what
#
you cant palatalize a palatal (phonetically. i'm aware that it's possible in phonemic transcription, but the comment above used square brackets)
#
thats like adding water to water
#
it's still water
I didn't study linguistics so I can't actually explain it. I do find that the standard way linguists describe sounds doesn't cut in so many ways. To give it a try: j palatalizes consonants, then the j moves the tongue further, making some kind of palatal on steroids. It's not like the ch in nature. (Sorry, no IPA on this contraption.) Sounds aren't a digital either/or, it's not like sorting mail into neat cubby holes. Russians take a ch and an sh to get chsh, which has neither sound in it. The same with Serbo-Croatian lj, which has no possible similarity with Spanish ll. I'd get laughed at in either language. Mouths just don't talk that way. Objectivity's a real bitch.
Legit question: why is copula dropping associated with lack of intellect or sophistication? The copula-dropping caveman is an ever popular trope, after all.
I get what you're saying, and that was my first intuition, but you don't see Finns making fun of Anglos for not having an excessively elaborate case system. Besides, apparently as some other dude responded to me, in Russian the stereotype is flipped, and using the copula is characteristic of cavespeech.
Also I know this is very much a stereotype in the Euro/Anglo-sphere, but I'm also wondering whether it applies to non-Euro IE languages or even non-IE languages altogether.
From my time growing up in China I got the feeling that succinct speech was associated with being very uptight, the sort of person who doesn't waste breath and doesn't appreciate others doing so in their vincinity.
The general population has a thirst for linguistic knowledge; they just often get their info from the wrong sources, making it seem like many are ignorant of linguistics and have no interest in learning
In reality, people love knowing about languages. I see love for learning new language information in comments all over the internet.
I’ve heard theories (probably from some kind of Eastern European nationalist) that Russian isn’t a Slavic language but an Asiatic one, I’ve heard Turkic and Mongolic. It doesn’t make any sense, just a weird justification to argue that Russians aren’t European lol
Those “theories” are also often followed by a table comparing different Slavic languages (usually Ukranian, Belarussian, Polish and sometimes Czech) trying to show that Russian has different words and thus is not Slavic. Ironically enough the Russian words in this comparison are usually Slavic while other languages use mostly Germanic words
and also there is another table that compares Slavic words, where Russian has Slavic root words like other languages in the comparison table except for Ukrainian, which has germanic/turkic/etc root words for the same term.
so it's basically propaganda and nitpicking to suit the narrative.
I think that the difference is that the countries you listed have led conscious government-sponsored efforts to replace foreign loanwords. Russian didn't but was just removed from non-Slavic influences. As a result, Russian has more loanwords in higher registers which came through nobility, whereas other slavic languages have more loanwords in the lower registers because the higher registers were purged.
Of course these theories are ignorant as hell and have no right to be and I am sure these theorists in no way know the Russian language. I've seen a lot of nationalist online that compare words etc. and say: "Russian is in no way Slavic and it is Finnish or Turkic" meanwhile Russian has really small amount (you can count them) of non-European loan words that are popular. On the other side, there are A LOT of European loan words from French, English, and a little bit from German. Almost every sentence that is not basic (like from Duolingo) has European loan words and that is why I can see some English or French programs and suddenly shout: "Hey! I know this word!" — and it is not a rare occasion.
