Characteristics of East, West and South Slavic

[Risto the Great]

Originally Posted by Bratot

For me it's easy to understand equally both, east and west slavic languages, since I have the everyday contact with those languages and of course a pre-knowledge basis that every native Macedonian speaker possess compared to the rest.

Please explain this to me more Bratot. What do you think are our advantages?

[Soldier of Macedon]

I understand the Macedonian language reasonably well, but again I will say, that when I have listened to Polish or Russian news reports or shows, I understand probably 5-10% of the conversation. Reading is another matter, as the words can be identified much easier when read rather than spoken.

Mario Allinei states that the South Slavic languages share similarities to both East and West, many of these similarities are not shared between West and East. This is the basis for his belief that South Slavic is older than the northern (east/west) variants. Bratot, given your good understanding of Slavic languages, are you able to identify any of these characteristics?

[Bratot]

I'm not a linguistist neither a "poliglot" , so without exaggeration of course, I have been quite familiar with slavic languages as a result of my early contact with them. I lived outside Macedonia, spent a lot of time with Ukraine, Russian, Belorus, Polish, Czech people and we often discussed this subject.

Knowing our own dialects and also being familiar with the Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian language it was really pretty easy to understand those west-east slavic group of languages, of course not every each of them with the same level of easiness.

It helped me a lot as SoM mentioned "Reading is another matter, as the words can be identified much easier when read rather than spoken" that I read also texts which are easy to be identified since the root is common and you don't have to deal with the pronunciation. (except the west since you have to learn their signs). And those are our advantages Risto, you can find the root of every Macedonian word in 60-70 % of the other Slavic languages.

You are becoming more aware of the similarities after you get know better the language.

For ex. a friend of mine, from Czech, who finished Croatian on the university in Poland and also speaks Polish, has no problem understanding me in Macedonian.
The only condition is to speak normal not fast.

[Soldier of Macedon]

Thanks Bratot, very insightful.

Regarding this comment:

Originally Posted by Bratot

....you can find the root of every Macedonian word in 60-70 % of the other Slavic languages

I think it is the other way around, because there are several Macedonian words that are not shared by other Slavic languages, some loaned, others unique.

[Soldier of Macedon]

The last few days I have been listening to the Polish news on the foreign languages radio station here, and still, I can't manage to comprehend. It is clearly evident that one could not refer to a Polish dialect or a Macedonian dialect, they are in all their rights, separate languages, albeit belonging to the same family.

I notice sound and accent similarities between Polish and Russian that are lacking in Macedonian, they seem to stretch the vowels somewhat, a name like Bielski which would be pronounced as BIEL-SKI or simply BEL-SKI in Macedonian, sounds more like BIIL-SKI or BIIEL-SKI in Polish/Russian.

Bratot, do you concur?

[Soldier of Macedon]

I haven't researched Paul Wexler much so not sure how his suggestions have been received, nor have I looked into modern Hebrew in any great detail either. But the below seemed interesting and related to Slavic languages so I will post it here, although I don't know how credible it is:

The vast majority of scholars see Modern Hebrew as a direct continuation of Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew, though they concede that it has acquired some European vocabulary and syntactical features, in much the same way as Modern Standard Arabic[1] (or even more so, dialects such as Moroccan Arabic). Two dissenting views are as follows:

Paul Wexler[2] claims that modern Hebrew is not a Semitic language at all, but a dialect of "Judaeo-Sorbian". He argues that the underlying structure of the language is Slavic, but "re-lexified" to absorb much of the vocabulary and inflectional system of Hebrew in much the same way as a creole. This view forms part of a larger complex of theories, such as that Ashkenazi Jews are predominantly descended from Slavic and Turkic tribes rather than from the ancient Israelites.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann[3][4] compromises between Wexler and the majority view: according to him, "Israeli" (his term for Israeli Hebrew) is a Semito-European hybrid language, which is the continuation not only of literary Hebrew but also of Yiddish, as well as Polish, Russian, German, English, Ladino, Arabic and other languages spoken by Hebrew revivalists.[5][6] Thus, "Yiddish is a primary contributor to Israeli Hebrew because it was the mother tongue of the vast majority of revivalists and first pioneers in Eretz Yisrael at the crucial period of the beginning of Israeli Hebrew".[7] According to Zuckermann, although the revivalists wished to speak Hebrew, with Semitic grammar and pronunciation, they could not avoid the Ashkenazi mindset arising from their European background. He argues that their attempt to deny their European roots, negate diasporism and avoid hybridity (as reflected in Yiddish) failed. "Had the revivalists been Arabic-speaking or Berber-speaking Jews (e.g. from Morocco), Israeli Hebrew would have been a totally different language – both genetically and typologically, much more Semitic. The impact of the founder population on Israeli Hebrew is incomparable with that of later immigrants."[8]

So far, neither view has gained significant acceptance among mainstream linguists, and both have been criticized by some as being based less on linguistic evidence than post- or anti-Zionist political motivations.[9] However, some linguists, for example American Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz, have employed Zuckermann's glottonym "Israeli" and accept his notion of hybridity. Few would dispute that Hebrew has acquired some European features as a result of having been learned by immigrants as a second language at a crucial formative stage. The identity of the European substrate/adstrate has varied: in the time of the Mandate and the early State, the principal contributor was Yiddish, while today it is American English. There has also been some influence, on vocabulary rather than structure, from Arabic, both in the form of Palestinian Arabic and, during the large scale immigrations of Mizrahi Jews during the 1950-60s, the Yemenite and North African dialects. Some Russian influence may also be observed, both during the founding period and as a result of the wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union following its collapse in 1991.