Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 January 9

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

January 9

Catalan and Spanish

Is spoken Catalan mutually intelligible with spoken Spanish? 99.245.73.51 (talk) 03:04, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Based on what I've heard from Catalans, the answer is yes, generally. If you've had a reasonable amount of exposure to the other language, you'll understand everything, and if not, you'll understand most things. For example, for students at Catalan universities who come from other regions of Spain, the fact that lectures are given in both languages is mostly a non-issue from a practical standpoint. 82.120.58.206 (talk) 05:01, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Not really, perhaps a bit more so than either is with most other Romance languages, but not to the point where a monolingual speaker of Catalan (or more likely a bilingual Catalan-French speaker from North Catalonia) would be able to thoroughly understand a monolingual speaker of Spanish, and vice-versa. (edit conflict revision:) Like for most Romance-language speakers, picking up another Romance language (particularly understanding, but not necessarily production) is much easier than, say, German, so exposure, like 82.120 mentions, and a couple lessons helps, but I doubt a Spaniard without any prior contact with Catalan would understand a lot of Catalan.--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 05:03, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

You're right. I most likely overstated the case in saying they were mutually intelligible.

This source [1][2] states that the languages are not mutually intelligible, but that Catalan is easy to learn for a Spanish-speaker.

It does seem that native Spanish-speakers in Catalonia have been very successful in learning to understand Catalan. According to this source, in 1998, 95% of the population of Catalonia could understand Catalan, although only 60% spoke it natively. So in practice, society seems to function largely through passive bilingualism, with each group speaking its own language and understanding the other. Of course, native speakers of Catalan usually speak Spanish very well, while Spanish-speakers vary in their active ability in Catalan. 82.120.58.206 (talk) 06:42, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Intelligibility from a Catalan native speakers' point of view is confounded by the fact that, as far as I know, most Catalan speakers are bilingual in Spanish (similar to the situation for Galician speakers), so if they say they can understand Spanish you don't know if it's because the two languages are mutually intelligible or because of social reasons (that they're living in a country where Spanish is the major language). As the editors have pointed out above, not all Spanish speakers can understand Catalan, particularly if they're not from a Catalan-speaking area (grab someone from Mexico or Argentina and see how much of a recorded Catalan conversation s/he would understand...) rʨanaɢ (talk) 08:05, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

As a native German speaker with no command of either Spanish or Catalan I lived in Barcelona for a year. The city is bilingual to the point that both languages have about equal weight in everyday life. E.g. everything having to do with telecommunication or banking is by default in Spanish, while public transport is in Catalan (except RENFE, which is bilingual). As a result I learned banking terms in Spanish and the weekdays in Catalan, for example. This is the result of Catalan nationalism, which is pushing Catalan to the point that Catalonia is probably the only region in Europe where you have to prove an excellent command of the local language even when applying to a professorship at a university. (I guess this law is illegal. If all countries had such laws, international mobility of academic staff would break down.)

I mostly agree with the other comments. Catalan is about halfway between Spanish and French. The most closely related language is not Spanish but the Occitan language that used to be the standard language of half of France. As is the case with French, it's relatively hard for a beginner to understand spoken Catalan or guess how a word is written, or which word of another Romance language corresponds to a Catalan word. Spanish and Italian are much easier in this respect, and I guess that this makes Spanish and Italian more easily mutually intelligible than Spanish and Catalan, although understanding Spanish should be relatively easy even for a hypothetical Catalan speaker with no prior exposure to Spanish (while the other direction is probably much harder). Older Catalan speakers generally have a good command of French. If they didn't, I sometimes felt I could make myself understood in written French, pronounced as if it was Italian. Hans Adler 08:11, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

"Catalonia is probably the only region in Europe where you have to prove an excellent command of the local language even when applying to a professorship at a university." Surely this is the case in Britain as well? —Angr (talk) 16:43, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Touché. But English as the modern language of international research is of course a special case. And fortunately the corresponding laws probably don't exist in Denmark, Iceland, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia or Bulgaria. An academic might well apply for positions in all these countries in a single year. Hans Adler 20:17, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

I am puzzled about why you say that Catalonia is the only region in Europe. I am sure that in Germany you definitely cannot apply for a position if you don't speak German, even if they don't have a written rule about that, in the practice you have to. Quest09 (talk) 12:08, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

