Mutual intelligibility of Chinese dialects: Predicting cross-dialect word intelligibility from lexical and phonological similarity
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper aims to predict mutual intelligibility (defined here as cross-dialectal word recognition) between 15 Chinese dialects from lexical and phonological distance measures. Distances were measured on the stimulus materials used in the experiment. Their predictive power was compared with earlier similar distance measures based on large word lists. Predictors based on just the stimulus materials used afford the better prediction. Segmental Levenshtein distance was the strongest predictor, outperforming both lexical and tonal similarity measures.
منابع مشابه
Tone as a Predictor of Mutual Intelligibility of Chinese Dialects
This paper attempts to establish the importance of differences in the tone inventories for the mutual intelligibility of 15 Chinese dialects. Tone influence for mutual intelligibility was tested in two studies. In the first study mutual intelligibility was measured through opinion testing. The fable “The North Wind and the Sun” was read by one male speaker in each of 15 Chinese dialects with me...
متن کاملDialect MT: A Case Study between Cantonese and Mandarin
Machine Translation (MT) need not be confined to inter-language activities. In this paper, we discuss inter-dialect MT in general and Cantonese-Mandarin MT in particular. Mandarin and Cantonese are two most important dialects of Chinese. The former is the national lingua franca and the latter is the most influential dialect in South China, Hong Kong and overseas. The difference in between is su...
متن کاملLinguistic distance as a determinant of the mutual intelligibility between Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch language varieties
Research on the mutual intelligibility of closely related Germanic languages has shown that several linguistic and extra-linguistic factors determine intelligibility scores to a high degree. In this paper, we aim to pinpoint the precise role of the determinant phonetic distance. As for example Gooskens (2007) shows, aggregate Levenshtein distances turn out to be good predictors of the intelligi...
متن کاملDialect or a New Language: A Possible Explanation of the 70% Mutual Intelligibility Threshold
In most cases, linguists have a consensus on when people from different regions speak two different dialects of the same language (and can, thus, understand each other reasonably well) or two different languages (in this case, their mutual intelligibility is limited). In most cases, this intuitive consensus corresponds to a 70% mutual intelligibility threshold: if at least 70% of the words from...
متن کامل