polish or any slavic language key to any other slavic languages?

I'm from Chernivtsi in Ukraine and can say that I understand Polish without any difficulty. We always used to joke that Polish speakers were just trying to speak Ukrainian with a hot potato in their mouths. Russian is also very similar and in Ukraine, we all speak Russian as a native or second language anyways. I, for example, grew up to a ukrainian mom and Russian dad.

The words that are so similar in languages that come from different language groups usually have the same roots in Latin and/or Greek.

I think it is so much easier to understand and to learn languages like Russian, Ukrainina, and even Bosnian once you know Polish. Not only are there many words which you don't have to learn because you already know them (f.eks: Dobrydzien Russian) = Dziendobry (Polish), Dziewuzka (Russian) = Dziewczyna (Polish) etc - remember these are only a very small selection) but also such things as pronounciation which is very often the same and grammar also. I have begun to learn Russian lately and to be honest I was shocked to see how similar Polish and Russian is cause I had always heard the opposite. But that doesn't mean that you still gotta work hard to learn a new language...

Actually, Polish has a lot of words of Latin origin, which might explain why you are seeing similarities between Romance languages and Polish. (On that note, I know Spanish speakers which mistook Polish for French because of the fricatives and nasal vowels; the 'r' of course is more like the Spanish 'r'). Also, Polish and Russian are not mutually intelligible. It is a West Slavonic language (not East Slavonic as someone suggested). Its closest neighbors linguistically are Czech, Slovak and Sorbian, which are mutually intelligible. Ukrainian, however, despite Polish influence, is an East Slavonic language, closely related to Russian and Belarusian. A lot of West Ukrainians do however speak/understand Polish. I have heard people say that they can "understand" a language of the other group (i.e. West S. understand East S., and vice versa), but this is not really true. The only thing that's happening is that they're either false cognates or the occasional true cognate. For example, there are words in Russian that sound similar to Polish words, but indeed mean completely different things, and then there are words which sound similar and mean similar things by virtue of similar origin. And vice versa.

Re: Czech. To a Polish speaker, it sounds like a little child trying to speak Polish (I've also heard the opposite). Like in vocabulary, Czech equivalents of some Polish words sound more "provincial", like the word for soldier vs. the word for war (Polish: zolnierz/wojna; Czech: voyak/voina). Similarly with the word for ice cream (Polish: lody; Czech: zmrzlina - this is close to the word for permafrost in Polish which is zmarzlina). Also amusing, in the opposite direction, is the word for capital (city) in Polish is stolica, which is similar to the Czech word for stool, stolice.

I think that one with pigeon just did it for me! You would think there is a limit to how much of a word/phrase could be interpreted as funny in another language (like, 'la curva' or 'byc'). The Czech->Polish has to take the cake, probably because of their closeness. That thing with the pigeon just seems as likely as having "Turd Eater" mean "politician" in Dutch or something.

A true story.
Two Poles were riding a taxi cab in Prague and one was loudly complaining about how expensive Prague supposedly was, how horrible was the local bear and so on. At one point one Pole said: "and their language! it sounds just childlish!"
Hearing this was enough for the local cab driver who stoped the car suddenly and turned toward two Polaks saying: "A wasz je lepsi?" (And yours [language] is better?)

"A WASZ JE LEPSI" sounds to Poles really funny as if proving that czech language IS in fact childlish (in sense of a child trying to speak properly but making funny pronanciation mistakes)

And of course there is well known "Szukac, szukalem, szukalam, szukacie" which is polish for "looking for" and czech for that popular f. word.

Kowalski,

how about PESIA ZONA.
I was driving through the country(must have bee Slovakia) with my cousin and we couldn figure out the meaning, so we started to be creative: Zona psa - which was the closest to Polish.
As we later found out - it was Przejscie dla pieszych

Good one, Miranda! u made me laugh.

Spell of Bliss,

a famous emphatic quote by the late Pope Jan Pawel when asked a similar question regarding Polish and Russian: "All Poles understand Russian, but nobody speaks it!"
Undoubtedly, such remarks reflect the troublesome history between Poland and its neighbors

Speaking for me personally, I can understand the numbers in all Slavic languages, having already studied Polish, much as in the Romance tongues having learned French or in, say, Dutch, after having learned German etc.
Marek

Russian is much harder than Polish because the stress moves in the words unlike Polish, which is fixed. Czech is more like serbo croation. If you know Russian you could learn these languages easily. I think that slovak is nearer to Polish as someone above has already written. I thought Russian to be the hardest not really very phonetic and the stress moves in genetive and plural forms. I do not know Ukranian but I have been told that about 80% of the words are similar to Russian. Polish grammar is difficult at the beginning but once you get used to it it is like a set of mathematical tables you never really forget.

