# Why is Russian so uniform compared to other languages?



## Couch Tomato

Why is Russian so uniform compared to say, Spanish, English or even a much smaller language, Dutch? This remains a complete mystery to me. I'm more or less tri-lingual. My native language is Russian, but I've lived most of my life abroad. Personally, I have a hard time differentiating between different Russian accents. I've known people from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Almaty and so on but I don't really hear a huge difference. Of course there are some dead give-aways like the Ukranian _г_, but on the whole the differences are quite small. In Moscow, we tend to say _конешно_, _скушно _and _дощь_, which is different from how it's written, and I believe that speakers from other cities pronounce these words the way they are written, but even so, I don't usually notice how people pronounce these words in day-to-day conversations.

Now take English. The differences are huge. I'm not even talking about the differences between the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand. Even in one English speaking country, say England, there are massive differences between the English spoken in Manchester and the English spoken in Brighton. Or take a much smaller language: Dutch. I can easily tell whether someone is from Maastricht, Groningen, Enschede or The Hague. The differences aren't always obvious, but for such a small country they are rather surprising. And the Dutch spoken in Belgium is entirely different as well. It has a rather distinctive pronunciation and vocabulary.

But Russian, which is spoken in many different countries, is surprisingly uniform. I'm not saying Russian is 100% uniform, because it isn't, but it is relatively uniform compared to the aforementioned languages. How come? You'd expect to hear great differences but they are in fact very minor in opinion. What could be the reason for this? Is there something intrinsic about Russian that protects its inherent uniformity?


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## morbo

The Russian language of cities is what is more or less uniform. In no small part, it has to do with the fifty plus years of quite aggressive propagation -- through the education system, the media and otherwise -- of academically established norms, commissioned by the government. Since the early days of Soviet radio and later television, whatever spoken going on air was coming out of the mouths of specially selected people who were robotically articulating their lines. Now compare it with the history of the media in the free world -- the difference will be drastic.

When it comes to the language of people living in the territories that weren't thoroughly consumed by the aforementioned propagation, the differences could be quiute noticeable, with both pronunciation and vocabulary not conforming to the mold of the "proper" Soviet Russian speech; the speech of some elderly lady from a distant Siberian village might be anything but uniform with the speech of a city-born Mr. Pupkin.

So, to summarize, I tend to think of it as resulting from the psychotic idea of unification and standartization that permeated the whole Soviet period. And, of course, in the Soviet Russia (where 'Y' X's YOU!) the standards to be established would be comissioned in Moscow and developed primarily in academic circles of Moscow or Leningrad -- no surprise what speech standard was supposed to become ubiquitous.

I may seem a bit fixated on the Soviet period, but I'd think that is where the perceived uniformity may be coming from. But then again, the question remains whether it is really that uniform or not...

Disclaimer: I am by no means close to having any sort of expertise to speak of the problem with whatever authority.


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## Christo Tamarin

The existence of such languages as Ukrainian and Belarussian actually expresses the diversity of Russian. Those languages escaped from being Russian, they abandoned Russian, thus making Russian to seem more uniform than it could be.



Russian was brought to the wide territories of EurAsia recently, approximately at the same time that English was brought to America and Australia. It had not the time to loose its uniformity. Actially, Russian started (пошел) in Kiev and Novegorod and NOT in Kazan or Astrakhan.



We can consider England as the homeland of the English language. If we have to exclude Ukrainian and Belarussian, we have to consider Moskovia as the homeland of Russian. English was brought to its homeland more than 1500 years ago. Russian was brought to its homeland about 1000 years ago. So, Russian had less time to reduce uniformity than Endlish.


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## Maroseika

Christo Tamarin said:


> The existence of such languages as Ukrainian and Belarussian actually expresses the diversity of Russian. Those languages escaped from being Russian, they abandoned Russian, thus making Russian to seem more uniform than it could be... Actially, Russian started (пошел) in Kiev and Novegorod and NOT in Kazan or Astrakhan.


I'm afraid there is some confusion. Ukrainian and Belorussian have never escaped of being Russian, but all three have escaped of being one language, and this language was very far from what we call Russian now. And let the term "Ancient Russian language" not confuse us, this is just a term, but it doesn't mean only Russian has derivates from it directly. No, all three have derivated and all three have the same status in this regard.
As for Novgorod, some scholars consider it as the 4th East-Slavic dialect, which has not become the 4th language only because of the subordination to Moscow since the 15th century.


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## learnerr

morbo said:


> Disclaimer: I am by no means close to having any sort of expertise to speak of the problem with whatever authority.


Did you try to consider whether urban Russian was very uniform before the Soviets? People liked to centralise at that time no less, as far as I know.


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## Nanon

It may take a Petersburger to respond, but there is or was a St Petersburg pronunciation. Too bad this article does not bear a date. The typical example I learnt when I was studying Russian back in the '80s was that Muscovites tended to say _дощь _while Lenigraders tended to say _дожьдь (дошьть)_. I am not sure I have heard anybody say _дощь _these days.


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## babosa daltónica

Do you know Spanish? It is VERY uniform, especially for such an international language spread out over thousands and thousands of kilometers and 20 countries with it as the official language. Similarly, English is similarly very uniform. The only type of English that I have trouble with, to my knowledge, is the Scottish accented one.


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## morbo

learnerr said:


> Did you try to consider whether urban Russian was very uniform before the Soviets? People liked to centralise at that time no less, as far as I know.



I think you understand the difference between "liking to centralize" and "having a certain norm imposed on through a large-scale campaign". Things like likbez, total control over the media, education system conforming to a unified state-controlled program influenced the language in a way very unlike the influence of people getting together, intermixing, exchanging certain "speech customs" of their social strata and stuff like that.


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## Couch Tomato

babosa daltónica said:


> Similarly, English is similarly very uniform. The only type of English that I have trouble with, to my knowledge, is the Scottish accented one.



I couldn't disagree more. English is far from uniform. Surely you will know about the differences between British and American English? I'm not going to attempt to elucidate those differences here as entire books have been written on this subject. Also, within the US there are sharp differences between north and south in terms of pronunciation. As a speaker of both English and Russian, English is much less uniform than Russian in my view.

As far as Spanish is concerned, I don't know for sure as I don't speak Spanish, but my Spanish speaking friends tell me that the Spanish spoken in Spain and the Spanish spoken in Latin America are quite different. The same goes for Portugese as well.



Nanon said:


> It may take a Petersburger to respond, but there is or was a St Petersburg pronunciation. Too bad this article does not bear a date. The typical example I learnt when I was studying Russian back in the '80s was that Muscovites tended to say _дощь _while Lenigraders tended to say _дожьдь (дошьть)_. I am not sure I have heard anybody say _дощь _these days.



I would say _дощь _and I'm from Moscow. I'm surprised you've never heard it as I hear it all the time (and I'm not that old).


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## babosa daltónica

By "very uniform" I mean that I can understand British English speakers VERY well. Who cares if they write "learnt" or "colour"? I can understand them. The differences between English varieties are much less than that of Portuguese and German (Swiss-german vs Standard German), or arabic,for example.

Have you been in the US? I don't have a lot of trouble understanding almost any US speaker, so long as they are not from a tiny rural town in the mountains. 

That is the rub. You don't speak Spanish so you don't know what it is like speaking to Mexicans or Spaniards. It is very uniform. At the extremes it is *harder* (though not impossible or unbearably hard) to understand some Spanish speakers but it is a matter of getting used to the accents. I talk to a lot of Spaniards even though I am most comfortable with Mexican Spanish/Latin American Spanish.

Edit: I'm not saying that English/Spanish varieties are more uniform than that of Russian subtypes. Rather, I am saying that in absolute terms the English/Spanish accents aren't that hard to understand. The vast, vast majority of the words are the same and though the slang is different, a lot of it is understood by context. Or certain words in Latin American Spanish may be "formal" in Spain but they are still understood.


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## Nanon

Couch Tomato said:


> I would say _дощь _and I'm from Moscow. I'm surprised you've never heard it as I hear it all the time (and I'm not that old).


Not exactly never, but I try to pay attention and I have noticed that some Muscovites (or supposed to be? maybe they live in Moscow but I have the place they are from wrong?) say _дожьдь _a lot more frequently than I would have expected.And I agree with you, CT, about the "uniformity" of Russian as compared to other languages I speak: French, English, Spanish and Portuguese. I talk to a lot of speakers of Spanish from - and in - different countries. And the switch from Brazilian to European Portuguese takes me, erm... some concentration . I perceive those changes less when talking to native speakers of Russian.


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## learnerr

morbo said:


> I think you understand the difference between "liking to centralize" and "having a certain norm imposed on through a large-scale campaign". Things like likbez, total control over the media, education system  conforming to a unified state-controlled program influenced the language  in a way very unlike the influence of people getting together,  intermixing, exchanging certain "speech customs" of their social strata  and stuff like that.


