On Thu, 22 Jul 2004, Mark A Mandel wrote: > #Oh - that case is too complicated for me. Do priests talk to the gods in > #a particular language? How stable have Hebrew and Arabic proven to be? > > Hebrew was not used as a vernacular language (spoken language of > everyday life) for 2000 years or more... As noted in the snippage, I think the question that was at hand can be answered on the basis of a stable written language - I should add the proviso that instead of Eastern->Dragaeran it would be Dragaeran->Eastern + Vlad's confusion. > In my previous post I mentioned Lebanese Arabic. The language spoken on > the street varies so widely across the Arabic-speaking world that a > Moroccan and a Saudi, speaking colloquially, will find it difficult to > impossible to understand each other. When Arab speakers meet, they move > "up the scale" to more and more formal, standardized Arabic to reach a > level where they can understand each other. I've read this has proved to be a problem in the US occupation of Iraq - some of our translators had the wrong version. Otoh I thought that converting from one version to another was fairly straightforward - phoneme A->B, B-> C, D->E. > #If Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar was still alive today, and had > #spent the intervening time having new adventures and being glamorous, > #it seems to me I might be using a much harder language right now. > > Nonsense. I mean that literally. No language is "hard" to its native > speakers, until they get into reading and writing and the levels of > formalized and standardized language, such as the "dialect" of the > biomedical texts that I work with every day. Note that I'm writing. And in fact I'm mostly trying to write in a style somewhat elevated with respect to normal speech. And for that matter, I'm multilingual, and I and my multilingual friends >from different countries all think you're wrong on this point. All human languages have more or less the same degree of expressivity, but unless you can for example show that full spoken command of say Japanese is achieved by children at the same age as say Spanish, and that bilingual children learn any two languages with equal facility, I'm going to persist in that opinion. And even so I would be likely to ascribe lack of differences to our amazing childhood language acquisition mechanism and would ask for evidence that for any pair of languages adult native speakers of one find the other as easy to acquire as v.v.