28
votes
Accepted
Are the vast majority of Ukrainians more proficient in Russian than Ukrainian?
After researching this a bit, I'm posting an answer to my own question, but I want to say that I welcome more answers, especially if they bring other pieces of evidence.
A 2008 Gallup poll asked ...
- 1,102
27
votes
How similar are Ukrainian and Russian?
Ukrainian and Russian are partially mutual intelligible. I as a native Russian speaker can read Ukrainian and usually understand the most but spoken Ukrainian is relatively hard to understand, ...
- 279
26
votes
Accepted
What is the function of the soft sign (Ь) in Russian?
WARNING: The question is sooo many-sided, it is very wide and can be split into at least 3 different questions. I'll answer it all, don't tell me later that you haven't been warned the answer would be ...
- 17.7k
19
votes
How similar are Ukrainian and Russian?
The mutual intelligibility of the Slavic languages (going far beyond the pair Ukrainian and Russian) is a fascinating theme for linguistic research, and there are works out there trying to measure the ...
- 29.8k
19
votes
How similar are Ukrainian and Russian?
You have 2 questions in 1:
How mutually intelligible the 2 languages are.
What's more practical to help refugees.
In terms of mutual intelligibility, it highly depends on context, an educated (the ...
- 447
16
votes
Why does Russian not vary from region to region?
First of all, it varies to some extent. People from Ural region, people from Rostov-on-Don, people from Vyatka region have quite recognisable pronunciation norms. The same with vocabulary, there's ...
- 917
14
votes
How similar are Ukrainian and Russian?
Russian and Ukranian are mutually intelligeable to a significant degree... perhaps to greater extent than, e.g., French and Italian. However, it is necessary to keep in mind that the situation with ...
- 960
12
votes
Accepted
If Hebrew is not related to Slavic, why there are apparent sound correspondences?
Just as you cannot compare two random species today to accurately assess their taxonomy (otherwise we would conclude all crabs form a single family when they actually form at least five distinct ...
- 6,547
12
votes
Are the vast majority of Ukrainians more proficient in Russian than Ukrainian?
Looking at this from a software developer's perspective, there's a significant factor here that you may have overlooked. Translating a program or a website is a significant amount of work, testing, ...
- 221
11
votes
Why are some Russian and Swedish words so strikingly similar? Два - två, по-шведски - på svenska, etc
You've mixed a bunch of words of very different origin with a bunch of quite weak and poorly defined assumptions (like no considerable interactions between Russians and Swedes).
It comes as no ...
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11
votes
Accepted
How can I find the frequency for the Russian word "чем-нибудь"?
Asking the Leipzig Wortschatz Projekt gives the answer:
Word: чем-нибудь Number of occurrences: 5,018 Rank: 33,962
Frequency class: 14
Information on the corpus:
Information on corpus:
Russian Mixed ...
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11
votes
Is Russian the most diverged Slavic language?
Your question shows that you are unfamiliar with both Russian and other slavic languages.
To add to Anixx's answer:
Think:
misliet - misliet - misliec - misliti - misliti - mislityi - mislyati - dumat
...
- 447
9
votes
Accepted
On the phonetics of Russian ы
Russian ⟨ы⟩ can be a little difficult to master, especially if one wishes for a native-like pronunciation. When stressed, the vowel in question is a close central unrounded vowel: IPA /ɨ/. But, as ...
9
votes
Why don't minimal pairs like "быть" and "бить" prove that /ɨ/ and /i/ are separate phonemes in Russian?
This is because they are not minimal pairs. They differ in a consonant. The "бить" has soft б while "быть" has hard б.
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9
votes
Accepted
Can "da" phrase endings used in Russian and Kannada be traced back to the same origin (as in usage, not like cognates)?
Absolutely not. Its similar to asking if Kannada word alla, which is a negation suffix and also a separate word for no/not, is same as the Islamic deity. It's just coincidence. They are false friends.
...
