'Gateway' slavic language?

According to a reliable almanac, Esperanto's actual usefulness fell well short of his hopes. There were far fewer speakers of it than he had predicted.

If you observe Poles, Slovaks, Czechs and Russians working together as I have done in my place of work, you will notice that communication across language barriers is not a huge problem. I have used Polish to speak to Slovakian colleagues and been understood better than if I had just tried to rely on their minimal English skills. This means that if you speak one of these languages to a reasonable level, it should be possible to communicate with someone who speaks another Slavic language, not perfectly of course.

But why would anyone want to learn a language merely as a "gateway" to another? The best option has to be to want to learn a particular language, then learn that language. I have no desire to learn Slovakian, for example. It's just nice to know that I can speak Polish to a Slovakian and with a bit of luck and a bit of extra effort, be understood.

Osioł, one hundred percent agreement with your Slovak colleague example!
As far though as to the apparent usefulness of a sort of 'bridge' Slavic or common Slavic language to split the distance, I think it could be more helpful than not.

Very good post, Osioł. Just don't say 'szukać' too often ;) ;)

?? I don't get it, Seanus.

What about Sorbian (aka Wendish or Lusatian)? Lord's Prayer seems no more difficult than in Kashubian.

Wótèe naš (Upper Sorbian)

Wótèe naš, kiž sy w njebjesach.
Swjeć so Twoje mjeno.
Přińdź Twoje kralestwo.
Stań so Twoja wola, kaž na njebju, tak na zemi.
Wšědny chlěb naš daj nam dźens.
Wodaj nam naše winy, jako my tež wodawamy swojim winikam.
A njewjedź nas do spytowanja,
ale wumóž nas wot złeho.
(Přetož Twoje je kralestwo a móc a sława na wěki)
Amen.

Wóśce nas (Lower Sorbian)
Wóśce nas, kenž sy na njebju,
wuswěśone buź Twójo mě;
pśiź k nam Twójo kralejstwo;
Twója wóla se stań
ako na njebju, tak teke na zemi.
Wšedny klěb naš daj nam źinsa,
a wódaj nam naše winy,
ako my wódawamy swójim winikam.
A njewjeź nas do spytowanja
ale wumóž nas wót togo złego,
Pśeto Twója jo to kralejstwo a ta móc a ta cesć do nimjernosći.
Amen.

Analagous here perhaps to Czech vs. Slovak?

For a new-born, every joke is new... ’Cause szukać is like jebać in Czech/Slovak...! :)

Well, I do see some usefulness of Slovio. I often surprised at how little problems can frustrate my English classmates at Polish lessons. As simple things as accusative case which is pretty much obvious for anyone else whose native language is as agglutinative as Polish. :) For an introduction, Slovio would be much easier to learn. Even if it's not much of a help with the grammar of a real Slavic language you want to study, but at least you could build up the basic vocabulary to rely on / to relate to.

At least, if I'm not mistaken, Slovio aims to be a language that you can put to a use for communication, it's not for philosophical heights. :)

Slovianski is much better than slovio, that much I can tell you by my own experience. Slovio is pretty bad: 90% of the word stock comes from russian, although some of it is heavily mutated. There is nothing slavic in the grammar, which is more based on esperanto than on any living language. For Poles a text in slovio is difficult to understand. Of course, an easy text is easy, but we would also understand it, if it's written in czech or even serbocroatian. No, better try slovianski, it is much more slavic and much more understandable to Poles. It is a perfect introduction to the slavic languages in general. There is a lot of typical Slavic grammar in it, that will help you to understand not only polish, but also other languages. Since I started to learn it, I can much better understand the texts in other languages too.

Also, slovio is very political language. If you look at the website, there are all kinds of links to pan-slavic organizations and the like. On the slovio forum they are constantly shouting at Jews, Germans, Hungarians, Americans, and how the poor Slavs are the victims of the history. The creators of slovianski are much more reasonable people, they keep themselves far from politics.

