Belarusian

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Beli Orao
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Belarusian

Post by Beli Orao »

What are the major features that distinguish this language from Russian? Is it a more conservative form of East Slavic?

TomHChappell
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Post by TomHChappell »

This whole thread will be incomplete unless someone mentions that the biggest "difference" between these "two" "languages" is politics.

That said, there are real linguistic differences as well.

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Post by Miekko »

My Russian teacher could read Ukrainian but not Belorussian. The form of Russian she has been taught is basically St Peterburg Russian. It's more than just politics.
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Post by Mecislau »

Miekko wrote:My Russian teacher could read Ukrainian but not Belorussian. The form of Russian she has been taught is basically St Peterburg Russian. It's more than just politics.
Eh, a large part of that is because Belorussian's orthography is so wacky (compared to Russian's and Ukrainian's, which follow the etymological principle). If you just "normalize" the spelling to match Russian and Ukrainian conventions, it's not that bad at all.


That said, heremaecg, what makes you think Belorussian would be more conservative?

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Yiuel Raumbesrairc
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Post by Yiuel Raumbesrairc »

Miekko wrote:My Russian teacher could read Ukrainian but not Belorussian. The form of Russian she has been taught is basically St Peterburg Russian. It's more than just politics.
Then QcFr is not French, because people taught Parisian French (not native) have a hard time understanding even the most simple sentences of QcFr. Non-native learners seem to have a hard time with highly diverging dialects, which is not surprising. More interesting would be to see an educated native's reaction.
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Post by Niedokonany »

It's definitely more than just politics. Probably it could function as a dialect of Russian but the situation here is far from the Serbo-Croatian one as there are quite a few established phonological, morphological and lexical differences between the standards. Some of the apparent differences are purely orthographical, though, e.g. <и> vs <і>.

These are some differences I've been able to find/could think of:

- stronger affricatization of the historical t_j and d_j than in Russian
- *v, *5 > u_^ in certain positions, hence the famous <ў>
- PS *g > G (I think)
- depalatalization of r_j, e.g. трэці "third"
- ч is less palatal than in Russian
- prothetic v before PS *o, *u - I believe only in stressed syllables or something as they have alternations such as вокны - акно
- geminate consonants from former clusters with /j/, e.g. in the word жыццё "life"
- some differences in vowel reduction (also, it's reflected in spelling as opposed to Russian)
- in the genitive ending of adjectives *g hasn't been replaced with v as in Russian
- the 3rd singular ending of verbs is lost where Russian has -ет but preserved where it has -ит; additionally, it's historically palatalized in Belarusian: гаворыць, ru говорит
- some consonant alternations lost in ru are preserved in Belarusian: рака > па рацэ (ru по реке, I think), бераг > на беразе, скруха > у скрусе
- there is no initial н- in the form of pronouns used after a preposition
- the nominative of masculine adjectives doesn't have the final -й
- perhaps fewer Church Slavic influences than in standard Russian; more Polish loanwords.
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Post by Khvaragh »

Yiuel wrote:
Miekko wrote:My Russian teacher could read Ukrainian but not Belorussian. The form of Russian she has been taught is basically St Peterburg Russian. It's more than just politics.
Then QcFr is not French, because people taught Parisian French (not native) have a hard time understanding even the most simple sentences of QcFr. Non-native learners seem to have a hard time with highly diverging dialects, which is not surprising. More interesting would be to see an educated native's reaction.
This is one of those language areas where the distinction between what constitutes a massively divergent (or even divergent enough to make mutual intelligibility difficult) dialect as opposed to a different language becomes blurry. In a similar line of thought, I can barely understand more than a couple words of Moroccan Arabic - and neither can my fiance or any of his family (and they are all native speakers of Egyptian Arabic, which is (arguably) much less divergent); they don't call it a /luGa/ "language," nor do any of my colleagues at uni, but a /lahga/ "dialect." I'm still hesitant to call it a different language, but I've seen compelling arguments that it is. Politics does play a huge role in this though.

I'm somewhat of the opinion that "language" is something like "phoneme" - a term for an abstract entity which is more of a catchall for many closely related "real" entities.
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Post by hwhatting »

TomHChappell wrote:This whole thread will be incomplete unless someone mentions that the biggest "difference" between these "two" "languages" is politics.

That said, there are real linguistic differences as well.
Well, that's true for many dialects. This is really an "army & navy" situation - Belarus had about 400 years of separate political & cultural development from (Muscovian) Russia, which is the basis of the separate Belarussian ethnic identity, not the language in itself. Without that separate identity (and country), there would be no reason to declare Belarussian a separate language instead of a Russian dialect.

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Post by Beli Orao »

That said, heremaecg, what makes you think Belorussian would be more conservative?
I know absolutely nothing about it, so there was a 50/50 chance it might be :)

So, ignoring politics (and as a Serbo-Croatian speaker, I've gotten used to the bullshit), Belarusian is a somewhat divergent Russian dialect without any particularly interesting features?

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Post by hwhatting »

heremaecg wrote:So, ignoring politics (and as a Serbo-Croatian speaker, I've gotten used to the bullshit), Belarusian is a somewhat divergent Russian dialect without any particularly interesting features?
What do you call "interesting"? Piotr gave a good overview over the most important features. To someone interested in historical linguistics, some of them are quite "interesting" (morphonological retention of the 2nd palatalisation, 3rd sg. present tense endings).

