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Which slavic language is the most slavic? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| mabajsas Newbie Sweden Joined 6434 days ago 16 posts - 17 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 1 of 9 14 November 2007 at 7:45am | IP Logged | ||
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What slavic language is the most slavic in terms of influences from other languages (i.e. loan words) and other typical slavic characteristics?
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| Bojan Bilingual Pentaglot Newbie Germany Joined 6224 days ago 35 posts - 35 votes Speaks: Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian*, German*, English | Message 2 of 9 14 November 2007 at 8:24am | IP Logged | ||
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I guess it's Serbian (many Turkish, German etc. words.).
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| mabajsas Newbie Sweden Joined 6434 days ago 16 posts - 17 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 3 of 9 14 November 2007 at 8:33am | IP Logged | ||
When I say in terms of influences from other languages (i.e. loan words), i mean in terms of the least unfluence, sorry! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 4 of 9 14 November 2007 at 8:52am | IP Logged | ||
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I think that one way is note some characteristics of Proto-Slavonic or Old Church Slavonic and compare them to what is present in all of the modern Slavonic languages. Arguably, the language that has retained the most of the old traits would be the "most Slavonic" in addition to eschewing loanwords and preferring calques (which are rather superficial and say little about retaining structure).
A few of the old characteristics are: 1) division of noun declensions into classes (more like Latin - and more elaborate than the modern division by gender) 2) singular, dual and neuter 3) pitch accent/tone 4) nasal vowels (which in turn evolved from earlier pairs of vowel + m/n) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6272 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 5 of 9 14 November 2007 at 4:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know for sure, but standard literary Czech might be, at least in the vocabulary. Czech came close to extinction, and 19th century work to revive it involved removing lots of foreign words, mostly German. Loanwords, where needed, were often imported from other Slavic languages like Russian. Colloquial Czech, especially the Prague version, does have lots of German words, though.
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| Arti Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 7012 days ago 130 posts - 165 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: French, Czech | Message 6 of 9 18 November 2007 at 9:23am | IP Logged | ||
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It's difficult to say for me. I suppose this can be said on the basis of a certain research, but Goggle for example hasn't given me the answer at least in English. IMHO this field hasn't been studied well...
In Russian I found something: Belarussian is claimed to be the purest one just because its usage has been limited and now it's used by quite little part of Belarussian population, so it could preserve all the true slavic features including lexicon. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 7 of 9 18 November 2007 at 4:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've checked my books on Slavonic linguistics and took a few notes on which grammatical or phonetic features of the Proto-Slavonic language still exist in the modern languages.
From what I have gathered, it's hard to say which of the modern Slavonic languages has retained the most traits (less accurately: which Slavonic language is "most" Slavonic) since each of the modern languages preserves only some of the Proto-Slavonic traits if at all. Conversely, some of the traits of Proto-Slavonic have disappeared in some if not all of the modern languages I can post my notes on what I found in this thread (since they do become rather detailed) if anyone is interested. I've also found some discussion about the proportion of native vocabulary in most of the modern Slavonic languages. (The page numbers refer to those from the chapters of "The Slavonic Languages" (edited by Bernard Comrie and Greville G. Corbet) and I've quoted sections from the chapters which I think are relevant to the thread's subtopic of the origin of Slavonic vocabulary. Each chapter was written by a specialist in that particular language.) BULGARIAN (p. 239 - written by Ernest A. Scatton) - "The standard 'Academy' dictionary of Bulgarian (Романски/Romanski 1955-9) contains over 63,000 entries, of which 25% are foreign borrowings or words derived from them (Бояджиев/Bojadžiev 1970). - "The relative weight of inherited Proto-Slavonic material can be estimated from Николова/Nikolova (1987) - a study of a 100,000-word corpus of conversational Bulgarian. Of the 806 items occurring there more than ten times, approximately 50 per cent may be direct reflexes of Proto-Slavonic forms; nearly 30 per cent are later Bulgarian formations and 17 per cent are foreign borrowings or words derived from them." MACEDONIAN (p. 295 - written by Victor A. Friedman) - "In the absence of an etymological dictionary, it is not practical to attempt an estimate of the proportion of inherited or borrowed items." BCS/SERBO-CROATIAN (pp. 375-6 - written by Wayles Browne) - "Fed by various dialects, contacts ... and more than one standard, the Serbo-Croat vocabulary is large. Academic dictionaries run to many volumes... Unfortunately, we possess no full etymological dictionary. Skok (1971-4), though abundant in rare and dialectal words, has many lacunae." SLOVENIAN (pp. 441-2 - written by T.M.S. Priestly) (Priestly did not put down any numbers and discusses Slovenian vocabulary qualitatively.) - "The Slovene word-stock is in many respects extremely idiosyncratic. On the one hand, it has not only retained much of the core of Proto-Slavonic lexis, but even maintained