Slovakia and the Eastern Question...

[khiemtran]

Since Slovakia appears to be in my future, I've been reading up on the Ottoman Empire. I never quite grasped before just how big it was or how long it lasted. Reading about Central Europe in general really puts in perspective what it means to be able to live in cities without walls and the threat of invasion, and what a wonder it is that, tourists can wander from Ireland to Turkey as the mood takes them, flitting across old empires like birds hopping from fence to fence.

It's also been an education flicking through the LP Eastern Europe phrasebook (yes, I know Slovaks don't consider themselves Eastern European, but this one had more languages than the Central European one, and was the same price). I didn't quite realise just how close the Slavic languages were to each other, and how you can trace the story of the Slavs through the modern day spread of languages (not to mention the story of the Great Central European Vowel Shortage).

The Slovak chapter somewhat optimistically cites Slovak's "cosy position" as a base for learning the other Slavic languages, though I have to say the resources for learning Czech are vastly better. Still, I sense another love affair coming up...

Comments

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I didn't quite realise just how close the Slavic languages were to each other,

How close are they to each other? I'm aware of the distinction between Slavic languages that have a G sound and those that have an H, but that's about all. (There's a story of a Jewish family named Gitler after their matriarch Gitel (which happens also to have been the middle Hebrew name of the matriarch of my family, viz. my grandmother), who were horrified after they moved from Russia to the Ukraine to discover what their name had become there...)

and how you can trace the story of the Slavs through the modern day spread of languages (not to mention the story of the Great Central European Vowel Shortage).

LOL! That'll be because they were all disemvowelled by the Janissaries during the wars with the Ottoman Empire...

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

How close are they to each other?

Well, close enough that if you flick through the phrasebook, the phrases all start to look very familiar, but I guess no closer than Spanish and French.

For example (romanizing when appropriate):

ne razbiram/ne razumijem/nerozumín/ne razbiram/nie Rozumiem/na panimayu[1]/nerozumiem/ne razumem.

[1] I guess this one isn't a cognate with the others.

LOL! That'll be because they were all disemvowelled by the Janissaries during the wars with the Ottoman Empire...
I'm going to postulate a market crash as well, since the markets of Czech and Slovak (trh) are bereft of vowels even today, and those of Slovenian and Croatian (tržnica) are still desperately short.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

ne razbiram/ne razumijem/nerozumín/ne razbiram/nie Rozumiem/na panimayu[1]/nerozumiem/ne razumem.

Yes, that's similar to the few examples I know in multiple Slavic languages, e.g. the response to a sneeze (I collect these in different languages): bud zdorov[a] in Russian, and nazdravy in Czech. But they're not mutually intelligible?

I'm going to postulate a market crash as well, since the markets of Czech and Slovak (trh) are bereft of vowels even today, and those of Slovenian and Croatian (tržnica) are still desperately short.

I'd guess the Serbians are the worst off, since even the adjective "Serb" (Srpska) has five consonants back to back...

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

But they're not mutually intelligible?

I would guess only a few of them are, although if you wanted to learn seven different languages to win a bet or something, starting on the Slavic languages might be a good tactic.

I'd guess the Serbians are the worst off, since even the adjective "Serb" (Srpska) has five consonants back to back...
Yes, but their market (pijaca) has heaps of them! So, you know where to go buy a vowel...

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Also, from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovak_language#Orthography) (which, as you know, is never wrong):

Eastern Slovak dialects have the greatest degree of mutual intelligibility with Rusyn of all the Slovak dialects, but both lack technical terminology and upper register expressions. Polish and Sorbian also differ quite considerably from Czech and Slovak in upper registers, but non-technical and lower register speech is readily intelligible. There is also some mutual intelligibility with spoken Rusyn, Ukrainian and even Russian (in this order), although their orthography, based on the Cyrillic script, is very different.
There are also similarities with the western Southern Slavic languages, i.e. Croatian, Serbian and to a lesser degree Slovenian stemming from the time before the arrival of the Hungarians in Central Europe.