6 ms·

After russian, other languages - georgian, hebrew, english seem reasonable. Especially hebrew. Saying this as a native Russian speaker

• CGamesPlay 10mo ago
  Georgian is really interesting. Very few cognates for non-modern words. Colors in Georgian are fun: you don't have "brown", you have "coffee-color" (ყავისფერი / ყავის ფერი); you don't have "light blue", you have "sky-color" (ცისფერი / ცის ფერი).
  • SanjayMehta 10mo ago
    There are several Hindi words for brown, my favourite is "Badami" - almond-like. My grandfather used "laal" which is usually used for red. I used to wonder if he was colour blind.
    • leephillips 10mo ago
      He might have been unusually color aware, as brown is a type of red.
  • cyberax 10mo ago
    > "coffee-color" The Russian word for "brown" is literally "cinnamon-colored" ("коричневый"). And the Chinese language just uses the literal "coffee-colored" phrase (咖啡色).
    • d_silin 10mo ago
      You can also use "кофейный" (coffee-coloured) as synonym for "brown".
      • koakuma-chan 10mo ago
        That wouldn't be natural though. You would never describe, say, pants, as "coffee-coloured" in Russian.
        • d_silin 10mo ago
          It would make your Russian more posh, eccentric or sophisticated, depending on the context, but not necessary unnatural.
        • galkk 10mo ago
          Брюки цвета кофе is natural in Russian. Pretentious, but still natural.
          • koakuma-chan 10mo ago
            "Брюки цвета кофе" ("pants of coffee color") is natural, "коричневые брюки" ("brown pants") is natural, but "кофейные брюки" is not. In fact the latter would likely be interpreted as "coffee pants" or "pants made out of coffee."
            • d_silin 10mo ago
              "кофейного цвета брюки" is acceptable too.
              • koakuma-chan 10mo ago
                I admit that. I also realize that tguvot is actually arguing in my favor, as he said that coffee color is distinct from brown, and therefore the inference is that they aren't synonymous. I would summarize that they are conceptually different, as "brown" is a real color, whereas "coffee color" is a marketing color.
            • tguvot 10mo ago
              "кофейные брюки" is totally ok. everybody will understand it. it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
    • tguvot 10mo ago
      Actually brown in russian it's "bark-colored". bark = кора. Корица (cinnamon) is diminutive
      • deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
  • ku-man 10mo ago
    [dead]
  • inkyoto 10mo ago
    Colours are fun in many languages. For instance, Japanese and Vietnamese do not differentiate between blue and green and require context specific clarification, e.g «traffic light blue-green».
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    • rvrs 10mo ago
      Japanese has a word for green now 緑 (midori). Traffic lights use the word for blue for historical reasons
    • nephihaha 10mo ago
      Celtic languages, and I believe Mayan, had a similar thing going on with blue and green. A lot of languages never distinguished orange from yellow really either.
  • cryptoegorophy 10mo ago
    I believe polish is similar. They have “sky color” which is pretty cool!
  • selcuka 10mo ago
    > you don't have "brown", you have "coffee-color" It's coffee-colour (kahverengi) in Turkish as well, but I don't find it interesting. The English word "orange" is after a fruit as well (which is also the same in Turkish: "portakal rengi", or "turuncu").
  • lordgrenville 10mo ago
    Sky-colour makes sense, but coffee drinking only goes back to the 15th century or so. Did Georgians not have a word for this colour before then?!
    • adrian_b 10mo ago
      There have been many authors who have claimed about various old languages that they lacked words for some colors, and "brown" is one of the most frequent colors about which such claims have been made. I believe that most such claims, if not all, were wrong. The problem is that when reading an ancient text in which colors are mentioned it is very difficult to guess which is the color that is meant by some word and it frequently is difficult to even be sure that the word refers to a color and not to some other kind of property of an object. There are very rare cases when the text says something like "this object is X like blood", so you can infer that X = "red", or "this object is Y like the sky", so you can infer that Y = "blue". Brown is a color for which it is even rarer to find suitable comparisons in a text, from which the color can be inferred, than for colors like red, green or blue, which are typically compared to blood, grass and sky. So when various authors have claimed that there was no word for "brown" in some old language, the truth was that they just were unable to find any word whose meaning could be determined with certainty to be "brown", in the preserved texts, even if there were plenty of words that most likely meant "brown". Moreover, in nature there are many shades of brown, lighter or darker, more reddish or more yellowish, which is why in many languages there are multiple words for brown, which are derived from various things that have that particular shade of brown, e.g. words that mean coffee-brown, chestnut-brown, dry-earth brown, brown like the fur of certain animals, etc. Such words that identify a particular shade with reference to a familiar object have been renewed from time to time, in function of which objects have become more familiar or less familiar. After coffee became a very popular beverage, in many languages it has replaced whatever reference object was previously used for a dark brown. As an example, many have claimed that Ancient Greek had no word for "brown". However, when reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, i.e. the oldest Greek texts except for the Mycenaean tablets, there already are a lot of places where there is no doubt that "brown" was meant by the word "aithono-". This is an adjective derived from the verb "to burn", and most dictionaries say that it means "burning". However, in the actual texts there are plenty of places where it does not mean "burning", but it means "burnt", more precisely "having the color of burnt wood", i.e. brown. This is not surprising. Another word used in the same way is "anthrakos", which can be used either for an object red like a burning ember (e.g. for red garnets or rubies) or for an object black like an extinguished ember (e.g. for charcoal or coal).