First, people's likes to centralise do result in large-scale campaigns. Bolsheviks were good at advertising, so we, lay people, do know a little tad about how they followed this wish of people (now their advertisement success plays badly on them, but that's another matter); but it takes to be an historian in order to know what the tsarist governments did in this direction. Are you one?
Second, we need to understand the difference between what must have happened according to people's presuppositions and things that did actually happen. So again the question: was urban Russian very uniform before the Soviets?
As for "total control over the media" and "education system conforming to a unified state-controlled program" – how do you think, why there were well-educated people who wanted total reorganisation of life in Russia, up to revolution? Maybe because the tsarist governments approved like programmes just as well?


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## Ben Jamin

babosa daltónica said:


> Do you know Spanish? It is VERY uniform, especially for such an international language spread out over thousands and thousands of kilometers and 20 countries with it as the official language. Similarly, English is similarly very uniform. The only type of English that I have trouble with, to my knowledge, is the Scottish accented one.


How come then that Argentinian has 9000 own words that not only  Spaniards, but even Peruvians don't understand? Even window panes and matches have different names. They have their "voseo" that is unknown in most "Spanish" speaking countries, too.


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## Ben Jamin

morbo said:


> The Russian language of cities is what is more or less uniform. In no small part, it has to do with the fifty plus years of quite aggressive propagation -- through the education system, the media and otherwise -- of academically established norms, commissioned by the government. Since the early days of Soviet radio and later television, whatever spoken going on air was coming out of the mouths of specially selected people who were robotically articulating their lines. Now compare it with the history of the media in the free world -- the difference will be drastic.
> 
> When it comes to the language of people living in the territories that weren't thoroughly consumed by the aforementioned propagation, the differences could be quiute noticeable, with both pronunciation and vocabulary not conforming to the mold of the "proper" Soviet Russian speech; the speech of some elderly lady from a distant Siberian village might be anything but uniform with the speech of a city-born Mr. Pupkin.
> 
> So, to summarize, I tend to think of it as resulting from the psychotic idea of unification and standartization that permeated the whole Soviet period. And, of course, in the Soviet Russia (where 'Y' X's YOU!) the standards to be established would be comissioned in Moscow and developed primarily in academic circles of Moscow or Leningrad -- no surprise what speech standard was supposed to become ubiquitous.
> 
> I may seem a bit fixated on the Soviet period, but I'd think that is where the perceived uniformity may be coming from. But then again, the question remains whether it is really that uniform or not...
> 
> Disclaimer: I am by no means close to having any sort of expertise to speak of the problem with whatever authority.



Standardization of language has not been invented by the Soviets. It had been tried out much earlier by the French, Germans, Italians and English as well, for not to speak about many other nations. In the case of English the standardization was effective only when people aspiring to upper and upper middle class were concerned.


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## babosa daltónica

Ben Jamin said:


> How come then that Argentinian has 9000 own words that not only  Spaniards, but even Peruvians don't understand? Even window panes and matches have different names. They have their "voseo" that is unknown in most "Spanish" speaking countries, too.



Um, I talk with a lot of Argentines online on skype, also. Do you skype chat or chat face to face with Argentines? My friends sometimes use their peculiar way of conjugating verbs, but I understand what they are saying even if I don't agree with their way of doing things. And when we talk they don't use "Argentine" slang but "international" Spanish. There are words like "patotero" and the like that are not used in other countries (although probably in Uruguay) but it isn't a big deal--they just don't use them when speaking with other Spanish speakers. Go to any English speaking country or even state within the US and there will be differences in slang. The British say "flat" instead of apartment and "mobile" instead of "cell phone" but these differences don't impede intelligibility. With one argentine friend that I've spoken to for about 25 hours online, I can count on my hand the few times that he has used a word that I didn't know because it was listed as "argentine" slang on wordreference.

There are differences, but they aren't *that* big.


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## rusita preciosa

babosa daltónica said:


> There are differences, but they aren't *that* big.


I'm not sure what you are arguing with. The topic here is the degree of difference within Russian compared to other languages. 

I speak Spanish enough to appreciate some differences; my teacher was Mexican and I for a long time worked mostly with Agrentines. I can guarantee you there is much, much more differences between Argentine, Peninsular and Mexican varieties of Spanish than between any varieties of Russian. 

I also speak English fluently and work with Americans, Brits and Aussies. Again, the differences (altough not as big as in Spanish) are much greater than between any varieties of Russian.


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## Nanon

Based on face-to-face experience, I second Rusita's input. I work with a British company and I talk to Americans. My Spanish is Venezuelan but I visit Argentina once a year. I learnt (learn - does one ever stop learning a language?) Brazilian Portuguese but I was in Portugal recently. Not to forget that I have been working with a Belgian (Francophone) boss for a couple of years. I notice differences.  But I don't really notice anything significant when talking to colleagues or professional contacts in Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Minsk - just to give examples.


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## morbo

Ben Jamin said:


> Standardization of language has not been invented by the Soviets. It had been tried out much earlier by the French, Germans, Italians and English as well, for not to speak about many other nations. In the case of English the standardization was effective only when people aspiring to upper and upper middle class were concerned.



I'm pretty sure I haven't claimed that it was *invented* by them. I've just surmised that a certain brand of the Russian language -- the Russian of today, which is heard to be seemingly uniform, may have been influenced by an agency whose actions were rapid and well-organized, the results of those actions being way more far-reaching and quick to settle in than ever before.

I've repeatedly distanced myself from being assertive on the matter -- anyone can take a look at the Russian history of late 19th to mid 20th centuries and decide for themselves.

Upd:
Anyway, I've tried to highlight an influence instead of singling out something as "the" source of that uniformity.


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## Maroseika

Nanon said:


> It may take a Petersburger to respond, but there is or was a St Petersburg pronunciation. Too bad this article does not bear a date. The typical example I learnt when I was studying Russian back in the '80s was that Muscovites tended to say _дощь _while Lenigraders tended to say _дожьдь (дошьть)_. I am not sure I have heard anybody say _дощь _these days.



Many people say this nowadays in Moscow, especially when speaking quickly.


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## ahvalj

Take any book dedicated to the Russian dialectology, and you'll see that the difference between various dialects is pretty minor, especially in grammar. This is in striking contrast with Slovenian, a Slavic language spoken in a very limited (though montainous) territory while exhibiting by far the largest dialectal variability.

I won't pretend the reasons are clear, but from what we know about the history of Slavic dialects in what is now Russia, there was always a strong tendency for levelling. The Novgorod birch bark letters clearly show that the peculiarities of the former North-Western dialects diminished from the 11th to the 15th centuries and further — to such a degree that the dialects of this area to the early 20th century became minor variants of the Middle Russian dialectal belt. And all that happened with apparently no influence from the mass media ,-) 

A sidenote. I think it is inaccurate to speak of the ancient Pskov and Novgorod speech as of the fourth East Slavic language. We know about its peculiarities mostly because of the written evidence casually preserved in the archeological record and discovered in the last 60 years. We actually have no idea how far did the speech of other areas diverge from the literary standard of that time. Archeology and chronicles suggest that the East Slavic continuum was formed from two major waves of settlement: from modern West Ukraine and from modern northern Poland (словене, кривичи, вятичи), plus at least the accentological peculiarities of the dialects around Moscow suggest there may have been pockets of dialects that settled the Russian plain before the bulk of the Slavic migration and thus potentially exhibited in the past a number of specific features not less striking that in the North-West. Also the ethnic substrate was different: Finnic in the north, Baltic in the center and Iranian in the south. The modern boundaries between Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian are secondary and are largely defined by the political boundaries between the Horde, Polish Kingdom and the Great Duchy of Lithuania in the late Middle Ages. One thousand years ago the tribal boundaries were different and there is absolutely no evidence to think that dialects of modern Ukraine or of modern Russia were any closer to each other that to other dialects across the modern boundaries. In particular, in the couse of the history кривичи were divided between Belorussians and Russians, and северяне between Ukrainians and Russians.

A second sidenote. In St. Petersburg me and many other people say «дощ, дожжя», at least as variants. The differences in pronunciation you can find in the literature are to a great extent philological myths copied from one author to the other without attention to the real speaking habits. Unfortunately, this is how philology works during several millennia: the written opinion of earlier authors has prevalence over field observations.


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## Apollodoros

My 2 cents... I dare to express an opinion that had the Russian Empire survived until now, there would be no such languages as Belarussian or Ukrainian and these would be considered as mere dialects of Russian. So the answer to the original question lays mostly in politics. A yet different view would be that Russian had at some point dialects so different form the standard, that they evolved into separate languages. Now, that these two languages had separated and considering that the communication is easier and heavily influenced by the TV and other media mainly coming from the Moscow/St. Petersburg the local vernaculars will not diverge from the standard or at least the process will be very slow.


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## learnerr

Apollodoros said:


> I dare to express an opinion that had the Russian Empire survived until now, there would be no such languages as Belarussian or Ukrainian and these would be considered as mere dialects of Russian.


Why do you think so? We can't know what decisions would the country of Romanovs do, if Romanovs remained at rule. They would have to act quickly, and possibly in similar lines to Bolsheviks, who knew how to win hearts at that time.
By the way, that would be a funny monster: nearly an only major absolute actual hereditary monarchy in the world, and so vast.


