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Urdu/Farsi vs Russian/Croatian similarity

 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
12 messages over 2 pages: 1 2  Next >>
solidsnake
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China
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 Message 1 of 12
28 January 2006 at 3:46pm | IP Logged 
Which of the two has an overall higher rate of transparency
transference?


Urdu --> Farsi

or

Russian --> Croatian


thanks

Edited by solidsnake on 28 January 2006 at 3:47pm

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Marin
Triglot
Groupie
Croatia
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Speaks: Croatian*, English, Italian
Studies: German, Russian, Persian

 
 Message 2 of 12
04 February 2006 at 1:00pm | IP Logged 
Wow, that requires somebody with a knowledge in Croatian, Russian, Urdu and Farsi to give a correct answer....Congrats to that person for the achievement in advance!
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patuco
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 Message 3 of 12
04 February 2006 at 4:55pm | IP Logged 
Marin wrote:
Wow, that requires somebody with a knowledge in Croatian, Russian, Urdu and Farsi to give a correct answer....Congrats to that person for the achievement in advance!

Yes, not the most "popular" languages to get to grips with.

However, if someone relatively fluent in Russian and Croatian gives their opinion followed by someone relatively fluent in Urdu and Farsi, then I'm sure that you could compare their answers.

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boaziano
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Italy
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 Message 4 of 12
07 February 2006 at 9:23am | IP Logged 
I can tell you about Hindi/Urdu:
they have the same grammar. The main difference is at a high level of the language (I mean poetry and so on...) in which Hindi can add to its lexicon the Sanskrit one and Urdu the high-Pesian one. For every day conversation they use a Persian everyday-lexicon and the one which is derived from the Prakrits/Apabhramsha (the Middle Indo Aryan languages or the languages developed after Sanskrit). Phonetically a Urdu speaker pays more attention to the sounds from Persian while a Hindi speaker tends to uniform them to the Indo-aryan sounds which he feels more similar.

I think Russian and Croatian are more different; at least phonetically because, if I'm not wrong, Croatian has some kind of pitch tones and vocalic neutralisation which Russian doesn't have.
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Lugubert
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 Message 5 of 12
07 February 2006 at 10:11am | IP Logged 
Grammar-wise, the Slavic languages tend to be very similar, whith the exception of Bulgarian, which is influenced by non-Slavic neighbours.

The grammars of Hindi/Urdu and that of Persian are very different, to the point that you believe that they aren't related at all. For example, the Persian word order isn't too different from most other IE languages, but Hindi/Urdu heaps verbs at the end of sentences. Persian abounds in irregular verb forms, but H/U has only seven irregular verbs, and they are regular as well, but in a slightly different way.

I hasten to say that I'm no expert, but I have had one semester of Russian and a good look at Bulgarian plus some superficial looks at Czech and Polish, aparat from stuff in Comparative IE linguistics. One uni semester of Persian and two of Hindi.

Summarized, my impression is that even Russian-Bulgarian are closer than Hindi/Urdu-Persian.
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winters
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Senior Member
Italy
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Speaks: Croatian*, Serbian*, Russian*, English, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek
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 Message 6 of 12
08 February 2006 at 9:52am | IP Logged 
My view of Croatian and Russian, as a speaker of both, is the following:
1.The grammar is not the same.
They both recognise perfect/imperfect aspects of verbs, but Croatian has more tenses. When it comes to nouns, Russian has 6 cases, while Croatian kept the "vokativ" case and thus has 7 cases.
Some forms are identical to both languages but have diverse meanings, for example "idu" in Russian is the verb "to go" first person singular, while in Croatian the same verb third person plural, and similar things with cases of words of the same form, but which mean different case in each language, etc. This can be somewhat confusing.
2.Vocabulary is mutually intelligible to a certain point.
Even though there is a number of "false friends", a speaker of one language can recognise most of the words and guess their potential meanings.
Interesting enough, Croats seem to understand more of the written Russian than vice versa, but that's only my observation and it might be incorrect of course.
3.Croatian is harder to learn.
Again, only my observation, but I've actually noticed that it's easier for Croat to learn Russian than vice-versa, except when it comes to native-like pronunciation, where the soft sounds of Russian aren't so easy to copy for Croatian speaker as Croatian harder sounds probably are for Russian speaker.
When it comes to ortography, they are somehow "hard" to the same point; and when it comes to grammar, Croatian is more complex.
Russian tenses
From this source you can see that Croatian has 7 tenses (speaking only of indicatives), and Russian has them 3.
One more reason why it is easier for Croats to recognise that "Ja byl/byla" means "Ja sam bio/bila"; but it's definetely harder for Russians to figure out that "Ja sam bio/bila", "Ja bjeh", "Ja bih", "Ja bijah", "Ja bjeh bio/bila", itd all mean "I was" in Croatian.

Overall, I'd say that they are intelligible to a high point when it comes to written texts (assuming one can read both writing systems). I cannot compare them with Hindi/Urdu as I haven't studied those languages, but I hope you can see basically how close they are from this.

Edited by winters on 08 February 2006 at 9:54am

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jalcalde
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 Message 7 of 12
08 February 2006 at 12:17pm | IP Logged 
Well, following the map that Daromat put in another topic, http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/oe/oe-ie.html, it seems that Croatian is more similar to Bulgarian than to Russian. I don't really know much about Slavic languages. Could you please tell me if you think that this classification is right?
Thanks
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winters
Trilingual Heptaglot
Senior Member
Italy
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199 posts - 218 votes 
Speaks: Croatian*, Serbian*, Russian*, English, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek
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 Message 8 of 12
08 February 2006 at 1:49pm | IP Logged 
Here is the article about Bulgarian language.
I checked it in addition to the link you provided, because I was unsure about could I or not judge Croatian similarity to Bulgarian only on the table.
Theoretically, it can be expected that southern branch of slavic languages is more mutually intelligible than with northern ones (and thus I do read that the classification is great approximate); when I read Bulgarian, it certainly "rings a bell" somewhere in my head, so they even might be closer than Croatian/Russian, but I cannot really estimate this before I learn some Bulgarian.

Edit: mispelled url in the link

Edited by winters on 08 February 2006 at 1:51pm



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