sardinian must be a nightmare but I totally encourage Italian speakers to also venture into Dialetti

The amount of "you know" Norbert says is quite astounding.

Incredibile topic and great guest

I'd love to see Ecolinguist look more at Scots...

The feel → hear semantic shift seems to be very common. It happened in Ukrainian too with чути ‘čuty’ (and in Polesian and Podlachian lects in Poland AFAIK), and also multiple times in Irish (besides the typical verb for ‘to hear’: ‘clois, cluin’ you also get ‘mothaigh’ in the north (originally ‘feel’), and ‘airigh’ in the south (originally ‘sense, perceive’).

About foreign scripts and spelling conventions – I feel that if the script is alphabetic, the consistency of the system (and how much phonemic it is) matters more than your familiarity with it and whether it’s a foreign script or not.

I can read Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and to some extent medieval forms of Gaelic. And they use a pretty wild spelling system from average European point of view (so getting familiar took a while), and Irish used to use its own version of Latin alphabet (the so-called Gaelic script or Insular script) which looks pretty foreign to most Europeans too. But I learnt that and can read it all fairly easily and it makes sense to me.

But for the life of me I cannot read Manx, even though I am kinda familiar with the grammar and the vocab is mostly cognates with Irish and Scottish Gaelic – because it uses a more English-like (and a bit Welsh-like) spelling that’s super weird for me having the Irish/Scottish background. Now, Manx spelling also isn’t very consistent (it kinda is phonemic to an extent, but there’s a lot of ambiguity there too, so if you’re not familiar with the pronunciation, it’s often not predictable; it doesn’t mean it’s a bad spelling – it seems to have worked well for native speakers of 18th and 19th century – but it definitely does not help a learner!).

So even though it uses Latin script, even though it’s kinda similar to English spelling, and even though most words are cognates with Irish and/or Scottish, I often cannot make sense of written text. But if and only if I see translation, I can often easily figure out what every individual word means and what the structure is – that is, I start recognizing cognates cause now, when I know what to expect, it’s suddenly much easier to guess what the spelling stands for.

At the same time, Irish or Gaelic spelling is much wilder from Polish or English point of view, but it’s also much more consistent and thus was easier to get used to, I think. But then, I also spent much more time with those languages, so I’m obviously biased.

Why do you even mention russian? The language of the nazist state and nazist people? The one that should be prohibited

Hungarian... of course... The language of the devoted satellite of the nazist russia! Why don't you try to learn Ukrainian and help it to survive? The language of the people russian has been trying to destroy for more than 300 years, and committing a sheer genocide to right now before the eyes of the whole world!

Polish have a Russian accent but only in English 😁.

Pozdrowienia!!! Świetny kanał 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

To answer your last question as also a polish speaker: I think it depends on what language is native to you. For me the cyrrylic script was very offputting at first and seemed overwhelming but then I looked at it from a different perspective that russians make this exotic thing sound like an actual normally sounding language that has a phonetics somewhat similar to polish. Learning to read cyrrylic letters was like learning english words.
"Ш- that's "sz" and thats all
Ж- that's "ż" and thats all"
Then you just read and it makes words that you may understand if you analyse them.
Same with english
That's "through" and it's read like that
That's "though" and it's read like that.
Etc.

Comprehensibility across all languages? One has to get out of European languages to realize it's not possible.

The thing abort polish and slovak is very recognizable for me as a swede in comparison to norwegian bokmål and nynorsk. Because of The former union beteende Sweden and norway som Woods have taken on a slightly other mening and som words tend to be thought of as slang in swedish och "childs talk" but in noreegian I know it is adult talk. This regards both vocabulary and grammar. It is very important nit to redicule the other varieté. It woukd be rally interresting to hear norwegeian commenting on this if it goes the other way to That a skede uses vicab which is childish in norsk.

I would say that the wiring system factor really depends on the type of the script. If you already know Latin, Cyrillic or Greek, it's not really hard to learn another one of these. Armenian and Georgian are much more distinct so learning them would be harder. But then there are abugidas, abjads and logographic scripts, and in the case of Chinese and Japanese languages the wiring is a real challenge.
But also there are orthographies with different levels of complexity. I've started learning Finnish and it took me only two minutes to understand how to read and write anything properly. On the other hand, even native English speakers sometimes can't be sure how to read or spell a specific word.