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## Gavril

Out of curiosity, how does the dialectal diversity of Russian compare to that of Polish?

I recall a thread from a while ago where it was claimed that Polish has (virtually) no regional accents. Accents and dialects aren't exactly the same thing, but I wonder if there's any correlation here.


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## merquiades

In the Café Cultural Forum there was a thread called "the mystery of accents".  It's a long thread but perhaps some of you have access to it. The subject about Russian having or not having dialect was brought out.  I'll summarize what I remember.  In Southern Russia /g/ is pronounced /h/ giving them a very recognizable accent.  Likewise there are areas where unstressed /o/ and /a/ have merged into /a/, like Moscow, other areas like in Northern Russia where the two phonemes remain separate.  A purer Russian is spoken along the Volga RIver.  Moscow is sloppy in that speakers regularly assimilate consonants when they are back to back, or at the end of a word.
Here is a map of European Russia showing three main dialects and the geographic distribution of each.

Babosa Daltónica.  I find the differences in vocabulary and grammar to be very important between different varieties of English and Spanish.  Pronunciation too depending on the country.  The average Spaniard may be lost in Argentina assuming no effort is made by either person and knowledge of the specificities of each other's dialect is not known.  I have also heard stories of American tourists not understanding different people in the UK.  That is probably greater than the case of Russian, where it seems that vocabulary and grammar is rather uniform.


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## ryba

Apollodoros said:


> My 2 cents... I dare to express an opinion that had the Russian Empire survived until now, there would be no such languages as Belarussian or Ukrainian and these would be considered as mere dialects of Russian.



What you are talking about is a language shift scenario. And I'd say that language shift might be one of the key issues here: most modern Russian speakers are descendants of people who shifted to Russian from another language, very often non-Slavic.



Gavril said:


> Out of curiosity, how does the dialectal diversity of Russian compare to that of Polish?
> 
> I recall a thread from a while ago where it was claimed that Polish has  (virtually) no regional accents. Accents and dialects aren't exactly the  same thing, but I wonder if there's any correlation here.



The relatively high stability of the pre-war Standard Polish language aside, Polish has largely dedialectalized due to the mass migrations after the borders of Poland shifted westward, as the Soviet Union won the Second World War. The areas repopulated with speakers of different dialects (or of different varieties of regionally-flavored Standard Polish) are the ones that show the highest levels of dedialectalization. I'd say this leads us to another key issue: that of the scale of the migrations. Stalin loved to move people(s) around from one part of the Empire to another.


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## ahvalj

Apollodoros said:


> My 2 cents... I dare to express an opinion that had the Russian Empire survived until now, there would be no such languages as Belarussian or Ukrainian and these would be considered as mere dialects of Russian.


That actually partly happened with Belarussian: in the beginning of the twentieth century it was distributed somewhat further to the east, in what is now Smolensk oblast' of Russia (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Belarusians_1903.jpg?uselang=ru), and it was the school system that made the local population to switch to the language of educated classes, i. e. Russian. If you understand some Russian, you can read and listen about it here — http://echo.msk.ru/programs/netak/48841/  — namely: «Потому что там, по статистике, этих белорусов… если в 60-х годах их находили на западных окраинах Вяземского уезда, то где-нибудь уже к началу XIX века их находили где-нибудь восточнее Смоленска, около Дорогобужа, по той самой границе академика Карского. Поэтому, вот, ситуация достаточно стремительно складывалась. И если бы, вот, успехи императорского правительства по созданию значительного количества школ увенчались успехом, то никаких белорусов уже где-нибудь в 20-м году у нас бы и не было».


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## ahvalj

merquiades said:


> In the Café Cultural Forum there was a thread called "the mystery of accents".  It's a long thread but perhaps some of you have access to it. The subject about Russian having or not having dialect was brought out.  I'll summarize what I remember.  In Southern Russia /g/ is pronounced /h/ giving them a very recognizable accent.  Likewise there are areas where unstressed /o/ and /a/ have merged into /a/, like Moscow, other areas like in Northern Russia where the two phonemes remain separate.  A purer Russian is spoken along the Volga RIver.  Moscow is sloppy in that speakers regularly assimilate consonants when they are back to back, or at the end of a word.


Let me confess: for my 38 years I have never ever heard any Russian dialect. Never. Neither personally, nor in the media. The only time I was exposed to something comparable was in the countryside near the Ukrainian border where the locals of older age spoke surzhyk, a Ukrainian-Russian mix. 

The southern accent does exist (Khruschev, Brezhnev and Gorbachov as examples), but it consists just in some peculiarities in the way people pronounce the sounds and emphasize the intonation (very flat in literary Russian and stronger in the south and close to the Urals), plus some minor lexical preferences.


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## Skolkotvoyazhupa

This is a rant, but I hope it's educational, and it is on the subject of Slavic (inc. Russian) language divergence, and I hope to answer the OP's questions, without diverting onto romance languages etc.

My observations on Slavic languages and why they are so internally uniform, and the recent threats to that uniformity (300 years or so, but now accelerating):


1. Russian is quite uniform, but then all the Slavic language groups are quite uniform within each designation, it's normal, and the reason is that it is *easy to form native words*, because the affixes and suffixes and cases are all still Alive and Productive in Slavic languages. 

When I lived in Poland, I was able to 'invent' words when I didn't know the word, and imagine how pleased I was to discover that I almost always 'invented' the actual word! You don't get that in English or Spanish, if you don't know 'ladder' or 'polygraph', then you can't guess it. T

he uniformity between different Slavic languages is broken more by the random importation of words from other language families than by internal mutation. So for example, Polish has lots of old (dying out, thankfully) words from german beginning Sz+consonant, particularly words used in mining (Silesian influence) Russian has lots of words from French (tsarists fault) and Latin (Bolsheviks fault). 
I can understand Ukrainians and Slovaks when they speak slowly, - how good is that??
(Russians: too much foreign substitution (tartar words, French words, german words etc)) 

Latin sounds particularly ugly and alien to Slavic languages. The former dominance of French and German, and the current dominance of English, more of these smelly pidgin-latin and greek words are slithering into daily use in Polish. Compare for yourself, in just one example field, the simple beauty of Slavic word-making compared to the recent bourgeois desecration and alienation of Polish:

Języko+znaw+stwo - language+familiarity+collective - Lingwistyka: Linguistics.
źródło+słów - Source+of words - Etymologia - etymology
Mianow+nik - Nominate, name, elect + agent = nominative - "nominativus ETC" (recent Uni-speak)
Bier+nik - Passive + agent = accusative
Celow+nik - Goal, aim + agent = dative
Dopełniacz - (Person/thing) which makes complete - genitive
Narzędnik - Tool + agent = instrumental
Wołacz - (person/thing) which calls out = vocative

Do you know what this means? It means anyone who has a grip on the rootword (rdzeń) can quickly learn all technical vocabulary. I never understood "accusative" and "dative" and "transitive/intransitive" until I learnt Polish. My language, English is ruined and maimed and excludes ordinary people from being able to learn simple things. Because linguistics is a simple thing, if you could get rid of the high-sounding empty polysyllabic pig-latin nonsense.

In English, we waste so much effort learning latin and greek loan words.... half of university education in our countries is wasted learning big words instead of learning HOW and WHY to do things, sociology, psychology, business, littered with shoddy latin imports, devoid of content. More examples... what does 'diabetes' mean? Who knows. Asthma? No idea. you have to learn each word separately in English. Rather: in 'english'. But check out these (disappearing, alas) Polish versions:

Sukrz+yca - sugar + illness: diabetes
Dychaw+ica - breath + illness: Guess!
Grzyb+ica - fungus/mushroom + illness : Guess!

and eg:
Lekarz (medicine - lek+arz - occupation) - doctor
Lotnik (Flight + agent) - Pilot
Urzędnik (office + agent) - administrator/govt official etc etc etc

Help save Slavic languages from pollution: Don't say "medycyna" say: Lekarstwo! Don't say "agent" say: przedstawiciel! 

The welsh say : "If you lose your language you lose your identity" no wonder then, that we Anglophones have no proper identity or culture of our own...

Thanks, Bye!


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## Gavril

Hi Skolkotvoyazhupa,

Interesting post, but I wonder if it can be squared with the situation in Slovenian?

Slovene seems (based on the few months I've spent studying it) to be a very puristic language. E.g., it uses Slavic coinages for the names of cases (_rodilnik_ "genitive", _orodnik_ "instrumental", etc.) and parts of speech (_samostalnik_ "noun", _glagol_ "verb" etc.).

Yet, earlier in this thread, it was mentioned that Slovene shows greater dialectal diversity than Russian, despite being spoken over a comparatively tiny geographical area. Why would this be if Slavic languages "naturally" resist fragmentation into dialects?

(Maybe part of the answer has to do with the contrast between written Slovene, the main type I am familiar with right now, and spoken Slovene, which I've heard is much less puristic than the written language.)