And yeah, learning other European languages isn't that hard for me due to some similar structures including phonetic ones
P.S.: sorry I deleted Grammarly and haven't checked my grammar so there might be mistakes :)
Russian definitely is a slavic language, but it has quite a notable substrate from Finnic and Turkic neighboring languages. What I've heard is that Russian is based on the Old Church Slavonic rather than Old East Slavic, and therefore it's closer to the Southern Slavic languages, such as Bulgarian and Macedonian, which seems more believable as a theory
As far as I'm aware Russian is of course just based on Old East Slavic, but at some point a lot of Old Church Slavonic was introduced - the reason why the word for city in Russian is *gorod* (as would be expected for an East Slavic language) while in the names of cities it's often *grad* (which was taken from OCS). It surely makes for some... Interesting stuff. I wouldn't say it's closer to South Slavic languages though
A lot of the vocabulary is more similar to Bulgarian than to Ukrainian or Belarusian. Compare Russian заемлю (meaning: to borrow, OCS loan) vs Ukrainian позичю (original OES word)
Are you sure? The Russian word is actually займу, заемлю doesn't exist, and there doesn't seem to be any indication that it's a Church Slavonic loan. Meanwhile, позичу seems to be a [West Slavic isogloss](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/po%C5%BEit%D1%8A%C4%8Diti) eventually borrowed from Polish
Idk, it says it come from Proto-slavic. One of theories is that there wasn’t actually any “Old East Slavic”. Instead, this theory states that the Eastern Slavic languages developed independently, but their similarities can be explained by them existing in the Eastern European sprachbund. Kinda interesting, and this can also explain why the Old Novgorofian dialect was more similar to Polish than to Russian, yet being thousands of kilometers apart. From Wikipedia: Ukrainian linguist Stepan Smal-Stotsky denies the existence of a common Old East Slavic language at any time in the past.[23] Similar points of view were shared by Yevhen Tymchenko, Vsevolod Hantsov, Olena Kurylo, Ivan Ohienko and others. According to this theory, the dialects of East Slavic tribes evolved gradually from the common Proto-Slavic language without any intermediate stages during the 6th through 9th centuries. The Ukrainian language was formed by convergence of tribal dialects, mostly due to an intensive migration of the population within the territory of today's Ukraine in later historical periods. This point of view was also supported by George Shevelov's phonological studies.[24]
> Idk, it says it come from Proto-slavic
I don't think you really understood the contents of the page. The definitions are marked as 'West Proto-Slavic' because the descendants are only attested in the West Slavic languages (See below: Czech, Polish, Slovak). Due to the geographical limitation, the etymology section also states that it 'May have been formed in post-Proto-Slavic', due to the fact that reconstructable Proto-Slavic vocabulary is generally not geographically limited, due to Common Slavic's relative recency (we can date it to the 8th-9th century due to words like *korlь).
Also, in the 17th century a Ukrainian bookprinter, Lavrentiy Zyzaniy printed a OCS - Ruthenia (Ukrainian) dictionary. If you can read Cyrillic, you can see that many of the OCS words are in use in Russian instead of the Ukrainian ones: https://uk.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Лексис#/media/Файл%3AСловарь_1596_г._Лаврына_Зызания_Тустановского.jpg
And also, a fun fact - according to various estimates, about 30-60% of the vocabulary of the Continental North Germanic languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) comes from Middle Low German. It doesn’t make them less North Germanic, just like Ukrainian having large amounts of German, Polish and Latin loans doesn’t make Ukrainian less Eastern Slavic. By the way, Ukrainian preserved the vocative case in standard speech, meanwhile Belarusian (the closest language to Ukrainian) and Russian did not.
1.) That's not a substrate by any means, most Turkic and Finnic loanwoards were borrowed not earlier than 13th century.
2.) In addition to that there are few Finnic loanwords in Russian.
3.) What "based on Old Church Slavonic" means? There are plenty of loanwords, of course, but it doesn't imply that it's not genetically an East Slavic language. By the same logic English is based on Latin.
While that might sounds reasonable, Russian isn't based on Church Slavonic. Russian is part of Eastern slavic, wherein much influence of the Church Slavonic was put and that church slavonicism has been part of the standard language. Compared to the languages of Belarus and Ukraine, that did not have the acknowledgement nor the standardization at those times, the pure languages - well actually their speakers - could perform a "purification" of the language that the at contemporary standard language couldn't anymore. Russian had many more dialects that were erased or strongly discouraged during the time of the Soviet Union, like the Novgorodian dialect. Only after it there "remained" one Russian dialect, the dialect of the "intellectual comrades".
To summarize, Russian had 2 periods of great intermingling with Church Slavonic. The first one is when Orthodox Christianity became Kievan Rus' state religion and when the Byzantine Empire fell, due to which the Orthodox people mostly fled to Moscovian Rus
The Orthodox didn’t mostly flee to Moscovian Rus though… separate duchies were established in the east and west. At this point, Muscovy and the lands of Western Rus (red Ruthenia) were completely different lands. The people of Kyiv fled mostly to the Halych-Volhynia region, where they established the kingdom of Ruthenia (King Leo even received the crown from the Pope). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_I_of_Galicia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Galicia–Volhynia
It isn't much closer to west slavic. Although they share one old innovation (liquid metathesis, and even then it had a mix of this one, an own one and and the eastern one) and some archaisms (preserving kv/gv) it is still an own thing with many eastern influences and ofc with own innovations being the most prominent. Old novgorodian dropped the nasal vowels same way as east slavs, didn't have palatalizations that polish had, it tended to open syllables with simplified clusters like old east slavic, did't fix the stress. And if we classify slavs by their oldest split, novgorodian would form an own group of slavic like east, west and south
Huh? Huh? Yes they do, I'm a native Czech speaker and I know Slovak pretty well too. In the past tense you say Já jsem udělal (I did), but for the third person you drop the copula (the verb to be): on udělal, not on je udělal; same in plural: oni udělali/ony udělaly, not oni jsou udělali/ony jsou udělaly. However when you say something with copula in the present tense like: on je hezký (he is handsome) you can't drop the copula like in Russian.
