Re: OT: semi-OT: bilingual communication

Jan wrote:

> --- Eamon Graham skrzypszy:
> > This leads me to another question, in the opposite direction: is
> > Polish at all intelligible with Czech or Slovak?
>
> I've been there, too. Thirteen years ago. AFAIK Czech and Slovak are
mutually
> completely understandable (I know of several mixed marriages, BTW, where
each
> partner speaks his own language).
> My impression is that Slovaks understand Polish better than Czechs. I
> understand Slovak better than Czech. So, my very unscientific conclusion
would
> be that Slovak comes a bit closer to Polish than Czech. There might also
be a
> cultural dimension to that, though.
>
There's a good number of Czechs and a Slovak girl in my Russian class: they
can understand each other perfectly, but they argue that this is due to the
multinational status of the former C.S. Republic, where tv and radio were
bilingual. Children growing up nowadays in the two separate republics aren't
anymore exposed to bilingual tv and radio shows, and they're not acquiring
the passive diglossy their fathers developped. That's what's happening (to a
much lesser extent, obviously) between Serbian and Croatian: the main
differencies in the two dialects were mainly pronounciation, the relative
pronoun (IIRC) and some vocabulary (strangely enough, Serbian seems to be
more receptive than Croatian, which seems to prefer Slavic formations to
loanwords).

Luca