Re: OT: Russian and Ukrainian was Re: semi-OT: bilingual communication

At 13:24 26.1.2003 +0200, Isaac A. Penzev wrote:

><<or because of their
>similarity? You said below that "Russians who live in Russia, don't
>understand Ukrainian at all," which makes me think that Ukrainians understand
>Russian more from long exposure to it, likewise with Russians in Ukraine.>>
>
>It seems true.
This seems, sad to say, to be the case with Swedish/Norwegian/Danish 
too.  I used to think that I understood Norwegian because standard Bokmål 
Norwegian is essentially Danish with a Swedish pronunciation[*] and because 
my native dialect is from an area bordering on South-East Norway, but 
seeing how my kids persistently claim Norwegian to be unitelligible I'm 
leaning towards long exposure as the explanation why I find so little 
difficulty with Norwegian.  Likewise most Norwegians have had long exposure 
to Swedish television, and that's why they undertstand Swedish.

But heck I still think that a Malmö dialect is more different from a 
Gothenburg dialect than an Oslo dialect is!



/ B.Philip Jonsson B^)>
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