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Learning Slovenian to get to BCMS? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4886 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes  Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish | Message 1 of 6 26 April 2012 at 9:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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As a native Bulgarian speaker, if I were to learn Slovenian, exactly how much of an effort would I have to make
to learn BCMS? I can already understand a large portion of the vocabulary just through mutual intelligibility, but if I were to learn Slovenian, how much of BCMS's grammatical structure and declension would I absorb? In essence, the basic question that I'm asking is that if you were to know both ends of a (relatively short) dialect continuum such as that of the South Slavic languages, how easily would you gain access to all of the languages in between the ends without studying the in between languages separately? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Michael K. Senior Member United States Joined 5549 days ago 568 posts - 886 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 2 of 6 27 April 2012 at 12:08am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know much about Slavic languages, but if you want to learn BCMS, just learn it.
There's just no reason to learn another language to get to another language, so unless you want to learn Slovene, I'd just skip it and start on BCMS. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4886 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish | Message 3 of 6 27 April 2012 at 12:34am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for your response, but, to be honest, this was really just supposed to be a hypothetical question. I am
somewhat interested in learning BCMS and/or Slovenian some time in the future but I'm more curious to know if knowing more than one language within this dialect continuum will provide considerably greater ease in learning the others than knowing only one language in the continuum. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Michael K. Senior Member United States Joined 5549 days ago 568 posts - 886 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 4 of 6 27 April 2012 at 1:17am | IP Logged | ||
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I understand. Someone more knowledgeable about Slavic languages will have to respond to you.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6976 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 6 27 April 2012 at 5:35am | IP Logged | ||
This isn't quite what you're looking for but Medulin put down his impressions of Slovenian as a native speaker of a Chakavian sub-dialect. His comments suggest that there's a fairly deep division between Kajkavian (the base of Slovenian) and Shtokavian dialects/languages (the base of BCMS/SC). He reports experiencing less difficulty understanding Slovenian at first blush than the average Croat who speaks a Shtokavian sub-dialect natively, and like all Croats learns the Shotkavian standard in school. There's also a blog from a Bulgarian point of view which compares Bulgarian with other Slavonic languages. The relevant information is under "Bulgarian compared". Although much of the comparison is indisputable, the blogger relies on scholarship (see the blog's references) which has been superseded by modern research in Slavonic dialectology. In addition there are a couple of shaky ideas there in using the obsolete division into Southeastern and Northwestern (basically Eastern/Southern Slavonic versus Western Slavonic) and the uniting of Croatian with Slovenian partially on the idea that Kajkavian dialects are spoken natively only by Slovenes and some Croats even if this ignores that Croatian has been effectively Shtokavian like Serbian (and Bosnian and Montenegrin) for about 150 years starting from the days of Serbo-Croatian (Kajkavian and Chakavian on the other hand had been marginalized and their exclusion from Croatian (and later Serbo-Croatian) standardization angered some Croatian intellectuals then, and still rankles some nationalist Croats today.) 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5093 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 6 of 6 27 April 2012 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | ||
My father speaks Slovenian natively. My impression is that it is somewhat harder than Serbian. It is also obviously spoken by ~10 times fewer people, so it may be harder to find learning materials and diaspora speakers to practice with. What makes it easier: one less case, but that's practically irrelevant, and the verbal system is a bit simpler than that of Serbian (2 past and 1 future tense as compared to 4 past and 2 future tenses in Serbian). However, as mentioned in another thread, 3 of 4 past tenses in Serbian are becoming obsolete in spoken language, anyway, so perhaps it's of little importance. Supposedly the pitch accent system is a little bit simpler and less relevant than in Serbian. What makes it harder: dual number, which affects both nouns and verbs, some tricky vowels (there are certain varieties of "e" that I absolutely cannot pronounce correctly, and these are not marked as different in the written language, you just have to know what word uses what variant of the sound), and it's quite a bit less phonetic than Serbian. Sometimes the letter "v" ends up being pronounced as "u" and "l" as an English "w" - you never see that sort of thing in Serbian. Quirks: other than dual, there are surprisingly a lot of dialects for such a small country, probably due to the Alps separating different communities throughout history; the language is rather archaic in its vocabulary - and curiously there are words it shares with Montenegrin dialects (my mother is acquainted with some of these words through her grandmother), probably owing to Montenegro's mountainous isolation, but these words have died out in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia. Of course you didn't ask for my advice regarding whether you should learn Slovenian, but unless you are hoping to become a South Slavic linguist, I think it is too much effort. The vocabulary is substantially off from Serbian, and even more so from Bulgarian. Also, if you wanted to learn "ijekavian" (spoken in Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, and parts of southeastern Serbia), Slovenian will not help, since - like Bulgarian, Serbian, and Kajkavian of Croatia - it is an "ekavian" language. Edited by Merv on 27 April 2012 at 3:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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