• ffuxlpff 10mo ago
  Your command and understanding of the grammar of your native language puts a hard limit to how well you can learn other languages. This has not been stressed enough and schools have all but given up trying to teach children grammar because as natives they more or less get along without it.
  • davidgh 10mo ago
    This. When I first started learning Russian, we immediately jumped into basic grammar rules. After two weeks of incredible frustration, I realized I did not have sufficient mastery of English grammar to be able to establish a framework for understanding Russian grammar. I often say that my first two months of learning Russian were spent learning English and it is not a joke.
    • culebron21 10mo ago
      Interesting. We had a lot of grammar parsing of Russian since the 2nd grade of school. Especially we analyzed parts of speech and constituents. For the latter, we'd underline words in sentences in different ways. It's so widespread that today if you want to play word guessing with gestures, and you have several words, you just imitate that underline style, and everybody understands it. (Just remembered, we also did a lot of word analysis, marking up prefix, root, suffixes and ending, and everyone knows this markup too.)
  • eszed 10mo ago
    On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language. I mean, I used standard English intuitively, but couldn't have told you any of the technical terms. I agree with modern educators that explicit grammar instruction beyond a very, very basic level should not be a high priority. Exposure to and guided close reading of complex texts sharpens grammatical intuition, right alongside all of the other benefits of an advanced reading level. Knowing deep grammar does not so automatically improve textual interpretation. This is speculation, but I wonder if the period of emphasizing explicit grammatical instruction wasn't an accidental interregnum. That is to say, back in the days when Latin and/or Greek were part of the ordinary curriculum students learned grammar much as I did, as a "natural" excelerant to interpreting a foreign tongue. Once those languages were dropped educators noticed students couldn't do grammar analysis anymore, and so tried teaching it directly, without fully considering when and why it might be useful. I don't know how well the dates line up, but it would be interesting to look into.
• volemo 10mo ago
  Well, just as Nabokov said: Russians have an impression that foreign languages are simpler than Russian.
  • tguvot 10mo ago
    I have my own sample set as I presented. Russian is seriously messed up language. Especially after learning Hebrew (which is simple and algorithmic) , I was able to look back in Russian and realize what a horrible mess of a language it is.
    • vkazanov 10mo ago
      Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago. Language designers really did great work on taking a core of a dead language and proposing a cleaner, more modern version of it. Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment. In fact, English borrows heavily from different languages (old german, old danish, latin, old french...) adding even more complexity. Russian borrows from greek, old slavonic (bolgarian), among others. So an advanced speaker/reader of these languages has to understand the influences. A couple of years ago I tried learning some minimal Ancient egyptian. A fascinating language in its diversity. Middle kingdom egyptian, old and new kingdom written dialects. Then, there's a simplified cursive script which almost feels like modern writing.
      • rgblambda 10mo ago
        >Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago. I had heard somewhere that much of the vocabulary of Modern Hebrew consists of loanwords from Arabic. Is this correct and if so, would it mean that the "cleanliness" of the language is more a reflection of Modern Standard Arabic? Apologies in advance if this is seen as some falsehood or if it's a sensitive topic.
        • vkazanov 10mo ago
          No idea. But vocabulary and grammar are mostly orthogonal.
• pmontra 10mo ago
  I've been told that western European languages are easy for Russian speakers because you can learn them by removing parts of the Russian grammar. "Oh, they don't have A, and B and C are the same thing for them, and they don't have D too!" Is that correct? It's a little bit like moving from Italian/French/Spanish to English, except that English has some tenses with no direct equivalent in those languages and a ton of phrasal verbs to learn, but that's vocabulary and not grammar.
  • tguvot 10mo ago
    Not really. At least not for me. The vast assortment of tenses was somewhat surprising. About English there is a Russian saying: "in english you write Manchester but you read Liverpool"
    • paganel 10mo ago
      No need to throw daggers at Wayne Rooney just like that!
  • culebron21 10mo ago
    Yes. Although, Romance languages have more verb tenses, generally they're easier. BTW, I only learned that Russan's past tense is the same compound past, by learning Italian. Also, Old Russian dropped participles, but re-borrowed them from Church Slavonic (southern Slavic), so we know these things, and learn them at school. (Ukrainian has participle 2, but not 1, as far as I understand.) Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object. Some people can't wrap their head around that it can be the other way around, e.g. Italian "sua madre/suo padre" can mean both his and her mother/father. In German, they must concord with both, sein Vater, seine Mutter, ihrer Vater, ihre Mutter. But Russian regional dialects do have the same feature, and if your teacher isn't a mad purist, they can easily give examples: евойная, еёйный. Otherwise, indeed, there are less features. And in Indo-European, they're all the same: compound past tense, participles, compound past and future. To give an example of another system: Turkic languages. 4 modal verbs (to run, to walk, to stand, to lay down), that must be applied to everything except the verb "to be", they indicate how much hurry you have doing what you're doing. It's a bit similar to Russian aspect (complete/incomplete), but way more complex. Plus you have noun cases, and everything is a suffix, and the verb is always the last. So, "I don't do X" will be something like "I <verb+ing> <stand>+me+not" (like those German prefixes that fall down in the end of the sentence.) My colleague, a Kazakh born in Russia, learns it as a foreign language, and he says it's hard.