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## Skolkotvoyazhupa

You could be right, I mean not just Slovenian, but there are lots of little languages in that whole area. I read about Baćka in serbia, and I swear to jesus, it is sooo like Polish/Slovak that I was stunned. Couldn't believe it, that so far away, for so long that there was more in common between a so-called 'south' Slavic Serbian dialect and two 'western' Slavic ones. So I looked into it further, and apparently a significant group of Slovaks had migrated to the Balkans after it had been settled by south slavs.... so there was a reason, you see!

So I guess groups there have been shifting and moving a lot more than the central European ones - influences form the people who already lived there or arrived later (same with the decline of inflection in Bulgarian, I suspect that the so many different ethnic groups used Bulgarian as a lingua franca and not a home language, that they simplified it, just like happens with French creoles, and happened to Latin in the provinces). That's the explanation I would offer, together with the muslim domination for hundreds of years (for this reason too, Russian differs a bit from polish etc, and according to those haplogroup ethnicity maps, about a quarter of Russian ancestry is Turkic-Altaic, contrasting with parts of Ukraine, Poland where it is nearly zero).

So, more mixing. That's why it's always a laugh for me when people speaking grammatically simplified languages talk about the purity of their nation... for a nation that had little mixing would still have a wildly complicated language (like medieval basque, Albanian, Georgian, eskimo languages etc) In Russia, the languages of those small groups of paleo-siberian languages have only disappeared and massively simplified within living memory... to do with being shifted around and using lingua francas, I think. I could be completely wrong.


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## gentilhom

This is not so special. French is also very uniform.


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## Skolkotvoyazhupa

gentilhom said:


> This is not so special. French is also very uniform.



Mmm but with french, there were originally many dialects, accents and even languages. The uniformity is due to government policy, rather than naturally conservative language. On example is Breton, where if a child in school was caught speaking Breton, he would be punished, unless he could catch another child speaking breton, and then he would escape punishment, and the second boy would cop it. This was the system of délateurs.


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## Copperknickers

Skolkotvoyazhupa said:


> Mmm but with french, there were originally many dialects, accents and even languages. The uniformity is due to government policy, rather than naturally conservative language. On example is Breton, where if a child in school was caught speaking Breton, he would be punished, unless he could catch another child speaking breton, and then he would escape punishment, and the second boy would cop it. This was the system of délateurs.



I don't know about Russian, but in the UK and Scandinavia, geosocial reasons have a large part to do with dialect and accent. 

Look at a map of Scottish accents, and there is a massive correlation between terrain and accent: so the central belt, a reasonably flat area, has almost exactly the same accent throughout, except in the middle of cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh where they become distinguishable. 

Then, as soon as you reach hills, you get to cities like Dundee and Aberdeen, which have a totally different accent that even fellow Scots are hard pressed to understand. This goes back to Medieval times when media and travel were not so easy: there was a lot of travel in the central belt, and interaction, because anyone who lived there travelled to Edinburgh, Stirling or Glasgow frequently. But Dundee and Angus were an entirely different sphere of influence, so different accents developed. And indeed, if you go over to the other side of the highlands, you find Gaelic, an entirely different language, being spoken. The same goes for Norway: each fjord has a differnt dialect, because the mountains separated them from interaction. So huge long fjords have 1 dialect, but two fjords next to each other have different dialects from each other. 

European Russia is extremely flat, and it had large cities with their spheres of influence that radiated out from Moscow. Scotland and Norway did not really have a real capital city until recently, but St Petersburg and then Moscow have been easily the most important cities in Moscow since. Especially, because of the change, the established St Petersburg prestige dialect neutralised the Muscovite dialect as the centre of prestige shifted to Moscow. So the geography of Russia is not conducive to dialectalisation in the way that the UK is.


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## korova_milkbar

Gavril said:


> Out of curiosity, how does the dialectal diversity of Russian compare to that of Polish?
> 
> I recall a thread from a while ago where it was claimed that Polish has (virtually) no regional accents. Accents and dialects aren't exactly the same thing, but I wonder if there's any correlation here.


Poland has no accents in the regions with a plenty of post-war immigration from all the other parts of the country. This also why the Russian language is so uniform accross the USSR. The industrial mammoth cities between the Urals and the Pacific Ocean were planted and populated by Joseph Stalin. 



ryba said:


> Most modern Russian speakers are descendants of people who shifted to Russian from another language, very often non-Slavic.


Makhachkala is unique in that people can tell exactly where in the Caucasus you are from based on how you speak your Russian. And that language wasn't spoken there until ~100 years ago. So recent language shift did occur but it didn't level regional difference at all.


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## Ben Jamin

ryba said:


> What you are talking about is a language shift scenario. And I'd say that language shift might be one of the key issues here: most modern Russian speakers are descendants of people who shifted to Russian from another language, very often non-Slavic.



This is not correct. Most of the inhabitants of the modern Russia are descendants of people that had spoken Russian for centuries. The ethnic minorities today, mostly concentrated in the peripheries, are not so populous as to form a majority. Besides, people settling in new areas learn the local dialect in not more than one generation, unless they have a chance of living in thery dense minority groups.



ryba said:


> The relatively high stability of the pre-war Standard Polish language aside, Polish has largely dedialectalized due to the mass migrations after the borders of Poland shifted westward, as the Soviet Union won the Second World War. The areas repopulated with speakers of different dialects (or of different varieties of regionally-flavored Standard Polish) are the ones that show the highest levels of dedialectalization. I'd say this leads us to another key issue: that of the scale of the migrations. Stalin loved to move people(s) around from one part of the Empire to another.



 You must not forget that the acquired ("recovered") teritories include only 30% of the teritory and 25-27% of population. In the rest of the country the core population have remained mostly unchanged. So the reasons of declining of dialects in Poland must be sought elsewhere.


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## Maroseika

Skolkotvoyazhupa said:


> and eg:
> Lekarz (medicine - lek+arz - occupation) - doctor



By the way, lekarz < leca (medical cure) < Germanic (cf. Gothic lēkeis - doctor, Anglosax læce - doctor, Swedish läkare – doctor and so on).
Discard this stem?


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## Gavril

Maroseika said:


> By the way, lekarz < leca (medical cure) < Germanic (cf. Gothic lēkeis - doctor, Anglosax læce - doctor, Swedish läkare – doctor and so on).
> Discard this stem?



Slovene uses _zdravnik_ for "doctor" and _zdravilo_ or _sredstvo_ for "medicine", but the _lek-_ root shows up in e.g., _lekarna_ "pharmacy".


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## ryba

Ben Jamin said:


> This is not correct. Most of the inhabitants of the modern Russia are descendants of people that had spoken Russian for centuries.



Prove me wrong. I want statistics. Besides, why are you talking about modern Russia _only_? I wasn't. What exactly do you mean by "for centuries"? Do you think a language shift that ocurred, say, in the times of Peter I (i.e. 3 centuries ago) has no bearing whatsoever on the current shape of the language?



Ben Jamin said:


> You must not forget that the acquired ("recovered") teritories include only 30% of the teritory and (…)



This thread is about Russian, not about Polish (or any other Slavic language). I constructed my post in a way that was supposed to keep the discussion focused on Russian, and give prominence to the link I provided.


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## ahvalj

ryba said:


> Prove me wrong. I want statistics.


Could you please explain where is it intended to get this kind of statistics? Anyway, even if all the Russian population would have acquired their current language from some Martian colonizers, it would not explain its uniformity across most of Eurasia. English in Australia or New Zealand or South Africa, being less than two centuries old, already represents separate regional variants, Dutch in South Africa has developed into a separate language. Nothing comparable exists in Russian: all the tendencies are centripetal there.


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## ryba

ahvalj said:


> Could you please explain where is it intended to get this kind of statistics? Anyway, even if all the Russian population would have acquired their current language from some Martian colonizers, it would not explain its uniformity across most of Eurasia. English in Australia or New Zealand or South Africa, being less than two centuries old, already represents separate regional variants, Dutch in South Africa has developed into a separate language. Nothing comparable exists in Russian: all the tendencies are centripetal there.


Exactly. Which is why I restrained myself from stating _in what way_ the language shift(s) may have influenced the development of Russian, and merely named the issue among the factors to consider.


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## ahvalj

If we do not go deep in history and only touch the last centuries, the language shift may have been statistically important only in the areas between Volga and the Urals or in the Caucasus, and even there I cannot imagine any source of reliable data as to the percent of speakers — only a subjective feeling that the percent of strangely looking people there is higher than elsewhere. Belarus and Ukraine are a different thing, but with all the peculiarities of the Russian language there, it is nothing remotely comparable to the regional variants of English or Spanish or French overseas. From the St. Peterburg perspective, people in Ukraine may speak Russian with a funny countryside accent and use some local words, but it is not a dialect.


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## korova_milkbar

ahvalj said:


> Dutch in South Africa has developed into a separate language.


There is no Kavkazaans because the Mountainous Republic didn't last quite as long as the Orange Free State. 
Although the Skoropadsky hetmanate fell soon after establishment as well. And still Ukrainian is a proper language.
Go figure!


