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"Easy" Slavic Language? | ||
Tags: Easiness | Slavic Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6455 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes  Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 17 of 44 30 September 2008 at 7:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm sure that Slovio is the easiest!
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| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5824 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 18 of 44 30 September 2008 at 7:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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Yes but it's even more useless than Esperanto which is difficult to achieve :p. Edited by Sennin on 30 September 2008 at 7:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| teddo Diglot Newbie South Africa Joined 6200 days ago 22 posts - 22 votes Speaks: English, Polish Studies: French | Message 19 of 44 30 September 2008 at 8:06am | IP Logged | |||||
(at the bottom of first page, to the Volte answer) This isn't true.... Edited by teddo on 30 September 2008 at 8:09am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6229 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 20 of 44 30 September 2008 at 8:54am | IP Logged | |||||
Which part? Russian has dialects, but the language was apparently "heavily prescribed during the Soviet period, deviations from the norm being purged by the Union of Soviet Writers", according to Wikipedia. I've read other, contemporary things on Russian attitudes towards dialects, but I'm thus far unable to find them again; paraphrased extremely badly, it would be something along the lines of that the dialects are acknowledged and studied, but not really considered correct alternatives to the standard language. On the other side, Ukranian is pretty uncontroversially classified as a separate language at this point, despite being quite similar, to the best of my knowledge. Polish dialectal differences aren't as strong as they once were, but wikipedia's article on Polish mentions two dialects, Silesian and Kashubian, which are sometimes classified as separate languages. Both countries had migrations which led to less regional variation in the respective national languages, but formal prescriptivism played a stronger role in Russian, as far as I know. As for BCS: it's several quite similar but not identical languages, which seem to be diverging since this was decided, and lots of odd situations near borders. I'd rather not put my foot in my mouth speaking about it, I guess. That said, given the amount of comments I've read where native speakers have mentioned getting lectured for saying something that's considered to be in one of the 'other' BCS languages, I'd say the dialect situation is more major, simply because lines have changed recently, there's been limited time for prescriptivism, the political sensitivity, etc. I admit I made my point badly the first time, since I didn't want to segue into everything above at the expense of what I was trying to say. If there's anything incorrect in this, I'd like to hear about it; I knew basically nothing about Slavic languages less than a year ago, and they haven't been my only focus in the meanwhile. Edited by Volte on 30 September 2008 at 8:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| PiotrKozlowski Newbie Poland Joined 5701 days ago 11 posts - 11 votes Speaks: Polish* | Message 21 of 44 30 September 2008 at 12:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
Kashubian is officially recognized as a "regional language" by Polish law, so the caution is not needed here. Silesian, Podhale and some other dialects (spoken in the South of Poland; and considered languages by some) are quite divergent from the standard, but all in all, they are spoken by 5 percent of population, at the very most (personally I suspect 2-3 percent for ALL the divergent dialects together). Even when it comes to regional accents (working definition: standard grammar, differences in intonation patterns, pronunciation & vocabulary), for the most part I am unable to tell where a person I'm talking to comes from. If I can do that it's because of actively "fishing" for regional shibboleths (some of which can go unnoticed by laymen). I would say that a small _minority_ of Poles has any regional accent to speak of. So, I'd say, Polish is quite a good example of a "monolithic" language. I tend to believe that Russian is actually the more divergent of the two, if you take into account the easily recognisable dialects of its L2 speakers, Russian as spoken by Rusophones in Belarus/Ukraine etc. What I mean is that you are more likely to encounter non-standard Russian on the streets of Moscow, than non-standard Polish on the streets of Warsaw. Edited by PiotrKozlowski on 30 September 2008 at 12:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Russianbear Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6565 days ago 358 posts - 422 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, Ukrainian Studies: Spanish | Message 23 of 44 30 September 2008 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree with Volte. Russian is remarkably homogeneous for a language that is used in such a large country. The dialects are indeed minor - either in terms of the number of speakers, or in terms of their difference from the "standard" language. Also, the dialects tend to be limited to rural areas whose speakers are not likely to be encountered not only by foreign Russian-language learners, but also, by the great majority of Russians themselves.
PiotrKozlowski mentioned Russian as spoken by Russophones in Belarus/Ukraine as dialects that are more divergent than the dialects of Polish. I am not familiar with the dialects of Polish, but I think the differences between Russian spoken by Rusophones in Belarus/Ukraine and Russian spoken in Russia are quite small and in most cases they are almost impossible to tell apart. I do agree with the notion that it is possible to encounter non-standard Russian on the streets of Moscow, but one needs to be careful about drawing conclusions from that. There are a lot of people from all over the world in Moscow, so one can hear all kinds of non-standard Russian there. But if one were to draw conclusions about Russian dialects based on what one heard in Moscow, it would be like drawing conclusions about American English dialects based on what one heard in New York. Coming back to the original question, I agree with those who mentioned Bulgarian as a language with little to no noun declension. That doesn't mean there aren't other things that make Bulgarian more complex, but it is probably a relatively "simple" Slavic language. But like Volte mentioned, Bulgarian doesn't have anywhere near as many resources as Russian, and may even lag behind other Slavic languages in availability of materials. Edited by Russianbear on 30 September 2008 at 12:59pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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