# All Slavic languages: Standard language comprehension [audio/video]



## Jana337

The purpose of this experimental thread is to make it possible for you to test your comprehension skills and to compare the sounds of various Slavic languages. The idea is that someone will post a link to an audio/video clip in a Slavic language and other members will try to understand it. A transcription will appear at some later point. 

WR rules (click here to read the full version) say:



> Quotes and translations of prose up to 4 sentences are permitted. No audio or  video files or links may be inserted without prior moderator approval. No  links to YouTube are permitted.
> Song lyrics and verse may be quoted and translated, up to a maximum of 4  lines.
> All forms of inserted content that do not meet these conditions will be removed  without exception.


For this thread - and only for this thread in the Other Slavic Languages forum only - the moderators decided to make an exception: *Audio/video links (including Youtube links) complying with our guidelines (see below) can be posted without being pre-approved by moderators.* However, moderators may remove links ex post anytime at their own discretion.

Guidelines:
1. The clips should be easily accesible to everyone. Choose international politics or other topics that do not require deep knowledge of your country's history, culture or of other very specialized issues etc. News clips with trained voices are ideal.
2. Post Youtube links or links to broadcasters (radio, TV). Other decent Youtube-like servers are permissible, too, but moderators will remove links to servers with adult ads, annoying pop-up windows and suspicious websites of all kinds. If you have doubts, you can contact one of the moderators of the OSL forum privately.
3. Post clips of reasonable length - 2 or 3 minutes.
4. No songs, just clips with fluent speech.
5. It is clearly impossible to have a reasonable and tractable discussion with several clips for each Slavic language. If another forero has already posted a link for your language, please do not post another unless it has a special value added for the discussion. If moderators consider a language sufficiently well represented, they may remove otherwise acceptable new links.
6. Since this is probably going to be a long thread, please make sure that you know how to use the multiquote feature.
7. This thread is meant for standard versions of Slavic languages. Depending on the success of this thread, moderators may decide to open threads for dialects.

I hope it will be a fruitful and rewarding thread.


Edit: Clarification

The general forum rules say that you must not publish Youtube links (sorry for confusion - I quoted it because even some very senior members do not know it ). Afterwards, I wrote that in *this *thread, Youtube links will be allowed (even without moderator approval) as long as they respect the aforementioned guidelines.

Please do not post Youtube or other audio/video links in other threads as they will be removed without prior notice.


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

Great thread! Thank you for starting it.

*Slovenian Clip #1*

Here's a brief excerpt of TV news coverage from 1999 of US President Bill Clinton's visit to Slovenia:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7idlmxcv1Tk

*Slovenian Clip #2*

Here's another TV news clip in Slovenian, this time from the Yugoslav era (1977):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tud9vyW5pXg

Both feature standard Slovenian, but the speech in the second (older) one is more formal and trained.


----------



## Kanes

Bulgarian, some news thing about 'Prison Brake' =D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXxnkmCKeR4


----------



## Mišo

*Slovak*, weather forecast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QCmAZYsUy8&eurl=http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=stv+po%C4%8Dasie&www_google_domain=www.google.com&emb=0


----------



## trance0

Hm, after having listened to the Slovak youtube links, I have altered my opinion about understanding Slavic languages. I must say I understand much more spoken Slovak than spoken Bulgarian. It all depends on the topic, but generally I understand about 30-40% of spoken Slovak, if spoken slowly even more than 50%, whereas I understand no more than 10% of Bulgarian if spoken fast.


----------



## .Jordi.

TriglavNationalPark said:


> Great thread! Thank you for starting it.
> 
> *Slovenian Clip #1*
> 
> Here's a brief excerpt of TV news coverage from 1999 of US President Bill Clinton's visit to Slovenia:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7idlmxcv1Tk
> 
> *Slovenian Clip #2*
> 
> Here's another TV news clip in Slovenian, this time from the Yugoslav era (1977):
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tud9vyW5pXg
> 
> Both feature standard Slovenian, but the speech in the second (older) one is more formal and trained.


I'm suprised that the pronunciation of Slovenian is so hard, if I didn't know that it is Slovenian, in some parts I could even think that it's Portuguese or Romanian. And when talking about comprehension, yes, I understand the main meaning of these clips, but some parts are harder and unclear, meanwhile some of them are quite easy.



Kanes said:


> Bulgarian, some news thing about 'Prison Brake' =D
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXxnkmCKeR4


First clip: I'm able to understand some words, even some phrases  (especially on the beggining, I think that their about a Golden Globe reward given to the serial Prison Break), but that's all.



Mišo said:


> TV weather forecast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QCmAZYsUy8&eurl=http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=stv+po%C4%8Dasie&www_google_domain=www.google.com&emb=0


These clips are the most comprensible for me, I understand about 80—90% of them, I don't if it's because weather forecasts are easy to understand in all of the languages or because Slovak and Polish are so similiar, the second clip was even easier because of the text .

And clips in Polish:
weather forecast: http://pl.youtube.com/watch?v=ivKkvykvDV8&feature=related
and some reportage about euroorphans: http://pl.youtube.com/watch?v=Jto82l-gpVg


----------



## Kanes

Hmm, interesting, in the Slovenian clips I understand without problem what they are talking about, but would say generaly 70%. In Slovak, I get only some words here and there and some particles so about 10-15%. The Polish one... 5% maybe.


----------



## Azori

*Slovak*, a news clip: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa61-e4SGdE


----------



## sokol

From the point of view of a learner (quite good passive competence in Slovenian but not very good active competence; also beginner level competence in BCS): I can understand quite some bits of written language but those links showed me that auditive comprehension is something completely different.

Of those posted so far I am most comfortable with Slovak - but even of the Slovak videos I don't understand much, sometimes I understand a whole sentence, but mostly only some words.
The weather report is quite difficult for me while the news clip posted by lior neith is easier. I hope to find the time next week to try and make sense of that news report; if I do I'll post it here. 

Bulgarian comes next, of which I understand some words and, occasionally, phrases.
But with the Polish weather report I am almost completely lost.

Slovenian is a different matter of course - those Slovene videos are comprehensible to me, I only have to concentrate for the faster spoken parts, and I don't understand some words (a matter of my limited vocabulary ): but I get the meaning, and I should be able to transliterate the whole text without making too many errors.


----------



## texpert

TriglavNationalPark said:


> *Slovenian Clip #1*


 
I could translate it word for word without a single peek at the dictionary. I don't know if it's becuase these news are always the same (there's hardly any room for alternations) or due to my fair exposure to BCS. However, at the time of the stand-up my comprehension markedly fell and had to rely more on the context. 
 


TriglavNationalPark said:


> *Slovenian Clip #2*


 
This proved to be a tougher nut to crack. 
1. Members of some organisation (FSJ) delivered present (?) to Tito. 
2. The second round of talks between Israeli and Egyptian delegation. Details unknown, but the Declaration of Peace (?) was being prepared. 
3. According to Radio Cambodia, fights near the Cambodian-Vietnamese border (?) continued. Getting wild.. 
4. Hijacking attempt on the US plane? Heading for Cuba?? Not enough fuel??? Blimey..
5. National feast commemorating war, occasion used for opening new manufacturing capacities. Merited comrades awarded. Hooray..

The first clip was clearly a coincidence. These were mental somersaults. Similar to my first hearing of BCS before obtaining the decoder grid. 





Kanes said:


> Bulgarian, some news thing about 'Prison Brake' =D
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXxnkmCKeR4


 
There's a news - TV Nova will broadcast the popular TV series (Obyatstvo ot zatvore in BG? - that's what I hear) - awarded by the Golden Globus - and to mark the occassion the main character Robert Napper is coming..
(and so on - I got 80% of it, though it dropped to much lower levels with the progression of clips - but my comprehension of those is usually below 50% even in English and Czech). 




.Jordi. said:


> And clips in Polish:
> weather forecast: http://pl.youtube.com/watch?v=ivKkvykvDV8&feature=related


 
I got 95% of the news. 
I was confused only by the word /kal:/ (right at the beginning), 
amused by the word /chmur:/ (understood) 
and somewhat confused by the /burze kwoltovne:/ expression (does it mean speedy or urgent storms?)
 


			
				.and some reportage about euroorphans: [URL="http://pl.youtube.com/watch?v=Jto82l-gpVg" said:
			
		

> http://pl.youtube.com/watch?v=Jto82l-gpVg[/url]


 
Oscillating between 90% comprehension (narrator's voice) and 30-50% (direct interviews). 
Confused by /cudownie:/ and /samodzelnosc:/ 

* /../ = this is how I hear it


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

Note: You may want to skip this post if you haven't yet watched the second Slovenian clip and would like to make your own guesses.



texpert said:


> 1. Members of some organisation (FSJ) delivered present (?) to Tito.


Very close; they gave Tito a gold medal for his "achievements". The organization was identified in the report as Počitniška zveza Jugoslavije (The Vacation Union of Yugoslavia). Its BCS name was Ferijalni savez Jugoslavije, hence the initials FSJ; it apparently organized vactions for students, ran youth hostels and camps, etc.




texpert said:


> 2. The second round of talks between Israeli and Egyptian delegation. Details unknown, but the Declaration of Peace (?) was being prepared.


Very close again, but it the declaration was described as "deklaracija o namerah" (= Declaration of Intent), which was to serve as a basis for a peaceful and just solution later on.




texpert said:


> 3. According to Radio Cambodia, fights near the Cambodian-Vietnamese border (?) continued. Getting wild..


You got it!




texpert said:


> 4. Hijacking attempt on the US plane? Heading for Cuba?? Not enough fuel??? Blimey..


The plane was hijacked and the hijacker did indeed want to comandeer it to Cuba, but he was caught when the plane made a refueling stop in Atlanta and he decided to release the women and the children.




texpert said:


> 5. National feast commemorating war, occasion used for opening new manufacturing capacities. Merited comrades awarded. Hooray..


Yep. You got both the meaning and the tone right. 




texpert said:


> The first clip was clearly a coincidence. These were mental somersaults. Similar to my first hearing of BCS before obtaining the decoder grid.


Perhaps it was a coincidence, but I think other factors may have played a role as well. First of all, the story of Clinton visiting Slovenia was much more straightforward than most of the news items in the second clip. But another factor was probably the different style of TV news writing in the two clips. In 1999, TV news stories, especially on the commercial POP TV, were written more with the average viewer in mind; television news had become more populist in the 1990s. In 1977, however, the style was still considerably more formal, the writing resembled wire reports and official communiques, and a more demanding vocabulary was generally used.


----------



## Diaspora

The first Slovenian video is reasonably comprehensible (65%), the second one somewhat less, I missed a lot of details. I was surprised to understand this much.

Bulgarian 65%: Written material is much easier, I understood that he was talking about the TV show, about escape and how the audience relates to it, the moderators also gave a very short bio of the actor. Though the speech was fast, and by all means more difficult to understand than Vidin-Belogradchik speech.

Slovak 15%: I could get the general topic, but could not at all get the details! I understood a few words such as "information", "good day", "peninsula". Both Slovak videos are difficult to understand and to my ears sound like Czech.

Polish 10%: Few words such as "morning" but this is even less comprehensible than Slovak.


----------



## texpert

TriglavNationalPark said:


> Perhaps it was a coincidence, but I think other factors may have played a role as well. First of all, the story of Clinton visiting Slovenia was much more straightforward than most of the news items in the second clip. But another factor was probably the different style of TV news writing in the two clips. In 1999, TV news stories, especially on the commercial POP TV, were written more with the average viewer in mind; television news had become more populist in the 1990s. In 1977, however, the style was still considerably more formal, the writing resembled wire reports and official communiques, and a more demanding vocabulary was generally used.


 
Thanks for the clues. Especially the _namerah_ expression - I played it five times before deciding it _did not necessarily have to_ mean the peace after all. But it was well worth an effort. 
As to the latter remark, I bear this in mind indeed. I've had my fair share of both styles of newsmaking and the latter (1999 in this case) makes any news item hell of a predictible thing. Tu such extent that one might get straight to the point even in Swahili


----------



## texpert

Now here is a recent *story* from the *Czech TV *that has drawn quite an attention (Entropa). How do you fare while listening? 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YdfDdsHp0E

edit:
(the previous link was a mistake)


----------



## WannaBeMe

I could understand:

-*Slovenian* about *75%*- many, many words well comprehentive, in some places a little bit confused with unexpected declinsion endings. Accent sometimes totaly weird.

-*Bulgarian*-I was surprised with Bulgarian. I couldnt understand more than *45-50%*.
Many words have been similar but more proned to Russian. I could understand words only on thier begining, it sounded to my ears like familiar words strown all around, thus very chaotic. I could only say that I thought that Bulgarian is almost the same as Macedonian. Not at all. Macedonian I understand about 80%. and I understand it much easier than Bulgarian.

-*Slovak*- on the other hand sounded to my ears pretty harmonic, accordant. I could understand it less than Slovenian but a bit more than Bulgarian, let me say about *65%*. The only thing I should concentrate to was "h". I needed one moment to calculate :"hora" whats that? Ahhhh its gora. And so on. Pronounciation sounds like Serbian or Polish, with hard č and š but accent more like Croatian than Slovenian. It sounds nice to me, I think I am going to start learning it.

*-Polish*- Ufff, no mather how strong I effort myself I cant follow it, to rapid, to confusing. I could only recognise *every 10th word* and common Slavic words. 

-*Czech*-About* 30%*, I wonder why but it is not so comprehent to my ears as Slovak although I know these two should be almost the same. I had to strength myself to recognise the words like hora (BCS. gora) but I just cant accomodate myself to *ř* instead of *r*. And I think thats the reason I can understand written Czech much more than 30%. It sounded to me something like between Slovene and Polish.

I think it would be good to _make_ some _audio clips_ of the _same text_ in _all Slavic languages_ or at least to the _same subject_. Because I think it is very common that words of some subjects like weather or nature are more similar in every Slavic language than some technical and modern stuff like cinema or economy.


----------



## robin74

texpert said:


> I was confused only by the word /kal:/ (right at the beginning)



She says "przyłożyć kalkę", meaning "copy" (literally "to carbon copy" or "apply carbon paper" - that's what "kalka" is)



> "and somewhat confused by the /burze kwoltovne:/ expression (does it mean speedy or urgent storms?)"


"Gwałtowne burze". Sudden, violent, torrential.
 


