Re: [Lingo] Bulgarian and Russian and Romanian (oh my?)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Josh Glover writes:

 > > You mean like French-Italian-Spanish-Portuguese (which, like Mandarin
 > > and Taiwanese, are quite mutually intelligible as written languages)?
 > 
 > Mandarin and Cantonese would have been the better example,
 > methinks. ;-P

No, I picked Taiwanese deliberately because of the clear difference in
glyphs in the national standards.  Nonetheless, AFAIK they are
mutually intelligible as written languages.  Sort of like the way
anybody can handle such incorrect spelling as "labour" (and certain
incorrigibles even prefer it! hard to believe, I know).

I wondered if you'd catch me out on the French.  Two French guys were
abusing each other on python-dev the other day for their English (all
in good fun, of course, so an Aussie jumped in to demand smileys<wink>).

 > Seriously, language classification can be a hairy issue. Just ask a
 > Japanese linguist whether Japanese and Korean are related.

You mean like that guy who wrote "ima nihongo ga abunai" because
Unicode codepoints lack the essential Yamato damashii of, say, Shift
JIS? :-(