several items that were lost elsewhere;... Local semantic and phonological developments resulted in further unique items:... In particular, Slovene managed to develop its native vocabulary in ways that mark it off as very different from its closest relative, Serbo-Croat (see Brozović 1988). The position of Slovene on the Slavonic periphery resulted in little medieval influence from other Slavonic languages, but the directly inherited lexicon was complemented by extensive borrowing from contemporary Slavonic languages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and by the equally extensive coinage of new native derivations for referents in all areas of modern life. On the other hand, its geography and history ensured that Slovene was subject to extensive non-Slavonic influence both spatially and temporally. Not only was it open to influences on three sides - from Romance, Germanic and Hungarian - but the thousand-year lack of political independence had its natural consequences." CZECH (p. 522 - written by David Short) - "The core of the word-stock is firmly Slavonic, with about 2,000 items shared with all or most of the other Slavonic languages. Borrowings are increasing rapidly, chiefly by adoption of Greco-Latin or English internationalisms. The relative share of Slavonic and non-Slavonic in the lexicon overall is hard to determine, but on average every seventh word in use is said to be a borrowing." SLOVAK (p. 583 - written by David Short) - "Slovak is said to preserve the greatest number of Proto-Slavonic lexical items and to have built steadily on that core by derivation, expansion or reduction of original meanings... Exact statistics cannot be given, owing to uneven tolerance of regionalisms even with the standard lexis, differing assessments of individual items among users and authoritative sources, the relative frequency of items, and the attrition in the native word-stock that accompanies developments in society... Currently, every sixth word in the press is a loan. In everyday speech the proportion is lower, while in literature, which draws freely on a vast stock of regionalisms, it is lower still..." SORBIAN (p. 674 - written by Gerald Stone) - "Sorbian has been in contact with German for about 1,000 years and during that time has absorbed and assimilated a large number of German lexical borrowings... Excluding loan-translations and ignoring the distinction between true loan-words and substitutions resulting from code-switching, we find that the proportion of nouns of German origin in dialect texts may even exceed 50 per cent (Michalk and Protze 1967:31). In literary varieties of Upper Sorbian, on the other hand, it seems likely that the proportion of German loan-words does not normally exceed 5 per cent, unless words from international terminology are included. The proportions in Lower Sorbian are probably similar, but the Lower Sorbian literary language is a little more tolerant of Germanisms than literary Upper Sorbian." POLISH (p. 750 - written by Robert A. Rothstein) - "In the mid-1930s Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński compared data from the two existing Slavonic etymological dictionaries with his own vocabulary and concluded that the active vocabulary of the average educated speaker of Polish at that time (estimated at 8,000 words) preserved more than 1,700 Proto-Slavonic words... By comparison the largest dictionary of Polish (Doroszewski 1958-69) contains some 125,000 words... Some forty years later Jiří Damborský analyzed the 37,719 entries in the one-volume abridgement of Doroszewski's dictionary and concluded that these consisted of 28,532 'native' words and 8,787 foreign words." RUSSIAN (p. 878 - written by Alan Timberlake) - "The lexicon of Modern Russian is to a large extent constructed from roots of Proto-Slavonic provenance, though much of it may have been formed by productive processes in the history of Russian." BELORUSSIAN (p. 937 - written by Peter Mayo) - "For Belorussian no statistical data have been yet produced which would allow us to state with any degree precision the proportion of items within the word-stock of the language which can be traced directly back to Proto-Slavonic. The nearest one may get to such a calculation is to extrapolate from a generally accepted figure of about 2000 for lexical items of Indo-European an Proto-Slavonic origin in the modern Slavonic languages as a whole, and from approximately 95,000 words recorded in Атраховіч / Atraxovič (1977-84), that it is of the order of 2 per cent. Small though this figure may be, the words themselves are, of course, among the most frequently encountered in everyday linguistic situations, since they denote the most fundamental objects, phenomena, characteristics and activities: kinship terms,... body parts:... food terms:... flora and fauna:... temporal concepts:... basic activities in man's physical and mental existence:...; as well as numerals, pronouns and basic prepositions, conjunctions and adverbs." UKRAINIAN (p. 989 - written by George Y. Shevelov) - "The general idea of the share of Common Slavonic vocabulary in modern standard Ukrainian can be drawn from the following observation. In a randomly taken page of a work of fiction (text 1: 300 words) 216 words have Common Slavonic roots; in a randomly taken page of non-fiction (text 2: 300 words, from a linguistics journal), this number falls to about 150. Among the remaining word-stock, borrowings play an important part. 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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 9 18 November 2007 at 4:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Belarusian does have quite a few loanwords, often for words that haven't been loaned by Russian. Not sure if it's influence of Polish. Actually the only words I can think of that are foreign loans in Russian and original words in Belarusian are names of months.
(Examples of the opposite: папера (papera) for paper, дах (dakh) for roof, while Russian has бумага (bumaga) and крыша (krysha) respectively). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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