> Confused by /cudownie:/ and /samodzelnosc:/


"cudownie" - wonderfully
"samodzielność" - self-dependence


----------



## Azori

I understood:
*Slovenian -*A difficult pronunciation and accent for my ears. In the first video, in some parts, I could understand a sufficient number of words to get the main meaning (but not the details), while some other parts were totally incomprehensible to me. With the second video it was even worse, I understood "Good evening", and the rest was like hearing a few familiar words here and there that together made no sense
*Bulgarian -*Just a few words (mainly those international ones -television, series, popular), overall not more than 5%
*Polish *-At first hearing not very comprehensible, but after I have listened to it several times, I could understand about 80% from the weather forecast, from the second video 70%
*Czech *-100% obviously


----------



## texpert

WannaBeMe said:


> *Czech*-About* 30%*, I wonder why but it is not so comprehent to my ears as Slovak...


 
I think you had listed the reasons further down yourself. The weather forecast is a way more predictable story than a piece about an exhibition.



robin74 said:


> "Gwałtowne burze". Sudden, violent, torrential.


 
I see. It is a loanword from German (Gewalt). The Czech had borrowed it as well but transformed it into "kvalt" (speed - colloquially). Think I'll start a thread on this.


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

Since no one has posted any BCS or Macedonian clips yet, I decided to do it myself:

*Serbian (BCS)*

The beginning of a TV newscast:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ7dI5mCqnQ

*Croatian (BCS)*

Weather forecast:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49Lml1_l1-Y

*Macedonian*

The beginning of a TV newscast:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PZgOzRku88


----------



## Ptak

How sad. I haven't understood even a word in the *Czech *video (maybe only two or three separate words...). But I expected that.


----------



## texpert

TriglavNationalPark said:


> *Croatian (BCS)*[/b]


 
I have some knowledge of Serbian so I skip the content. However, it has been some 10 years since I listened to proper Croatian and it ocurres to me now that the diction _is _a little bit different. The Croatian presenter doesn't intone as much and his syllables sound somewhat shorter to me (or their length is more equally spread)? It is getting closer to the Czech diction in my ears. 



TriglavNationalPark said:


> *Macedonian*[/b]


 
Having played it just once with no replays I grasped the outline (but not many specifics) of the story. The striking feature is that everything seems to be in nominative. The intonation is pretty much linear when compared to BCS.


----------



## Kanes

Macdonian and Bulgarian have only vocative. I wonder though can the -ov, -en, -ski suffixes of nouns, including names be cassified as a case?


----------



## sokol

The Croatian clip is quite easy: fog is expected, bura too (the cold catatonic wind on the Adrian), sun also, and little clouds; there's an Eastern European anticyclone (istočno europske) but tomorrow the Icelandic deep will get more influence.
What is quite unexpected was to adress the audience "Dobro vam dan". Have I heard this wrong?
But basically, Croatian (and also the topic) is rather easy to me. To get it all though I would have to write it all down: as it is, and with the help of the weather card, I only get the basic meaning.

I have more difficulties with the Serbian clip: it is about the largest Serbian airline which should become privatised - but is as good as bankrupt.
But as the explaining telephone voice is almost incomprehensible to me and as my vocabulary of BCS is relatively poor I miss much. I understand a great many words, and most numbers, but the content won't materialise in my mind.

Macedonian - well: something unexpected; I thought this might be as incomprehensible as Bulgarian but in fact it sounds more familiar, I understand quite a number of words (and that "avto-" is pronounced "afto-"), but without the pictures I wouldn't have known that it is about a race in Skopje.
Still, I only understand some words, not sentences.

So far I'd say (from a learner's perspective): with Slovene being my "learner's language" and with having learned some BCS I understand BCS rather good but I would have to transcribe to get the meaning.
Thus, auditive comprehension - certainly below 50%, probalby below 40% as I wouldn't be able to "survive" when addressed in any of the BCS standard languages.
(I think I would "survive" with Slovenian standard language - I think I would understand most of Slovenian, basically, if vocabulary wouldn't be too elaborated, and if there were no switch to dialect which would make hearing comprehension very tough.)

Of all the other Slavic languages I don't have "real" auditive comprehension; Slovak was best, next come Czech and Macedonian, next (with very little comprehension) Bulgarian and then almost unintelligible Polish. But I wouldn't understand a few spoken standard language sentences in any of those languages - or only if vocabulary were kept very simple and if speech were slow.

Having said this: I've listened to all those clips ~ 5 times (Polish only twice, I gave up then ...), so comprehension would be much better if I had spent more time with them.


----------



## texpert

What seems to me remarkable is that we are roughly on a par when it comes to comprehension of Macedonian, while I am a native Czech speaker and you are a Slovenian learner (not having a bit of a common platform that is


----------



## texpert

Ptak said:


> How sad. I haven't understood even a word in the *Czech *video (maybe only two or three separate words...). But I expected that.


 
Did you score any better on Polish or Slovak?


----------



## Diaspora

The Macedonian video is about a race in Skopje, one of the drivers was seriously injured, most racers have a number of years of experience and so the topic of the news cast is how it happened and reactions. I think I understood 75%.

Obviously, I understood the BCS videos. Though the accent in the Croatian video was somewhat amusing. And yes he said "Dobar vam dan" it is a more friendly and emphatical version.


----------



## Azori

*Serbian* -too fast, about 20%. I understood the first 3 sentences. Then some words
*Croatian* -20-30%
*Macedonian* -a few words, 5% maybe


----------



## trance0

Serbian - I understood more than 95%, the only problem presenting unknown word here and there
Croatian - the same as Serbian, over 95%
Macedonian - now this was a complete surprise, I managed to understand about 70% in one run and I wasn`t even fully concentrated! I am almost sure I would have understood even more if I`d listened to the recording more than once. In any case, I had no problem figuring out what the video was about and I also managed to understand some of the details.


----------



## phosphore

WannaBeMe said:


> I could understand:
> 
> -*Slovenian* about *75%*- many, many words well comprehentive, in some places a little bit confused with unexpected declinsion endings. Accent sometimes totaly weird.
> 
> -*Bulgarian*-I was surprised with Bulgarian. I couldnt understand more than *45-50%*.
> Many words have been similar but more proned to Russian. I could understand words only on thier begining, it sounded to my ears like familiar words strown all around, thus very chaotic. I could only say that I thought that Bulgarian is almost the same as Macedonian. Not at all. Macedonian I understand about 80%. and I understand it much easier than Bulgarian.
> 
> -*Slovak*- on the other hand sounded to my ears pretty harmonic, accordant. I could understand it less than Slovenian but a bit more than Bulgarian, let me say about *65%*. The only thing I should concentrate to was "h". I needed one moment to calculate :"hora" whats that? Ahhhh its gora. And so on. Pronounciation sounds like Serbian or Polish, with hard č and š but accent more like Croatian than Slovenian. It sounds nice to me, I think I am going to start learning it.
> 
> *-Polish*- Ufff, no mather how strong I effort myself I cant follow it, to rapid, to confusing. I could only recognise *every 10th word* and common Slavic words.
> 
> -*Czech*-About* 30%*, I wonder why but it is not so comprehent to my ears as Slovak although I know these two should be almost the same. I had to strength myself to recognise the words like hora (BCS. gora) but I just cant accomodate myself to *ř* instead of *r*. And I think thats the reason I can understand written Czech much more than 30%. It sounded to me something like between Slovene and Polish.
> 
> I think it would be good to _make_ some _audio clips_ of the _same text_ in _all Slavic languages_ or at least to the _same subject_. Because I think it is very common that words of some subjects like weather or nature are more similar in every Slavic language than some technical and modern stuff like cinema or economy.


 
Same here. I was surprised that I understand Slovenian way better that Bulgarian; I am not surprised that I practically do not understand Polish (I would understand Portuguese, which I have never studied, on the same level, knowing French and some Spanish).


----------



## phosphore

TriglavNationalPark said:


> Since no one has posted any BCS or Macedonian clips yet, I decided to do it myself:
> 
> *Serbian (BCS)*
> 
> The beginning of a TV newscast:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ7dI5mCqnQ
> 
> *Croatian (BCS)*
> 
> Weather forecast:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49Lml1_l1-Y
> 
> *Macedonian*
> 
> The beginning of a TV newscast:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PZgOzRku88


 
Is this serious about Jat?

I undersood every single word of Croation, of course, but I was not that good with Macedonian: I could even say that I undrstand Slovenian better than Macedonian, which is surprising again.


----------



## trance0

phosphore said:


> Same here. I was surprised that I understand Slovenian way better that Bulgarian; I am not surprised that I practically do not understand Polish (I would understand Portuguese, which I have never studied, on the same level, knowing French and some Spanish).



Well, to tell you the truth, I am not that surprised that you understand Slovene better than Bulgarian. I think Slovene and BCS are closer than BCS and Bulgarian, at least grammatically and syntactically, whereas vocabulary is somewhere in the middle. I think Slovene and BCS are mutually understandable about 75% both ways, if both sides speak and listen to each other carefully(on the supposition that neither BCS natives nor Slovene natives had had much exposure to each other`s languages).


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

phosphore said:


> I undersood every single word of Croation, of course


 
I noticed that the Croatian clip includes at least one word that isn't used in Serbian, namely *zrak* (=air). Serbian uses *vazduh *instead. I was wondering whether the average Serbian speaker would understand words such as *zrak*, *otok*, and *kruh**, which are used in the Croatian standard of BCS (as well as Slovenian), but not in Serbian?

* Croatian: island = *otok*; bread = *kruh*
Serbian: island = *ostrvo*; bread = *hleb*


----------



## Duya

An _average_ Serbian speaker would most likely understood them, depending on age and education. I'm not too confident to say 100% though; younger generations generally had less exposure to Croatian and <rant on> education system today is much worse than in my times <rant off>. For example, I know that my well-educated friend had problem with _vrhnje_ when in Zagreb (or his collocutor had a problem with _pavlaka_, I don't recall the details -- of course they eventually understood each other).


----------



## phosphore

I'm 20 years old and I have never been exposed to spoken Croatian (except a little on television), and I would not know what _vrhnje_ is (I thought they say _smetana_?); but I understand z_rak, otok, kruh, vlak, tlak, tisak, dušik_ and so on, perhaps because the Croatian books are still in use here (in Serbia).


----------



## phosphore

trance0 said:


> Well, to tell you the truth, I am not that surprised that you understand Slovene better than Bulgarian. I think Slovene and BCS are closer than BCS and Bulgarian, at least grammatically and syntactically, whereas vocabulary is somewhere in the middle. I think Slovene and BCS are mutually understandable about 75% both ways, if both sides speak and listen to each other carefully(on the supposition that neither BCS natives nor Slovene natives had had much exposure to each other`s languages).


 
I was surprised also because there was that discussion about Slovenian as a South Slavic language, and it seems to be more similar to Serbian than Bulgarian. A reason was the territorial proximity, too: I though that I would be better with Bulgarian, and someone from Zagreb would be better with Slovenian.


----------



## trance0

Well, this just proves all the more that Slovene is doubtlessly a South Slavic language and very close to all versions of BCS. I understand BCS almost 100% because I have been exposed to this language since childhood and also because I am interested in languages in general. But like I said, both languages should be about 75% mutually intelligible in any case. With little training any native BCS speaker can gain very good passive understanding of Slovene and the same goes for native Slovenes regarding BCS.


----------



## Mišo

Well, dear slavic "brothers" and "sisters". 

*Polish* videos were, obviously, the most understandable for me. Mass of words I know from frequent listening to radio, so nothing new for me. I can really translate about 90 per cent from both videos without problems. Brothers Czechs like to say, when they listen to Slovak women's speech, that they are very sexy. I could say the same about Polish women - it is soo cute to listen them. 

*Slovenian*. So, though its accent and pronounciation was no big surprise for mee too, I find, that Slovenian could be named as "Slovak negative". Why? Where we have stress, there Slovenians use it not, and vice versa. When we pronounce something soft, then Slovenians pronounce it hard, and ... vice versa. Still better, I find this language enough euphonious and in some places enough hard-bitten. I understood circa every second word, so, quite success for me. 

*Bulgarian and Macedonian*. Foohh. Really something untraditional for us ears. Very similar languages, I could not fairly demark themselves by these videos. Both tongues were in few words - compressed, ungraspable, rigorous, a bit raucous and distinctively consonant. There were feeled also east slavic accent. Unbendability (many words ended with -ta, and so on) was other reason to ununderstanding. Not more than ten per cent in the aggregate was understandable for me. 

*Croatian and Sebian* had traditionally, symphatetic sonorous accent to my ears. I could not recognize themselves in this case. Understanding was basically the same, as in the Slovenian case.


----------



## WannaBeMe

phosphore said:


> I'm 20 years old and I have never been exposed to spoken Croatian (except a little on television), and I would not know what _vrhnje_ is (I thought they say _smetana_?); but I understand z_rak, otok, kruh, vlak, tlak, tisak, dušik_ and so on, perhaps because the Croatian books are still in use here (in Serbia).


 
Well I think it is stupid to say this word is Croatian and this Serbian. I am 20 years old too  but I was born in Zagreb and grow up in Banja Luka. 
We use both variationes, they have sometimes not the same meaning. 
We use both zrak and vazduh but it if sameone needs frish air he always say "_Nemam zraka_" its shorter than "_Nemam vazduha_" hehe. But we use _ostrvo_ as insel, _otok_ means swelling;
we say _kru(h)_ same as _(h)ljeb:_
we use _voz _not _vlak_, we use _tlak_ as blood pressure and _zračni_ _pritisak_ or _vazdušni pritisak_ as air pressure;
We use the same vocabulary as Serbocroatian from SFRJugoslavia but not that new-sinhesized Croatian words like "_četveronožno okolokućno travobrstilo_" for "_koza_" (I am just trying to be funny right now )

My Serbian teacher gave me always a worse grade when I was using a word that is chosen to be Croatian after the War. This politic ruins our languages. My teacher alway said we have to use always construction
"da + present" instead of infinitive because infinitive sounds more Western. I found it stupid. I will speek like my parents do and not like some Serbs in Vojvodina do just because this looks more Serbian for politicans. They want the biggest BCS dialect whch is basis of standard BCS to disapear, So I used to make it worse every time, I and one friend of mine used to write in esseys all tipical Croatian words like _tisuća_ and not _hiljada_, tjedan (nedelja), stoljeće (vijek) and we used to talk this way in our Sebian language hours. It was prety funny to see our teacher so angry; Good old gymnasium


----------



## WannaBeMe

phosphore said:


> I was surprised also because there was that discussion about Slovenian as a South Slavic language, and it seems to be more similar to Serbian than Bulgarian. A reason was the territorial proximity, too: I though that I would be better with Bulgarian, and someone from Zagreb would be better with Slovenian.


 
Do you understand Macedonian better than Bulgarian just like I do?
Do you know the film "Balcan-can". Its Macedonian and I understood everything. I think that north Macedonian dialect is closer to Serbian than to Bulgarian in vocabulary and pronounciation and southern Macedonian is closer to Bulgarian. What do you think?


----------



## Ptak

texpert said:


> Did you score any better on Polish or Slovak?


