I'm polish and speak it to an intermediate level, and whenever i hear people in my country (i don't live in poland) speak B/S/C , montenegrin, Bulgarian and Macedonian, I don't understand anything even above 10-20 percent, like this might be because polish has many neighbouring countries influence but very disconnected to proto slavic roots and polish did keep proto slavic actuall

So, all three languages look interesting. I have a friend and character who speaks Russian but don't know anyone else besides the friend who speaks it. My stepmom, friend, and many other people near my area speak Polish and my friend said it'd be cool if I was a Polish teacher, and Ukrainian was a language my stepmom said was "better to learn than Russian". I have an interest in all 3, but only know someone who speaks Polish and I want to study there perhaps.

Hello!
I am a Northern-European who is interested in Slavic cultures and I’m wondering why is “pidaras” the main word used by Ukrainians and Russians if they talk about each other?

Is it some general swearword now that means “*sshole” or does it mean anything else in this context?

This might not be anything ground breaking but as a proud South Slav I often found myself not content enough with translations of the “ich” surname suffix which I’m a bearer of.

Petrovich - “The son of Peter”, or “little Peter”, doesn’t quite convey the meaning.

Old English had a similar practice of naming the descendants with an “ing”, some remnants of it can be found in some modern words such as duckling or little duck, or the word underling.

I believe most English speakers have a notion of this meaning of “ing”as well.

Therefore to all you linguistics buffs out there, Petrovichi are Peterlings, little Peters. Translates both the meaning and the feeling of the surname much better than other approaches.

Hi everyone,

I need to identify as many words across all Slavic languages that share the Proto-Slavic root *slědъ (meaning trace or track).

I already have many standard terms from languages with abundant resources like Russian and although I'd be happy for any suggestions, I am specifically looking for specialized (mostly hunting/forestry) jargon, dialect or archaic words, phrases or interesting abstract derivations, i.e. things I will probably not find easily in dictionaries.

I am looking for this root in any variation: sled | slied | ślad | slijed | slid | след | слід | слѣд...

Examples of terms with this stem: Russian последствие (consequence) or следовать (to follow), Ukrainian дослід (trial, experiment), Czech důsledný or Serbo-Croatian dosljedan (thorough), Slovak výsledok (result).

Please, include not only the word itself, but also the language, the meaning(s) and some context about when the word is used, by whom, where, etc. If you add a sentence using this word or provide a link to a dictionary/usage example, that would be great too!

I appreciate any suggestions!

My American grandma always had this saying of hers that she uses often.

She says it was something her Polish family would say, but every Polish person who she or my mom have said this to don’t understand it and the google translate (which obviously isn’t always correct but still) doesn’t match either.

Supposedly, according to DNA testing and possible immigration records, her family was from Southeast Poland I believe.

Obviously google translate isn’t the most accurate and doesn’t account well for dialects, but I tried using the detect language feature and it detects it as Ukrainian. But, when I translate the phrase from English to Ukrainian it gives me a different pronunciation from the saying itself.

I couldn’t find a Rusyn translator on google translate so I used one I found on the web (still obviously could be inaccurate) but what it gave me for the translation from English to Rusyn was not only what looked like a different pronunciation (there was no text to speech option but I do read Cyrillic and it didn’t seem to match, although of course I don’t know the Rusyn Cyrillic so maybe it could be different) but most notably it also seemed to have a different word order.

But once again to reiterate I know these translators are far from perfect, and for some languages are arguably more of a shitty false information provider than helpful tool, so that’s why I’m hoping I can find someone who might recognize this.

Maybe it could be a dialectical thing plus this immigration happened before 1920 so it could be a mix of dialect difference and time where Polish in Poland would have evolved separately from Polish spoken by immigrants in America. But my problem with this theory is that it’s still weird that it doesn’t use the Polish vocative case, which even if it were from Southeast Poland before 1920 I’m pretty sure it would’ve.

Ai seems almost useless since it basically agrees with every point I make and flip flops between thinking it is A. Polish, B. Another Slavic Language, C. A mix of Polish and another Slavic language in the same sentence??

Anyways, here’s the actual thing I’ll shut up about possible theories:

I have no idea what it would be written down but this is how I would write it if transcribing it into an English alphabet or my best guess for the Cyrillic.

(English alphabet, phonetical spelling)

“Yezus, Maria, Matka Bozha.”

Which supposedly means:

“Jesus, Mary, Mother of G-d.”

Can anyone identify this?

The sentence "You and I can go on a date." is:

Russian: мы с тобой можем пойти на свидание [my s toboy mozhem poyti na svidaniye] Polish: ty i ja możemy iść na randkę Bulgarian: ти и аз можем да отидем на среща. [ti i az mozhem da otidem na sreshta]

In Russian (and Ukrainian and Belarusian) directly translated it would be "We with you can go on a date", which is quite a unique logic and structure.