I was talking about academic positions. Is that what you are referring to as well? For a short-term teaching position that includes courses for undergraduates a teacher obviously needs to speak the local language well. But for permanent professorships I thought it's common practice that applicants merely have to pledge that they will learn the local language in the first year or so. (Of course an underlying assumption is always that they are fluent in English.) This doesn't eliminate the bias of course, but at least it gives the most qualified international candidates a chance. Especially for small language communities this is the only way to guarantee high academic standards in the long run. The academic job market in a region such as Catalonia is obviously too small, and the general trend in Europe is to take measures that are meant to solve, not exacerbate, the problem. In Catalonia, on the other hand, I heard that you have to pass a hard language test before you apply. Hans Adler 12:33, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

• I was talking about academic positions in Germany. You won't get a permanent position without Habilitation, and you won't get through Habilitation without speaking German. Indeed, I haven't even heard of any one becoming full professor in Germany who didn't got a German degree, German PhD and German Habilitation. the only exception I can think of are foreign language lectors. Quest09 (talk) 19:06, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

It's generally true that the Romance languages are close enough that if you locked two speakers of different Romance languages, say Italian and Portguese, together in a house and they just had to make it work, they could understand each other better than, say, a German speaker would have in the same house. Mutual intelligibility is very relative; Romance languages have significant overlap with structure and vocabulary with each other, and where they differ they often differ systematically (thus, for example verb forms with one ending in French all have the same different ending in Spanish; while its not the same ending its consistantly different where there is often a simple one-to-one correspondance between the differences). The other problem, noted by several people above, is that there are many speakers of Romance languages which are dually-fluent; it may be impossible to tell if, for example, someone from Nice understands someone from Genoa because they the Niçois version of French has lots of Italian influence (like Niçard), or if it's because the Niçois native speaks both French and Italian fluently.--Jayron32 20:04, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

For the record, I have been recently in Galicia, and had the chance of spending some days in Barcelona. For all practical purposes, I'd define Galician as almost perfectly understandable for a native Spanish speaker (at least, of course, as spoken by someone with the idea of communicating with the Spanish speaker). On the other hand, I can't say something similar at all for the case of Catalan: I find even hard to understand written Catalan, to a scale not comparable with the Galician case. I'd say, in a line commented above, that Catalan lies somewhat in the middle between Spanish and French, and, having read the comment of Hans about the Occitan language, I was remembered of the fact that my wife mentioned that some Catalan words remind her of the Italian vocabulary. Pallida  Mors 20:19, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

On the other hand, as I said, I suspect that for phonological reasons it's much easier for (hypothetical) Catalan speakers with no exposure to Spanish to understand Spanish.

As an illustration for the closeness between Catalan and French, consider how the three languages express "silence, please!": Silencio, por favor! (Spanish), Silenci, si us plau! (Catalan), Silence s'il vous plait!. On the other hand, Catalan long played the role of a dialect of Spanish in the same way that Occitan is still regarded as a French 'argot', so it's only natural that they also have a lot in common. I suspect that when Pompeu Fabra standardised the Catalan language (as a literary language rather than a continuum of dialects), he was guided by the desire to have a clear distinction between Catalan and Spanish much more than by the demarcation to French or Occitan. This must have created a bias for French-like choices such as si us plau where Spanish-like choices such as per favor were probably equally common, perhaps depending on the region. Hans Adler 20:34, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

I don't know if this helps the discussion any, since I know neither Spanish nor Catalan...but I can read (and speak, for the most part) French, including various historical forms of it, and I find Catalan far easier to read than Spanish. Spanish actually seems kind of bizarre and incomprehensible to me, while Catalan is like oddly-spelled French. Adam Bishop (talk) 03:11, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

I know what you mean and feel the same way about the written language. But spoken Catalan is much harder to understand. You can try yourself with this random podcast from YouTube. I have no idea what it is about. Spoken Spanish is much easier once you have become used to the weird o -> ue translation. Hans Adler 12:52, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm a native speaker of both Spanish and Catalan. Catalan is a regional language of Spain, just like the so-called "dialects" of Italy and Germany. The main - or maybe the only - difference between the so-called Italian and German dialects and Catalan is that Catalan has been used as a political tool recently - by recently I mean the last 100 years - by the then newly-born Catalan regionalism and nationalism. Just like the Italian and German dialects, Catalan isn't readily mutually intelligible with Spanish although it is very easy to learn the "common different words" to be able to understand almost everything said. From my experience, Spanish speakers with zero knowledge of Catalan were able to understand Catalan almost completely in about two weeks of living in Catalonia. --Belchman (talk) 20:48, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

"Swag"?

