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I can understand her of course ( her Belorussian is really weak though,) and as I've said many times before, both languages ( Ukrainian and Belorussian) sound very archaic comparably to Russian, which is clearly modernized. What I'd like to find on youtube though, is a version of old, pre-reformed Russian.
Thing about Russian is there is less variation to the other two from region to region.
Russian among the rich and poor doesn't change much either, there is not as big of a divide between the classes in their speech that is.
Thing about Russian is there is less variation to the other two from region to region.
I would guess that "standardization" of Russian language really took place in Soviet times; in pre-revolutionary Russia the language varied more from region to region.
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Russian among the rich and poor doesn't change much either, there is not as big of a divide between the classes in their speech that is.
Oh it does, of course it does. Particularly when it comes to written language. The less educated ( people who don't read enough) rarely can master it. You can always tell *the class* ( the background of the person) by written Russian. Actually, by spoken Russian as well. Because written Russian and conversational Russian are quite different too.
I have absolutely no knowledge of any Slavic languages, so I can't comment on that. But I would say that in the Germanic branch Swedish would be the easiest in grammar, or maybe Dutch. Forget the umlauts in Swedish, and the pronounciation is pretty straightforward. From the Romance branch Spanish is probably the easiest.
I just watched an emission in Turkish and although I don't understand the language, I find it so sweet, and pretty (particularly spoken by females). Is it difficult to learn ?
You said "class"....? I'm going to write that down...
But back to the subject.
Due to my age, I've known people that lived before the revolution that are now dead. They took the last train to Vladivostock, for real. They ended in Shanghai and then, they jumped to the United States.
According to them, modern Russian was vulgar, had no class whatsoever and was not comparable to the language spoken before among the high class.
They were representantives of an American insurance company whose headquarters became the Lubyanka.
High class language is not the original, it evolves from colloquial. It is almost always a standardized smoothed over version like Mandarin, Finnish, or Sanskrit, or it looks like some weird imitation of Ancient Greek using syntactical constructions designed to look as posh as can be. The vulgar language of the people is the real deal. Language planning gets on my nerves, I would bet half of our (yes all of us from the west) vocabulary definition, syntax, and word formation is literary and overblown in origin.
When I was studying library science in graduate school, I met a Russian student. The university library had an old set of Russian encyclopedias. She said it was written in Czarist-era Russian.
I just watched an emission in Turkish and although I don't understand the language, I find it so sweet, and pretty (particularly spoken by females). Is it difficult to learn ?
There are no tricky pronunciations and no grammatical gender, only distinction between singular and plural in Turkish language. I don't think it is difficult for an European to learn.
There are no tricky pronunciations and no grammatical gender, only distinction between singular and plural in Turkish language. I don't think it is difficult for an European to learn.
Do you buy into the "nomadic" explanation for the straightforwardness? The historical lack of literary device/writing and little stable inhabitation of one region is responsible for the crystal regularity since old forms from previous generations cannot survive into the next one without dictionaries or oral tradition.
One thing unique about Turkic languages is the sheer lack of ancient words, such as compounds that have fused like "nostril" coming from "nose-thrill" or vocabulary that retains archaic morphemes surviving into the modern day like "towel" coming from "tow+el" where "el" used to be a nominalising suffix that not longer is productive. Uzbek then is a language of here and right now. Idiomatics tend to be easier to analyse in older Turkish I suspect, it is only now that quirky lack of logic in areas now comes into existence with a stable inhabitation of a region.
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