Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

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Dialects can mean very different things hence the old joke "a language is a dialect with its own army and navy", recognizing that the issue is really political rather than linguistic. Many Chinese dialects (like Mandarin and Cantonese) are considered dialects of the same "Chinese language" for political reasons but are mutually unintelligible, whereas Danish and Norwegian (the majority bokmal dialect anyway) are considered different languages even though they are pretty mutually intelligible because Norway and Denmark are different countries.

As for how the table of Spanish dialects was constructed, the figure gives the link to the paper it was from [1]. Basically they measured differences in dialects by giving pictures of an item (the example shown is a pinwheel) and asking what Spanish speakers from different places called that thing. Given hundreds of different concepts you can see how close Spanish dialects are to each other.

[1] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opli-2018-003...

Okay, so the article is wrong for using that bit of data for the argument. It doesn't tell you much about how well two people from two different places will understand each other. If two people are in the same place and one says to the other "¿me das la veleta?", but the other would have called the object "molinete", chances are they could probably understand what the other person is saying. What makes different dialects of Spanish difficult to understand each other is slang and accent, not different words for common objects. Like, if a Spaniard tells me "Mariana está en el ordenador", I'm not going to get confused about what he means even if I would have called it "computadora".

True, but that's like saying a British person wouldn't be confused by the phrase "the trunk of my car" said by an American even if they would would say "the boot of my car" themselves. The fact still remains than "trunk" is US dialect and "boot" is British, and that the dialects are different.

I'm not saying the dialects are not different, I'm saying the fact that they're different is separate from how mutually unintelligible they are. Correlated? Yeah, sure. Equivalent? Not even close.

Shouldn't that comparison be weighted by how frequent the words are? For example words in the top 100 usage would count for more than the top 1000 and the top 10000.

It would be a much different story if British English and American English had different words for "a car". Which, by the way, happens in Spanish dialects ("el coche" vs "el carro").

here (argentina, non-native) we usually say 'el auto' but have significant use of 'coche'. 'carro' means something different; using it for an automobile sounds mexican

but if you showed an argentine a picture of a car, they might very well say 'auto' while perhaps someone from elsewhere would say 'coche', leading to a basically incorrect point of difference being measured in this study between the two dialects

Why would it be incorrect? Sometimes two or three different words describe the same thing and that's ok. If you poll enough people you can get a rough idea if one version is more dominant that the other, if there's an even split, or if different regions in the same country prefer different versions. Similar to soda/pop/coke in the US.

You can design a study with a high level of data granularity. You could even track differences in pronunciation and grammar if you wish so.

because 'we usually say coche but sometimes say auto' is almost the same as 'we usually say auto but sometimes say coche', but they differ from 'we always say carro'. if a study is saying spanish is radically different in montevideo and in buenos aires, it's just wrong. this may not be the particular design error that resulted in these incorrect results, but it seems like a promising candidate

I think we're both in agreement. Perhaps my example of coche/carro was unfortunate and I didn't make my point clear enough.

A well-designed study, in my mind, would compare the usage of a varied bag of words. Starting from articles, pronouns, numbers, common verbs, then common objects, verb forms, less common adjectives, ending with uncommon objects and phrases. The compared words would be weighted based on their frequency. If two dialects have the same articles, pronouns, numbers, etc. and some differences in less frequent nouns, they would be similar rather than radically different - at least lexically. Things might look differently if we look at pronunciation.

I don't know what list of words was compared in the study linked in this subthread, so it's hard for me to say anything about it.

i agree

In Chile:

* auto: car

* coche: stroller or carriage (depending on context)

* carro: cart or carriage (see above)

Spain:

Automóvil: Formal word for car.

Coche: Car. If used with 'de caballos' (of horses), well, carriage.

Carro: Carriage, or trolley.

I guess thank God for Hollywood, it means we can all at least speak one version of English

probably a better cross-atlantic example would be something like 'perambulator' where the other dialect doesn't have a conflicting meaning for the word

And I suspect this is only true because of frequent cultural contact. If there wasn't any the British wouldn't know the American English word for it.

I agree with you, differences in pronunciation, cadence, etc. should be taken in account as well. Though measuring those could take longer, if possible.

You don't even have to go all the way to China. The English countryside has multiple so called "accents" that are basically unintelligible to a speaker of London English, with plenty of famous examples in popular media (e.g. [1][2]).

Similarly, Germany has plenty of mutually unintelligible dialects. They are all related to each other and any two geographically adjacent dialects are mutually intelligible, but as distance grows it becomes harder to bridge the gap (which is why everyone learns Standard German nowadays). Luxembourgish meanwhile is in every sense a dialect of German with French influences, but due to having an army is considered its own language.

1: https://youtu.be/Hs-rgvkRfwc

2: https://youtu.be/Z660sool2L4?t=49

Danes and legibility isn't something people say often, even Danes themselves can't always understand other Danes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

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