Re: OT: semi-OT: bilingual communication

 --- Pavel Iosad skrzypszy:

> > Which leads me to a question I've wondered about ever since I was a
> > wee lad: how mutually intelligible - if at all - are Ukrainian,
> > Russian and Byelorussian?
>
> Pretty much. Of course, if you take the peripheral dialects - i.e., say
> the Arkhangel'sk dialects and the Transcarpathian Ukrainian, they won't
> be intelligible. The written forms are for the most part intelligible
> with little problem. Careful speech close to the literary standard is
> also readily intelligible.
I have that impression, too. But the same is true between Ukrainian and Polish
(but NOT between Russian and Polish. I have seen Ukrainian defined once as "a
polonized East Slavic language". Lexically, I think it has more in common with
Polish than with Russian.
I was quite a few times in Ukraine, and usually hadn't any problem to
understand it, even if I couldn't speak it. On the other hand, nobody seemed to
have a problem with my Polish.

> You might want to do a search in the archives for 'surzhik', which is
> the transitional Russo-Ukrainian zone. The Byelorusso-Ukrainian
> transitional zone in the Poles'je has *very* interesting dialects, but
> unfortunately they are quickly dying out :-( not the least because of
> emigration caused by the repercussions of Chernobyl'.
If I'm informed correctly, the Polesian dialects are closer to Ukrainian than
bo Belorussian, and most speakers don't have a trace of national consciousness
(in neither direction).

Jan

=====
"Originality is the art of concealing your source." - Franklin P. Jones

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