Easiest European language to learn, (grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary) (best, house, theory)
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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.
Well you can easily tell the tzarist-era Russian, because at that point in time the Russian "и" was still spelled as Latin "i" I suppose. Besides, we have plenty of samples of tzarist-era writing style, since "War and Peace" or Dostoyevsky's "Idiot" were written in that time ( plus famous Russian poets left us plenty of "sampling." However this is already post-reformed Russian; the real reform took place during Peter the Great from what I remember, so when I am talking about pre-reformed Russian, ( which I am sure sounded much closer to both Ukrainian and Belorussian,) I am talking about the language of pre-1700ies.
But that's one issue.
The other one is what Mahhammar mentioned ( or rather even two separate issues.)
Number one - the regional difference in Russian language ( which is currently quite standardized all over the place.)
And number two - the difference between the "high class" Russian and "low class" Russian.
You know, recently I came across some interesting images, the pictures made by a German photographer ( well he was a soldier of course, an invader, but he happened to be a photographer and most likely a very decent human being as well.) These pictures were made not earlier than the beginning of the forties of the previous century, and they give a glimpse into the life of Russian village, the way it still was throughout Stalin's times, when the connection with tzarist times was still in place ( the real changes I think took place only in Khrushev's times - i.e. in the sixties.)
When I look at these images, I wonder what language did they speak, did they still keep the local dialect and how much did it differ from, say, the language of Moscow's intelligentsia even of the same historic period?
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.
Turkish people took more time to settle in a place than Uigur, so Turkish people were more unstable than Uigur people in this regard.
And Turkish language seems more sophisticated than Uigur language.
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.
I find it interesting but I feel sorry that I don't have enough knowledge to analyze the fact.
I also just read some info on the tatar language and other turkic languages during the soviet union. Stalin's attitude towards them is similar to the bigoted attitude many europeans have towards English (maybe not as bad).
Stalin claimed that the regular agglutination and simplicity of the Turkish languages was a sign of a primitive unintelligent people enslaved under rulers and decadent khans, etc, he believed they had tiny vocabularies with little attention to nuances found in Russian.
He advocated attempting to erase them all and to force Russian into becoming the new language everyone would speak in the USSR, that they should start rapidly russifying the native languages with loans and prescribed style until little remained to ease the change.
Now this is certainly not 100% exactly what happened, but such things likewise did occur.
I also just read some info on the tatar language and other turkic languages during the soviet union. Stalin's attitude towards them is similar to the bigoted attitude many europeans have towards English (maybe not as bad).
Stalin claimed that the regular agglutination and simplicity of the Turkish languages was a sign of a primitive unintelligent people enslaved under rulers and decadent khans, etc, he believed they had tiny vocabularies with little attention to nuances found in Russian.
He advocated attempting to erase them all and to force Russian into becoming the new language everyone would speak in the USSR, that they should start rapidly russifying the native languages with loans and prescribed style until little remained to ease the change.
Now this is certainly not 100% exactly what happened, but such things likewise did occur.
Well think about it this way; Russia (or Soviet Union) consisted of different nations, that ( from Tzarist times) were at different stages of social development. Unlike Britons in America, Russians were not putting them in reservations, but rather were trying to engage them into a process of assimilation in order to strengthen the state. Russifying their language was one of the venues of it. Don't forget that Stalin himself was not ethnic Russian; he was looking at things from a point of view of a Russified ethnic person, really.
( Not trying to poke at you, just pointing at a different concept. And the reason that the concept was different most likely, was precisely how different ethnicities were perceived by colonizers - as "absorbable" into the mainstream culture or not.)
the absolute easiest language in the largest consideration of the European area would be Turkish or a non-finnic/non-Hungarian Uralic language like Komi in some minority republic in Russia.
You obviously don't know Turkish.
I've known many Westerners who have spent years in Turkey, and with a handful of exceptions, they never learn to express themselves with greater complexity than an average 7 year-old Turk. And most of them fare far worse than that.
I've known multiple Kurds and one American who learned both Turkish and Arabic, and all of them told me that, with the exception of reading and writing, Turkish was more difficult to learn.
I've known many Westerners who have spent years in Turkey, and with a handful of exceptions, they never learn to express themselves with greater complexity than an average 7 year-old Turk. And most of them fare far worse than that.
I've known multiple Kurds and one American who learned both Turkish and Arabic, and all of them told me that, with the exception of reading and writing, Turkish was more difficult to learn.
Turkish is genderless, 100% regular, has a small inventory of sounds, few concatenations, and no articles. It is only because it is agglutinating that it has evaded the disgusting bigotry from the stupidest wastes of space in this world that is handed to English on a daily basis that Americans and Brits have to take.
I've known many Westerners who have spent years in Turkey, and with a handful of exceptions, they never learn to express themselves with greater complexity than an average 7 year-old Turk. And most of them fare far worse than that.
I've known multiple Kurds and one American who learned both Turkish and Arabic, and all of them told me that, with the exception of reading and writing, Turkish was more difficult to learn.
You don't understand.
In his mind, all Europeans criticise the English language deploring it.
Obviously it never crosses his mind that 99% of non-English speaking Europeans don't care about linguistics, that they completely ignore whatever absurd linguistic claim English-speaking users do.
I always love how English-speaking "superiority" supporter claim that English is free of arbitrary gender, hence it clearly is superior.
Please, explain us what's rationality is there into the phrasal verbs.
I mean, how on earth is "break up=separate" ? Why? According to which logic?
About the Italian language you have to learn how to gesticulate, as it must be done, otherwise we do not understand what you say
This is evidently an exageration. Otherwise how could we talk at the telephone or listening to the radio?
Anyway not everyone use hand gesture so much, for example I'm not used to.
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