Re: Armenian (was: Re: ISO 639-3 changes, part 3)

Yes, people are amazingly good at adjusting to weird phonologies, even with
many mergers and shifts.  The two main obstacles to mutual intelligibility
are vocabulary (interlocution is one thing, but you don't want to have to
read Eastern Armenian with a dictionary in hand to deal with the loanwords)
and orthography (EA has a Soviet orthography; WA and the Iranian variety of
EA continue to use the classical orthography, which dates from the 5C and
is less phonetic).

On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 11:03 AM, Mark Davis ☕️ <[email protected]> wrote:

> Just spoke to a colleague who is a native Western Armenian. She said that
> while it sounds strange at first, she adjusted to it in a few days.
> Afterwards there were occasional loan-words from Russian that she didn't
> understand, but those with her always knew the western equivalent, and just
> rephrased.
>
> That really sounds like the proximity is in the realm of separate dialect
> rather than separate language.
>
> Mark
>
> Mark
>
> On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 11:21 AM, Kent Karlsson <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> http://www.elinguistics.net gives:
>>
>> "The genetic proximity between Danish and Norwegian(bokmal) is:  3,7".
>> "The genetic proximity between Danish and Swedish is:  15,7".
>> "The genetic proximity between Spanish and Portuguese is:  19,4".
>> "The genetic proximity between Danish and Norwegian(nynorsk) is:  23,1".
>> "The genetic proximity between Italian and Romanian is:  29,4".
>> "The genetic proximity between Spanish and French is:  37,1".
>>
>> "The genetic proximity between Armenian and Armenian_(Eastern) is:  5,0".
>> "The genetic proximity between Armenian and Armenian_(Classical) is:
>>  35,4".
>>
>>
>> I have no idea how accurate that is (nor how to exactly interpret the
>> numbers, and even less how they were derived). Just wanted to get some
>> comparison. But I take it that Michael means that the distance between
>> Armenian and Armenian_(Eastern) should be around 20-30 on that scale.
>>
>>
>> There is also:
>> https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17400/
>> worldwide-map-or-data-
>> for-linguistic-distance
>> <https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17400/worldwide-map-or-data-for-linguistic-distance>
>> (a bit down on the page there is a table with
>> numbers; slightly different from the above ones). Neither the maps nor the
>> table cover Armenian, though.
>>
>> /Kent K
>>
>>
>> Den 2018-03-01 10:20, skrev "Michael Everson" <[email protected]>:
>>
>> > We made that registration assuming that hy covered both and that they
>> were
>> > mutually intelligible dialects. They are not mutually intelligible
>> without a
>> > great deal of work. It is not like Danish and Swedish. It is more like
>> Italian
>> > and Romanian.
>>
>> There will be older data using ³hy² for both, of course. This
>> > is a disunification.
>>
>>
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>>
>
>

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