Yes, *Polish* is much more comprehensible. The excerpt itself is easier though...


----------



## Ptak

*Russian*, a clip about Blagoyevich scandal:

http://www.vesti.ru/videos?vid=182732&cid=1

*Russian№2*, a very short clip about weather:

http://www.vesti.ru/videos?vid=182717&p=1&sort=1&cid=9


----------



## iobyo

WannaBeMe said:


> I think that north Macedonian dialect is closer to Serbian than to Bulgarian in vocabulary and pronounciation



You're right. This has more to do with Macedonian-Serbian contact in the last century more than anything. The authentic northern dialects are dying out and northerners usually just speak standard Macedonian with a few Serbian pronouns and prepositions (_више _vs. _повеќе_, for example). In my opinion, trying to imitate the rustic dialect of the older generations or maybe Serbian is just 'cool' for the younger people.


----------



## phosphore

WannaBeMe said:


> Do you understand Macedonian better than Bulgarian just like I do?
> Do you know the film "Balcan-can". Its Macedonian and I understood everything. I think that north Macedonian dialect is closer to Serbian than to Bulgarian in vocabulary and pronounciation and southern Macedonian is closer to Bulgarian. What do you think?


 
I have not seen that film, but I have heard (I think standard) Macedonian several times, and I had an impression of understanding it quite well; now having heard it on television, I am no more sure about it.

Anyway, Macedonian _is_ closer to Serbian than Bulgarian, since it underwent many sound changes Serbian did, too, and Bulgarian did not.


I heard these Russian clips and I could say I understood it a bit more than Polish and that means 2%; it is such a shame because I have been learning Russian for 4 months already.


----------



## WannaBeMe

This Russian was to fast for me, I had no time to think about the words. I understood whats the point, I would say about 20%. But I simply know I understand Russian very well if they are speaking not so fast. I know many Russians in Germany here, and I still remember when a Russian woman drunk tee with my Mother; My mother spok no German at that time so she spok normal Serbian and the Russian woman normal Russian. And this worked well. 
I also know that there are many many Russians that I understand about 80%(because I already have some basis knowlegies) but also some that I understand less than 30%. Strange


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

We always forget this Slavic language:

*(Lusatian) Sorbian**

Here's a clip from a Sorbian TV broadcast about a ghost in a church tower. Sorry about the German subtitles; I couldn't find any good Sorbian clips without them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSke_dbHWVA

And for a bit of fun, here's_ South Park_ in Sorbian:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI_tjEtDwzU

* I don't know whether this is Upper or Lower Sorbian. They are separate standard languages.


----------



## Mišo

TriglavNationalPark said:


> We always forget this Slavic language:
> 
> *(Lusatian) Sorbian**
> 
> Here's a clip from a Sorbian TV broadcast about a ghost in a church tower. Sorry about the German subtitles; I couldn't find any good Sorbian clips without them:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSke_dbHWVA
> 
> And for a bit of fun, here's_ South Park_ in Sorbian:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI_tjEtDwzU
> 
> * I don't know whether this is Upper or Lower Sorbian. They are separate standard languages.



What a pity, there is no Sorbian speaker in these forums.
Viz, the difference between Upper and Lower Sorbian is allegedly bigger, than between Czech and Slovak.
I just guess, this videos were in Upper Sorbian, because of its high percent occurrence in Lusitian territory.
I heard this language for the first time, and the biggest surprise for me was, how much it was affected by German (Saxon or Brandenburg) accent, even a "r" was not pronounced "normally slavic".
Pronounciation was a bit Polish, there were some Czech and Serbian features, but in the aggregate it was not vocal by standard slavic languages.

I add one audio file in Kashubian (kaszëbsczi jãzëk, pòmòrsczi jãzëk, kaszëbskò-słowińskô mòwa).
It is ever difficult, at least for me, to find any recordings in this language on net.
This one is from regional broadcasting on Radio Gdansk.
http://193.17.212.14/00420043001233233801.mp3


----------



## DarkChild

phosphore said:


> Anyway, Macedonian _is_ closer to Serbian than Bulgarian, since it underwent many sound changes Serbian did, too, and Bulgarian did not.


Macedonian is much closer to Bulgarian in all aspects regardless of the decades of Serbization and being part of the same country.


----------



## phosphore

I do not agree, but it does not matter.


I am not sure if we are allowed to post movie trailers, but this one is titled, so it helps checking if you understood it right, and the language is pretty good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuRctLXYzO8 *a Serbian movie trailer*


Here is one more titled, but not from any movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXlQ9imluow *Serbian news* 

I must say also that I have not understood a word of Sorbian, Kashubian neither


----------



## Darina

Sorbian:
The beggining was too difficult to understand. Thanks God there are German subtitles! But after the first two minutes I got used to the accent and could undertand a few words and phrases.

Polish:
Hm, the map helped a lot but even without watching the video I could get the main idea. May be...

Czech:
Not better than Polish.


Slovak:
Strange but Slovak was easier than Slovene. It was somehow... I don't know how to explain it but it sounded very convenient to my ears.  The pronounciation is very clear.

Slovene:
It probably depends on the topic but I could not get much.

Serbian/Croatian:
I got about 50%.

Macedonian and Russian were OK.

Bulgarian from the eastern part of the country say they do not understand Serbian/Croatian at all and Macedonian only slightly.


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

Mišo said:


> I heard this language for the first time, and the biggest surprise for me was, how much it was affected by German (Saxon or Brandenburg) accent, even a "r" was not pronounced "normally slavic".


 
The Slovenes of Austrian Carinthia, even when speaking standard Slovenian, pronounce words in a similar way; they also use the German "r". In fact, if the moderators decide to start a similar thread for Slavic _dialects_, as Jana said they might, I'll post some clips of Carinthian Slovenian.


----------



## sokol

TriglavNationalPark said:


> The Slovenes of Austrian Carinthia, even when speaking standard Slovenian, pronounce words in a similar way; they also use the German "r". In fact, if the moderators decide to start a similar thread for Slavic _dialects_, as Jana said they might, I'll post some clips of Carinthian Slovenian.


Indeed they do, and I can tell you that I too (as I've learned "mainland Slovenian") always think how strange it is to pronounce Slowenian with fricative velar "r". 

And a remark: Carinthian Slovene *standard *language is perfectly on topic here (and it would add an additional point of view ), so if you've got an else acceptable clip (as stated by Jana) of standard language just go ahead and post it.


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

sokol said:


> And a remark: Carinthian Slovene *standard *language is perfectly on topic here (and it would add an additional point of view ), so if you've got an else acceptable clip (as stated by Jana) just go ahead and post it.


 
Fantastic!

*Carnithian Slovenian (koroška slovenščina)*

A news report:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyRm2oubjSA

An excerpt from an interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLEoHtcCuo0

Standard Carinthian Slovenian, which you can hear in these clips, is essentially standard Slovenian with different phonetic values.

However, standard Burgenland Croatian, also spoken in Austria, is very different from standard Croatian (BCS); it has a different grammar and vocabulary:

*Burgenland Croatian (gradiščansko-hrvatski)*

News reports:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaAWUlFLwQg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ladB0tp36hk

In fact, Burgenland Croatian has a lot in common with Slovenian (including most case endings).


----------



## phosphore

TriglavNationalPark said:


> Fantastic!
> 
> *Carnithian Slovenian (koroška slovenščina)*
> 
> 
> *Burgenland Croatian (gradiščansko-hrvatski)*


 
They do use the uvular or velar /r/ but the language sounds just like Slovenian anyway; in fact, Burgenland Croatian sounds more like Slovenian to me than Carinthian Slovenian. On the other side, Sorbian sounds just like German to me.


----------



## sokol

TriglavNationalPark said:


> In fact, Burgenland Croatian has a lot in common with Slovenian (including most case endings).


Yes, the Burgenland Croatian standard language differs significantly from Croatian mainland standard language - because it is influenced by Čakavian dialects (see here,) but there are also Štokavian and Kajkavian dialect speakers in Burgenland, and their standard language is influenced by all three.

It is really interesting to hear those Carinthian *Slovenian *clips. 
They are easily understandable to me (except for occasional vocabulary I don't know), after all this is standard language (I would be completely lost with dialects).
Prosody and phonetics sound *very *much Austrian, or to specify: to my ears, German Carinthian pronunciation and Slovenian Carinthian pronunciation basically are the same.
Note though that German Carinthian (both standard language and dialects) are significantly different from "general" Austrian German: so there was influence both ways. 

The second Slovenian voice - Rudi Vouk - however has rolled "r" occasionally (uvular only, not apical, far as I can tell), this one sounds "more Slavic". 

*Burgenland *Croatian to me also is much easier to understand than mainland Croatian. (And yes, phosphore, I agree - it sounds more "like Slovenian" than Carinthian Slovenian. )
But while it is true that their standard language is somewhat closer to Slovenian than mainland Croatian there's also another reason which makes it so much easier to understand those clips, and I guess not only for me: language is articulated very carefully and rather slowly.


----------



## trance0

Burgenland Croatian sounds like archaic Croatian with Slovene declension endings and with a mixed Slovene-Croatian vocabulary.  It is somewhat confusing to listen to it because I am more used to hearing Standard Croatian, but it has more to do with intonation, the morphology seems to be more or less the same as in Slovene and that of course doesnt influence negatively on my understanding of this interesting Croatian dialect.  Overall, I find this quite easily intelligible, I believe native Slovenes without prior exposure to Standard Croatian would find Burgenland Croatian significantly more intelligible than Standard BCS.


----------



## phosphore

This Burgenland Croatian is really interesting; these clips are almost 100% intelligible to me (and that is, as sokol said, because they speak slowly), but what I am finding interesting at the moment is a sentence said in the first clip around 1.20:

If I understood it well, it says like "...sada pišemo na temu je folklor proklijetstvo ili blagoslov, a na kraju *će se pak odluči* čiji tekst je najbolji." So, its prosody sounds Slovene to me, blagoslo[f] instead of blagoslo[v] is a German influence, I suppose? but what about this Future Tense? It is just like in southern Serbian dialects. How come?


----------



## Mišo

TriglavNationalPark said:


> Fantastic!
> 
> *Carnithian Slovenian (koroška slovenščina)*
> A news report:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyRm2oubjSA
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLEoHtcCuo0
> 
> *Burgenland Croatian (gradiščansko-hrvatski)*
> News reports:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaAWUlFLwQg
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ladB0tp36hk



No offence, but, in truth, during watching Carnithian Slovenian videos, the intensive feeling came into my mind, that native language of these persons is Austrian German. St. similar I could composedly say respecting Burgenland Croatian. Nobly told, it looks to me like all of them, not long ago, have finished studies of Slovene at Arnold Schwarzeneger´s language school in Graz, seeing that Federal State of Styria lies in the midst of Carinthia and Burgenland.


----------



## Ptak

Some *Ukrainian* news:

http://ru.youtube.com/watch?v=VJw-bce5bJM

(Unfortunally, I can't say how "standart" is the language in this clip, but it's TV...)


----------



## phosphore

Ptak said:


> Some *Ukrainian* news:
> 
> http://ru.youtube.com/watch?v=VJw-bce5bJM
> 
> (Unfortunally, I can't say how "standart" is the language in this clip, but it's TV...)


 
I've been learning Russian for four months or so and I can't point out any phonetical (exept the vowel reduction perhaps?) or grammatical difference between Ukrainian and Russian


----------



## Ptak

phosphore said:


> I've been learning Russian for four months or so and I can't point out any phonetical (exept the vowel reduction perhaps?) or grammatical difference between Ukrainian and Russian


But it's Ukrainian in the clip, it's not Russian, believe me.


----------



## WannaBeMe

phosphore said:


> I've been learning Russian for four months or so and I can't point out any phonetical (exept the vowel reduction perhaps?) or grammatical difference between Ukrainian and Russian


 
I understood Ukrainian about 30% and could easely distinguish it from Russian. Its slightly "harder" than Russian. Infinitiv ending is -TI like Southslavic lang. Ending of 1.person plural present is -MO, again like BCS and Slovene. And it has a lot of -I overall like "Dalmatinian" Croatian. They say ODIN not ADIN, no akanje.
But yes, it is the most similar language to Russian.


----------



## DarkChild

OK My turn

*Slovenian* - 60%, I can understand the main point of the video. It's sounds nice overall. It sounds like BSC.

*Slovak* - 15 %. I really couldn't understand much! Only a random word here and there. It sounds strange to my ears, robotic. It has some strange H sounds.

*Polish* - 5% I'll never understand why they use so many consonants 

*Czech* - 15 %. Same as Slovak. I can't tell them apart.

*Serbian* - 70%. Overall I could get most of it. Sounds like western Bulgarian dialects.
*
Croatian* - 50%. Interestingly enough, I couldn't understand it as well as Serbian. Maybe it had to do with the specific weather words. Otherwise it sounds a little nicer than Serbian, less stringent.

*Macedonian* - >95%. This was very easy. I could understand virtually everything. Here and there would be an unknown word or sometimes it might be the same word but pronounced differently. It kind of makes my head hurt though because it sounds like broken Bulgarian. Mind you, I'm from Eastern Bulgaria  and the dialect here (which is the basis for the standard language) is more distant. Western Bulgarian dialects (which also drive me crazy), they sound similar to that.

*Russian* - 80% I've been exposed to Russian quite a lot though. 

*Sorbian* - I didn't understand anything. It sounds very ugly to my ears - like a mix between German and French, and sometimes like a Scandinavian language.

*Ukranian* - 30%. Sounds like Russian but has a distinctive H sound.


I didn't bother with the other ones. Maybe some other day


----------



## DarkChild

*Banat Bulgarian* - spoken in Western Romania 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyGlg068p0s&feature=related

It starts 0:40 sec. It's about the visit of the Bulgarian vice president.


----------



## Athaulf

TriglavNationalPark said:


> However, standard Burgenland Croatian, also spoken in Austria, is very different from standard Croatian (BCS); it has a different grammar and vocabulary:
> 
> *Burgenland Croatian (gradiščansko-hrvatski)*
> 
> News reports:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaAWUlFLwQg
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ladB0tp36hk
> 
> In fact, Burgenland Croatian has a lot in common with Slovenian (including most case endings).



I don't know much about various dialects of Burgenland Croatian, nor about its standard form, which I assume is used in these clips. However, the language in the clips strikes me as very close to standard Croatian -- I can understand it almost without any problems.  Thus, I strongly suspect that the standard form of Burgenland Croatian is a very much watered down version of the authentic local dialects, standardized under a strong influence of BCS. I'm pretty sure that I'd have major problems communicating with someone speaking an authentic Burgenland village dialect.