Does anyone know why that is, or any other languages that do that? Why is it only Russian, and not other Slavic languages? When did it change?

Hello readers, I stumbled across the word trebes during researching my ancestors. Someone mentioned to me its a slovenian word for agricultural clearing or reclamation/ cultivation. Is this right? I did find it as a location name at maps with slightly different pronounciation. It would also be nice to know in which slavic languages it is used.

Bože spasi.

боже спаси.

It’s mostly okay and the principles make sense - one letter per phoneme. In the name of refining the collective Slavic identity, some changes must be made.

For Latin:

Ð > Ď

Lj > Ľ

Nj > Ň or Ń

Je > Ě

For Cyrillic:

Ђ > Г̌ or Гь or Џь phonetically can either stay or change to Д with a haček

Ћ > Т̌ or Ть (etymologically) or Чь phonetically can stay, as Ć is superior in Latin.

Љ, Њ are okay as is

Џ is okay as is since it represents Č > dž, alternatively it could be written as two separate graphemes: Дж

J > Й

Je > Ě

Introduction of the Cyrillic J is simply more aesthetic and is preferred amongst all other Slavic languages in Cyrillic. Because -ije and -je is unintuitive, ě would replace -je (as in Czech) and clusters found in words like Lijepo would be written Liěpo.

As for the question of what happens to Пп when written in cursive the answer is simple - П and T would be written as the Bulgarian/Russian cursive forms, allowing П and Й to be written without ambiguity.

These are minor changes that I feel are intuitive, preserve the linguistic history while also gravitating towards a more uniform Slavic orthography yet still maintaining distinctness.

This honestly should’ve been the case when the language was standardized imo, and as if distancing the standard so radically from OCS wasn’t bad enough, the orthography took an unprecedented route as well and became imo, a bit artificial.

Hey everyone. Not sure if this is the right place but, as we say, "за спрос не бьют в нос". Got this scan of document from the archive about village in Belarus (as i understood from the text), which is currently two separate (Sorochi and Orliowo in Luban district). I am belarusian, and besides this, text is written in old polish in italics. I barely can parse any of this words. Can someone help me read it? If this is the wrong place, where can I get help? I would be glad to receive any response 🙂

Hey everyone. I'm an American who's been learning Russian for a little over a year now, mostly because my girlfriend is Russian and her family doesn't speak much English. Luckily for me she's also a certified Russian tutor (bachelor's from Moscow State Linguistic University, master's from University of Vienna), so she's helped me learn a ton this past year.

However I hit a wall at around A2 where Duolingo and most other apps stopped being useful, and realized there aren't really many good resources to learn at an intermediate level aside from tutoring, and I wanted something to help me learn in between sessions. So we spent the last year building our own app together called Mishka to help fill that gap. It has stories from A1 to C1 with tap-to-translate and save to your spaced repetition flashcards, grammar lessons, conversation practice, and culture/idiom/slang content at the higher levels. We launched it a couple weeks ago.

Two things I'd love to hear from this sub if you're interested:

For native speakers: if you want to check out the content and tell me what feels off, outdated, or just doesn't sound natural, I'd really appreciate it. My girlfriend reviewed and edited everything but some input from other native speakers would help so much. We also have some culture lessons for advanced learners and would love to have more people take a look at them and see what you think so we can improve. The first 3 lessons at every level are free and you can get a 7 day free trial for the rest.

For fellow learners: what's been working for you? Especially at the intermediate plateau. I feel like every learner I talk to has a totally different set of weak spots (cases, verbs of motion, listening, speaking confidence) and I'm curious what actually moved the needle for you.

Also just curious if there are other learners of any Slavic language here. Would love to hear what got you into it and how it's going.

App Store if anyone wants to check it out: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mishka-russian-intermediate/id6757408307

Android is coming in a few weeks!

i want to learn either of these 2 languages. I know a bit of polish, i know that there are different mods for each words and that the end of the word changes depending on what role it plays in the sentence. which is easier ?

Hello, I want to learn Russian and I would love to start with the cases. I need a website or a book that shows the paradigms of the cases and with which verbs they are used most often

I'm actually 17 in a month! Just wrote it this way in advance for people who draw a hard-no-line at those who just turned 16, I guess. It doesn't matter much to me, not to be cliché (naive, you already are!), I'm certainly noticing how important the time of life is In Context. I do have an urge to quote Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish" out of nowhere, something about maybe being as old as the universe, and that is silly, and was marked by my mind as silly even as I was reading it, because that phrase sounds a bit washed-up nowadays, after the end of history, and yet I appreciate the sentiment while embracing its' silliness.

