Re: Language Identification?

On Sun, 16 Nov 2003, Joseph Fatula wrote:

> From: "JS Bangs" <jaspax@...>
> Subject: Re: Language Identification?
>
>
> > > > I can see that it's definitely a Slavic language, but I'm not sure
> which
> > > > one.
> > >
> > > Well, there's always the process of elimination :x)
> > > It's not Serbo-Croat or Russian, but it's closer to the latter.
> >
> > Actually, I'm not sure that it's not Russian either. It doesn't *look*
> > much like a good transliteration of Russian, but it's not far off from
> > what we might expect of a naive non-native speakers transcription.
>
> 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.

--Apollo Hogan

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