Re: Language Identification?

Apollo Hogan sikyal:

> > Well, from my experience of Russian, it's definitely not Russian.  I spent a
> > couple months in a Russian-speaking country (more or less) this summer and
> > learned a bunch of Russian then.  I'm afraid I just don't know X-SAMPA off
> > the top of my head so I wrote down some phonetic terms I thought most of us
> > would understand.
> >
>
> I agree.  Also, I take back my assertion that it is Belorussian.
>
> I checked with all the languages in Routledge's "Slavonic Languages".
> It doesn't look like the "standard" version of _any_ of the languages there.
> It is clearly not Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian.
> It doesn't match in various particulars (so far as I can see)
> Polish, Czech, Slovak, Belorussian, Serbian/Croatian, Cassubian, Polabian,
> Slovenian.
>
> The more I look at these, the stranger they seem.
> 'ta' for "to" is strange to me...
> 'muozhem' usually means "may" or "can"
> 'bud-es' is a bit surprising, as I would expect '-e' or '-et' as a 3rd person
> singular ending.
"Ta" for 'to' is quite odd, the only one I can't explain.

"Muozhem" isn't surprising as it's quite close to std. Russian "mozhem"
for the 1pl form of "moch'", 'to be able to'. However, the subject is
supposedly "ja", which makes no sense.

"budes" is on the first hand a plausible mishearing of /budet/. On the
second hand, the following word may begin with /s/, which assimilates (or
seems to assimilate) the preceding /t/ in fast speech.

I'm leaning towards Polish, though I don't know enough to confirm.

--
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://blog.glossopoesis.org

"We're counting on our virtues,
Cause it's too hard to count the dead."
 - Jason Webley

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