Re: languages in Russia

From: Pyroclastic flow (sulphur_at_lava.com)
Date: 08/30/04 

Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 09:36:57 GMT

"MirTopolskiRexPrez" <2472-810@onlinehome.de> wrote in message
news:cgume8$ij4$1@online.de...
> John A. Rea wrote:
>>Xenia wrote:
>> Wiktor S. wrote...
>>>
>>>> Russian is the official language of Russia, but what languages do
>>>> people actually speak? Or the country is monolingual?
>>>
>>> Officially the country is polylingual but the Russian is universally
>>> comprehended. Perhaps the worst Russian speakers are Muslim
>>> highlanders of Dagestan. They say there are 30 separate languages
>>> coexisting in that tiny stretch of Caucasus, and more than 300
>>> dialects. Russian is also used as lingua franca elsewhere in the
>>> former USSR. It is the language of everyday speech in Belarus,
>>> Kazakhstan and most of Ukraine.
>>>
>>>> Are there significant differences between Russian spoken in Moscow and,
>>>> say, Archangelsk?
>>>
>>> No difference at all. The particular feature of the Russian language
>>> is that it has virtually no dialects. On the huge territories,
>>> rivalling in size the whole of Europe, people have been speaking the
>>> same language, except certain differences in pronunciation of several
>>> letters. It is particularly striking if you think how often folk
>>> living in the same country across a river cannot comprehend each
>>> other's speech.
>>>
>> Aha! This means that, for instance, a speaker of Russian from
>> St Petersburg (or whatever its name is this week) like Vladimir
>> Nabokov, say, would notice nothing different in the speech of a
>> native of Moscow, such as, say, Roman Jakobson. Interesting.
>
> Like French, Russian evolved to perfect imperial language. Xenia is
> accurate - it is the only lingua franca between German, Turkic and Chinese
> linguistic domains. Surely, smart native euro-Russians can distinguish
> between local dialects (say in Moscow and St. Pete), but these are only
> minor differences in pronunciation. Notably - unlike Russian - German
> domain is not centralized and lacks Cyrillic phonetic simplicity, despite
> common Slavic-Germanic "barbarian" pronunciation (take 'Deutsch' as first
> example - in Cyrillic one could replace 'tsch' by one single character).

Would require two characters. That's OK. I know math has also been a problem
for you.
So why are there so many Russian words that have a zillion letters?

French has the same problem of having to use multiple letters to make a
single sound...like eaux instead of "o".

If I was Emperor of Germany I would switch to
> Cyrillic :-)
>

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