4 ms·

I like to imagine Slavic languages as a sort of scale, where Russian is at one end, Polish and Serbian are at the opposite end, and Ukrainian and Belarusian are

by grishka 10mo ago

I like to imagine Slavic languages as a sort of scale, where Russian is at one end, Polish and Serbian are at the opposite end, and Ukrainian and Belarusian are somewhere in the middle.

samus 10mo ago
The scale is two-dimensional and has three poles, like RGB color charts. Polish and Czech in the west, Russian in the east, and Southern Slavic (represented by Serbian) in the south. Hungarian and Romanian split them apart, while in turn having absorbed a huge amount of Slavic words in turn.
- rvba 10mo ago
  Hungarian is not Slavic and genrerally it feels like a completely alien language, since everything is so different. No idea about the Hungarian grammar. I heard that Finnish has a lot of cases
  - inkyoto 10mo ago
    Finnish and Hungarian, despite being spread well apart from each other, are from the same Uralian language family. Both (and other languages in the family) share one distinctive feature – an excessively large number of noun cases (by Indo-European language family standards). However, these languages do not have prepositions, i.e. the 16-20 odd noun cases replace them, so it makes it somewhat easier for a new learner. The noun cases can also be thought of as postpositions despite obviously not being them, but it is a good and simple mental model. The real outlier is Icelandic, which has a notoriously irregular grammar, multiple noun declension and verb conjugation groups, prepositions and postpositions despite a small number of noun cases.
  - samus 10mo ago
    I used the word "split apart" to express that Hungarian is not a Slavic language. If it was a Slavic Language then there would be no split between its neighboring Slavic languages, but a dialect continuum instead.
davidgay 10mo ago
And then there's Bulgarian, with no cases and definite articles, to throw that scale off...

4 ms·

I like to imagine Slavic languages as a sort of scale, where Russian is at one end, Polish and Serbian are at the opposite end, and Ukrainian and Belarusian are

by grishka 10mo ago

I like to imagine Slavic languages as a sort of scale, where Russian is at one end, Polish and Serbian are at the opposite end, and Ukrainian and Belarusian are somewhere in the middle.

samus 10mo ago
The scale is two-dimensional and has three poles, like RGB color charts. Polish and Czech in the west, Russian in the east, and Southern Slavic (represented by Serbian) in the south. Hungarian and Romanian split them apart, while in turn having absorbed a huge amount of Slavic words in turn.
- rvba 10mo ago
  Hungarian is not Slavic and genrerally it feels like a completely alien language, since everything is so different. No idea about the Hungarian grammar. I heard that Finnish has a lot of cases
  - inkyoto 10mo ago
    Finnish and Hungarian, despite being spread well apart from each other, are from the same Uralian language family. Both (and other languages in the family) share one distinctive feature – an excessively large number of noun cases (by Indo-European language family standards). However, these languages do not have prepositions, i.e. the 16-20 odd noun cases replace them, so it makes it somewhat easier for a new learner. The noun cases can also be thought of as postpositions despite obviously not being them, but it is a good and simple mental model. The real outlier is Icelandic, which has a notoriously irregular grammar, multiple noun declension and verb conjugation groups, prepositions and postpositions despite a small number of noun cases.
  - samus 10mo ago
    I used the word "split apart" to express that Hungarian is not a Slavic language. If it was a Slavic Language then there would be no split between its neighboring Slavic languages, but a dialect continuum instead.
davidgay 10mo ago
And then there's Bulgarian, with no cases and definite articles, to throw that scale off...