Hacker News Reader

Comment by fortes | Hacker News Reader

As a native Portuguese speaker, it's fun to look at the dialectic continuum you can construct as you go across the Iberian peninsula.

It's imperfect, but you can travel with a very soft "language gradient": Extremaduran -> Portuguese -> Galician -> Asturian -> Castillian (Spanish) -> Valencian -> Catalan -> Aragones -> Occitan -> French ...

Each individual step is pretty easy, but it adds up to a huge difference.

Unfortunately, there isn't a great analogue for English. You can kinda construct a small jump by looking at Scots, but it ends quickly and is (at least to my ears) a jump on par with Portuguese to Galician.

View on HN

English is member of a language continuum, albeit a disjointed one by virtue of the English Channel and the Norman conquest. The Ingvaeonic languages is a "gradient" including Scots, English, Frisian, and Low German/Plattdüütsch. Frisian is certainly legible to an Anglophone with a wide exposure to English dialects and historical periods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingvaeonic_languages

Don't forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Norse and its influence on English. (I say) some of the contemporary Norwegian is very close to some contemporary Scots.

The English continuum also includes pidgins of various kinds, and Engrish.

After years in Portugal I still can't differentiate where anyone is from within the country, but put me a Brazilian event and I can tell you where each person is from in Brazil (where I also lived) by accent and word-choice alone. I'm impressed by my lack of ability when it comes to Portugal. Perhaps it's more nuanced.

However, the language gradient you speak of is one of the reasons I love Iberia. If only modern English, as you note, would be so interesting.

By the way, the region the author speaks of is beautiful, in case anyone plans to take a lazy drive through it. If yes, don't forget Andorra.

But go to Scotland and modern English gets quite more interesting.

Go further North (the Orkney Islands) and it gets more interesting yet, as the Norse influence creates a whole new dialect.

The North East of Scotland has a particularly "interesting" dialect - things like "Fit like ma loon?"

I'd love to know where the terms "loons" and "quines" for boys and girls came from.

It's a sair fecht.

Loons I am not so sure about (http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/loun has some interesting info on the name though, see e.g. item 5) but quines sound somewhat similar to the word for woman in today's Scandinavian languages: Danish: kvinde, Norwegian: kvinne and Swedish: kvinna.

You can also find it again in the word Queen (originally woman) that seems to share similar words and meanings in different European languages: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/queen

Fascinating stuff! :-)

My family is from a North East fishing village and apparently I've got one Finnish ancestor about ~300 years ago - I've wondered if that's where I got my distinct epicanthic folds from!

It's all in the family! :-)

Before the Swedish zpelling reform a century ago, "kvinna" used to be typed "qvinna". So even there, not far removed from "queen".

"Quine" is a great name for a girl because after all, she can produce a daughter. Although sans parthenogenesis, the daughter's not an exact copy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)

Not quite similar:

> ... program which takes no input ...

The only recorded human quine produced a son.

Braw

Valencian/Catalan is actually one single language, although you can use either term to refer to it.

There are two main dialects of the language (eastern and western) but their division is by geographic borders, rather than by administrative divisions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language

There is a nationalistic political movement called "Blaverism" that states that people in Catalonia and in the Valencian Community speak different languages, but their reasons are political, not linguistic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaverism

Reply on news.ycombinator.com