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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Same here, and if you speak German, the same applies to Yiddish.

LibriVox has recordings of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" translated into many languages, including various Germanic ones. https://librivox.org/the-raven-multilingual-by-edgar-allan-p...

As a native German speaker who also knows English (obviously), I'd rate the comprehensibility of the others as follows:

Swedish: understood just a few words

Dutch: understood some entire phrases

Yiddish: understood entire sentences, but there were still some words I couldn't recognize, which I guess might stem from Hebrew or Slavic languages. (But I did know about some of the more regular sound changes relative to German before, like Augen → Äugen.)

Importantly, there is a difference between comprehension and production. Just because you can mostly understand a language, doesn't mean that it isn't a language in its own right. Yiddish, as an example, has many syntactic differences from German, in addition to its differing vocabulary.

Scots is absolutely a different language from English, despite it being intelligible. I can't produce that speech, even with an accent. It has different rules and formations that My English just doesn't have.

Yes, it's true. There are unique words in Ladino that a Spanish speaker won't be able to identify, but my main takeaway is that modern Spanish and Ladino are mutually intelligible.

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