muckefuck | (no subject)

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You know me, I'm generally extremely sympathetic to the promotion of minority languages and I strive not to be judgmental about what goes under that label; the whole "language or dialect" argument is unscientific claptrap in my eyes. But I'm sorry, "Belarusian" just looks like ordinary Russian badly misspelled.

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Really? "Dziakuju" and "spasibo" don't look that close to me.

I don't care if they throw in the occasional word of Polish, I'm not fooled!

I dunno; as a speaker of Russian I find real Belarussian somewhat hard to follow. To me they're as alike as Catalan and Castillian, and I know if I said that Catalan was just badly spelled Spanish you'd have a shitfit.

Edited 2010-03-11 20:17 (UTC)

That's because you'd be talking collons. How many phonemes are present in Belarusian that are absent from Russian? (For Catalan, the answer is "seven consonantal and two vocalic--or eight and three for Balearic".)

That seems a bit arbitrary. By that logic Ukranian is also Russian with spelling issues. o_o

What are you talking about? They look nothing like each other!

Ukranian and Belarusian are a lot closer than Russian and Belarusian, at least in my opinion. Perhaps not in orthography, but in vocabulary, grammar, and even mutual intelligibility.

Therefore, if Belarusian = Russian, so does Ukranian.

You're only saying this to hurt me because you know how I adore Ukrainian.

It's just Russian with bad spelling.

:: laugh ::

Have I told you how much I hated trying to talk with the Belarusian and Ukranian cleaners when I was at Jewel because they would understand but never respond in standard Russian? Yeah. -_-

Trying to talk with or trying to chat up?

Talk WITH. The only one I tried to chat up was Super Hot Ukranian Bear Daddy With The Wife Who Looked Like A Weeble, and he spoke English already, at least somewhat.

Reminds me of the Essentialist Explanation "Written Belarusian is essentially Russian with misspellings one would expect from small Russian children."

I shared a book written in Turkmen with a Turkish-speaking friend a few years ago and he couldn't stop laughing. He said pretty much what pne said: it looked like it had been written by a small child or someone marginally literate.

...sadly, I still don't know if that was because of differences between the languages or if it was a problem with that specific book.

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