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## Maroseika

korova_milkbar said:


> Although the Skoropadsky hetmanate fell soon after establishment as well. And still Ukrainian is a proper language.
> Go figure!


Ukrainian is a proper language not because it has separated once from Russian and developed separately for centuries. But just because both Ukrainian and Russian are equal descendant of once common language, and it is a big question actually, which one resembles that common language more. 

As for other examples, it would be interesting to compare language of Volga Germans with the corresponding German dialects. Anybody knows how far they diverged?


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## ahvalj

Maroseika said:


> But just because both Ukrainian and Russian are equal descendant of once common language, and it is a big question actually, which one resembles that common language more.


There is no question: lexically and orthographically Russian is more conservative (cp. http://litopys.org.ua/yushkov/yu04.htm or http://litopys.org.ua/oldukr/pouch.htm), otherwise both languages have changed in a more or less similar degree.


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## ahvalj

By the way, there is not only geographical but also a considerable social uniformity. The school and media for the last century have largely eradicated the speech of old uneducated classes: even a person of lowest educational rank now speaks the language that is much closer to that of the heroes of e. g. Tolstoy than to those of Dostoyevsky or Zoschenko — in the sense that the spoken language of the latest decades is not descendant in any perceptible way from the speech of uneducated classes of the past.


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## korova_milkbar

Maroseika said:


> Ukrainian is a proper language not because it has separated once from Russian and developed separately for centuries. But just because both Ukrainian and Russian are equal descendant of once common language, and it is a big question actually, which one resembles that common language more.
> 
> As for other examples, it would be interesting to compare language of Volga Germans with the corresponding German dialects. Anybody knows how far they diverged?



Uzbeks speak the best Common East Slavic. They still have consistent  polnoglasie and ultra-short vowel-yers. As to Volga German you're better off asking in the German forum. The Volga Germans live in Germany now. My best guess is it went to the very same graveyard as Kalmyk Oirat and Meskhetian  Turkish.


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## ahvalj

korova_milkbar said:


> Uzbeks speak the best Common East Slavic. They still have consistent  polnoglasie and ultra-short vowel-yers. As to Volga German you're better off asking in the German forum. The Volga Germans live in Germany now. My best guess is it went to the very same graveyard as Kalmyk Oirat and Meskhetian  Turkish.


Евгений Ваганович, здесь не все в состоянии понять Ваш искромётный юмор...


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## Ben Jamin

ryba said:


> Prove me wrong. I want statistics. Besides, why are you talking about modern Russia _only_? I wasn't. What exactly do you mean by "for centuries"? Do you think a language shift that ocurred, say, in the times of Peter I (i.e. 3 centuries ago) has no bearing whatsoever on the current shape of the language?



 I haven't got the statistics, but I still maintain that the develpoment of the  Russian language (at least since middle ages) has not been influenced by absorbtion of people speaking other langauges. The few Mongol and Tatar loans don't change the picture.



ryba said:


> This thread is about Russian, not about Polish (or any other Slavic language). I constructed my post in a way that was supposed to keep the discussion focused on Russian, and give prominence to the link I provided.


It's you that have brought the Polish dialects to the thread, so mine was just a response to it.

By the way, the decline of dialects in both Poland and Russia in the XIX and XX century may have the same reasons. Both countries had a peasant population that had been hold as an underprivileged caste of quasi slaves, with extremely low social status. This population, emancipated in the 1860-s, began to move to towns and losing their dialects that were treated as a social stigma. With the social advancement of the rural population and migration to towns under the Communist rule, people were even more eager to become as anybody else in the cities, and to speak the standard language.


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## ahvalj

Ben Jamin said:


> By the way, the decline of dialects in both Poland and Russia in the XIX and XX century may have the same reasons. Both countries had a peasant population that had been hold as an underprivileged caste of quasi slaves, with extremely low social status. This population, emancipated in the 1860-s, began to move to towns and losing their dialects that were treated as a social stigma. With the social advancement of the rural population and migration to towns under the Communist rule, people were even more eager to become as anybody else in the cities, and to speak the standard language.


In Russian it is not constrained to the cities: wherever in the countryside I was, I never heard any dialect spoken there. Plus, indeed, as I had written some posts above, the dialectal differentiation in Russian never was strong, even before the acquisition of the lands lying eastwards. I recall in this connection the situation with the Old Norse: so far no dialectal variability is documented there prior to the viking times (judging from the runic inscriptions and subsequent developments), yet since the medieval period especially Norway became a real patchwork in this respect — without any foreign influence and with exactly the same connections between different parts of the country. So, there are processes in languages we do not quite understand: different societies are not equally ready to accept the language deviations.


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## Ben Jamin

ahvalj said:


> In Russian it is not constrained to the cities: wherever in the countryside I was, I never heard any dialect spoken there. Plus, indeed, as I had written some posts above, the dialectal differentiation in Russian never was strong, even before the acquisition of the lands lying eastwards. I recall in this connection the situation with the Old Norse: so far no dialectal variability is documented there prior to the viking times (judging from the runic inscriptions and subsequent developments), yet since the medieval period especially Norway became a real patchwork in this respect — without any foreign influence and with exactly the same connections between different parts of the country. So, there are processes in languages we do not quite understand: different societies are not equally ready to accept the language deviations.



Well, dialects are quickly disappearing in the country in Poland too. The rural population has followed, albeit later, the general trend of acquiring the standard language, helped by spreading of secondary and higher education. The regions that still stick to dialects are usually located in regions with lower accessibility, especuially mountains.

I think that the flat configuration of the Great European Plain is a feature that promotes easy communication between people, and therefore lesser pulverization of the langauges. 

In Norway it's both the mountains and fiords that form natural barriers and create an incredible patchwork of dialects. Often people living a couple of kilometers from each other speak very different dialects.


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## ahvalj

Ben Jamin said:


> In Norway it's both the mountains and fiords that form natural barriers and create an incredible patchwork of dialects. Often people living a couple of kilometers from each other speak very different dialects.


That's true but interestingly there is no evidence this differentiation existed before about 1500 years ago — with exactly the same geography. All the distinguishing characters of modern Scandinavian dialects are younger than that age.


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## Ben Jamin

ahvalj said:


> That's true but interestingly there is no evidence this differentiation existed before about 1500 years ago — with exactly the same geography. All the distinguishing characters of modern Scandinavian dialects are younger than that age.


1. People were much less numerous and lived much more concentrated at that time. They had enough land to cultivate in few, but fertile areas. Later, when the population grew, the people began to move to far away places.
2. It takes time to differentiate into dialects. 
3. We haven't got much evidence about dialects spoken at that time.


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## ahvalj

Ben Jamin said:


> 1. People were much less numerous and lived much more concentrated at that time. They had enough land to cultivate in few, but fertile areas. Later, when the population grew, the people began to move to far away places.
> 2. It takes time to differentiate into dialects.
> 3. We haven't got much evidence about dialects spoken at that time.


(1) People already occupied those territories of south-eastern and south-western Norway and southern and central Sweden where in the last millennium we encounter numerous dialects of two languages.
(2) The Germanic languages have been spoken in that region for three thousand years, so 3000-1500=1500 years were sufficient to get differentiated into dialects (and the entire Germanic group did differentiate, it is the Scandinavian speech that did not for some reason).
(3) We have runic inscriptions since the first centuries AD and they show no dialectal variability + none of the modern dialectal differences can be traced that far back, which means that the ancient dialectal characters in what is now Scandinavian languages were either insignificant or were leveled, the latter in its turn being rather strange since there was neither any major population exchange not any strong state to impose that leveling.

Why I recalled the Old Norse is to illustrate that the exactly same population with no alleged language shifts, migrations or totalitarian influences (all mentioned in this thread) may differ so much in its inclination to the dialectal differentiation: very strong in modern Norway (OK, south eastern and south western Norway) and barely noticeable two thousand years ago. Must be psychology.


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> That's true but interestingly there is no evidence this differentiation existed before about 1500 years ago — with exactly the same geography.



Was Germanic really spoken in *exactly* the same regions 1500 years ago (500 CE) as today? I'm no expert on this matter, but my understanding is that northern Scandinavia and Finland were dominated by speakers of Sami (or other non-IE) languages until relatively recent centuries.

I also recall (perhaps wrongly) reading that North Germanic didn't really start expanding beyond Denmark and the southern edges of Sweden/Norway until around 750 CE, and there was noticeable dialectal differentiation in North Germanic by 300 years thereafter (perhaps much sooner). And the North Germanic of 750 was already clearly distinct from the East and West Germanic of the same time period.


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## Gavril

P.S. -- as I was writing the last post, you posted that



> (2) The Germanic languages have been spoken in that region for three thousand years, so 3000-1500=1500 years were sufficient to get differentiated into dialects (and the entire Germanic group did differentiate, it is the Scandinavian speech that did not for some reason).



Just so I can be clear on your position, what territory do you think Germanic covered 3,000 years ago?


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> Just so I can be clear on your position, what territory do you think Germanic covered 3,000 years ago?