I've noticed today's youth tend to use the word "swag" but neither Wikipedia nor Wiktionary has not failed me in clarifying this term which is opaque to me. For an example of what I mean, see this facebook group (which I came upon when I was googling for the meaning, similarly without success. 24.92.70.160 (talk) 03:28, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Urban Dictionary is the place to go for teh yoof argot, although you are bound to get a lot of conflicting or downright bullshit definitions. meltBanana 04:10, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Speaking of opaque expressions, "neither Wikipedia nor Wiktionary has not failed me" took me about 6 readings to get a handle on. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 04:21, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. One should never never use double negatives. StuRat (talk) 05:21, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm rather surprised that the new usage of "swag" hasn't made it into proper dictionaries quite yet. I'd expect it to make it in soon. StuRat (talk) 05:24, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

German idiom

I just got done watching Everyone Else and in it there are two couples. The masculine man calls his friend's clingy and strange girlfriend a Brunhilde. I read a good portion of the article and cannot for the life of me find the significance. Does it just mean clingy and strange? Is there an English equivalent? Thanks WIkipedians. schyler (talk) 05:26, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that Niebelungenlied, or in much higer quality de:Nibelungenlied, is where you should be looking. Brunhild or Brünhild was the woman who, in the first night of their marriage, bound her husband with a belt and hung him on a nail on the wall, because he would not tell her the fresoning behind Sigfrieds marriage. As for an English equivalent I do not know. --129.206.196.154 (talk) 14:23, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Bunny boiler is perhaps a more extreme version. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 14:32, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks all. schyler (talk) 15:27, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Resolved

it should be noted that it's not really an idiom, but a cultural reference, and one that is probably unintellegible to most Germans, even educated ones, and most of the few who can decode it probably know it only by way of Wagner. The Nibelungen was dropped from the canon of school texts ca. 1945, while it was considered a "national epic" before that. I was educated at a school that was built in 1901 and decorated all over with frescoes depicting scenes from the Nibelungen, which we pupils did not know nor were ever taught about. Might as well have been the Gilgamesh epic. --Janneman (talk) 10:24, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

Suppletive plurals

Is there a natural human language (not a conlang) where singular/plural pairs are primarily suppletive (like "person/people" or "anecdote/data") rather than one being formed from the other by a regular process? LANTZY^TALK 21:09, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Maybe not primarily, but lots of Semitic languages have broken plurals. Arabic has the regular process of adding -un or -in to make a plural, at least for things like groups of people (jobs, nationalities, etc). It certainly doesn't seem very regular when you're learning the language though, since basic nouns always seem to have broken plurals. But even then, there are a number of patterns to form broken plurals, so it's still somewhat regular. Adam Bishop (talk) 02:58, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

Calling "data" the plural of "anecdote" sounds like a joke, and broken plurals definitely aren't suppletive, because they're formed from the same root as the singular. Pais (talk) 17:41, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it's a joke, but I couldn't think of another serious example. I wonder why suppletion is so much commoner in verbs than nouns. LANTZY^TALK 02:19, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

There are only a few examples of truly suppletive plurals, like Russian человек "person" / люди "people" and maybe Irish duine "person" / daoine "people" (it's not 100% clear whether the Irish forms are suppletive or not). It's funny how in English, Russian, and Irish it's the same semantic word that has the suppletive plural. You could make an argument that cow/cattle and pig/swine are suppletive plurals, but cattle and swine are more like collectives, and they exist alongside cows and pigs and are used differently. I really doubt there's any natural language where noun singular/plural pairs are primarily suppletive. Even in verbs, where suppletion is more common than in nouns, I'd be surprised if there was any category that was primarily suppletive in any language. Pais (talk) 10:28, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

Oh, and in German Leute "people" isn't normally the plural of either Mann "man" or Mensch "person" (both of which have their own plurals Männer and Menschen), but in some compounds it does replace Mann in the plural, e.g. Geschäftsmann "businessman" / Geschäftsleute "businessmen". And I don't think Geschäftsleute is just PC gender-neutrality, either. You use it even when all the businessmen in question are male, and it was the usual plural of Geschäftsmann even back in the days when there were hardly any businesswomen. Pais (talk) 10:35, 11 January 2011 (UTC)