Poland is gonna palatalise those kids.
Russian already has palatization all over the place
First palatalisation yes, but what about second palatalisation?
зжь # [ʑːʲ] Yes I stay extremely conservative and continue using \[ʑː\] because it's insanely rare to have a phonetic distinction between it and \[ʑ\]
wtf is a palatalized palatal
It's like an aspirated glottal hʰ
In Russian they're literally palatial.
what # you cant palatalize a palatal (phonetically. i'm aware that it's possible in phonemic transcription, but the comment above used square brackets) # thats like adding water to water # it's still water
I didn't study linguistics so I can't actually explain it. I do find that the standard way linguists describe sounds doesn't cut in so many ways. To give it a try: j palatalizes consonants, then the j moves the tongue further, making some kind of palatal on steroids. It's not like the ch in nature. (Sorry, no IPA on this contraption.) Sounds aren't a digital either/or, it's not like sorting mail into neat cubby holes. Russians take a ch and an sh to get chsh, which has neither sound in it. The same with Serbo-Croatian lj, which has no possible similarity with Spanish ll. I'd get laughed at in either language. Mouths just don't talk that way. Objectivity's a real bitch.
What about: sʲ - palatalized sibilant ɕ - palatal sibilant sj - cluster palatalization ʂ - historically palatalized sibilant ʂj - historical palatalized sibilant but j is here again
“You’re too late to stop me. They’re called cidź now!”
My ass figuring out whether what i see on my screen is ź or ż
/ʨidʲʑ/
cidź cidzi cidzi cidzią cidzią cidzi cidzi [feminine, no plural because it's a collective noun]
Googl translate: yeh yeh yeh yeh yeh yeh. Collective noun my cidž.
Legit question: why is copula dropping associated with lack of intellect or sophistication? The copula-dropping caveman is an ever popular trope, after all.
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
Why waste lot word when few good?
lot? when few good?
Lot bad few gud
[Holds hands about a foot apart and frowns. Holds hands closer together and smiles]
[uses the right gestures to effectively communicate that we should abandon words altogether]
Lot :( few :)
Much × few ✓ Edit: wrong
few
f
ㅤ
How the fuck did you do that
Enter a special case of non line breaking space from Unicode
Few did trick
did
Zero width non-joiner, i think
Lot word? No! Few word good :)
A fellow jan pi toki pona I see. (You got the spirit at the very least.)
A, jan pona li kama! Pona
I don't speak Toki Pona, but thanks
Why waste time say lot word when few do trick?
In Russian not dropping the "to be" (except when the copula is stressed) and not using cases is associated with cavespeech
Fascinating! Still, I'm curious to know why the status of the copula is so much associated with primitive speech.
on budyet debil
ja jest' grut
jesm'*
simple language = simple mind. it's pretty ignorant when you boil it down, but it's understandable where the trope came from
I get what you're saying, and that was my first intuition, but you don't see Finns making fun of Anglos for not having an excessively elaborate case system. Besides, apparently as some other dude responded to me, in Russian the stereotype is flipped, and using the copula is characteristic of cavespeech. Also I know this is very much a stereotype in the Euro/Anglo-sphere, but I'm also wondering whether it applies to non-Euro IE languages or even non-IE languages altogether.
that's a really interesting bunch of facts that I don't know how to answer
From my time growing up in China I got the feeling that succinct speech was associated with being very uptight, the sort of person who doesn't waste breath and doesn't appreciate others doing so in their vincinity.
It could just be a general thing that people associate lower-class dialectical features with "cavespeech" regardless of language.
or possibly something to do with past features of the language that no longer exist or are no longer shared between decendants
I can’t answer for the whole world, but in America it’s a feature of AAVE and gets associated with ghetto poor dumb people
The joke is that fuck Russia
My theory is that it's the simplest English can be while still being understandable
Think of Hebrew and Arabic.