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9
votes
Why are some Russian and Swedish words so strikingly similar? Два - två, по-шведски - på svenska, etc
@shabunc has treated the other examples already, so I will say something about the bear's service: The same idiom is also present in German Bärendienst and it is traced to a fable by La Fontaine ...
- 29.8k
9
votes
Accepted
Do Russian-Ukrainian bilinguals or speakers immersed in both languages switch between the pair [ʂ ʐ] and [ʃ ʒ] when they switch between the languages?
TL;DR:
The difference between the two pairs is substantial.
Native speakers intuitively use phones so not to get trapped into the adjacent phoneme.
The differences between [ʃ ʒ] and [ʂ ʐ] are pretty ...
- 8,599
9
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How can I find the frequency for the Russian word "чем-нибудь"?
Using the Araneum Russicum III corpus (I am linking to the readily available 125Mtokens subcorpus; after a (free) registration you get access to the whole huge 19Gtokens one; the results are from the ...
- 454
8
votes
If Hebrew is not related to Slavic, why there are apparent sound correspondences?
what can be done to rule out false sound correspondences when
reconstructing proto-languages
The main thing that is commonly done is to not directly compare random words from the modern languages, ...
- 81.9k
8
votes
Are the vast majority of Ukrainians more proficient in Russian than Ukrainian?
The answer is certainly no.
We cannot say that this is true for the "vast" majority (say 80%), but maybe this is 50/50. In the south and east, people speak better russian due to their roots (...
- 81
7
votes
Which languages have absorbed the most vocabulary from Russian, and which languages have influenced its vocabulary?
My guess is this question has more to do with history and culture than language per se.
You can say that English was influenced by French 'a lot' due to the Norman conquest (you can probably speak ...
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7
votes
What phonological process changes е to ё in Russian?
In the old Slavic languages, the sound [o] could never follow the palatalized consonants (which in those times also included the hushing consonants Ш [ʃ], Ж [ʒ], Ч [tʃ], Щ [ʃtʲ], and also Ц [tsʲ]), ...
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7
votes
Is Russian the most diverged Slavic language?
You have just picked Russian synonyms that are not related to the words in the other Slavic languages that you picked. You can pick other synonyms.
Think: мыслить (myslit')
I have: я имею (ya imeyu)
...
- 6,622
6
votes
American English speakers needing subtitles more often
My guess is that this is not a matter of the language, but rather of the sound quality.
Most films come with the original audio in (American) English where the actors speak right during the acting ...
- 6,478
6
votes
Accepted
Origin of the word/root 'del'
These words are related, but they do not have any known cognates outside of Germanic and Balto-Slavic. “Proto-Indo-European *dʰayl-, *dʰoyl-“ (as posited on Wikipedia) is highly uncertain. It has been ...
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6
votes
Accepted
Modern theories of Russian syntax
Sebastian Shaumyan proposed an order-free theory of syntax which has some currency in the U.S. However, I don't know whether Shaumyan's work was the historical source of the Western versions. I heard ...
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6
votes
Which languages have absorbed the most vocabulary from Russian, and which languages have influenced its vocabulary?
You can find examples of words borrowed into Russian language on Wiktionary RU. However, this is far from being a comprehensive list. The number of words borrowed from Turkic languages is somewhere ...
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6
votes
At some point, was г/Г pronounced in Russian like it still is in Ukrainian (somewhat akin to h/H in hotel, i.e. /h/)? Or is it purely regional?
The pronunciation of г as /h/ is purely regional (Southern dialects) by now; diachronically, it used to be /g/ in Proto-Slavic and that changed into /h/ in some languages (Ukrainian, Belorussian, ...
- 454
5
votes
Are the English word "charm" and Russian word "чары" etymologically related?
As it was mentioned in the comments, you have already given an answer. But let us make it more obvious.
Russian чары has a convincing Proto-Slavic reconstruction *čarъ (this word has many Slavic ...
- 510
5
votes
On the phonetics of Russian ы
The simplest way is probably this: pronounce the [u] sound (as in ’soon’, for example) and then try to unround your lips, without changing the position of the tongue.
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