Bondi
8 Jul 2008
Language / Listening to music and learning Polish [45]
Krzysztof:
thank you very much!
:D
Krzysztof:
thank you very much!
Mydelko FA :)
:D
Bondi
5 Jul 2008
Language / Listening to music and learning Polish [45]
Hi! Anyone knows the artist & song titles for these? Thank you in advance.
Hi! Anyone knows the artist & song titles for these? Thank you in advance.
Bondi
12 Apr 2008
History / Pole, Hungarian, two good friends [58]
Nope, it all goes back to the "extreme political conditions" after the First World War, namely the Trianon "Peace" Treaty. All our neighbours feel antipathy towards us. And antipathy is a very PC word here. The exceptions are the peaceful and lovely Croatia and Slovenia. And Austria, of course, our brother-in-law. :) Poland is totally out of question. I doubt anyone would be negative towards someone with a Polish nationality in Hungary.
Luckily, it all different when we are abroad. I've never had problems with Slovaks in England, and I would have no antipathy towards Serbians and Romanians, if I ever met them here. (Let's just leave our hostilities at home!)
About genetic backgrounds: in my origin, I am Slovak on my mother's grandparents' side. After the 150 years of the Turkish Occupation, Slovakian settlers had been brought into various parts of Hungary at the beginning of the 1700s to re-populate the abandoned areas. Old people are still bi-lingual in my region, they speak both the old Slovakian and the Hungarian language. But very few of the young generations can speak or understand Slovakian. I regard myself a Hungarian.
To put it in a nutshell: I don't think anyone really gives a toss about genetic origins in Central/Eastern Europe. It's more about speaking the language. Compare: you can be an Irishmen/-woman if you can't speak or understand Irish Gaelic. But you can't be a Hungarian, Slovakian, Serbian, Romanian etc. etc. if you don't speak the relevant language!
This is my experience, at least. I can be mistaken. Cheers.
The emotional link has not been broken even among extreme political conditions like the period of the Second World War when Germany invaded Poland, while Hungary was a close political (and later military) ally of Adolf Hitler's Germany.
Nope, it all goes back to the "extreme political conditions" after the First World War, namely the Trianon "Peace" Treaty. All our neighbours feel antipathy towards us. And antipathy is a very PC word here. The exceptions are the peaceful and lovely Croatia and Slovenia. And Austria, of course, our brother-in-law. :) Poland is totally out of question. I doubt anyone would be negative towards someone with a Polish nationality in Hungary.
Luckily, it all different when we are abroad. I've never had problems with Slovaks in England, and I would have no antipathy towards Serbians and Romanians, if I ever met them here. (Let's just leave our hostilities at home!)
About genetic backgrounds: in my origin, I am Slovak on my mother's grandparents' side. After the 150 years of the Turkish Occupation, Slovakian settlers had been brought into various parts of Hungary at the beginning of the 1700s to re-populate the abandoned areas. Old people are still bi-lingual in my region, they speak both the old Slovakian and the Hungarian language. But very few of the young generations can speak or understand Slovakian. I regard myself a Hungarian.
To put it in a nutshell: I don't think anyone really gives a toss about genetic origins in Central/Eastern Europe. It's more about speaking the language. Compare: you can be an Irishmen/-woman if you can't speak or understand Irish Gaelic. But you can't be a Hungarian, Slovakian, Serbian, Romanian etc. etc. if you don't speak the relevant language!
This is my experience, at least. I can be mistaken. Cheers.
Bondi
9 Mar 2008
Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]
I would say that Polish is easier to learn than Russian. It could be personal, though. Back in those days "we'd been taught Russian" (i.e. it was mandatory for schools to teach it) and everyone hated the language, because we hated the 'Russkie' oppression itself. In Slavic countries, they were more successful as the language didn't sound foreign. (And, of course, language-teaching was far more less sophisticated than today in our world of the internet and multimedia.)
I forgot nearly everything, but still helps me in my Polish. (Mostly basic things like numbers, names in the family tree etc., but here and there even some more difficult things just "pop in" from my forgotten Russian.) Sometimes we even joke with our "reminiscent" Russian knowledge with my Polish colleagues, ha-ha. :)
There's one thing no one has yet mentioned: the sexual discriminatory nature of Slavic languages. ;o) It still does my head in that everybody and everything is either masculine or feminin or neutral in gender, plus even in plural there's a difference between a masculine and a feminine/non-masculine "they"!
I would say that Polish is easier to learn than Russian. It could be personal, though. Back in those days "we'd been taught Russian" (i.e. it was mandatory for schools to teach it) and everyone hated the language, because we hated the 'Russkie' oppression itself. In Slavic countries, they were more successful as the language didn't sound foreign. (And, of course, language-teaching was far more less sophisticated than today in our world of the internet and multimedia.)
I forgot nearly everything, but still helps me in my Polish. (Mostly basic things like numbers, names in the family tree etc., but here and there even some more difficult things just "pop in" from my forgotten Russian.) Sometimes we even joke with our "reminiscent" Russian knowledge with my Polish colleagues, ha-ha. :)
There's one thing no one has yet mentioned: the sexual discriminatory nature of Slavic languages. ;o) It still does my head in that everybody and everything is either masculine or feminin or neutral in gender, plus even in plural there's a difference between a masculine and a feminine/non-masculine "they"!
Bondi
16 Sep 2007
Language / Polish or any Slavic language key to any other Slavic languages? [126]
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. :)
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.
The words that are so similar in languages that come from different language groups usually have the same roots in Latin and/or Greek.
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. :)