Well, archeology may tell more precisely, but I guess the southern part of Scandinavia, Denmark and the northern Germany. Netherlands have remnants of IE but not Germanic hydronymy. Northern Poland had Baltic Venetians (most probably a separate branch of IE). No ideas about Central Germany.


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> Was Germanic really spoken in *exactly* the same regions 1500 years ago (500 CE) as today? I'm no expert on this matter, but my understanding is that northern Scandinavia and Finland were dominated by speakers of Sami (or other non-IE) languages until relatively recent centuries.
> 
> I also recall (perhaps wrongly) reading that North Germanic didn't really start expanding beyond Denmark and the southern edges of Sweden/Norway until around 750 CE, and there was noticeable dialectal differentiation in North Germanic by 300 years thereafter (perhaps much sooner). And the North Germanic of 750 was already clearly distinct from the East and West Germanic of the same time period.


I intentionally limited the scope of the discussion with south-eastern and south-western Norway where the ethnic composition didn't change for sure — until the arrival of Hanseatic settlers in the Middle Ages and the modern immigrational disaster.

Scandinavians indeed occupied Denmark only after the departure of northern Ingaevones to Britain, so the original Norse was spoken only in what is now southern Norway and Sweden. Well, southern Sweden is a plain, but southern Norway is geographically very diverse and what strikes is that these geographic circumstances apparently did not cause any perceptible dialectal splitting for so long. Since this is not very probable, we must assume that there were psychological reasons that favored leveling and prevented any strong divergence — i. e. exactly the same reasons that we are discussing here with the Russian language.

There are cases when people see nothing wrong in speaking differently, and there are cases when they feel uncomfortable doing so. The absence of strong dialectal and (social) distinctions in the Russian speech must be caused first of all by these psychological reasons (strengthened of course by the centralized power — but this centralization itself was possible because the Russian language remained rather uniform and people from geographically distant regions [thousands of km by the way] did not feel alien to each other).


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## Gavril

Hi,



> Well, archeology may tell more precisely, but I guess the southern part of Scandinavia, Denmark and the northern Germany. Netherlands have remnants of IE but not Germanic hydronymy. Northern Poland had Baltic Venetians (most probably a separate branch of IE). No ideas about Central Germany.



Even if southern Norway/Sweden were Germanic-speaking far back in BCE times (with all due respect, I'm not sure how solid the consensus is on this), how can we be sure what Germanic dialect was spoken there before c.500 CE -- the time of the earliest inscriptions, to my knowledge -- and therefore how dialectally uniform this region remained over that period?



ahvalj said:


> I intentionally limited the scope of the discussion with south-eastern and south-western Norway where the ethnic composition didn't change for sure — until the arrival of Hanseatic settlers in the Middle Ages and the modern immigrational disaster.
> 
> Scandinavians indeed occupied Denmark only after the departure of northern Ingaevones to Britain,



What's your source for this, out of curiosity? I thought that Denmark (i.e., at least *part* of modern-day Denmark) was inhabited by North Germanic speakers at least as long ago as the northern Scandinavian countries, if not longer.



> There are cases when people see nothing wrong in speaking differently, and there are cases when they feel uncomfortable doing so. The absence of strong dialectal and (social) distinctions in the Russian speech must be caused first of all by these psychological reasons (strengthened of course by the centralized power — but this centralization itself was possible because the Russian language remained rather uniform and people from geographically distant regions [thousands of km by the way] did not feel alien to each other).



How is it that speakers of the Russian language would have assumed this "centripetal" stance in the first place, in contrast to speakers of many/most other Slavic languages? And what mechanism has kept the Russian area so uniquely "pure" in this respect across the centuries?

I don't mean to sound too critical here, but it seems to me that you're jumping the gun in your dismissal of geography, social policy etc. as causal factors in dialectal uniformity.


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## learnerr

ahvalj said:


> but this centralization itself was possible because the Russian language remained rather uniform and people from geographically distant regions [thousands of km by the way] did not feel alien to each other.


You might have hit the nail by this phrase, actually. If people believe that their not being alien to each other and their speaking the same tongue are inseparable (which, in general, is not true), then they will think that they speak the same tongue no matter what would lead them into a different conclusion. People speaking other dialects than one's own would be derided, personal developments of speech perceived as personal peculiarities, not something to imitate, and over-inventive speech felt not necessary or shameful.

Another thing to consider is that, in Russian, the written grammar is nearly the same as the supposed grammar of oral speech (which is seldom completely followed for the sake of shortness, but that's a matter on its own). Therefore, people perceive the language that they get in schools as exactly their own, having no psychological barriers to acquire it. For English, as I was surprised to learn, this is not true; not sure whether it is true for Spanish or French. At least, the concept of a verbal tense that exists, but is not used in speech, and even natives don't know how to use it, (as far as I know, something of this sort exists in Italian and in French), is entirely foreign to me.

Whether either of these bits plays actually any substantial role, I don't know, but they are points to bring.


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> Even if southern Norway/Sweden were Germanic-speaking far back in BCE times (with all due respect, I'm not sure how solid the consensus is on this), how can we be sure what Germanic dialect was spoken there before c.500 CE -- the time of the earliest inscriptions, to my knowledge -- and therefore how dialectally uniform this region remained over that period?.


From the Roman and Greek authors we imagine more or less the general tribal composition of the Germanic peoples of the first centuries, and we can be sure that all those who stayed in the Scandinavian peninsula developed into the later Scandinavians. All the bearers of the future West Germanic languages inhabited the continent at that time (though East German tribes may have been replenished by Scandinavian emigrants — e. g. Heruli — even for some time after that period). There is absolutely no evidence of any immigration *to* southern Scandinavia. 

As to the uniformity — I am sorry, but this will be the third time for 24 hours I will have to repeat the arguments. (1) The oldest runic inscriptions written in the Old Norse are linguistically uniform (this is in no way my original research: you can find this statement in any publication dealing with them). (2) The modern Scandinavian dialects have no ancient dividing characters (again, not my statement, though I will be able to comment if you find anything you consider ancient), which means that the pre-viking dialectal diversity was either originally weak or leveled for some reasons. Taking into consideration the landscape diversity in southern Norway, and the tendency of the later Norwegian language to split into dialects in the historical times, this looks spectacular.


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> What's your source for this, out of curiosity? I thought that Denmark (i.e., at least *part* of modern-day Denmark) was inhabited by North Germanic speakers at least as long ago as the northern Scandinavian countries, if not longer.


A part of northern Denmark is sometimes considered to have been inhabited by Vandals or a tribe of a similar name (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendsyssel). Well, there is no consensus if the East Germanic languages split from the North Germanic ones when their speakers migrated to the continent, but if so, this will be the only ancient evidence of Scandinavian speakers south of the Baltic sea I can recall. 

The map reflecting the traditional views on the ethnic composition of Denmark at the late Roman period can be seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_settlement_of_Britain Both Jutes and Angles were Ingaevones, i. e. West German peoples. Otherwise, see Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark#Prehistory):
"Historians believe that before the arrival of the precursors to the Danes, who came from the east Danish islands (Zealand) and Skåne and spoke an early form of North Germanic, most of Jutland and the nearest islands were settled by Jutes. They were later invited to Great Britain as mercenaries by Brythonic King Vortigern and were granted the south-eastern territories of Kent, theIsle of Wight among other areas, where they settled. They were later absorbed or ethnically cleansed by the invading Angles and Saxons, who formed the Anglo-Saxons. The remaining population in Jutland assimilated in with the Danes."


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> How is it that speakers of the Russian language would have assumed this "centripetal" stance in the first place, in contrast to speakers of many/most other Slavic languages? And what mechanism has kept the Russian area so uniquely "pure" in this respect across the centuries?
> 
> I don't mean to sound too critical here, but it seems to me that you're jumping the gun in your dismissal of geography, social policy etc. as causal factors in dialectal uniformity.


Again, this has been mentioned already in the discussion of the past few days. We do not have evidence that any deep split ever existed in what is now Russian language area. The most deviating dialect, that one of the ancient north-west (Pskov and Novgorod lands), documented by numerous birch bark letters, shows gradual leveling from the 11th century onwards, so that 100 years ago it was merely a minor dialect of the middle Russian dialectal belt. All the other dialects are documented from much later times and their distinguishing characters are quite minor, regardless of the geographic distance between them. These are not interpretations but field observations you can find in any book on the Russian dialectology. The uniformity of the language spoken now across the Russian territory (including much of the countryside) would have been impossible if the dialectal distinctions were stronger. These are facts and my centripetal ideas are just attempts to give explanations to the question of this thread: the Russian language is very uniform now and was rather uniform (both on the written and dialectal levels) across all its history. I mentioned ancient southern Norway to illustrate that the ethnic changes, recent settlement or strong state are not necessary conditions of language uniformity.


