Re: Language Identification?

On Sun, 16 Nov 2003, JS Bangs wrote:

> 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.
The '-em' doesn't bother me too much, as the OCS first-person singular
ending is /-o~/ (nasalized) (which became Russian /u/).  Also, for example,
in Bulgarian for the "A-conjugations", the ending is -am for 1s.
(e.g., obicham/obichash/obicha/obichame/obichate/obichat for
"I/you(sg)/he/you(pl)/they love")

What bothered me was the _meaning_ of 'muozhem' given here.  Although,
I guess Polish does have musiec' "must", or miec' "be supposed"...

Your explanation for "budes" makes sense.

My problems with the Polish Hypothesis:
1) Future for Polish would be  be,dzie  which is far from [bude(s)]
2) spoon: lyzka
   knife: noz
   fork: widelec
   these are close, and the examples could be diminutive forms, but...
3) door: drzwi
4) ta (maybe just a mishearing of 'na' or 'do' ?)

Best bet is to find a native Polish speaker and ask their opinion.

--Apollo