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Post by Beli Orao »

A retention of the copula in the present would qualify as "interesting," the other stuff isn't that strange.

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Post by Io »

hwhatting wrote:Well, that's true for many dialects. This is really an "army & navy" situation - Belarus had about 400 years of separate political & cultural development from (Muscovian) Russia, which is the basis of the separate Belarussian ethnic identity, not the language in itself. Without that separate identity (and country), there would be no reason to declare Belarussian a separate language instead of a Russian dialect.
Do Russians understand Belorussian? I understand the former but not a word of the latter. And how does Belorussian fare compared with other Russian dialects in regards to Standard Russian?
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Post by Niedokonany »

Well, I haven't heard about differences in the usage of ёсць and есть except that Belarusian (especially the western dialects, I believe) uses the verb мець "have" much more often than Russian its иметь, i.e. more in the SAE fashion. The construction "X is at me" (у мяне ёсць...) does exist too and I've heard тарашкевіца prefers the former, whilst наркамаўка the latter. Is this more exciting?
Last edited by Niedokonany on Fri Apr 23, 2010 2:36 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Mecislau »

Io wrote:Do Russians understand Belorussian? I understand the former but not a word of the latter. And how does Belorussian fare compared with other Russian dialects in regards to Standard Russian?
In my experience at least, Belorussian is much closer to standard Ukrainian than standard Russian. With written Belorussian, I can quite a bit of it, though not as much as Ukrainian, and it takes a lot more effort for me to figure out what each word is due to the spelling.

Spoken Belorussian is a lot trickier, though. I can pick out phrases and sentences, but not enough to really understand anything more than the general gist of the conversation.

EDIT: Hmm, to try it out, I decided to listen to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV2PV99WnQI and I actually understood maybe 80%. That wasn't nearly as bad as I thought.

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Post by Beli Orao »

EDIT: Hmm, to try it out, I decided to listen to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV2PV99WnQI and I actually understood maybe 80%. That wasn't nearly as bad as I thought.
Cool documentary. I have a hard time differentiating this language from Russian, and understand about the same amount spoken in both languages (30-40%).

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Post by Niedokonany »

I find the Belarusian until 0:45 particularly intelligible...
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Post by Amuere »

I only know a little Polish and Russian, I didn't find Belarussian very difficult to understand....it's about in the same zone of comprehension for me (around 10-20%)
Tjalehu ge frulehu, tjea ale stjindamihu? Dime sfraiaknanmi.

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Post by äreo »

Yiuel wrote:
Miekko wrote:My Russian teacher could read Ukrainian but not Belorussian. The form of Russian she has been taught is basically St Peterburg Russian. It's more than just politics.
Then QcFr is not French, because people taught Parisian French (not native) have a hard time understanding even the most simple sentences of QcFr. Non-native learners seem to have a hard time with highly diverging dialects, which is not surprising. More interesting would be to see an educated native's reaction.
Indeed. Though as a non-native learner of Metropolitan (Parisian) French I can say that after a bit of getting used to, Quebec French really isn't very hard to understand (for me at least).

Ascima mresa óscsma sáca psta numar cemea.
Cemea tae neasc ctá ms co ísbas Ascima.
Carho. Carho. Carho. Carho. Carho. Carho. Carho.

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Post by Mecislau »

Piotr wrote:I find the Belarusian until 0:45 particularly intelligible...
Is it Belorussian or Polish? I just ask because I find everything up until 0:45 difficult, but everything after becomes much, much easier.

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Post by Niedokonany »

Yeah, it is Polish (spoken in the typically "eastern"/East Slavic influenced way), I was wondering if anybody realized that. After that it becomes harder for me...
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Post by hwhatting »

Io wrote:Do Russians understand Belorussian? I understand the former but not a word of the latter. And how does Belorussian fare compared with other Russian dialects in regards to Standard Russian?
I can't add much beyond what has already been said. On my experience as a non-native fluent speaker of Russian, I find written Belarussian easy, but that's maybe because I know Polish, and the vocabulary in Belarussian that deviates from Standard Russian tends to be Polish loans. I haven't had much exposure to spoken Belarussian. I also don't have much personal experience of Russian dialects, but (again subjectively) I wouldn't say that Russian and Belarussian are farther apart than Standard German and (say) the Bavarian dialect of German.

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Post by jal »

Piotr wrote:Yeah, it is Polish (spoken in the typically "eastern"/East Slavic influenced way), I was wondering if anybody realized that. After that it becomes harder for me...
At 7:50 or the like its Polish again, right? Or at least it sounds a lot like it.


JAL

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Post by hwhatting »

jal wrote: At 7:50 or the like its Polish again, right? Or at least it sounds a lot like it.


JAL
Near the end, the guy in the orange sweater speaks Polish, the other persons Belarussian, and the audio engineer seems to speak Russian (it's only поздравляю, записано, so that may be Belarussian as well).
AFAIK there's some support in Poland for the Belarussian democracy movement, and the film seems to have been produced by a Polish group.

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Post by Mecislau »

jal wrote:
Piotr wrote:Yeah, it is Polish (spoken in the typically "eastern"/East Slavic influenced way), I was wondering if anybody realized that. After that it becomes harder for me...
At 7:50 or the like its Polish again, right? Or at least it sounds a lot like it.


JAL
Yeah, I think so. At least, there my comprehension of what is being said plummets.

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