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## ahvalj

learnerr said:


> You might have hit the nail by this phrase, actually. If people believe that their not being alien to each other and their speaking the same tongue are inseparable (which, in general, is not true), then they will think that they speak the same tongue no matter what would lead them into a different conclusion. People speaking other dialects than one's own would be derided, personal developments of speech perceived as personal peculiarities, not something to imitate, and over-inventive speech felt not necessary or shameful.
> 
> Another thing to consider is that, in Russian, the written grammar is nearly the same as the supposed grammar of oral speech (which is seldom completely followed for the sake of shortness, but that's a matter on its own). Therefore, people perceive the language that they get in schools as exactly their own, having no psychological barriers to acquire it. For English, as I was surprised to learn, this is not true; not sure whether it is true for Spanish or French. At least, the concept of a verbal tense that exists, but is not used in speech, and even natives don't know how to use it, (as far as I know, something of this sort exists in Italian and in French), is entirely foreign to me.
> 
> Whether either of these bits plays actually any substantial role, I don't know, but they are points to bring.


I haven't quite understood the first part of your post.

As to the Romance verbal system: you probably meant the French passé simple and its relatives in other languages. The situation is quite transparent (and is repeated with the analog of this tense in south German and in the old East Slavic): that tense disappeared from the speech *after* the literary language had formed, so while it is no longer used in the spoken language, people still acquire a passive knowledge of it through the literature and proverbs. Of course, since forms of the Romance passé simple, German Präteritum or slavic Aorist are quite complicated, the more deviating verbs cause more troubles, so a moderately educated person may have less doubts forming such forms from more regular verbs and be uncertain as to the others.


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## learnerr

In the Italian forum even the natives debate when it is possible, impossible or required to use the conjunctive mood (which I mistakenly called a tense). I.e. the question is not how to form it, but what it means. As for the first part of my post, one thing if people feel that, even if they are "the same" with the others, their speech is still their own business (which is true, even if counter-intuitive for us), another is when people think that if they speak in a conceptually different way, then they are aliens with the others. In the latter mood of thinking, if they want to believe they're not aliens, then they have to think that their speech, even if different, is not "conceptually" different, but is just mistaken.


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## Ben Jamin

ahvalj said:


> (1) People already occupied those territories of south-eastern and south-western Norway and southern and central Sweden where in the last millennium we encounter numerous dialects of two languages.
> (2) The Germanic languages have been spoken in that region for three thousand years, so 3000-1500=1500 years were sufficient to get differentiated into dialects (and the entire Germanic group did differentiate, it is the Scandinavian speech that did not for some reason).
> (3) We have runic inscriptions since the first centuries AD and they show no dialectal variability + none of the modern dialectal differences can be traced that far back, which means that the ancient dialectal characters in what is now Scandinavian languages were either insignificant or were leveled, the latter in its turn being rather strange since there was neither any major population exchange not any strong state to impose that leveling.
> 
> Why I recalled the Old Norse is to illustrate that the exactly same population with no alleged language shifts, migrations or totalitarian influences (all mentioned in this thread) may differ so much in its inclination to the dialectal differentiation: very strong in modern Norway (OK, south eastern and south western Norway) and barely noticeable two thousand years ago. Must be psychology.


I would be very interested in finding some literature on this subject. I can imagine that the way languages split into dialects, and later int new dialects has its own dynamics. It seems that in 1700 BC the later Germanic peoples were forming their Protogermanic language, and later it took time to differentiate the Norse language from the rest of the Germanic languages, and only then they could start to split the Norwegian branch of Norse into local Norwegian dialects.


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## ahvalj

learnerr said:


> In the Italian forum even the natives debate when it is possible, impossible or required to use the conjunctive mood (which I mistakenly called a tense). I.e. the question is not how to form it, but what it means. As for the first part of my post, one thing if people feel that, even if they are "the same" with the others, their speech is still their own business (which is true, even if counter-intuitive for us), another is when people think that if they speak in a conceptually another way, then they are aliens with the others. In the latter mood of thinking, if they want to believe they're not aliens, then they have to think that their speech, even if different, is not "conceptually" different, but is just mistaken.


I was never really interested in the Conjunctive so I cannot comment in detail, but I guess the Conjunctive usage in literary Romance languages was modeled after the Latin patterns (where the scope of that mood far exceeded the average across languages in this part of the world) and thus this extended Conjunctive is largely foreign to the Romance speakers, hence the troubles.

And again I don't understand what you are saying about the speakers' psychology. Since the dialectal differences now are largely eroded, and none of us can have any personal experience with them, I suggest to discuss the perception of Russian in the minds of Ukrainians and Belarusians, whose languages are different, but for many of whom Russian was (or still is) *the* literary language contrasted with their domestic dialects.


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## ahvalj

Ben Jamin said:


> I would be very interested in finding some literature on this subject. I can imagine that the way languages split into dialects, and later int new dialects has its own dynamics. It seems that in 1700 BC the later Germanic peoples were forming their Protogermanic language, and later it took time to differentiate the Norse language from the rest of the Germanic languages, and only then they could start to split the Norwegian branch of Norse into local Norwegian dialects.


Let's look at this from a purely practical viewpoint. You belong to a small tribe that settles some isolated fjord. You have contacts with your neighbors, but these are inevitably rather limited, plus the geography dictates that from that mountain to this one there is your land, and the rest is something alien and unknown, especially for those who are born here. The speech of your descendants starts to develop a little differently than that of your close, and especially remote, neighbors. After some centuries your dialect becomes different enough. This is how things happened in any mountainous area, including Norway of the last millennium. I see no reasons why two or three thousand years ago things in the same fjord would have happened any different. That divergence should have started since the Germanic language was brought to that fjord, say, three thousand years ago, and, extrapolating the level of divergence Norwegian dialects have acquired for the last 10 centuries, it should have been much stronger (cp. the Tsakonian dialect of Greek that continues the ancient Doric). Yet the presently observed divergence level indicates some starting point which roughly coincides with the beginning of the viking era — if there were dialects in each fjord before, we see no traces of them. Why, I don't know, but this is an illustration that the same nation in the same geography may behave differently as to their disposition towards dialectal variability. Russians, true, live in a plain, but the participants of this thread forget that the extreme points at this plain are separated by thousands of kilometers, so no real language contact was possible between speakers of remote areas and nevertheless the dialects are less distinct than within minute Slovenia. The same is true for the strong state: yes, in the 20th century the state imposed the unified language through schools and media, but which linguistic influence was possible from Moscow and St. Petersburg to some remote villages a few centuries ago? In most of these areas people never had a chance to hear a person from the capitals, less so to copy his speaking habits...


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## ahvalj

An observation from the 18th century by Lomonosov, himself a native speaker of a far northern dialect: «Народ российский, по великому пространству обитающий, невзирая на дальное расстояние, говорит повсюду вразумительным друг другу языком в городах и в селах. Напротив того, в некоторых других государствах, например в Германии баварский крестьянин мало разумеет мекленбургского или бранденбургский швабского, хотя все того ж немецкого народа» (http://feb-web.ru/feb/lomonos/texts/lo0/lo7/lo7-5852.htm).


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> From the Roman and Greek authors we imagine more or less the general tribal composition of the Germanic peoples of the first centuries, and we can be sure that all those who stayed in the Scandinavian peninsula developed into the later Scandinavians.



We can? Since written records of any kind don't start appearing in Scandinavia until the early centuries CE, I think we have to reserve judgement on the linguistic makeup of present-day Norway in BCE times. Even if we grant that it was Germanic, I don't know how we can be sure that it was Proto-Scandinavian Germanic.



> All the bearers of the future West Germanic languages inhabited the continent at that time (though East German tribes may have been replenished by Scandinavian emigrants — e. g. Heruli — even for some time after that period). There is absolutely no evidence of any immigration *to* southern Scandinavia.



Is this a case where absence of evidence can be equated with evidence of absence?



> As to the uniformity — I am sorry, but this will be the third time for 24 hours I will have to repeat the arguments. (1) The oldest runic inscriptions written in the Old Norse are linguistically uniform (this is in no way my original research: you can find this statement in any publication dealing with them).



Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most of the earliest Runic inscriptions in Scandinavia (from 500 CE or before, say) come from Denmark or southern Sweden?



ahvalj said:


> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark#Prehistory):
> "Historians believe that before the arrival of the precursors to the Danes, who came from the east Danish islands (Zealand) and Skåne and spoke an early form of North Germanic, most of Jutland and the nearest islands were settled by Jutes.



Zealand/Sjælland is part of modern-day Denmark, so this doesn't contradict the idea that Denmark is part of the ancestral North Germanic territory (perhaps more ancestral than modern-day Norway).



> (2) The modern Scandinavian dialects have no ancient dividing characters (again, not my statement, though I will be able to comment if you find anything you consider ancient), which means that the pre-viking dialectal diversity was either originally weak or leveled for some reasons.



The question is how long these dialects have been in the Scandinavian area north of Denmark, i.e., how long they've had to develop. I'm not yet convinced that Norway had 1500 (or even 500) years of linguistic uniformity followed by a sudden differentiation into dialects.


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> We can? Since written records of any kind don't start appearing in Scandinavia until the early centuries CE, I think we have to reserve judgement on the linguistic makeup of present-day Norway in BCE times. Even if we grant that it was Germanic, I don't know how we can be sure that it was Proto-Scandinavian Germanic.