I’ve seen 2 linguistic memes non-linguistic subreddits, this sub is leaking frfr
The general population has a thirst for linguistic knowledge; they just often get their info from the wrong sources, making it seem like many are ignorant of linguistics and have no interest in learning In reality, people love knowing about languages. I see love for learning new language information in comments all over the internet.
I’ve heard theories (probably from some kind of Eastern European nationalist) that Russian isn’t a Slavic language but an Asiatic one, I’ve heard Turkic and Mongolic. It doesn’t make any sense, just a weird justification to argue that Russians aren’t European lol
Those “theories” are also often followed by a table comparing different Slavic languages (usually Ukranian, Belarussian, Polish and sometimes Czech) trying to show that Russian has different words and thus is not Slavic. Ironically enough the Russian words in this comparison are usually Slavic while other languages use mostly Germanic words
The other thing is you can make this "comparison" for literally any Slavic language where it would be the odd one
and also there is another table that compares Slavic words, where Russian has Slavic root words like other languages in the comparison table except for Ukrainian, which has germanic/turkic/etc root words for the same term. so it's basically propaganda and nitpicking to suit the narrative.
I think that the difference is that the countries you listed have led conscious government-sponsored efforts to replace foreign loanwords. Russian didn't but was just removed from non-Slavic influences. As a result, Russian has more loanwords in higher registers which came through nobility, whereas other slavic languages have more loanwords in the lower registers because the higher registers were purged.
Of course these theories are ignorant as hell and have no right to be and I am sure these theorists in no way know the Russian language. I've seen a lot of nationalist online that compare words etc. and say: "Russian is in no way Slavic and it is Finnish or Turkic" meanwhile Russian has really small amount (you can count them) of non-European loan words that are popular. On the other side, there are A LOT of European loan words from French, English, and a little bit from German. Almost every sentence that is not basic (like from Duolingo) has European loan words and that is why I can see some English or French programs and suddenly shout: "Hey! I know this word!" — and it is not a rare occasion. And yeah, learning other European languages isn't that hard for me due to some similar structures including phonetic ones P.S.: sorry I deleted Grammarly and haven't checked my grammar so there might be mistakes :)
Russian definitely is a slavic language, but it has quite a notable substrate from Finnic and Turkic neighboring languages. What I've heard is that Russian is based on the Old Church Slavonic rather than Old East Slavic, and therefore it's closer to the Southern Slavic languages, such as Bulgarian and Macedonian, which seems more believable as a theory
As far as I'm aware Russian is of course just based on Old East Slavic, but at some point a lot of Old Church Slavonic was introduced - the reason why the word for city in Russian is *gorod* (as would be expected for an East Slavic language) while in the names of cities it's often *grad* (which was taken from OCS). It surely makes for some... Interesting stuff. I wouldn't say it's closer to South Slavic languages though
A lot of the vocabulary is more similar to Bulgarian than to Ukrainian or Belarusian. Compare Russian заемлю (meaning: to borrow, OCS loan) vs Ukrainian позичю (original OES word)
Are you sure? The Russian word is actually займу, заемлю doesn't exist, and there doesn't seem to be any indication that it's a Church Slavonic loan. Meanwhile, позичу seems to be a [West Slavic isogloss](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/po%C5%BEit%D1%8A%C4%8Diti) eventually borrowed from Polish
Idk, it says it come from Proto-slavic. One of theories is that there wasn’t actually any “Old East Slavic”. Instead, this theory states that the Eastern Slavic languages developed independently, but their similarities can be explained by them existing in the Eastern European sprachbund. Kinda interesting, and this can also explain why the Old Novgorofian dialect was more similar to Polish than to Russian, yet being thousands of kilometers apart. From Wikipedia: Ukrainian linguist Stepan Smal-Stotsky denies the existence of a common Old East Slavic language at any time in the past.[23] Similar points of view were shared by Yevhen Tymchenko, Vsevolod Hantsov, Olena Kurylo, Ivan Ohienko and others. According to this theory, the dialects of East Slavic tribes evolved gradually from the common Proto-Slavic language without any intermediate stages during the 6th through 9th centuries. The Ukrainian language was formed by convergence of tribal dialects, mostly due to an intensive migration of the population within the territory of today's Ukraine in later historical periods. This point of view was also supported by George Shevelov's phonological studies.[24]
> Idk, it says it come from Proto-slavic I don't think you really understood the contents of the page. The definitions are marked as 'West Proto-Slavic' because the descendants are only attested in the West Slavic languages (See below: Czech, Polish, Slovak). Due to the geographical limitation, the etymology section also states that it 'May have been formed in post-Proto-Slavic', due to the fact that reconstructable Proto-Slavic vocabulary is generally not geographically limited, due to Common Slavic's relative recency (we can date it to the 8th-9th century due to words like *korlь).