Michal!

The issue of accent, i.e. pronunciation, is different from that of morphology or inflectional structure. Granted, Russian's lack of fixed syllabic stress makes it resemble more English than, say, Polish or Czech.

However, the Polish numeric system after "five", coupled with the addition of the (often optional) vocative case to pan-slavic six cases, the repetition of endings between accusative vs. genitive, are often quite confusing for a foreigner. In addition, Polish has " byl", "byla" "bylo" depending upon the gender of the speaker or the object described. Russian has "Anna byl", "Wiktor byl", with no difference in past tense gender!

Marek

The russian past tenses change like polish. On byl, ona byla, ono bylo, oni byli. True, polish has an addittional one one byly for feminine plural in the past but ja rabotal odako ona rabotala torze so why is there no difference in the past tense? Ja goworil, ona goworila, ja skazal, ona skazala i to samo po polsku ja powiedzialem, ja mowilem i tak dalej.

The Russian numeric system after five is also the same as in Polish.

OOOPS again!!
Thanks Michal. I posted too soon, I later realized. That says more about my somewhat limited Russian than it does about my Polish (which I honestly consider fluent, albeit not always accurate.)

I'd neglected to mention the "byly" form for feminine plurals. Right again.
Why "Ja robotal odako."? Perhaps because in Russian, the speaker's gender is clear by the very lack of a verbal ending. The latter though, is pure guesswork on my part. In Polish: "Pracowalem...", without the compulsory pronoun compared to Russian!

Marek

I really don't want to rain on your parade, but very unfortunately I must inform you that "pigeon" is simply HOLUB in Czech. And so it goes on with these supposedly Czech words that most Poles like to ridicule. The truth is that Poles *think* they understand Czech when in reality they haven't got a clue. Actually I'm quite mad, I wouldn't have thought that those idiotic pseudo-jokey ideas about Czech vocabulary that I heard so often in primary school would actually perpetuate themselves onto a forum such as this :-(

I would like to inform you, Michal, that the so called 'serbo-croatian' never really existed. It was an attempt by the government in ex-Yugoslavia to merge the two languages into one because of politics in the country.
I've heard some linguists mentioning the serbo-croatian diasystem, but that doesn't mean that it is one language, although they are very closely related. Serbian and Croatian are, and have been since the early middle ages, two separate languages. It is inappropriate and to use that term nowadays.

What about English English and Scots English? They have at times been considered seperate languages. Until the two countries became one about 300 years ago, it was considered two seperate languages.

I get the impression there is far more diversity within English than in many of the Slavic languages, and that the differences between some of them is really quite small. The biggest difference between Croatian and Serbian seems to be the different alphabets they use.


What else would you call a pigeon?

Interesting topic, hehe. :) As an outsider, a Hungarian who is Slovak on the mother's grandparents' side, I do think that learning one Slavic language is "enough" (I put it in double quotes). I can't speak Slovakian (well, the archaic Slovakian, actually, that elderly people still speak in my region), though with this heritage, plus my primitive Russian (as everyone had to learn it up until before '90.....), I still has an advantage in understanding Polish.



Apart from this, interestingly, we discovered with my Polish friends that we have lots of words in common -- first of all, k*rwa/k*rva, of course. :) Hungarian do seem to have preserved some Slavic loanwords. The above mentioned gołąb - galamb is one of them. (Which is "holub" in Slovakian, we even have people with this surname in my region! It's interesting that the starting "g" is usually "h" in Slovak/Czech and Russian. "Gamburger" always made us laugh at Russian lessons. :)

I apologize for asking this, but are you a linguist? Do you speak any of the Slavic languages? Do you speak Croatian and/or Serbian?

There is diversity in every language, of course. I don't know enough about Scots English to have an opinion on that.


No, I'm afraid that is not the only difference. But it's pointless to try to explain the differences to you now.

We have k*rva, too! ROTFL!