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Are there any pairs of Slavic languages.. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 17 of 23 02 December 2011 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've always found "Silesian" to be even closer overall to standard Polish than Kashubian.
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| H.Computatralis Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 6305 days ago 130 posts - 210 votes Speaks: Polish*, French, English Studies: German, Spanish, Latin | Message 18 of 23 02 December 2011 at 11:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I know that it's a contentious issue, but "Silesian" is generally considered a dialect of Polish - or at least its language status is disputed by many linguists (opinions are divided), whereas no serious linguist disputes the status of Kashubian as a separate language.
Edited by H.Computatralis on 02 December 2011 at 11:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 19 of 23 03 December 2011 at 2:57am | IP Logged | |||||
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I tend to agree but if we were to give the benefit of the doubt to the Silesian nationalists (!) then "Silesian" is a "language" and in turn Polish and Silesian would be a closer pair than Polish and Kashubian. Otherwise I go along with the idea that the next nearest language to Polish is Kashubian (or perhaps Slovincian).
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| mjhowie1992 Diglot Newbie AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 24 posts - 27 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Mandarin | Message 20 of 23 03 December 2011 at 3:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, I am just going by what my friend tells me. He and his family are from Southern Poland, and speak Polish at home. He tells me that he has been able to understand Czech being spoken to him. Also, one of their most favourite movies to watch is Tři oříšky pro Popelku, a Czech movie very similar to Cinderella. They are able to understand virtually everything without much difficulty, which goes to suggest there is quite a good degree of mutual intelligibility between Czech and Polish, but it may depend on where one comes from. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 21 of 23 03 December 2011 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For sure this has something to do with being from Cieszyn. The speech there is transitional between Czech and Polish.
If all that people are familiar with is only one of Standard Czech or Standard Polish, then the mutual intelligibility is fairly low. In other words, H.Computatralis' assertion holds for the majority of Czechs and Poles. I estimate the magnitude of difference between Czech and Polish to be comparable to that between Spanish and Portuguese. Here's a thread on WordReference that talks about Czech, Polish and Slovak and also juxtaposes a dryly humorous text in the three languages about shopping in Poland from the Czech and Slovak point of view.
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| floydak Tetraglot Groupie Slovakia Joined 4855 days ago 60 posts - 85 votes Speaks: Slovak*, English, German, Spanish Studies: French | Message 22 of 23 03 December 2011 at 11:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I saw some theories on this forum, that Czechs and Slovaks do understand eachother so
well, more becouse of the common history, exposure rather than becouse of linguistic issues itself. I think, one might see from above example, that this probably simply can't be that case. Even someone with completely no knowledge about these languages should admit, that 2nd and 3rd texts are much closer related than any other combination. If then I should pick up which language is closer to Polish from Slovak and Czech, I wouldn't be able to do so. Howerver, some Polish friends of mine told me they were better able to understand to Slovak. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 23 of 23 04 December 2011 at 1:51am | IP Logged | |||||
In this instance, however one could manipulate the Czech and Slovak samples to make them seem more divergent. however the texts as they are seem "natural" enough to me and so I wouldn't suspect that the writers were trying to minimize or maxmize the divergence between them. If one wanted to be a "splitting" nationalist and make the texts appear less similar, one could as examples begin the Czech text with Jestli... but the Slovak one with Ak... or use v obchnodním centru in Czech but keep v obchodnom stredisku in Slovak or use the clearly Slovak lebo instead of pretože which is obviously linked to Czech's protože. However there's only so far one could manipulate the texts' lexicon since the inflectional endings in Czech and Slovak do diverge regularly anyway in a fashion that leads to the consensus that we're dealing with closely-related but distinct languages as opposed to pluricentric variants such as BCMS/Serbo-Croatian or national standards of German where the unique differences are concentrated in lexicon rather than morphology. Fooling around with the latter would set off wide-ranging changes in how the native speakers make grammatical distinctions. I think that Czechs and Slovaks living so closely helped with passive understanding of each other's tongue and led to the acceptance of originally Czech terms as acceptable Slovak ones after these were modified to fit Slovak phonology or morphology (e.g. the aforementioned pretože under influence from Czech protože, diaľnica from Czech dálnice for "proper" Slovak autostráda - a kind of "Slovakized" Czech word). However I do agree that on their own, Czech and Slovak are fairly close already because of the similarity in the "building blocks" (they would probably be even closer if Bernolák's standardization had not been discarded in favour of Štúr's). As a foreigner I agree that Czech and Slovak are separate languages, but only barely (more or less to the same degree as I've found Bulgarian and Macedonian, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, or even Afrikaans and Dutch).
I also agree with your Polish friends as I have found that there's something about Slovak that makes it more comprehensible to Poles at first blush than Czech (regardless of Czech using ř like Polish rz and the similarity in using verbs of motion). Perhaps the česká přehláska and frequent use of obecná čeština make Czech seem stranger to Poles than Slovak. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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