OK, nobody can until the time machine becomes available. What it may change in the context of our discussion is that you are free to assume a language shift to proto-North Germanic in this area, making my example on the ethnic and linguistic stability of that piece of land inapplicable. Well, this would change nothing with the Russian language, just would make the situation less beautifully contrasted.




Gavril said:


> Is this a case where absence of evidence can be equated with evidence of absence?


Philosophy detected. Too smart for my level.




Gavril said:


> Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most of the earliest Runic inscriptions in Scandinavia (from 500 CE or before, say) come from Denmark or southern Sweden?


Check the map here, please: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Futhark



Gavril said:


> Zealand/Sjælland is part of modern-day Denmark, so this doesn't contradict the idea that Denmark is part of the ancestral North Germanic territory (perhaps more ancestral than modern-day Norway).


OK, though I have never seen any data about the tribal composition of ancient Zealand. Why do they call it North Germanic, I don't understand. In any case, you may be right, and this area of modern Denmark may have been inhabited indeed by North Germanic speakers.



Gavril said:


> The question is how long these dialects have been in the Scandinavian area north of Denmark, i.e., how long they've had to develop. I'm not yet convinced that Norway had 1500 (or even 500) years of linguistic uniformity followed by a sudden differentiation into dialects.


I have written nothing about the continuous dialectal uniformity — in contrast, in my post #67 I qualified this as unrealistic since dialects tend to diverge in such geographic conditions. What I did state is that in the first centuries AC there are no signs of dialect diversity in Scandinavia — most probably due to some leveling, though there is no information to discuss its reasons. I had mentioned there the situation with the Greek dialects, which passed through a probably similar process: the diverse and pretty well documented (for that remote period) ancient dialects were leveled with the spread of the Koine so that only the Tsakonian survived to the present day, while all the medieval and modern Greek dialects are descendants of the former Ionic speech. The Greek situation is different, however, in that this leveling occurred with the spread of the Greek as an official language — first in the Macedonian Empire and its Hellenistic descendants, then in the Roman Empire as one of two official languages, and finally in the East Roman Empire as its only official language. We have no reasons to imply anything like this for the Old Norse (that's why I chose it as a paradoxical example), and can only partly expect something similar to explain the uniformity of Russian (no documented initial major diversity, no practical ability of the government to impose an official way of speaking to the vast Russian territory in the past, and finally pretty weak economic and cultural life to spread the uniform language this way).


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## Awwal12

Couch Tomato said:


> Why is Russian so uniform compared to say, Spanish, English or even a much smaller language, Dutch? This remains a complete mystery to me.


Naturally it wasn't uniform at all. North Russian vs South Russian dialects are generally comparable to North English vs. South English, and I even don't touch the currently Russian dialects of Ukrainian or mixed Russian-Ukrainian origin. But the dialects underwent the strongest pressure from the Standard Russian in any possible aspect. Nowadays the small remnants of them exist in villages only, and even villagers will tend to communicate with a stranger in a more or less "standartized" manner. In cities one can encounter mostly just residual phonetic features.


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## ahvalj

See post # 68. Middle 18th century. Native speaker of a far northern dialect.


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## Sepia

Ben Jamin said:


> How come then that Argentinian has 9000 own words that not only  Spaniards, but even Peruvians don't understand? Even window panes and matches have different names. They have their "voseo" that is unknown in most "Spanish" speaking countries, too.



... and still I'd say, they are easier to understand than the Cubans.


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## Ben Jamin

Sepia said:


> ... and still I'd say, they are easier to understand than the Cubans.


But Cuban Spanish is difficult mostly due to phonetic features. Cubans are the same for the Hispanic world as Danes are for the Scandinavian. But once I complained to a Cuban about the problem, and he answered me "Pero, nosotros, Cubanos, podemos hablar tambien muy distintivamente", with a perfect pronunciation of every sound.


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## merquiades

Sepia said:


> ... and still I'd say, they are easier to understand than the Cubans.


They just speak the way Andalusians and Canary Islands taught them to speak.  Chop off all the endings and get the meaning from the stem.


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## jasio

Maroseika said:


> I'm afraid there is some confusion. Ukrainian and Belorussian have never escaped of being Russian, but all three have escaped of being one language, and this language was very far from what we call Russian now. And let the term "Ancient Russian language" not confuse us, this is just a term, but it doesn't mean only Russian has derivates from it directly. No, all three have derivated and all three have the same status in this regard.
> As for Novgorod, some scholars consider it as the 4th East-Slavic dialect, which has not become the 4th language only because of the subordination to Moscow since the 15th century.



Fully agreed. 

Actually, _cum grano salis_, one could even say that it was Russian, which escaped from the others, because it introduced an additional "s" to the original adjective "Ruski" (retained in the other etnolects, with local pronunciation variants), and the state name was changed from the original "Rus'" to perhaps more noble Greek name "Rossiya".


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## ahvalj

jasio said:


> Fully agreed.
> 
> Actually, _cum grano salis_, one could even say that it was Russian, which escaped from the others, because it introduced an additional "s" to the original adjective "Ruski" (retained in the other etnolects, with local pronunciation variants), and the state name was changed from the original "Rus'" to perhaps more noble Greek name "Rossiya".


The original adjective is «роусьскъ/роусьскъи», formed from the name of the country «Роусь», like tens of thousands of other such adjectives. After the fall of the weak yers in the 12th century, the two newly adjacent s's naturally merged into one. As in many other cases, the peculiarity of Russian is that it has preserved the old literary form, while both other East Slavic traditions started anew from the vernacular (cp. the fate of the original Slavic literary vocabulary discussed recently elsewhere).

The name «Россия» is first attested in 1517 (Russian Wictionary), in connection with the concept of the Third Rome. The name «Русь» has been used since the first texts up to now, just having been forced out from the formal contexts with the introduction of the more solemn Byzantine variant (cp. "Britannia"). «Есть обычай на Руси / ночью слушать Би-Би-Си».


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## marrish

Quite a good answer but I thought the name (actually it doesn't matter but..) was older. I am a lay person in this field but Arabic and Persian had "Ruus" in the vocabulary. 

On the recent discussion, I am strongly opposed to making a base or denying nationalistic ideas on geminated vowels in any language. It is now a stupidity but it was the same surely ages ago. A bit of coolness is advisable.


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## ahvalj

Maroseika said:


> I'm afraid there is some confusion. Ukrainian and Belorussian have never escaped of being Russian, but all three have escaped of being one language, and this language was very far from what we call Russian now. And let the term "Ancient Russian language" not confuse us, this is just a term, but it doesn't mean only Russian has derivates from it directly. No, all three have derivated and all three have the same status in this regard.
> As for Novgorod, some scholars consider it as the 4th East-Slavic dialect, which has not become the 4th language only because of the subordination to Moscow since the 15th century.


This is so common place that even linguists often forget that it is plain wrong. The three (or four) East Slavic languages are not natural results of the development of some original four cores — a look at a historical map will show that the boundaries between these languages reflect the late medieval political boundaries between Muscovy/Novgorod/later (and smaller) Great Duchy of Lithuania/Polish Ukraine. Some of the ancient tribal groups were split between two languages by these boundaries, e. g. the Krivichis formed major parts of Belarusians and Russians (both in Novgorod and Muscovy), and the Severians formed parts of Ukrainians and Russians. We know virtually nothing about the vernaculars of the Kievan Rus times other than the Old Novgorod and Pskov dialects attested in the birch bark letters, and therefore we have absolutely no evidence to state that dialects within the future Ukrainian, Belarusian or Russian areas were any closer to each other than to dialects across the future boundaries. In the only case where we have evidence, again in the Old Novgorod, the two constituting dialects, those of northern Krivichis and of the Novgorod Slovenians, were very different, the Slovenian dialect lacking virtually all of the deviating features of the northern Krivichian speech. The differences between the three modern literary languages are all newer than the earliest texts, and when we find ancient differences (in accentology, fate of the yers, lengthening of the vowels), they are scattered across dialects, never corresponding to the language boundaries. So, if not the Mongol invasion, the linguistic map of the Russian plain would have been totally different from what we have now.


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## ahvalj

marrish said:


> Quite a good answer but I thought the name (actually it doesn't matter but..) was older. I am a lay person in this field but Arabic and Persian had "Ruus" in the vocabulary.


The name Rus-/Ros- is older, we were speaking about the form "Rossiya" that has come from the Greek sources and has partially replaced the original "Rus'". The distinction between "o" and "u" comes from the phonetic development of the prehistoric East Slavic: the original long "o:" (from the Slavic åu [*tåurås>turъ] and in the borrowings [Gothic domjan > dumati]) shifted to "u" around the 7–8th centuries in (almost) all Slavic dialects, so that the Scandinavian "*ro:þs-" gave "ros-" in Greek but "rus-" in the later Old East Slavic. The Arabian has ru:s- because it lacked the long "o:" (cp. Ro:ma > Ru:m), and Persian most probably borrowed this word from the later East Slavic.


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