----------



## Athaulf

TriglavNationalPark said:


> We always forget this Slavic language:
> 
> *(Lusatian) Sorbian**
> 
> Here's a clip from a Sorbian TV broadcast about a ghost in a church tower. Sorry about the German subtitles; I couldn't find any good Sorbian clips without them:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSke_dbHWVA
> 
> And for a bit of fun, here's_ South Park_ in Sorbian:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI_tjEtDwzU
> 
> * I don't know whether this is Upper or Lower Sorbian. They are separate standard languages.



These speakers, especially the first one, strike me as having a strong German accent. Does anyone know if the pronunciation of Upper/Lower Sorbian, or perhaps some of their dialects, has been influenced by German so heavily? Or are these just heritage Sorbian speakers who speak with a heavy German accent? 

I also found this web page of a German radio station that broadcasts Sorbian programs:
http://www.rbb-online.de/_/radio/sorbisches_programm/

Some of these radio speakers sound much more Slavic to me than the ones in the above clips. For example, their prosody resembles German much less, and their realization of /r/ (or whatever similar phoneme Sorbian has) sounds alveolar, not uvular like the German one. 

Regarding the mutual intelligibility, I can't understand almost any Sorbian speech, except for an occasional word here and there. When listening to the radio program, I can't even figure out what topic they're talking about. However, this is not surprising, since Sorbian is probably the most distant Slavic language from Croatian.


----------



## WannaBeMe

I send you an example of normal standard spoken Serbian freom Serbia, which is not to fast like on the news in example from phosphore.
You can hear the conversation better from 0:47 sec. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnYuYX40TPc&feature=related


And here is Serbian language from TV Republika Srpska (Bosnia), the difference is minimal but still it an other standard variation of Serbian, spoken in Bosnia, Western Serbia and Montenegro.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjJpwySzpAM

And this is Bosnian (or eventualy Bosniak): 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-Jy4m_IkXE
Link replaced in accordance with WannaBeMe.

I wish you good understanding


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

*Resian* is spoken in the Resia Valley of northeastern Italy, not far from Slovenia. Classified as a Slovenian dialect by linguists, it nevertheless has its own standard written form. Its ortography, grammar, phonetics, and vocabulary are all *very* different from standard Slovenian. In fact, standard Slovenian and standard Resian* are *not* mutually intelligible. I have an easier time understanding many languages in this thread than I do Resian. By the way, many Resians consider themselves to be Slovenes, but some do not.

*Resian*

I couldn't find any video clips, but here's a RealMedia audio clip:

http://www.resianet.org/rac1.ram (RealPlayer required)

This may be the most unusual-sounding Slavic clip yet.

* Resian itself has several (sub-)dialects.


----------



## sokol

phosphore said:


> If I understood it well, it says like "...sada pišemo na temu je folklor proklijetstvo ili blagoslov, a na kraju *će se pak odluči* čiji tekst je najbolji." So, its prosody sounds Slovene to me, blagoslo[f] instead of blagoslo[v] is a German influence, I suppose? but what about this Future Tense? It is just like in southern Serbian dialects. How come?


I can't help with this future tense - only that it seems to be very regular, see here: a very short article about a new type of school = "sridna škola" (= "sredna/srijedna") being introduced. But I don't know if this formation goes back to Croatian dialects, or German or Hungarian interference.

But to pronounce "-v" in word-final position as "-f" is neither Slovenian nor German influence, or rather this is also a feature present in Kajkavian and eastern Slovenian dialects (probably also in Čakavian, that I don't know).



Mišo said:


> (...) that native language of these persons is Austrian German.


Well, of course it is. 
Please take into account that those Burgenland Croatian and Carinthian Slovene speakers all are perfect bilinguals. 
Also I wouldn't be too surprised if quite some of them were more proficient in German than in their Slavic mother tongues (don't forget: they are surrounded by a German environment, media, TV, computer games even, with the younger generation ...) - nevertheless, I am quite sure that they all are bilinguals.

There might be several reasons why they might sound somewhat "non-native":
- They speak slowly; surely not for lack of proficiency but because those ethnic news on Austrian TV should be easily understandable for the younger generation, especially for those who are not (anymore) fully proficient in their minority language.
- They don't speak their "real" native language because that would be dialect: so those speakers use dialect in everyday speech, and they might not be too familiar with talking standard language.
- They use different phonetics due to interference with German, thus they don't sound "very Slavic" (especially but not only due to the pronunciation of "r").



Athaulf said:


> Thus, I strongly suspect that the standard form of Burgenland Croatian is a very much watered down version of the authentic local dialects, standardized under a strong influence of BCS. I'm pretty sure that I'd have major problems communicating with someone speaking an authentic Burgenland village dialect.


Yes, this Burgenland standard Croatian indeed is watered down.  There have been a few "Croatisation" waves, originally Burgenland Croatian was an interdialect based on all three dialects of the region, written in Hungarian orthography. Croatian orthography, and some features of standard Croatian, were taken over later.

And as for Lusatian Sorbian: I guess, as in the case of minorities of Austria, that there's heavy German influence. It may be that some speakers show less interference than others, that's even to be expected I'd say.
But I'd say that they are native speakers - as with Austrian Slavic minorities mostly members of the minority only take part in minority activities; I guess that there are always some people who have no ethnic Slavic background who contribute (I know for sure that there are some in Burgenland and Carinthia), but most of those who are active have the ethnic background at least - quite some of them though (surely in Austria, I guess the same is true for Sorbians) already are more proficient in German than in their Slavic native language.



DarkChild said:


> *Banat Bulgarian* - spoken in Western Romania
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyGlg068p0s&feature=related
> 
> It starts 0:40 sec. It's about the visit of the Bulgarian vice president.


This was _so much easier_ to understand for me than that Bulgarian clip earlier in this thread!
I understood many words and even whole phrases: it's not only the vice president visiting but also the Bulgarian delegate in Bucharest, right? After both Bulgarian and Romanian hymns they are (I think) talking about schools (about live and activity - животе е деиносте or so), and what's missing mainly is vocabulary - најмодерне теначене when they're standing in the computers room and talking about internet: I have no idea what теначене means, but it could be just an alternative word for "computer"?! (Which, the English term, also is used of course.)

Still, overall understanding for me is pretty poor - but I get much more than I would have expected.
(And no, the Romanian subtitles were of no use to me. )

And the reason here, I think, again is very simple: they speak *slowly*, and very *clearly*.
For the same reason, obviously, they do this on Austrian TV: their audience is that of a minority of which not all speakers are fully proficient - either in standard Bulgarian or (also) in their respective dialects. It wouldn't do to use fast, authentic speech on those minority broadcasts because those of the minority who never had learned standard language probably would struggle to understand this.


----------



## trance0

Well, I understand less than 5% of Lusatian Sorbian, I think it is Upper Sorbian in the videoclip, because, if I am not mistaken, the story unfolds in Bautzen(Budyšin) and that is the center of Upper Lausitz.

Resian, hmmm, aside from a few words and short sentences here and there I didn`t understand anything. It sounds like Slavic French with occasional Hungarian influence.  I am not sure if this is so hard to understand because an old lady is telling the story(with several missing teeth  ) and the quality of the recording is very bad, but I think the intonation and pronunciation are unusual and many words would be unkown to me even if I heard them correctly.

As for Polish, I understand less then Slovak, but perhaps somewhat more than Czech, which I find utterly hard to understand when spoken quickly, it has a less clear pronunciation than Slovak.


----------



## Darina

sokol said:


> најмодерне теначене


She said actually най-модернете начене, най-модерните начини (most modern ways). The difference between Banat Bulgarian and Bulgarian Bulgarian is not big. They palatize more often (Бъльгария), use the suffix e instead of i for plural (начене, учителе...) and have a slight Romanian accent and a few archaic words, which is not surprising.

Banat Bulgarian uses Latin alphabet. And the lady speaks really very slowly.


----------



## DarkChild

Darina said:


> She said actually най-модернете начене, най-модерните начини (most modern ways). The difference between Banat Bulgarian and Bulgarian Bulgarian is not big. They palatize more often (Бъльгария), use the suffix e instead of i for plural (начене, учителе...) and have a slight Romanian accent and a few archaic words, which is not surprising.
> 
> Banat Bulgarian uses Latin alphabet. And the lady speaks really very slowly.


They also have many Hungarian words and write with Croatian script.


----------



## sokol

Darina said:


> She said actually най-модернете начене, най-модерните начини (most modern ways). The difference between Banat Bulgarian and Bulgarian Bulgarian is not big. They palatize more often (Бъльгария), use the suffix e instead of i for plural (начене, учителе...) and have a slight Romanian accent and a few archaic words, which is not surprisinġ.


Ah, I segmented incorrectly - and as I wrongly attributed the article "te" to "način" the whole phrase became incomprehensible because "način" would be comprehensible to me through my knowledge of Slovenian (where it means basically the same). 

This is really interesting: I am sure if I had more hearing practice I would understand much more. - And of course the speed of speech is very important for comprehension.


----------



## PEGI

Can someone please explain to me, how come that I understand better Slovak than Bulgarian or Russian-language that I had exposure.


----------



## WannaBeMe

PEGI said:


> can someone please explain to me, how come that i understand better slovak than bulgarian or russian-language that i had exposure.



For me the most understandable is Macedonian. And although I know that Bulgarian and Macedonian are very similar to eachother, I cannot understand Bulgarian better then Russian.
Slovak sounds OK, it is really easy to understand and to learn. And again the same situation. Although I know that Slovak and Czeck are so similar to eachother I can understand Slovak much better because Czech ř and all those umlauts ju to ji etc. are like a devil to me.


----------



## texpert

PEGI said:


> can someone please explain to me, how come that i understand better slovak than bulgarian or russian-language that i had exposure.


 
No clue. Most likely you are referring to some highly specific speech or text in Slovakian. Can you elaborate?


----------



## PEGI

I speak about speech from posted URL. and first time in life I heard Slovakian. I like Czech movies and am able to understand its story.but on my big surprise I m able to clearly hear and recognize Slovakian words and every single sound in it; that i m not able on Czech.  Written Russian I understand 60 percent,but when I listen to same text i m not able to differentiate words and my understanding is just 20 percent.  is that coincidence or behind that exist some other reason?


----------



## ilocas2

I think that mutual intelligibility is only for people with some special gift or I'm not typical case.

From various Youtube videos (not those ones posted here), I understand:

Polish - 20 %
Slovenian, BCMS - 10 %
Russian, Ukranianian, Bulgarian, Macedonian - 5 %


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

Since Slovenian was brought up in another thread (I suspect that the conversation will be moved here), and I noticed that the original Slovenian YouTube links posted in this thread no longer work, here is another, similar clip of TV news from Slovenia*:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vxRTVZ-UUs

* Allowed in this thread only.


----------



## ilocas2

After 3 listening I understand this Slovenian clip from 15 %.


----------



## nonik

sorabian video .....almost everything, I had listened 2-3 times when I started understand. Speaker has very hard, almost funny accent for my ears, maybe influence of germany, dont know. Without any attention, I would say its german leanguage


----------



## ilocas2

I understad the Sorbian video from 25 %.


----------



## DenisBiH

WannaBeMe said:


> And this is Bosnian (or eventualy Bosniak):
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-Jy4m_IkXE
> Link replaced in accordance with WannaBeMe.
> 
> I wish you good understanding




Vowel reductions by this guy hurt my ears. Accent is also somewhat unusual, do I hear a touch of Mostar/west Herzegovina accent there? The use of "djelatnicima" suggests a Croatian speaker, not Bosnian (but not necessarily). Miroslav Ćiro Blažević (the guy he's interviewing) is a Croat from central Bosnia and is of course speaking Croatian.

Here is a much more representative sample of Bosnian from the same tv station by Midheta Kurspahić who is a long-time anchorwoman (worked on the Bosnian state tv prior to transferring to Hayat). You also get to hear Austrian German (or Carinthian Slovenian?) accented BCS by Valentin Inzko. 


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR2fqu-_wfM

Another one with international politics according to Jana's suggestions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2qWzaN8wog&feature=related


----------



## marco_2

And now some Belarussian language samples:

Commercials in Belarussian (though some interviewed young people spoke Russian):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?=heepIBzGg8 

And 1 September in 35 Junior Secondary School in Minsk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU9sshJYuLE&feature=related 

Knowing Polish and Russian I understand everything but I couldn't speak Belarussian without previous studying.


----------



## ilocas2

Bosnian: both videos 15 %
Belarussian: first video doesn't work in my computer, second video 5 %


----------



## DenisBiH

Belarussian:

Sounds really nice. Don't understand a thing except a random word here and there.


----------



## Orlin

ilocas2 said:


> After 3 listening I understand this Slovenian clip from 15 %.


It's not very difficult to me but it wouldn't be so if I didn't speak BCS.


----------



## Orlin

ilocas2 said:


> Belarussian: first video doesn't work in my computer, second video 5 %


The 1st doesn't work either, the 2nd isn't very difficult to me - I know Russian well and although I don't speak Polish, I already know some basic Polish words that help me a lot.


----------



## ilocas2

Orlin said:


> The 1st doesn't work either, the 2nd isn't very difficult to me - I know Russian well and although I don't speak Polish, I already know some basic Polish words that help me a lot.



And how do you understand Czech? This video could be quite comprehensible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkhCQHKIf8E


----------



## Orlin

ilocas2 said:


> And how do you understand Czech? This video could be quite comprehensible.
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkhCQHKIf8E


Yes, comprehensible enough to form the context and get the main information despite the serious problem with many words because I speak no West Slavic lanuage (of course, my exposure with Czech in WRF is very helpful).


----------



## PeterX

I'll go the other way round: I speak Slovenian, live quite near Croatian border and also speak Russian.

So, I have South & East languages pretty much covered, but I have difficulties understanding Czech and especially Polish pronunciation. Although slovenščina and slovenčina are a bit more similar. In Polish, it is all čšššš... But if I lived there for two months, my neurons would reconfigure.


----------



## DenisBiH

TriglavNationalPark said:


> *Macedonian*
> 
> The beginning of a TV newscast:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PZgOzRku88




I would say that I understand 90%+. A random word here or there that's unclear. Prior exposure to written Macedonian and some songs, no real formal learning apart from bits and pieces.


----------



## Awwal12

Only Belarusian and Ukrainian clips sound more or less comprehensible to me (and even those not 100%). As for the rest clips listed above, it's separate phrases in the best case, and usually just some scattered words (often even of non-Slavic origin). Anyway, I cannot objectively judge basing on just some separate clips (1-2 per language), since the intelligibility may also depend on individual peculiarities, intonations, speed and even context. But the fact is that spoken Czech appeared to be almost unintelligible; Slovak, Slovenian and BCS weren't much better. Polish, Bulgarian and Macedonian seemed a bit more clear somehow.

