Re: Brugmann's Law

On Čet, siječanj 17, 2008 4:11 am, Rick McCallister wrote:

> He's from Nish

Well that explains it. Nis^ dialect indeed *is* like Bulgarian but
northern Serbs lough at them because they have no cases.

> but his parents are from Krajina. He
> tells me that he has no problem communicating with
> most Slavic languages

That's an overstatement, I'm afraid. That kind of thing is possible for
some Slavic languages (for instance Slovak seems to be quite easy to
understand for South Slavs) but in general it works only if people speak
veeeery slowly and if they're linguists :)

> but that Polish is by far the
> most difficult but this may be Polish's unique
> spelling system.

Actually, no. Polish is difficult to understand because they palatalize
almost everything and that renders it unintelligible.

> He finds Ukrainian and Russian very
> easy --slightly more dificult than Bulgarian.

Also funny. Bulgarian is definitely easiest to understand. I had no
trouble in Bulgaria speaking Croatian and listening to Bulgarian and
neither did Bulgarians.
Russian can be grasped when you get the idea of vowel-reduction (i.e. that
voda is vada etc.), Ukrainian is easier since there is no akanie.

> He says
> Slovak is slightly easier for him than Czech

Definitely true.

> but
> Polish is much more difficult.
> From he says, I'd think southern Slavic was closer to
> Eastern Slavic --except that the relation may be due
> to the effect of Old Church Slavonic. He tells me that
> even curse words are the same in Southern and Eastern
> Slavic --that in that whole region you can find
> posters of Bush with a crown and the logo "Hail to the
> Peace Duke"

Huh?

Mate