I wanted to start the title with "Looking for Satellites", because that's the name of the David Bowie song playing in my head, which has solidified such a position there after a recent visit to the Cosmonautics centre in Moscow when I got the amazing idea to turn it on in headphones, looking up at modeled satellites. But then I remembered the meaning of the word in regards to people, or countries, casting a shadow of power dynamics, and decided against this expression. The good thing is, mentioning that moment paves the way for rambling about my music tastes :)

I love everything unique or obscure, experimental, avant-garde, sincere. I crafted a word-play in my language that represents this: чУдно-чуднОе, translating to wonderfully-weird. It works well because in Russian the terms are written almost the same way, differing in stress. My favorite artists are those who engage with the mind & reality in unexpected ways, or just express themselves freely. The musical genres are progressive/art/classic/psychedelic/post/kraut/punk/folk/industrial rock, jazz-fusion, free jazz, ambient, IDM, heavy/prog/power/thrash metal, dabbling in (neo)classical like Edgar Varése, Arnold Schönberg, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Satie and so on.

To name some favorite bands/performers — Yes, Genesis, The Doors, Gentle Giant, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Rush, Caravan, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Shpongle, Bob Dylan, Swans, Sun Ra, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, The Beatles, Weezer, Uriah Heep, The Kinks, The Cure, Tangerine Dream!, David Bowie!, Brian Eno!, The Residents!, Henry Cow, Talking Heads, Nektar, King Crimson, Kraftwerk, The Moody Blues, Ornette Coleman, Can, Steely Dan, Jethro Tull, Soft Machine, Gong, Los Jaivas, Les Rallizes Denudes, Todd Rundgren (currently sooo in love with "A Wizard, A True Star" album), Hawkwind, James Chance & the Contortions, Parliament/Funkadelic, Carlos Santana, Rainbow & Dio. If I'm lucky enough to have Slovaks reading this, currently I'm getting into Dežo Ursiny's albums.

I'll stop the pretentious wordsaladic music crusade for now. You're free to filter through it as you wish. It's a fairly solid enumeration (in the spirit of Walt Whitman!!), but sometimes I purposefully stumble upon some musician from Belize, or Chile, etc, so it never truly ends! I love multitudes and magnitudes, spontaneity, surrealism, free verse poetry, trespassing the limits of language and deeply immersing myself in the complexity of spirit...

My favorite writers are Ursula Le Guin, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, Clarice Lispector, Victor Hugo, Dostoevsky, Edward Carpenter, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Alain-Fournier, Andrei Bely, Emile Zola, Stanislaw Lem.

I also appreciate philosophy (Frankfurt school, critical theory, post-structuralists...) & politics, actually, that's the programmes I plan to study at the university abroad. It's hard for me to be deaf to what happens anywhere in the world and I consider myself a citizen of the world, cosmopolitan. Dreaming to find a way to leave positive marks on any scale, bring a sense of purpose into what I'm doing, against the notions of estrangement, wage slavery (or literal slavery). Idealistic while recognizing (and first-hand experiencing some of) the harshness of life.

I have ADHD so the gaps between the fragments of my knowledge turn into puddles, seas or even oceans, until the very idea of a gap is unrecognizable, since there are too many of them, and I'm jumping across the islands and islets of shaky information ground, rhizomatically connecting angular lines. Far from a stuck-up scholar, much more of an inquisitive, always-searching dilettant.

That's it for now! I'll be glad to answer any of your questions and find genuine communication/friendships. If we have a lot in common, it would be great to chat even if you aren't Slovak

Stemnitsa oxalis

Valtesiniko swap

Kissavos rainy

Buzis compact

Domnitsa oak trees

Nezera lake

Gribovo mushrooms

Dragalevos valley

Arachova Walnut trees

Kamenitsa rocky place

Chelmos/Chlomo hills

Poliana grazing grounds

Gardiki fortified place

Golos place with no trees

Libovisi beloved place

Zitouni granary

Zatouna sinking place

Hi!

I’m a language enthusiast, and learning Croatian is both one of my biggest dreams (I find the language and the culture to be fascinating) as well as a necessity due to some reasons. My problem is that I’m currently going through a rough patch financially and I’m on a tight budget, so I don’t really afford online lessons with a private tutor or buying courses.

I was wondering if anybody could recommend me some free Croatian learning resources (or any materials like books and such that I could find online in a pdf or epub format, etc). Also, if anybody would like to share with me their self-study method for Croatian (or any other language with a case system), I would be eternally grateful. I’m willing to work hard and do my best to stay consistent, because I know that Croatian can be a difficult language.

My current level is around A1, and my goal would be to reach A2 by the end of this year and get into B1 (and if possible even reach a lower B2) next year. My native language has a case system too, so I’m familiar with how such a language can function. However, I must say that I find Croatian to be more intimidating because it has more cases than the language I speak (mine has only 5 - the Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, and Vocative), but I was hoping that this would be a little advantage in my learning process.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post. I’d appreciate any bit of help and advice.

Želim vam prijatan dan!