I believe, it's better to collect several videos per language in this thread, to avoid the factors mentioned above so much as possible. Here are some other clips in Russian.

news, various topics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWoD9uzozuI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_1BxcWKNPY

weather forecast (probably the best Russian pronunciation here - i.e. the closest to the standard one):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpuiblXuqxA


----------



## Orlin

DenisBiH said:


> I would say that I understand 90%+. A random word here or there that's unclear. Prior exposure to written Macedonian and some songs, no real formal learning apart from bits and pieces.


Meni je bilo sasvim lako! Mislim da svaki ko zna i bugarski i srpski neće imati problema, ali trebalo bi da je lako i Bugarima koji ne govore srpski - izgleda da nam je makedonski najlakši strani jezik za razumevanje.


----------



## ilocas2

Awwal12 said:


> Only Belarusian and Ukrainian clips sound more or less comprehensible to me (and even those not 100%). As for the rest clips listed above, it's separate phrases in the best case, and usually just some scattered words (often even of non-Slavic origin). Anyway, I cannot objectively judge basing on just some separate clips (1-2 per language), since the intelligibility may also depend on individual peculiarities, intonations, speed and even context. But the fact is that spoken Czech appeared to be almost unintelligible; Slovak, Slovenian and BCS weren't much better. Polish, Bulgarian and Macedonian seemed a bit more clear somehow.
> 
> I believe, it's better to collect several videos per language in this thread, to avoid the factors mentioned above so much as possible. Here are some other clips in Russian.
> 
> news, various topics:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWoD9uzozuI
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_1BxcWKNPY
> 
> weather forecast (probably the best Russian pronunciation here - i.e. the closest to the standard one):
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpuiblXuqxA



First video runs only without sound in my computer.
Second video - it was maybe even worse than Belarussian, nevertheless I give 5 %.
Third video - 30 %, these weather forecasts are obviously easiest from all.

So when all have weather forecast, here is Czech weather forecast
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHnayuXGceU


----------



## DenisBiH

ilocas2 said:


> So when all have weather forecast, here is Czech weather forecast
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHnayuXGceU




I wouldn't say that more than 15% is understandable to me. 


Here is a bit of an unorthodox weather forecast (Bosnian TV channel, but ekavian Serbian speaker). BCS speakers, enjoy.


----------



## Orlin

DenisBiH said:


> I wouldn't say that more than 15% is understandable to me.
> Meni isto, mislim da mi je češki najteži slovenski jezik.
> 
> 
> Here is a bit of an unorthodox weather forecast (Bosnian TV channel, but ekavian Serbian speaker). BCS speakers, enjoy.


Mnogo zabavna vremenska prognoza! Tako mnogo je volim!


----------



## DenisBiH

Orlin said:


> Mnogo zabavna vremenska prognoza! Tako mnogo je volim!




Lana seems to have worked on Serbian state tv, RTS, before (Serbian members can confirm if it is really so). According to what I've read, she holds Bachelor degrees in Law and Spanish language and literature from the University of Belgrade.


----------



## Orlin

DenisBiH said:


> Lana seems to have worked on Serbian state tv, RTS, before (Serbian members can confirm if it is really so). According to what I've read, she holds Bachelor degrees in Law and Spanish language and literature from the University of Belgrade.


Ah, sećam se da sam čitao o tome!


----------



## Sobakus

*Bulgarian* - 50%, Banat Bulgarian -about 40%, but I guess it's mostly due to the nature of the videos.
*Slovak* weather forecast - up to 90% even, had to concentrate real hard. The news report - 25% or so, couldn't catch that guy's thought most of the time.
*Polish* weather forecast - about 70%. The news report - 20%, the interviewees were mumbling a lot 
*Czech* - only separate words, this is probably the hardest language for a Russian to understand indeed. Long vowels are confusing among other things, I hear 2 stresses in a single word.
*Serbian* news report - 25% maybe, I couldn't keep up because the accent retraction made it hard to recognize the words instantly, I had to think them over. Also, a very hard pronunciation. Nevertheless, I got the general idea.
*Serbian* movie trailer - looks like something to watch! Got about 20%.
*Serbian* skate park report - 10% or so, couldn't grasp almost any familiar words except for English borrowings. Then I watched it with subtitles and I think it's the grammar. The words are there, but you only hear them when you know what to look for, and you only know it when you understand the grammar =\
*Croatian* weather forecast - about 35%, surprisingly hard for a forecast, lots of unfamiliar words and grammar.
*Macedonian* - 30%, couldn't understand the interviewees.
*Sorbian* - maybe a bit more words than in Czech >_> Not only the pronunciation, but the actors look utterly German as well 
I watched all the vids at least 2 times, some - 3 or more. Gonna watch the other ones later.


----------



## marco_2

An example of the Ruthenian (Rusyn) language from Voyvodina:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIqk_BCrjxY


----------



## DenisBiH

marco_2 said:


> An example of the Ruthenian (Rusyn) language from Voyvodina:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIqk_BCrjxY



First time around 50%, maybe up to 60%. To me it sounds like BCS using Slovak/Czech words and grammar.


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

Here is a video with some clearly enunciated basic Slovenian phrases, which probably give a better impression of Slovenian phonology than the earlier clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdhTRcAOiz0

Note: YouTube links are allowed in this thread.


----------



## matko

Slovak was the easiest from the western group.
I did understand 50% from the Macedonian video. 
Russian and Belarus, 30 %.

And one question: why is the sound D in Czech pronounced differently from the other Slavic languages?


----------



## bibax

> And one question: why is the sound D in Czech pronounced differently from the other Slavic languages?


Really? I hear no difference. IMHO non-palatal D,T,N are pronounced the same way in all Slavic languages. There are some differences in pronunciation of palatal D,T. The palatal N (written ň, ń, nj etc.) is pronounced the same way, but there is certainly a big difference between Czech/Slovak/Russian Ď and Polish DŹ. BCS Đ is different as well.


----------



## jazyk

I do think that many Czechs (not all) pronounce their d's much harder than speakers of other languages.


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

marco_2 said:


> An example of the Ruthenian (Rusyn) language from Voyvodina:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIqk_BCrjxY


 
How different is Ruthenian from standard Ukrainian in terms of phonology, grammar, and lexis? It _sounds_ very different to me.


----------



## ilocas2

Ruthenian: 70 %

I don't know about that D, I wrote something about it, but I was not sure, so I deleted it.


----------



## marco_2

TriglavNationalPark said:


> How different is Ruthenian from standard Ukrainian in terms of phonology, grammar, and lexis? It _sounds_ very different to me.


 
I suppose Ruthenian is more comprehensible for Slovaks than for Ukrainians, especially those from  Eastern Ukraine. It has much in common with Slovak dialects from eastern Slovakia - this characteristic "še" instead of "-cя" at the end of verbs, or "robic" etc. There are also some Serbian loanwords like "slika" which don't occur in Ruthenian dialects in Slovakia or Poland.


----------



## matko

bibax said:


> Really? I hear no difference. IMHO non-palatal D,T,N are pronounced the same way in all Slavic languages. There are some differences in pronunciation of palatal D,T. The palatal N (written ň, ń, nj etc.) is pronounced the same way, but there is certainly a big difference between Czech/Slovak/Russian Ď and Polish DŹ. BCS Đ is different as well.



Polish DŹ and BCS Đ are the same sounds as well as DŻ and DŽ and I think Russian D' and Czech and Slovak Ď are not pronounced the same. 

Regarding to D sound in Czech (non palatalized), compare it to some other Slavic languages. It sounds like a tap.


----------



## ilocas2

matko said:


> Regarding to D sound in Czech (non palatalized), compare it to some other Slavic languages. It sounds like a tap.



Do you mean that sound like in the word "better" in American English?


----------



## matko

exactly!


----------



## Awwal12

marco_2 said:


> An example of the Ruthenian (Rusyn) language from Voyvodina:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIqk_BCrjxY


It's less understandable to me than Ukrainian, but surely much more understandable than all West and South Slavic languages. I can follow the context, and when it comes to formal terms, I sometimes can completely understand entire sentences. But of course it still sounds very different.


----------



## Duya

Awwal12 said:


> But of course it still sounds very different.



It sounds very Serbian phonologically: about exactly the same quality of vocals, no palatalization. I'm not sure if every Rusyn speaks like this (I live in Vojvodina but don't have much access to spoken Rusyn), or if Serbian is actually the mother tongue of the speakers.


----------



## ilocas2

matko said:


> exactly!



You're right, I watched those videos again and it's really that sound, at least in some positions (not all). I speak that way too.



matko said:


> And one question: why is the sound D in Czech pronounced differently from the other Slavic languages?



Why? Because all languages are changing, they are continously undergoing sound changes, which are telling them apart from related languages.


----------



## ilocas2

Hello, the atmosphere on this forum is in last days horrible, I don't exactly understand why this happens, and who is responsible for it, so here is a beautiful song for bettering the atmosphere. It's from well known fairy tail "Lion King". There's Russian, Polish, Czech, Croatian and Bulgarian version of this song among Slavic languages. I like most the Croatian version.

Croatian version - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ejpb9AAb78


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

Here is an old Czech cartoon (with narration):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INZtcs3-QT0

And here is the Slovenian version of the very same cartoon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c718CegaJeU


----------



## DenisBiH

Since we're into Czecho-Slovak cartoons, here's some more childhood memories. Kinda off-topic, but still...nostalgia. 


Not to be entirely off topic, here's an example of Bosnian from the north of Bosnia. Though it is the standard language in form, the pronunciation exhibits the open back rounded vowel (I assume that's the one) that we discussed here. Unfortunately I can't find a longer version.


----------



## Azori

Here is a popular Polish cartoon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Alqjoxi0z8

and the same episode in Slovak:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2_4XlkpZ0

and Slovenian:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZGOQ0Qzixc


----------



## matko

I like this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLQOUCKQPzM (Croatian version)
my favourite cartoon


----------



## Orlin

DenisBiH said:


> First time around 50%, maybe up to 60%. To me it sounds like BCS using Slovak/Czech words and grammar.


Meni je to bilo ponekad razumljivo, ponekad ne. I ja mislim da zvuči kao BCS ali s ukraijinskim rečima i gramatikom.


----------



## vianie

marco_2 said:


> I suppose Ruthenian is more comprehensible for Slovaks than for Ukrainians



I cannot affirm this for the Ukrainians.
Anyway, I (as a person not from Eastern Slovakia) find Pannonian Rusyn fairly easy. I think, that it has the potential to be at least as understable for Slovaks as Polish is.



jazyk said:


> I do think that many Czechs (not all) pronounce their d's much harder than speakers of other languages.



These d-s effect on me rather as badges of a phonological kerning.
One way or another, in Czech they ding perfectly.



 And here are other videos:

Moravian singer talks "a story on H"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8EBF-XxR1w

Slovak late actor recites a romantic poem
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KCse2zSzII


----------



## jazyk

> These d-s effect on me rather as badges of a phonological kerning.
> One way or another, in Czech they ding perfectly.


Mohol by si to preložiť do slovenčiny? Ja tomu nerozumiem. 
Ďakujem.


----------



## vianie

_Tak či onak, v češtine zvučia_ (vo význame _znejú_) _dokonale_.

Týmto som chcel vyjadriť, že tieto d-éčka v češtine proste súzvučia, že v nej znejú prirodzene a dôstojne, čo by o nich v takej slovenčine pravdaže neplatilo (počul som aj niekoľko Slovákov hovoriacich týmto štýlom).

Ak to viete vhodnejšie preložiť do angličtiny pri zachovaní mnou požadovanej výstižnosti, kľudne mi to prezraďte a ja to po uvážení prepíšem.


----------



## jazyk

> _Tak či onak, v češtine zvučia_ (vo význame _znejú_) _dokonale_.
> 
> Týmto som chcel vyjadriť, že tieto d-éčka v češtine proste súzvučia, že v  nej znejú prirodzene a dôstojne, čo by o nich v takej slovenčine  pravdaže neplatilo (počul som aj niekoľko Slovákov hovoriacich týmto  štýlom).


Už je mi všetko jasné. Ďakujem.


----------



## Ayazid

vianie said:


> These d-s effect on me rather as badges of a phonological kerning.



Co přesně znamená tahle věta? Mám problém hlavně s tím "phonological kerning".


----------



## ilocas2

vianie said:


> Moravian singer talks "a story on H"
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8EBF-XxR1w



I don't find this video much funny. There are some vulgar words, some German words - hilfe, hakenkreuz, himmel herrgott, it can be offensive for homosexuals, etc. In every case it is not "standard language" at all.

Sorry for off-topic, but I just wanted to say that not for all people this video is funny.



> Slovak late actor recites a romantic poem
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KCse2zSzII



Quite archaic language, 90 %


----------



## vianie

vianie said:


> I think, that it has the potential to be at least as understandable for Slovaks as Polish is.





Ayazid said:


> Co přesně znamená tahle věta? Mám problém hlavně s tím "phonological kerning".



Že podľa mňa písmeno d vyslovujete ako vyslovujete kvôli zvukovej plynulosti. To kerning bola len symbolika.



ilocas2 said:


> I don't find this video much funny. There are some vulgar words, some German words - hilfe, hakenkreuz, himmel herrgott, it can be offensive for homosexuals, etc.



Precisely because of these things I have long considered whether I post this video here, but in the end there prevailed the linguistic perspective and I tried it. It was also about to show to the other forumers, what the current language is and not what it should be.



ilocas2 said:


> In every case it is not "standard language" at all.



I opined that it is more standard than _obecní čeština_.



ilocas2 said:


> Quite archaic language, 90 %



Yes, that was expressly an archaic language. Not to mention the accent and pronounciation at the moment, I did not understand some words too.


----------



## ilocas2

vianie said:


> Precisely because of these things I have long considered whether I post this video here, but in the end there prevailed the linguistic perspective and I tried it. It was also about to show to the other forumers, what the current language is and not what it should be.



I must clarify that nor Hilfe or Hakenkreuz are commonly used in Czech. They are incomprehensible without knowledge of German. Hergot or Himlhergot are used, it's true.




> I opined that it is more standard than obecná čeština.



You're right.



> Yes, that was expressly an archaic language. Not to mention the accent and pronounciation at the moment, I did not understand some words too.



This version is much nicer and has even lyrics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0aLYPtFJJ0&feature=related


----------



## Istriano

Slavic comprehension is a myth. I can understand Slovenian, Croatian (cakavian, kajkavian, stokavian), Serbian, Bosniac, Montenegrin and Macedonian, but even Slovak and Bulgar are only a few words among 20 words....


----------



## itreius

Istriano said:


> Slavic comprehension is a myth. I can understand Slovenian, Croatian (cakavian, kajkavian, stokavian), Serbian, Bosniac, Montenegrin and Macedonian, but even Slovak and Bulgar are only a few words among 20 words....


