Jiří Haviger

The Measurement of Mutual Intelligibility between West-Slavic Languages

Abstract The West Slavic languages are close enough for their speakers to use their mother tongues when communicating with each other. In 1966, Einar Haugen referred to this type of communication as ‘semicommunication’. To this date, research into the mutual intelligibility of the semicommunication of West Slavic languages has been conducted exclusively by sociolinguistic methods. The presented paper, therefore, uses the mathematical-linguistic methods proposed by Moberg, Gooskens, Nerbonne, and Vaillette [Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands 2006: Selected papers from the 17th CLIN Meeting, p. 51–66 (2007)] to measure the mutual intelligibility of semicommunication. These methods are based on calculating the conditional entropy. The calculations are realized on the phonetic and graphemic planes of Czech, Slovak, and Polish. Conditional entropies were the lowest between Czech and Slovak. Between both the languages and Polish they were much higher. The asymmetry of the mutual intelligibility was confirmed for every studied relationship. Its extent was varied for each. The differences between content and function words, and various styles of material were also explored. The measurements in this research proved, in agreement with Moberg et al., that conditional entropy correlates with mutual intelligibility. The general conclusions mostly confirm the sociolinguistic conclusions. In many cases, the conclusions have been refined and supplemented.

Evaluation of Stress Conditions for FIM UHK Students in Order to Improve Blended Learning and Flexibility of Educational Process

The aim of this study is to clarify the current theoretical background of the issues dealing with stress factors as well as to introduce the course and statistical evaluation of our own research. It focuses on the connection between stress load and behaviour of university students. In the research the following areas are monitored: life style, living and social conditions and the influence of negative emotions on stress increase. The method of the research is subjective questioning and statistical processing of correlations in the field of frustration tolerance, handling stress and psychosomatic symptoms.