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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 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 9 of 20 23 January 2010 at 6:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm more inclined to think that BCS / Serbo-Croatian would be a somewhat better "fit" for Old Church Slavonic than Bulgarian. Bulgarian (and Macedonian) have expanded on the original conjugation pattern of Old Church Slavonic, but dropped almost all of its declensional patterns. BCS / Serbo-Croatian has simplified somewhat the inflectional patterns used in OCS, but it hasn't done anything near to what happened in Bulgarian and Macedonian. I think what clouds matters somewhat is the use of "Old Bulgarian" or "Old Macedonian" as synonyms for Old Church Slavonic. No doubt Bulgarian or Macedonian scholars respectively support these usages since they emphasize a direct link with their modern languages to the fairly prestigious OCS. It's somewhat like insinuating that modern English is closer to Old English than any other modern Germanic language on account of the shared use of the word "English".
I've read that Old Frisian was actually the most closely-related language to Old English. Yet with all of the lexical and morphological changes that have happened in the evolution from Old English to modern English (i.e. influx of French and Latin loanwords, fading of cases, loss of grammatical gender, changes in tenses), I'm more convinced that modern Icelandic is closer to Old English than is modern English. Modern Frisian in some ways is harder to compare to Old English since modern Frisian bears a strong influence from Dutch and Low German and doesn't show much influence from French or Latin. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| unityandoutside Diglot Groupie United States Joined 6014 days ago 94 posts - 149 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Latin, Mandarin | Message 10 of 20 23 January 2010 at 8:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
In the respect that Romanian has retained more of a case system than other Romance languages, Romanian is the most conservative. However, it has been heavily influenced by slavic languages, and is definitely not phonologically conservative. In addition, it has is own grammatical idiosyncrasies that make it far different from latin or other Romance languages, such as the suffixed definite article. It also has SVO word order, as opposed to latin and the majority of other modern romance languages, which predominantly use SOV word order. Edited by unityandoutside on 23 January 2010 at 8:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Siberiano Tetraglot Senior Member Russian Federation one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6493 days ago 465 posts - 696 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Serbian | Message 11 of 20 23 January 2010 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Paolo mangia la pizza. Not "Paolo la pizza mangia". (In Russia, pizza eats Paolo?) Pablo está comiendo paella. Not "Pablo paella está comiendo". Edited by Siberiano on 23 January 2010 at 10:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5828 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 12 of 20 23 January 2010 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Sardinian (actually, more accurately called Sard) is definitely closest to Latin. My mother is
an archeologist who spent years working on Sardinia, and she said the locals were capable of having extensive conversations with foreigners who spoke Latin. They are actually more like dialects than separate languages. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Wilco Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6330 days ago 160 posts - 247 votes Speaks: French*, English, Russian | Message 13 of 20 24 January 2010 at 1:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's certainly interesting, but I was thinking more about vocabulary than grammar. Which language, of BCS and Bulgarian, has kept the "purest" slavonic vocabulary? 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 14 of 20 24 January 2010 at 6:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The short answer is that it's hard to tell.
As it relates to lexis or specific features attested in OCS and how many of them came through to BCS/Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian is made fuzzy by the methods of intermediation. Whatever has been passed on from Old Church Slavonic into BCS or Bulgarian may have come through from Russian intermediation (usually via Russian Church Slavonic or a descendant of the Russian recension of Old Church Slavonic) or just directly from the "national" recension (i.e. the Eastern Bulgarian recension of OCS would ultimately "pass on" features to Bulgarian while the Serbian recension of OCS would ultimately "pass on" features to BCS/Serbo-Croatian). Each of the recensions of OCS were modifications to an earlier form of OCS meant to make OCS more reflective of the prevalent linguistic norms within the congregation in question. The only facts are that OCS was a Southern Slavonic language like Bulgarian, Macedonian and BCS (among others), but each modern Slavonic language (i.e. not just the southern ones) kept some features found in OCS and discarded others. What was kept or discarded was affected not only by phonological or morphological changes occurring in specific areas of the Slavonic dialectal areas, but also by the degree to which some recension of OCS continued to be used by people whose own colloquial language had already diverged noticeably from what was in OCS (it's a bit like making modern Italians use Ecclesiastical/Medieval Latin instead of Italian in a church service despite the noticeable differences between them, and then noting if the continued use of Ecclesiastical Latin would begin affecting the patterns of colloquial Italian) Here's a thread from 2007 which deals with the question of which Slavonic language is "purest" http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=8012&PN=6 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| unityandoutside Diglot Groupie United States Joined 6014 days ago 94 posts - 149 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Latin, Mandarin | Message 15 of 20 24 January 2010 at 6:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I suppose I'm not sure, I spoke too quickly. Evidently my memory failed me, I seem to recall having read somewhere that Spanish was SOV. My apologies for the rather brash mistake. But I still don't think Romanian is very conservative overall. My mother, who reads Latin and speaks French, has visited Romania and told me that she found Romanian to be far less transparent than she had expected, certainly far less than Spanish or Italian, which she says she can make some sense of without excessive difficulty. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| alang Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7221 days ago 563 posts - 757 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 16 of 20 24 January 2010 at 7:26am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Cool. The Greek you wrote down I presume is suppose to be Ancient Greek. If it is, I really had no idea it was actually still used. Old Church Slavonic I was aware, but which area and how close to the original. I have no clue. There were some cds I listened to, unfortunately I do not know where the singers were from exactly. Latin I am also aware, but some of the people I have heard were either native English speakers or one time some Latin expressions by a person from Africa. Which of course these speakers I would think do not sound like the original Latin sound. The contributions from fellow members have been informative, as I only guessed from whatever I knew (Little to extremely little). I had not even heard of Pontic Greek, now I know. The Old English I have listened to was a reading of Beowulf from Trevor Eaton. Who I think taught in England, so I guessed probably British English. To my untrained ears I actually thought it resembled German of what little I knew. One other language I am going to guess at. Classical Arabic <---> Modern Arabic (Hejazi Dialect) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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