Define "understand". Written? Spoken? For example, I find it hard to believe that a non-native speaker of BCS would understand spoken non-pidginized Kajkavian.


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

Istriano said:


> Slavic comprehension is a myth. I can understand Slovenian, Croatian (cakavian, kajkavian, stokavian), Serbian, Bosniac, Montenegrin and Macedonian, but even Slovak and Bulgar are only a few words among 20 words....


 
As a native Slovenian speaker, I can read Czech and Slovak news articles without major difficulties, even though I've had very little exposure to either language. Spoken language is a different matter, however.



itreius said:


> Define "understand". Written? Spoken? For example, I find it hard to believe that a non-native speaker of BCS would understand spoken non-pidginized Kajkavian.


 
Since Istriano understands both Slovenian and BCS, I assume he would also be able to understand Kajkavian fairly well. After all, Kajkavian is a Croatian dialect transitional to Slovenian; its grammatical structure is similar to that of Slovenian.


----------



## itreius

Meh, that's what happens when I don't engage the brain before posting.


----------



## vianie

ilocas2 said:


> I opined that it is more standard than obecná čeština.


Oh, of course.  Just for an explanation: Czech obecný = Slovak všeobecný and Czech obecní = Slovak obecný.


----------



## Istriano

itreius said:


> Define "understand". Written? Spoken? For example, I find it hard to believe that a non-native speaker of BCS would understand spoken non-pidginized Kajkavian.



I understand Gruntovcani perfectly.


----------



## DenisBiH

Istriano said:


> I understand Gruntovcani perfectly.




I don't. Say 90% or so.


----------



## Deem-A

> I suppose Ruthenian is more comprehensible for Slovaks than for Ukrainians


 Ruthenian spoken in Ukraine is very comprehensible for Ukrainians since,scientifically speaking, it is a dialect of Ukrainian

 I agree with the fact that Slavic comprehension is a myth . Russians can barely understand Ukrainian(Ukrainians all understand Russian since for many of them Russian is mothertongue or at least they're all fluent in Russian). 
 I was surprised in Bulgaria(many say Russian and Bulgarian are very similar) when I asked something in Russian people looked at me as if I were and alien,only the old ones could understand a bit ... as for Bulgarian, I could understand some of the written words,but what Bulgarian speak sounds to me like Greek or something.


----------



## Orlin

deem-a said:


> i was surprised in bulgaria(many say russian and bulgarian are very similar) when i asked something in russian people looked at me as if i were and alien,only the old ones could understand a bit ... As for bulgarian, i could understand some of the written words,but what bulgarian speak sounds to me like greek or something.


Според мен би трябвало да можете да разбирате поне писмен български, защото значително мнозинство от думите са сходни, а сериозните граматически различия поне според мене не са решаващи. По отношение на говоримия български вероятно наистина имате право, защото се прибавя като трудност фонетическите различия, които доста често не позволяват да се разпознаят сходните думи, а и освен това на слух разбирането на какъвто и да е език е винаги по-трудно.


----------



## xpictianoc

ali isto tako je i u Njemačkoj, a ukoliko znam to i u Bugarskoj postoje različne narječa i govore. 

mala edicija  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpNcqWeOKYc


----------



## Wikislav

xpictianoc said:


> ali isto tako je i u Njemačkoj, a ukoliko znam to i u Bugarskoj postoje različne narječa i govore.
> Kašubski jezik:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQePUyGkz0A
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpNcqWeOKYc


These links to _Kashubian_ comparatively appear very interesting to me. I had yet formerly a scarce insight in the written Kashubian, and that appeared few intelligible to me (and also to other BCS users). These new linked videos are even less intelligible by us from BCS, i.e. the first Kashubian sermon is hardy intelligible (only a basic meaning of phrases), and the 2nd one with singing Kashubian was almost completely incomprehensible. My provisional impression was that Kashubian may be also exotic to BCS speakers on a similar level, as is our northernmost _Baegnjunski_ exotic and unintelligible to many other Slavs; both ones appear to be probably two extreme antipodes within Slavism. 



Istriano said:


> I understand Gruntovcani perfectly.


This offering of 'Gruntovcani' as an example for understanding northern Croat-Kaykavian is not the best representative for lingual purposes, because it was produced in a transitional margin at the easternmost limit of Kaykavians (Virje-Djurdjevac area) with many sub-standard Shtokavian impacts; i.e. that hybrid artificial example is really about 2/3 Kaykavian only (the rest being Shtokavian admixture). Any other typical example of a true Kaykavian e.g. from Zagorje hills or Medjimurje plain, or even urban elders from Varaždin or Zagreb city (Agramer) would undoubtely result by considerably lower comprehension.


----------



## Orlin

ilocas2 said:


> Quite archaic language, 90 %


But relatively understandable to me.


----------



## ilocas2

Orlin said:


> But relatively understandable to me.



I think in that video there are many simple Panslavic words and for this reason it's quite understandable for everybody. 

Kashubian I understood:
first video - 15 %
second video - only "to je" and "kašeba" (or something like that)


----------



## Orlin

ilocas2 said:


> I think in that video there are many simple Panslavic words and for this reason it's quite understandable for everybody.
> 
> Kashubian I understood:
> first video - 15 %
> second video - only "to je" and "kašuba" (or something like that)


Merry Christmas to all!
I understood Kashubian in the same way as you little in the 1st and hardly anything in the 2nd video.


----------



## ilocas2

I also wish to all people beautiful Christmas.

Here is a nice Czech song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25TTLSGkIdE&feature=related


----------



## marco_2

Wikislav said:


> These links to _Kashubian_ comparatively appear very interesting to me. I had yet formerly a scarce insight in the written Kashubian, and that appeared few intelligible to me (and also to other BCS users). These new linked videos are even less intelligible by us from BCS, i.e. the first Kashubian sermon is hardy intelligible (only a basic meaning of phrases), and the 2nd one with singing Kashubian was almost completely incomprehensible. My provisional impression was that Kashubian may be also exotic to BCS speakers on a similar level, as is our northernmost _Baegnjunski_ exotic and unintelligible to many other Slavs; both ones appear to be probably two extreme antipodes within Slavism.


 
For me Kashubian is comprehensible in 99% and it is different from Polish only phonetically. If you are familiar with Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) dialect and understand all German loanwords, you don't have any problems with understanding it.


----------



## Wikislav

marco_2 said:


> For me Kashubian is comprehensible in 99% and it is different from Polish only phonetically. If you are familiar with Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) dialect and understand all German loanwords, you don't have any problems with understanding it.


Concerning the mutual intelligibility of Polish/Croatian, this comprehension appear to be higher to northern Kaykavian Croats (with much German loanwords), than to other BCS ones. However, it is enigmatic to me that for average Croats without special linguist training, the intelligibility of Polish is often the lowest one than toward any other Slavic languages.


----------



## nonik

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNpeLklIPHo


Dialekt spoken on slovak-moravia border.


----------



## nonik

Brižinsky pametnik. Najdrievniejši starosloviensky pametnik predĆirilskoju slovenskoju grammotnosti v Sloveniji (Karantanija)
http://www.nuk.uni-lj.si/bs.html


----------



## ilocas2

nonik said:


> Dialekt spoken on slovak-moravia border.



Only for clarification:

It's a Slovak film (Sváko Ragan) from 1976 which takes place in Myjava region which is situated close to the border with Czech Republic.


----------



## vianie

*Rusyn* from eastern Slovakia:

http://www.stv.sk/online/archiv/narodnostny-magazin?id=43690&scroll=36

http://www.rozhlas.sk/inetportal/we...ationID=0&page=showRelacia&id=617&stationID=5



> Dialekt spoken on slovak-moravia border.


 
DELETED


----------



## Istriano

Write ''bednjanska svadba'' on ytube and see if you can understand this Croatian dialect.  It's the closest one to the old Slavic.


----------



## nonik

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywstbj_gsqw&feature=player_embedded


----------



## ilocas2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gA8oinNWBM

Edit: It's a reportage about Christmas tree in town of Litoměřice, it's standard Czech language.


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

Your are free to include YouTube clips in this thread, but please refrain from posting just a link without any explanation of the link.

Also don't forget rule #7:

_7. This thread is meant for standard versions of Slavic languages. Depending on the success of this thread, moderators may decide to open threads for dialects._

We haven't been very rigorous in enforcing this rule, but from now on, please try to focus on standard languages (and dialects with their own standardized written forms) and save any clips of pure dialects until a relevant thread is opened.

Thank you for your understanding.


----------



## Arath

To me, the two most easily identifiable languages are Polish and Russian. I can always recognize them.

*Macedonian: *I understand almost everything. The only problems are  posed by the numerous Serbian borrowings and the shifted stress in many  words. Among all the phonetic dissimilarities between Bulgarian and  Macedonian, I think that the difference in stress position is the most  prominent one and also the most annoying one. It's irritating to hear  familiar words pronounced like that.

*Russian:* >85%. What I find distinctive about Russian is the pronunciation of unstressed "o" as "a" and the palatalization which is much more common than in Bulgarian.

*Serbian: *50%. Although I can't tell whether the intonation is going up or down, I can definitely hear a certain melody. By the way, Serbian women always seem to have much deeper voice than women from other nationalities. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that Serbian is a tonal language.

*Ukrainian: *35%. Similar to Russian but definitely distinct. Palatalization seems to be less common than in Russian and vowel reduction is absent.
*
Belarusian**: *35%. Had I not known what I was listening to, I would have thought that it was Russian, and I would have wondered why I understood so little.

*Slovenian: *20% Mainly individual words and sometimes short sentences. Sounds similar to Serbian, but without the melody and at some places where Serbian has "u", Slovenian has "o".

*Slovak:* 20% What caught my attention was the diphthong "ou" and the long vowels here and there.

*Czech:  *10%. Sounds somewhat less melodic than Slovak and consonants seem to be more prominent than they are in Slovak.

*Polish*: 5% The most distinctive feature is the various nontraditional consonants which seem so difficult to pronounce, especially when they are in clusters.

Here are some more examples of Bulgarian:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8zjm23GjrU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4ZCnNceeWg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=640Up5TuAEI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rejyq0GZ4E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOlWSgpL_wY

The last three are songs and have subtitles and translation which could make comparison easier.

Is Bulgarian easily recognizable?
If not, which language is it most likely to be confused with?
What is(are) the most distinctive feature(s) of Bulgarian (if there are any)?


----------



## vianie

Arath said:


> What caught my attention was the diphthong "ou" and the long vowels here and there.


 
_If I may respond to this, the "ou" in Slovak, unlike Czech, isn't perceived as a diphtong and it occurs only at the end of words._

_Slovak words more often contain "ov", which can stand wherever in a word, and when it stands before consonant or at the end of the word, it has similar sound as "ou" has._


----------



## ilocas2

Arath said:


> Is Bulgarian easily recognizable?
> If not, which language is it most likely to be confused with?
> What is(are) the most distinctive feature(s) of Bulgarian (if there are any)?



I know Bulgarian only from songs from Youtube, but it's easily recognizable for me. I can recognize that it's Bulgarian after 10-20 seconds of video. I think that the most distinctive features of Bulgarian are very little of palatization and that sound which resembles schwa - ъ.


----------



## Aleksey Groz

Arath said:


> By the way, Serbian women always seem to have much deeper voice than women from other nationalities. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that Serbian is a tonal language.



Although I'm a native BCS speaker, I've noticed the same. Serbian women have a way deeper voices then many other Europeans. But I wouldn't connect that with Serbian musical accent, but rather with their Dinaric origin. The same deep voices could be found in mountainous area of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia. But the fact is that that colour of voice prevails in Serbia. On the other hand, population from northern Serbia (Vojvodina for example) has higher voices.


----------



## Aleksey Groz

Arath said:


> If not, which language is it most likely to be confused with?
> What is(are) the most distinctive feature(s) of Bulgarian (if there are any)?



Rarely, but sometimes I mix it with Russian. But only for a moment. The key moment is "lacking" of vowels in Bulgarian (especially ъ) and massive using of aorist tense.


----------



## DarkChild

Aleksey Groz said:


> Rarely, but sometimes I mix it with Russian. But only for a moment. The key moment is "lacking" of vowels in Bulgarian (especially ъ) and massive using of aorist tense.


I don't understand what you mean by "lacking" - do you mean they're not enough or the opposite?


----------



## iobyo

Arath said:


> I think that the difference in stress position is the most  prominent one and also the most annoying one.



That's quite interesting and exactly what I suspected. I tend to find the Bulgarian stress on the ultima in disyllabic words annoying (for lack of a better word).


----------



## Wikislav

Arath said:


> *Macedonian: *I understand almost everything. The only problems are  posed by the numerous Serbian borrowings and the shifted stress in many  words. Among all the phonetic dissimilarities between Bulgarian and  Macedonian, I think that the difference in stress position is the most  prominent one and also the most annoying one. It's irritating to hear  familiar words pronounced like that. ...


It is the same with Croats listening other Slavs. About *3/5* Croats including nearly all Kaykavians, Chakavians and partly Ikavians (Šćakavians), in their _spontaneous vernacular_ speaking have usually a postponed accent in penultima or ultima. Therefore, the _Russian, Bulgarian, Old-Slavic_ (mass) and similar Slavic pronouncing, to most Croats sounds very familiar and natural, despite partly divergent lexic. On the other hand, the Czech, Slovak, Serbian and Macedonian pronouncing to most Croats sounds annoying by hearing numerous known Slavic words in such irritating pronunciation with advanced stress on starting syllables, so blurring the comprehension of otherwise familiar words.


----------



## Vulcho

Pomatsko 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LouKDoG7pwA


----------



## Aleksey Groz

DarkChild said:


> I don't understand what you mean by "lacking" - do you mean they're not enough or the opposite?



Well, maybe it wasn't the best word to describe what I mean. 
Considering half-voice ъ, for example, in words such as Bulgaria (BCS Bugarska, Bulgarian България) or late (BCS kasno, Bulgarian късно), sometimes sounds like that half-voice is swallowing vowels (respectively, u and a). 
On the other hand, in words in BCS where there is not any vowel (like krv/ кръв, trn/трън....), Bulgarian is trying to make it easier to pronounce.
However, half-vowel ъ is alway a sure sign, for me, that I'm listening a Bulgarian language.


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

Vulcho said:


> Pomatsko
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LouKDoG7pwA


 
Interesting! I understand virtually none of it.

Speaking of standardized dialects, which are allowed in this thread, here is another example of Burgenland Croatian (spoken in eastern Austria) from Austran television:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVq7G2Ta8-I

For comparison, here is Austrian television's program in Slovenian (for Carinthian Slovenes, who live in southern Austria):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eimRLb1ySZ0


----------



## Aleksey Groz

Vulcho said:


> Pomatsko
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LouKDoG7pwA



wow! 
if I've not been told that this is a Slavic language, I would be sure that I'm listening Greek!
I understood maybe 5-10%, but video helped a lot. (I doubt that I could understand a word only by listening that).


