(no subject)

[muckefuck]

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.

Comments

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

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

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

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.

[pne.livejournal.com]

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

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

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.