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Re: Language Identification?

From:Apollo Hogan <apollo@...>
Date:Sunday, November 16, 2003, 22:58
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