----------



## DarkChild

Aleksey Groz said:


> wow!
> if I've not been told that this is a Slavic language, I would be sure that I'm listening Greek!
> I understood maybe 5-10%, but video helped a lot. (I doubt that I could understand a word only by listening that).


This is a Bulgarian dialect spoken in Rhodope mountains. Here it has a very heavy Greek accent and words thrown in it.


----------



## Vulcho

The accent certainly makes it very hard to understand what they are talking about. After listening to the beginning about 5 times I finally got the first sentence: 
Ися зафатот хабереве на помацко. = Ей сега захващат новини на помашки. 

Трябва ни някой от Смолян или Златоград да преведе останалото...
Träba ni näkatri at Smolyan ili Zlatograd za da terzimova ostalono...(I wonder if that is close)


----------



## Wikislav

Vulcho said:


> Pomatsko
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LouKDoG7pwA


Thanks to *Vulcho* _very much_ for offering to listen this interesting primaeval speaking of _Pomatski_. I tested its comprehension on my neighbors speaking almost standard BCS-Croatian and on an immigrated Bosnian too, and both ones understood almost nothing. But my wife (professional BCS-linguist) being Chakavian by mother, understood about 1/4 to 1/3 depending on topic across a dozen links offered there. 
Personally I was astonished understanding instantly about _2/3 to 3/4_ of Pomatski,- but I am not representative for BCS-group because my first native speaking of childhood was also the exotic primaeval _Gan-Vey*ãn*_ of Krk island (Adriatic Sea). Evidently it appears rather close to _Pomatski_ that I had never heard before this your link.


----------



## vianie

vianie said:


> *Rusyn* from eastern Slovakia:
> ...
> http://www.rozhlas.sk/inetportal/we...ationID=0&page=showRelacia&id=617&stationID=5



_Since that link isn't in operation anymore, I'm adding another audio link from the community site of Slovak Rusyns:_

http://holosy.sk/rozhlas


----------



## ilocas2

Polish - short street interviews in Kraków with subtitles:

What's your name?

What's your favorite color?


----------



## Istriano

I think that SBC along with Portuguese is the only language that uses 1st person past simple (_aorist_) for the meaning: _I'm leaving! I'm outta here!_


_Odoh! (SBC) = Fui! (Portuguese) = I'm outta here!
_
I would like to know if other Slavic languages use this way of saying _I'm leavin_g. 

_Aorist _and _imperfect _resurrected at least in Croatia because they are shorter, and therefore, more suitable for the text messaging (SMS),
even tho' they're not used much in speech (other than a few forms like _odoh _or _bijah_). This is similar to the use of _will ~ going to_
in the US English, even tho' _going to_ is more used in colloquial speech, _will _future is preferred in text messaging because it's shorter (I'll vs I'm gonna).


----------



## Istriano

Wikislav said:


> It is the same with Croats listening other Slavs. About *3/5* Croats including nearly all Kaykavians, Chakavians and partly Ikavians (Šćakavians), in their _spontaneous vernacular_ speaking have usually a postponed accent in penultima or ultima. Therefore, the _Russian, Bulgarian, Old-Slavic_ (mass) and similar Slavic pronouncing, to most Croats sounds very familiar and natural, despite partly divergent lexic. On the other hand, the Czech, Slovak, Serbian and Macedonian pronouncing to most Croats sounds annoying by hearing numerous known Slavic words in such irritating pronunciation with advanced stress on starting syllables, so blurring the comprehension of otherwise familiar words.



I don't think so.
Macedonian _'pedeset_ is similar to Kajkavian_ 'pedeset_  (as in _'pedeset let)._
These Macedonian accents are shared with Kajkavian, and others like _ma'kedonski _are shared with normative Štokavian.


My friend is a Kajkavian from Krapina and she pronounces
_pedeset, šestdeset, ponedjeljak, četvrtak_ all on the 1st syllable.

On the other Hand, Macedonian _šes'naest _is close to Čakavian _šeš'najšt_ (it's how people here in Istria speak)
when it comes to accentuation.


----------



## Wikislav

Istriano said:


> I don't think so. ...My friend is a Kajkavian from Krapina and she pronounces_ pedeset, šestdeset, ponedjeljak, četvrtak_ all on the 1st syllable. ...


Dear Istriano, you are too pretentious discussing _ad hoc_ on a foreign language (Croatian) and even on its dialects! For example, I rather understand your Portuguese (knowing well Latin & French, and partly also Italian and Spanish), but I am never so convinced and ambitious to discuss its details and dialects, as you on Croat dialects. 

Your friend is surely no any "Kaykavian" because ..."pone*dj*eljak, četvrtak..." are only the BCS standard forms, not at all "Kaykavian" (my speciality are Cro-dialects, and my mother is Kaykavian). Their true Kaykavian synonyms are intermediate between Slovenian and BCS standard: _ pond*él*ek, čet*ŕt*ek_ (= Monday, Thursday)_. _Moreover, Kaykavians *never* pronounce the standard *ije*kavian 'jat', they are almost Ekavians and this your "dj" combination is _completely impossible_ and unexisting in Kaykavians. 

Also, the *aorist* (e.g. your: odoh!) theoretically existed in Croatian standard, but it is so used rarely in the artificial litterary texts for special effects, but never in official texts. In everyday vernacular speaking this is also rarely used, and in Chakavian and Kaykavian it is almost unexisting. Besides writers, aorist in Croatia (and Istra) use almost only the Bosnian immigrants there.


----------



## marco_2

Istriano said:


> I think that SBC along with Portuguese is the only language that uses 1st person past simple (_aorist_) for the meaning: _I'm leaving! I'm outta here!_
> 
> 
> _Odoh! (SBC) = Fui! (Portuguese) = I'm outta here!_
> 
> I would like to know if other Slavic languages use this way of saying _I'm leavin_g.


 
The Russians don't have aorist, but they use their past simple like that: *Ну, я пошел! *(Well, I'm leaving!). The same I heard in Ukraine (*Я пішов*).


----------



## DenisBiH

Wikislav said:


> Dear Istriano, you are too pretentious discussing _ad hoc_ on a foreign language (Croatian) and even on its dialects! For example,




I don't know what this Portuguese business is about, but Istriano seems native enough to me, including proficient in the dialect of Istria (though someone else may comment on that)


----------



## xpictianoc

marco_2 said:


> The Russians don't have aorist, but they use their past simple like that: *Ну, я пошел! *(Well, I'm leaving!). The same I heard in Ukraine (*Я пішов*).



In my area (near Warsaw) we use poszedł (he left, he went ect.) as the imperative form of go away! Leave! 
Poszedł stąd! 
Poszli stąd!


----------



## Sobakus

xpictianoc said:


> In my area (near Warsaw) we use poszedł (he left, he went ect.) as the imperative form of go away! Leave!
> Poszedł stąd!
> Poszli stąd!



We in Russia do this as well, usually it's rude and mostly used with animals and bothersome children, but "пошли" just means "let's go" when you mean "мы".


----------



## xpictianoc

Sobakus said:


> We in Russia do this as well, usually it's rude and mostly used with animals and bothersome children, but "пошли" just means "let's go" when you mean "мы".



I suppose the way of using "poszedł (poszli) in Polish is an influance  of Russian from the time of the Partitions of Polish-Lithuanian  Comonwealth.


----------



## ilocas2

This Slavic language wasn't in this thread yet - Lower Sorbian spoken by an old man

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFumBiE8e7s


----------



## DenisBiH

I'm not sure if this is on-topic but let's try and see.

Here is the Czech coach of football club Sarajevo, Jirži Plišek (Czech Jiří Plišek) speaking pretty good BCS (can't really specify a variety as he's mixing ekavian and ijekavian). His intonation is noticeably Czech, at least for me, so I wonder how Czech and Slovak speakers understand this clip. Does his intonation/accent improve comprehension?


----------



## texpert

It certainly does. I followed him quite easily throughtout the interview, understood over 90%. My normal comprehension of BCS is anywhere between 25-75% after numerous visits to the former YU and active/passive vocabulary of 100/1000 words.


----------



## Bog Svarog

iobyo said:


> That's quite interesting and exactly what I suspected. I tend to find the Bulgarian stress on the ultima in disyllabic words annoying (for lack of a better word).


Well....that's quite interesting and almost exactly what I suspected! 
I tend to find the Bulgarian (mind you: especially Eastern-Bulgarian) accent annoying beyond imagination, *in general*.
When I hear the average Bulgarian male talk, I always get the feeling he's trying to do a voice-over for a cartoon.
Slavi Trifonov tops the list for me (good lord, that accent literally makes my toes curl), and mind the fact that he's from north-western Bulgaria...
Usually I like the Sofia accent, but some females sound pretty awkward to me.
The Pirin Macedonian sounds the most natural to me, along with the Shopski, although I wouldn't classify them as strictly "Bulgarian".

As far as preferrability goes, there seems to be no rule for me when I find (eastern) Bulgarian annoying, or when I think that it sounds better/more logical than in Macedonian.
Vodá vs vóda => I prefer vóda
Vodáta vs vódata => vodáta
Naród vs národ => naród
Petrévski vs pétrevski => petrévski
Milévski vs mílevski => mílevski
Magíja vs mágija => mágija
Čovék vs čóek => čovék
In the end it comes down to personal taste, which is quite subjective. 

As for the video in Bulgarian: I understood in between 80 and 95% of it. The fact that I have a Bulgarian girlfriend has made me understand Bulgarian a great deal better though, so I'm not an objective listener.
Fact remains that I have to concentrate very, very hard, to understand Bulgarian spoken like that, and as a result I can not remember what is said.
So the fact that I "understand" it is a bit meaningless.


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

MOD NOTE: Several posts have been moved to the new South Slavic Dialect Continuum thread started by Bog Svarog.


----------



## vianie

DenisBiH said:


> His intonation is noticeably Czech, at least for me



It's 100% Bohemian with BCS words. As smiling as this other one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxGKuimuto8



> Does his intonation/accent improve comprehension?



I haven't had the problems with BCS accent processing, so _that thing_ simply doesn't improve my comprehension.


----------



## Azori

The Czech language, once again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0atIyb6HMp4


----------



## vianie

Yep, and the original language of this TV series:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvL2Nj7Aqe4


----------



## Azori

Just to make things clear: the original language of this TV series is Slovak; the first video is from the dubbed version which was broadcasted in the Czech Republic.


----------



## vianie

Slovak from Slovak Hungarian http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDcV7VhwsjU


----------



## trosheniorasi

This is a very interesting thread!
For me the list goes like this:
Macedonian 85%-100%
Serbian (from the southeast) 70%-85%
BCS 45% spoken 40% written
Russian 20% spoken 75% written
Slovenian 20%
Czech/Slovak 10-15% 
Polish 5% (and this is after spending 2-3 years hanging out with Poles)

Serbian and Macedonian actually sound more natural to me, than eastern and even standard Bulgarian. Even though sometimes I do not understand the words I can tell the meaning of something just by the way it sounds. Russian and Bulgarian have similar vocabulary so it is easy to read, but spoken Russian sounds like mumbling to me (although so does eastern Bulgarian). Czech and Slovak are hard because there isn't a lot of common vocabulary. Polish is compleatly unintelligible to me! I hang out with Polish people quite a lot and for some reason they think that I can understand them, well I can't. I have easier time understanding all the Romance languages and even German than I do Polish. That being said, Polish does sound natural (Slavic to me), even more so than Russian, so I am assuming that it is because of the lack of common vocabulary.


----------



## Sobakus

vianie said:


> It's 100% Bohemian with BCS words. As smiling as this other one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxGKuimuto8



This man seems to have the accent in the right place! I mean, he doesn't have this Neo-Stokavian retraction which hampers my comprehension so much, does he? Or am I missing something?


----------



## Duya

Sobakus said:


> This man seems to have the accent in the right place!



...depending on whose viewpoint you use to define 'right'.


----------



## Anicetus

trosheniorasi said:


> BCS 45% spoken 40% written
> 
> Serbian and Macedonian actually sound more natural to me, than eastern and even standard Bulgarian.



Spoken more than written? Pitch accent, vowel length, retracted accent position, all of them changeable in word inflection, are more comprehensible than phonemic orthography? I find that very interesting! 

Does your dialect have a similar prosody to Neo-Štokavian then? As far as I know, standard Bulgarian has neither tones nor vowel length, and has mostly kept the original stress position...

It's always the other way around with comprehension for me. I can understand written Slovene quite well, for example, but not that much of the spoken language.


Questions for Sobakus and everybody else learning BCMS: can you hear our tones? Or even distinguish them while speaking our language? What about vowel lengths?

A question for everybody who has posted their level of comprehension in percentage: how do you measure that?!




Sobakus said:


> This man seems to have the accent in the right place! I mean, he doesn't have this Neo-Stokavian retraction which hampers my comprehension so much, does he? Or am I missing something?



He doesn't have the vocative case, which every standard variant of Neo-Štokavian does, either (so it should have been: _poštovani gospodin*e* predsjednič*e* Mesić*u*_ etc.). Nor the consonants /ʎ/ and /ɲ/, which is what _lj_ and _nj_ stand for, respectively.


----------



## Sobakus

Anicetus said:


> Questions for Sobakus and everybody else learning BCMS: can you hear our tones? Or even distinguish them while speaking our language? What about vowel lengths?


I kind of do hear the tones, but for a person who doesn't know what to look for it's just an odd intonation pattern. The same with long vowels, it's definitely not Finnish 



> A question for everybody who has posted their level of comprehension in percentage: how do you measure that?!


For me it's the ratio of me understaning what is being said at least in general to just sitting there with a dumb smile


----------



## Anicetus

Sobakus said:


> I kind of do hear the tones, but for a person who doesn't know what to look for it's just an odd intonation pattern. The same with long vowels, it's definitely not Finnish



Okay, that's what I thought. Tone and length aren't actually that important for being able to communicate in our language, there are even dialects completely without them, such as the one most commonly spoken in modern-day Zagreb. There are examples of tone or length being the difference between a minimal pair, but context usually resolves such ambiguities. Tones are certainly not critical like they are in Mandarin or Thai, for example.

Anyway, if you're interested... A syllable has _falling tone_ if it's both stressed and has a higher pitch than other syllables. _Rising tone_, on the other hand, means that the syllable after the stressed one has the highest pitch. Therefore, the last syllable in an accentual unit may never have the rising tone. Rising tones emerged with stress retraction, so as a rule of thumb, the tone is rising when stress position is retracted in comparison with Russian. There are examples of obviously retracted accents (on proclitics) being falling, too (such as _sa mnom_ or _u grad_), presumably because these were retracted in Proto-Slavic, and the resulting accent has become falling in Neo-Štokavian. I don't know how these behave in Russian. But I digress. Anyway, the last syllable is never stressed in the standard language, while syllables in the middle of an accentual unit (ie. not the first ones) may only have rising tones. First syllable can have any type of accent. Vowels before the stressed syllable may only be short.