Also, in the 17th century a Ukrainian bookprinter, Lavrentiy Zyzaniy printed a OCS - Ruthenia (Ukrainian) dictionary. If you can read Cyrillic, you can see that many of the OCS words are in use in Russian instead of the Ukrainian ones: https://uk.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Лексис#/media/Файл%3AСловарь_1596_г._Лаврына_Зызания_Тустановского.jpg
And also, a fun fact - according to various estimates, about 30-60% of the vocabulary of the Continental North Germanic languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) comes from Middle Low German. It doesn’t make them less North Germanic, just like Ukrainian having large amounts of German, Polish and Latin loans doesn’t make Ukrainian less Eastern Slavic. By the way, Ukrainian preserved the vocative case in standard speech, meanwhile Belarusian (the closest language to Ukrainian) and Russian did not.
1.) That's not a substrate by any means, most Turkic and Finnic loanwoards were borrowed not earlier than 13th century. 2.) In addition to that there are few Finnic loanwords in Russian. 3.) What "based on Old Church Slavonic" means? There are plenty of loanwords, of course, but it doesn't imply that it's not genetically an East Slavic language. By the same logic English is based on Latin.
While that might sounds reasonable, Russian isn't based on Church Slavonic. Russian is part of Eastern slavic, wherein much influence of the Church Slavonic was put and that church slavonicism has been part of the standard language. Compared to the languages of Belarus and Ukraine, that did not have the acknowledgement nor the standardization at those times, the pure languages - well actually their speakers - could perform a "purification" of the language that the at contemporary standard language couldn't anymore. Russian had many more dialects that were erased or strongly discouraged during the time of the Soviet Union, like the Novgorodian dialect. Only after it there "remained" one Russian dialect, the dialect of the "intellectual comrades". To summarize, Russian had 2 periods of great intermingling with Church Slavonic. The first one is when Orthodox Christianity became Kievan Rus' state religion and when the Byzantine Empire fell, due to which the Orthodox people mostly fled to Moscovian Rus
The Orthodox didn’t mostly flee to Moscovian Rus though… separate duchies were established in the east and west. At this point, Muscovy and the lands of Western Rus (red Ruthenia) were completely different lands. The people of Kyiv fled mostly to the Halych-Volhynia region, where they established the kingdom of Ruthenia (King Leo even received the crown from the Pope). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_I_of_Galicia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Galicia–Volhynia
[удалено]
Where did you get this info from? This is the first time I've ever heard of this opinion
It isn't much closer to west slavic. Although they share one old innovation (liquid metathesis, and even then it had a mix of this one, an own one and and the eastern one) and some archaisms (preserving kv/gv) it is still an own thing with many eastern influences and ofc with own innovations being the most prominent. Old novgorodian dropped the nasal vowels same way as east slavs, didn't have palatalizations that polish had, it tended to open syllables with simplified clusters like old east slavic, did't fix the stress. And if we classify slavs by their oldest split, novgorodian would form an own group of slavic like east, west and south
novgorodian slavic languages ftw!
northern slavic
nether slavic
neither slavic
Or to argue that Mongols and Turks are European?
Don't CZ and SK already drop the copula in third person?
Only in the past tense, not in the present tense like in Russian.
huh? no they dont
Huh? Huh? Yes they do, I'm a native Czech speaker and I know Slovak pretty well too. In the past tense you say Já jsem udělal (I did), but for the third person you drop the copula (the verb to be): on udělal, not on je udělal; same in plural: oni udělali/ony udělaly, not oni jsou udělali/ony jsou udělaly. However when you say something with copula in the present tense like: on je hezký (he is handsome) you can't drop the copula like in Russian.
There was the same thing in Old Polish, except in Polish the copula fused with the verb: ja zrobił**em**/**am**, on zrobił/ona zrobiła itd.
i thought you meant the past tense copula is dropped and on byl hezký could just be on hezký
No, not that, I didn't even thought about this case.
I like how the three westerners are aligned like they are on the map. Russia is on the wrong side though
i admit i've chuckled