Polish is not 'agglutinative', Bondi! True, it's not an analytical language such as English (owing to the former's complex morphology resp/ inflectional endings), but Polish doesn't tack on suffixes, i.e agglutinate letters in order to signify case endings, such as in Hungarian, Basque or Turkish.-)

There may be "only" 7 cases in Polish, but multiply them with these:
- masculine persons + masculine non-persons + feminine + neuter in singular
- these same in plural
- different endings in nominative which creates "sub-cases" for each case (for example nominative masc. persons end in either a vowel or a consonant, which affects forming the rest of the cases)

- plus, adjectives have to agree with nouns, which means they also have a plethora of different forms in cases -- even in daily life... :)

Compare:
- one inflection for each case, with no different genders
- one plural form for each case
- adjectives always stay in nominative when paired with nouns
- the only thing you have to learn is vowel-harmony in inflection, but even if you make a mistake with that, you will still be understood

Piece o’cake! ;-))


I think Slavic languages agglutinate, if we take the word formation itself (not just the inflection in grammatical cases). They have a system of "roots" to build on. For instance, how could you explain for an English speaker the relation of world and light? Świat, świecić is a matter of fact in Polish.

Oh, the latter is NOT agglutinating though. This is merely an inflectional change going on.

Furthermore, your talking about root relationships, that's all-:)

i think one should be careful when comparing Hungarian to Polish regarding "number of cases". Hungarian claims to have like 17 cases or something, but one needs to define what exactly a "case" is.

i was reading a paper written by a linguist one day on the net, and basically he had said that often times Hungarian calls say 3 or 4 "case changes" all seperate cases, yet, in Polish, it would all fall under 1 case. but, it often times proves to be no more difficult than Polish, or require any more memorization or practice.

for example, if you were to look at Miejscownik in Polish, word changes are virtually limitless. the way cities and countries change, simple nouns, especially those with less than 6-7 letters (wies,las.....wsi, lesie), not to mention matching up genders appropriately, adjective agreement, etc. etc.

in Hungarian though, and this is just as an example, it may take say "przy" and call it a case, and then take "w" and call that one a case.

OR, the case change that occurs in Hungarian may be completely regular and predictable, such as using the same word ending over and over, whereas in Polish, it is a constant guessing game for learners. What I mean by this is for example, it is much easier to teach someone past progressive in English than it is to teach past progressive verb formation in Polish. In English, it can be taught in 30 seconds. "Add -ing class, and there you have it," whereas in Polish, it is a lifetime of learning all the imperfective forms of all the verbs so that you conjugate the correct form to make a progressive form.

in the end, the true difficulty of the language stems not from how many cases, but quite literally how much one needs to know about case changes and agreement in order to speak correctly. you may study a case, but can you use it with any word effectively? is it regular and predictable? how many times does the case change occur, or is it only in special situations? in my opinion, THIS is how you really judge the difficulty of the language.

i don't know much about Hungarian aside from what I read about it, but whether Hungarian's case changes are more difficult or not, I feel these things are still worth saying.

gumishu

I have met claims that Croatian (Serbocroatian) is not very difficult to pick up by English speakers - but I don't know much about the language.

I would concur with these claims, i found it pretty easy to get to grips with. Also, the Serbian cyrillic alphabet is only slightly dissimilar to other cyrillic alphabets so i'd say Serbo-Croat would be a good gateway for the slavic languages, whether those with cyrillic or latin alphabets.

All in all though, learning the cyrillic alphabet as a native English speaker is likely to be the least of your worries when you compare it to the grammatical structure of any Slavic language.

As far as the subject of "case" is concerned (departing though momentarily from whether or not Polish is an 'agglutinative' language or not), it is generally defined by Chomsky and others as a designation of the speaker's resp. principal actor's, relationship with that/whom upon which is being acted, e.g. "I see the book." (Widzę książkę), designated 'accusative' or 'biernik' vs. "I arrived with the book." (Przybywałem z książką), indicated in Polish as governed by the 'instrumental' case, perhaps like the old Latin ablative of means or instrument. In German and in English though, 'with' is governed by the dative case:-)

Therefore, Hungarian may actually not have seventeen 'active' cases, however, they are seaparately far more numerous than either Polish or German. lol

English of course, does indeed have cases too! The difference though, is that English (much like Chinese, apparently), is an analytic language which doesn't signal morphological change as is the case in Polish, for instance, with inflectional endings. Instead, English indicates "case" simply by adding more words.

Usually, but we still have more inflections in pronouns than in regular nouns.

He saw him.
She saw her.
They saw them.

The dog saw the dog and the dog saw the cat.

It is useful for a beginner to think of the changes to pronouns as an introduction to cases when learning Polish. Polish doesn't have too many cases. It has too many different case endings within each case and gender, and it has too many case endings that are the same for different cases. But what would life be without a challenge?