This probably sounds much more confusing than it did in my head.


----------



## Sobakus

Anicetus said:


> Okay, that's what I thought. Tone and length aren't actually that important for being able to communicate in our language, there are even dialects completely without them, such as the one most commonly spoken in modern-day Zagreb. There are examples of tone or length being the difference between a minimal pair, but context usually resolves such ambiguities. Tones are certainly not critical like they are in Mandarin or Thai, for example.
> 
> Anyway, if you're interested... A syllable has _falling tone_ if it's both stressed and has a higher pitch than other syllables. _Rising tone_, on the other hand, means that the syllable after the stressed one has the highest pitch. Therefore, the last syllable in an accentual unit may never have the rising tone. Rising tones emerged with stress retraction, so as a rule of thumb, the tone is rising when stress position is retracted in comparison with Russian. There are examples of obviously retracted accents (on proclitics) being falling, too (such as _sa mnom_ or _u grad_), presumably because these were retracted in Proto-Slavic, and the resulting accent has become falling in Neo-Štokavian. I don't know how these behave in Russian. But I digress. Anyway, the last syllable is never stressed in the standard language, while syllables in the middle of an accentual unit (ie. not the first ones) may only have rising tones. First syllable can have any type of accent. Vowels before the stressed syllable may only be short.
> 
> This probably sounds much more confusing than it did in my head.



Thanks a lot for such a detailed explaination, I'll try noticing all of this in speech. It wasn't that confusing actually, as I had some background knowledge from reading this forum. In Russian there's accent retraction on prepositions/prefixes too (when the accent was falling in Common Slavic), but as we lost the tones it isn't exactly systematic to put it mildly, and it never happens in case of _со_ or _во_ (they've become shortened to _с/в_ almost everywhere).


----------



## DenisBiH

An interesting Serbian-Bulgarian duet can be found on YouTube, search for "Глория и група Луна - Кръговрат | Ne ostavljaj me [HQ]". I wonder if West and East Slavic speakers can tell which is which, and how much of both they understand. (I hope this is not off-topic)


----------



## ilocas2

DenisBiH said:


> I'm not sure if this is on-topic but let's try and see.
> 
> Here is the Czech coach of football club Sarajevo, Jirži Plišek (Czech Jiří Plišek) speaking pretty good BCS (can't really specify a variety as he's mixing ekavian and ijekavian). His intonation is noticeably Czech, at least for me, so I wonder how Czech and Slovak speakers understand this clip. Does his intonation/accent improve comprehension?



Yes, it helped me in that way, that I can clearly distinguish words, but there were many unknown words so I understood only roughly 70 % of it. BTW, it's Plíšek, not Plišek.



DenisBiH said:


> An interesting Serbian-Bulgarian duet can be found on YouTube, search for "Глория и група Луна - Кръговрат | Ne ostavljaj me [HQ]". I wonder if West and East Slavic speakers can tell which is which, and how much of both they understand. (I hope this is not off-topic)



I think I can tell which is which - that woman with darker hair is Serbian and that with lighter is Bulgarian, but I understood little, only few words in Bulgarian and about half of words in Serbian.


----------



## Arath

ilocas2 said:


> I think I can tell which is which - that woman with darker hair is Serbian and that with lighter is Bulgarian, but I understood little, only few words in Bulgarian and about half of words in Serbian.



Can you please elaborate? Was it just a guess? How did you know? Because of the accent or because of some distinctive words?


----------



## ilocas2

Arath said:


> Can you please elaborate? Was it just a guess? How did you know? Because of the accent or because of some distinctive words?



I recognized these Serbian words - ovo leto bilo je naše poslednje, nerazumijem ja toliko razloga za kraj, ne ostavljaj me, vratim tebe ja, pitam se u čemu sam tako zgrešila


----------



## Arath

ilocas2 said:


> I recognized these Serbian words - ovo leto bilo je naše poslednje, nerazumijem ja toliko razloga za kraj, ne ostavljaj me, vratim tebe ja, pitam se u čemu sam tako zgrešila



What I'd like to know is whether there is any difference between the Serbian and Bulgarian accents? Did you understand fewer Bulgarian words because of the accent or simply because they are more different than the Serbian ones? Here're the Bulgarian lyrics. How many words do you recognize?

Znaj šte dojde ljatoto otnovo s ljubovta.
Pak sled bolka njakakva idva radostta.

Poveče ne go tǎrsi, bil e njakoga.
Po-štastliva šte si ti, kakto nikoga.

Ne razbra li ti, če v tozi grešen svjat
ot ljubov boli, ne gledaj nazad?

Ne razbra li ti? Tova e krǎgovrat bez kraj.


----------



## ilocas2

Arath said:


> What I'd like to know is whether there is any difference between the Serbian and Bulgarian accents? Did you understand fewer Bulgarian words because of the accent or simply because they are more different than the Serbian ones? Here're the Bulgarian lyrics. How many words do you recognize?



Znaj šte *dojde* *ljato*to otnovo s *ljubov*ta.
Pak sled bolka njakakva idva *radost*ta.

Poveče ne go tǎrsi, bil e njakoga.
Po-štastliva šte si ti, kakto nikoga.

Ne *razbra* li ti, če v tozi grešen *svjat*
ot *ljubov* boli, ne *gledaj* nazad?

Ne *razbra* li ti? Tova e *krǎgovrat bez kraj*.

When I listened it, I recognized only these. And I don't know what is krǎgovrat, I only recognized it because it was in the title.

I'll try translate it:

Znaj šte dojde ljatoto otnovo s ljubovta. _Know that the summer will come again with the love_
Pak sled bolka njakakva idva radostta. _Then after some pain ? the joy_

Poveče ne go tǎrsi, bil e njakoga. _? don't ? him, somebody was_
Po-štastliva šte si ti, kakto nikoga. _That you are happier, like nobody_

Ne razbra li ti, če v tozi grešen svjat _If you don't understand, that in this sinful world_
ot ljubov boli, ne gledaj nazad? _from love it hurts, don't look back?_

Ne razbra li ti? Tova e krǎgovrat bez kraj. _If you don't understand? This is ? without end.
_
I have some knowledge of Serbian and Bulgarian thanks to this forum. Otherwise I would understand much less. And I think both Bulgarian accent and words are more different than Serbian in relationship with Czech.


----------



## DenisBiH

I put the words I don't recognize in bold (although the approximate meaning of _krǎgovrat _could be inferred from the context). I put the words and phrases I don't fully understand in the _context _in italic. There may be a few false friends, both among the words in italic and others.

All in all, I was somewhat surprised by the relatively low level of intelligibility of the Bulgarian lyrics in that song. It is somewhat better with the written lyrics, although not perfect as you can see. As for spoken/sung ones, some words I actually misheard (I thought she was saying _ne gledaj na sat) _and some others I could not make heads or tails of.



Arath said:


> Znaj šte dojde ljatoto otnovo s ljubovta.
> Pak sled bolka_ njakakva_ idva radostta.
> 
> Poveče ne go *tǎrsi*, bil e _njakoga_.
> Po-*štastliva*_ šte si_ ti, kakto _nikoga_.
> 
> Ne razbra li ti, če v tozi grešen svjat
> _ot ljubov boli_, ne gledaj nazad?
> 
> Ne razbra li ti? Tova e *krǎgovrat* bez kraj.


----------



## Vulcho

> Poveče ne go tǎrsi, bil e njakoga. _? don't ? him, somebody was_



This false friend gets me every time, when I hear "koga" in Serbian I think "when", but it is actually "whom" ("kogo" in Bulgarian).


----------



## DenisBiH

Vulcho said:


> This false friend gets me every time, when I hear "koga" in Serbian I think "when", but it is actually "whom" ("kogo" in Bulgarian).




I learned to be careful with that reading and listening to Macedonian, but I expected a final -ш as I believe exists in Macedonian (некогаш, никогаш) and was thus left confused when it wasn't there.


----------



## Arath

DenisBiH said:


> I put the words I don't recognize in bold (although the approximate meaning of _krǎgovrat _could be inferred from the context). I put the words and phrases I don't fully understand in the _context _in italic.
> 
> All in all, I was somewhat surprised by the relatively low level of intelligibility of the Bulgarian lyrics in that song. It is somewhat better with the written lyrics, although not perfect as you can see. As for spoken/sung ones, some words I actually misheard (I thought she was saying _ne gledaj na sat) _and some others I could not make heads or tails of.



някакъв (njakakǎv) - some kind, any kind

Pak sled bolka_ njakakva_ idva radostta - The joy comes again after any kind of pain.

търся (tǎrsja) - to look for, to search

Poveče ne go *tǎrsi* - Don't look for him any more.

някога (njakoga) - once, formerly, in former times, in the past, at one time.

 bil e _njakoga_ - literally, "He has been in the past". It means "Don't look for him any more, because he remains in the past".

štastliv - happy

Po-*štastliva*_ šte si_ ti, kakto _nikoga_. - literally,  "Happier you will be, like never". It means "You'll be happier than ever"

_ot ljubov boli _- literally, "from love it hurts", actually "Love hurts."


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

Television news from Serbia's multilingual province of Vojvodina in...

*Serbian (BCS):* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeM6lro8nYw

*Croatian (BCS):* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8mvyCXCqXw

*Slovak: *http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olrcGJNTcvE

*Ruthenian:* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uix4P8267U


----------



## Azori

TriglavNationalPark said:


> *Slovak: *http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olrcGJNTcvE


Interesting, I understood everything except a word that sounded like "pokrajina"  . Pretty much standard Slovak spoken with an (Serbian?) accent.

There is broadcasting for national minorities in Slovakia, too (usually with Slovak subtitles). Here's some of it:

*Polish:* http://www.stv.sk/online/archiv/narodnostny-magazin?date=2012-12-10&id=51563

*Russian:* http://www.stv.sk/online/archiv/narodnostny-magazin?date=2012-11-26&id=51369

*Czech:* http://www.stv.sk/online/archiv/narodnostny-magazin?date=2012-11-05&id=51042

*Serbian:* http://www.stv.sk/online/archiv/narodnostny-magazin?date=2012-10-01&id=50481

*Bulgarian:* http://www.stv.sk/online/archiv/narodnostny-magazin?date=2012-06-18&id=49503

*Croatian:* http://www.stv.sk/online/archiv/narodnostny-magazin?date=2012-05-21&id=49120

*Ukrainian:* http://www.stv.sk/online/archiv/ukrajinsky-magazin?date=2012-11-27&id=51382

*Rusyn:* http://www.stv.sk/online/archiv/rusinsky-magazin?date=2012-12-04&id=51478


----------



## TriglavNationalPark

On the same note, here's Slovenian-language news from Italian television (for the Slovenian minority in the province of Friuli-Venezia Giulia):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQPA4XMlidM


----------



## vianie

Hi forumates.

   Since I am meeting anywhere loads of people that are unable to distinguish between the Czech and the Slovak language I decided to make this a little clearer for those like them.

  I have selected (just for now) three youtube videos where a Czech and a Slovak are discussing together:

1. he & he - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjXBghjomCI
2. he & she - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCynSPMl0qA
3. he & she - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw2GOaEkhcQ


 It might be helpful if someone could provide similar comparing video samples about the BCS languages for instance.


----------



## Gnoj

vianie said:


> Hi forumates.
> 
> Since I am meeting anywhere loads of people that are unable to distinguish between the Czech and the Slovak language I decided to make this a little clearer for those like them.
> 
> I have selected (just for now) three youtube videos where a Czech and a Slovak are discussing together:
> 
> 1. he & he - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjXBghjomCI
> 3. he & she - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCynSPMl0qA
> 4. he & she - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw2GOaEkhcQ
> 
> 
> It might be helpful if someone can provide similar comparing video samples about the BCS languages for instance.



1. "Za dva mjesica" vs "za dva meseca"? If the man on the left is the one who speaks Czech, then Czech sounds more palatalised than Slovak to me, I can hear more "je", "ji" and that sort of stuff.


----------



## Azori

Gnoj said:


> 1. "Za dva mjesica" vs "za dva meseca"? If the man on the left is the one who speaks Czech, then Czech sounds more palatalised than Slovak to me, I can hear more "je", "ji" and that sort of stuff.


za dva měsíce - Czech, za dva mesiace - Slovak. In the first video the one on the left is Czech.


----------



## Azori

Slovak from a Serbian native (she moved to Slovakia in 1997 at the age of eighteen, nowadays works as a host in one of the Slovak state-owned radio stations - _her blog_):

https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150192325308123

http://www.100nazorov.sk/46-umenie/893-triaska-stefanovic-olja

Speaks fairly fluently and without mistakes as far as I can hear , but with a rather noticeable accent.


----------



## prst

What word does she say around 0:23, before "je strašne"?


----------



## Azori

prst said:


> What word does she say around 0:23, before "je strašne"?


From 0:20 onwards:

... ktorý je nielen zaujímavá osoba, ale *je strašne* inšpiratívny a rozmanitý výtvarník...

... who is not only an interesting person, but is a very inspiring and diverse artist...


----------



## Azori

I've noticed that she mispronounces the Slovak "h" as something that sounds more like "ch" in Slovak (for example, in that first video I posted at 0:19 - in the word _hosť_ = guest). But there are also plenty of other differences. When I first heard her on the radio I instantly noticed her accent and after a closer listening it struck me that it sounds somewhat BCS-like.  According to this interview (in Slovak) she didn't "know the language" (i.e. Slovak) when she first arrived in Slovakia in 1997.


----------



## DarkChild

Azori said:


> Slovak from a Serbian native (she moved to Slovakia in 1997 at the age of eighteen, nowadays works as a host in one of the Slovak state-owned radio stations - _her blog_):
> 
> https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150192325308123
> 
> http://www.100nazorov.sk/46-umenie/893-triaska-stefanovic-olja
> 
> Speaks fairly fluently and without mistakes as far as I can hear , but with a rather noticeable accent.



Wow, that's a really heavy accent. I'd never guess this was Slovak. She has the typical metallic Serbian voice and tone.


----------



## ilocas2

Montenegrin variant of BCMS wasn't in this thread yet. This actor was born in Montenegro.

link to video


----------



## ilocas2

Serbian: TV report about *Avala Tower *near Belgrade


----------



## ilocas2

For practical reasons I'm adding a video where different people say numbers from 1 to 100 in Russian. This video may help learners to understand Russian numbers in speech.


----------

