• tristynalxander@mander.xyzdeleted by creatorEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    I wonder how many people speak different pairs of languages. Like if you know English and Mandarin, can you speak to 1 in 3 people? Or is there a lot of overlap putting you closer to 1 in 5?

    • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzdeleted by creator
      0·
      3 months ago

      This would be a real mess to check. I bet there’s a really small overlap for some pairs, like Egyptian Arabic vs. Japanese*; but for others the overlap is rather large, like Hindi vs. English. And sometimes counting if you can speak a language or not can be tricky — like, how much Spanish does a Portuguese speaker needs to learn, or vice versa, in order to be considered “speaking” it?**

      *I can think on at least one example of that, though: Fairouz Ai. Two if her brother also learnt Arabic.

      **The Venezuelans (mostly ES speakers) in my city (mostly PT speakers) come to my mind. Sometimes their portuñol is easier to understand than some Portuguese varieties. Do they “count” as speaking Portuguese? No idea.

        • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzdeleted by creator
          0·
          3 months ago

          I’d argue those still count as messing with the consonants, given they’re usually from [Vn, Vm]→[Vŋ]→[Ṽ] in Portuguese, French, and Lombard. And old Romanian, too (the language eventually lost them, but apparently it had nasal vowels at some point).

          In fact some in Portuguese still interpret those nasal vowels as vowel+consonant sequences, proposing some “nasal archiphoneme” for that. e.g. “lã” wool /laN/. Often due to the presence of a nasal appendix (trailing nasalisation, after the vowel ended) in those words. I personally don’t buy it, but hey, still consonant weirdness!

    • quill7513@anarchist.nexusEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      by that logic, french and spanish have more in common than spanish and portuguese, so they should all be bundled as romantics