Horribly long words in agglutinative languages can look even scary than medium sized words in languages that look like they have a vowel deficit.

Correct, donkey:-):-)

And as per usual the average language teacher, in this example, of Polish, typically starts off on the friggin' mezzanine level, rather than (more logically!) in the basement, for Americans usually, the sub-basement level. Instead of 'The Instrumental Case is...., how about beginning with an focused and slowwwww explanation for the rest of us dunderheads out there of what "case" means??

True, English changes the pronoun, but compared with the dog-and pony-show of

książka
książki
książce
książkę
książką
ad infinitum.......

we merely add "of the book", "with the book" etc..., whereupon the nouns NEVER CHANGES it's intrinsic structural form, as compared with Polish, Hungarian, (older) German, and sooo many other languages!

in my opinion, it's not even worth it to bring up "cases" in English. nonsense. call it what you will, but learning pronoun changes is hardly a challenge. learning to master even 1 case in Polish, meaning you can use that 1 case to change any word, any gender, plural and singular, quantities of 1, 2-4, and then 5 and above, is a lifetime of learning for the non native.

well obviously it is, if it helps english speakers get their heads round the idea of cases, eg they will see immediately that one couldn't say "him book" for example.

It certainly helped me with Greek..:)

Thing is, guys, English DOES indeed (still) have cases, merely no morphological endings to signal such as in Polish and the rest of the 'synthetic' languages (of which, again, English is not one!).

Nom. This is a book.
Gen. The page of the book is torn.
Dat. It's written in the book.
Acc. I see the book.

There! Four cases in English, just as in German (minus ONE in Latin). Only difference is, we don't designate their usage structurally, but rather 'analytically', i.e. by indicated context around the word ("book")-:)

Once more, the issue never was (as far as I'm concerned!) whether Polish is any more or less challenging to learn for a non-native than English etc.., rather, whether Bondi's designation of Polish as "agglutinative" is correct or not. I contend roundly that it is NOT, as, technically, Polish doesn't tack on postpositions as does f.ex. Hungarian, Basque or Turkish, but instead adds to the changed structure before the word. Moreover, at least in word formation, German is hyper-agglutinative, what with it's multi-syllabic monstrosities ,e.g. "Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaenswitwenrente", etc....

Looks like it's a question of definitions, though. I wouldn't call German hyper-agglutinative. Most words are just multi-compounds. In English, they prefer of or ’s constructs and such.

I.e. Schiff - Dampfschiff - Donaudampfschiff + fährt etc. would be "a tour on the Danube by a steamship", instead of "Danubesteamshiptour" as a common English can't really follow words with more than four or five syllables. :)

Okay, let's say Polish is somewhere in-between. You all pointed out that it's pointless to argue beyond a point. :)

To get back on-topic, I like the idea of "explaining" the mysterious cases, especially for English-speaking natives. They only have those Latinic names for cases that are meaningless for an average learner.

......and it's precisely here where German, for example, is at its most 'pictorial' or building-block basic: Nominativ (Werfall = The WHO case) or erster Fall (1st case)

Genitiv (Wesfall = The WHOSE case) or zweiter Fall (2nd case)
Dativ (Wemfall = The WHOM case) or dritter Fall (3rd case)
Akkusativ (Wenfall = The TO/AT WHOM case) or vierter Fall (4th case)

As with Polish, the Pole on the street doesn't know from Latin, e.g. 'Genitivus', but instead 'Dopełniać', any more than the average German speaker thinks is terms of 'Genitiv', but rather of 'Wesfall' or even 'zweiter Fall'.

In Hungarian, I imagine it's much the same:-)

Bondi, I indeed take your point earlier regarding my slightly misleading comments as to German. Of course it's not 'agglutinative', but plain and simple ol' word compounding, as you said. LOL

LoL. Yeah, we do have Hungarian names for the grammatical terms. For instance, 'genitivus' is "birtokos eset" = "possessive case" etc. Actually, most of the foreign-sounding Latinic terms have co-existing 'localizations'.

But to get back on topic, that's one thing I love Polish for, as it is much the same. They even have a Polish nickname for "mobile": komórka. :)

...not really a 'nickname' though, as much as a diminutive, cf. Hungarian and given names
"Istvan"/"Pista", "Maria"/"Marika" etc...

Quite similar to Polish here:-)