I have been a learner of languages since my age was in single figures. I learn most in a systematic way that babies and children use to deduce meaning; this helps me to use my instincts rather than memory in part in order to retain words and phrases. This comes in very useful when faced with various false friends, such as the obvious ones: actually (=en effet) and actuellement (=at the moment), or librairie (=bookshop) and library (=bibliothèque). But the staggering differences between similar words in the Slavic languages are enough to make Noam Chomsky consider hitting the bottle.
If you want to learn a
language, sometimes those that are similar to yours are not necessarily always
the easiest ones. There is a reason why many Asian people speak better English than
French or Spanish native speakers, and it’s not just because of national
stereotypes – it often has to do with the fact that English is very different
from Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese or Hindi. Learning a language that is very
different to your own helps in many ways to learn that language better, because
you are working from a blank canvas, whereas an English speaker learning French
is really adapting a lot of already familiar words into a different accent and
sometimes a different part of speech. For that reason, it makes learning close
languages quite a hit-and-miss experience.
So it is all the more
astonishing to take a look at how tightly-bound the Slavic languages are, yet
can have totally different meanings for the exact same words. Take Czech and
Polish: they are almost mutually intelligible when written, and if spoken at a
reasonable pace using simple vocabulary, a meaningful conversation is not out
of the question. Russian is of course the go-to Slavic language, and I would
say a good one to start with. But I would also say Czech is probably the best
language to begin your Slavic learning adventures, as it has a very logical
grammar, is spoken exactly as it is written, and doesn’t lean too heavily on
the hard and soft consonant rules of Russian or Polish. This will help you
understand then use basic Slovak.
Czech and Slovak are
so similar, it can sometimes appear quite puzzling to non-speakers to see multilingual
instructions or user guides where both languages appear side-by-side with very
tiny differences. To some, it is baffling that a company would go to the
trouble of bothering to get two translations done for both languages. But they
would be wrong – you see, there are often great chasms of difference between them,
where they use wildly different words camouflaged deep in the seemingly
identical texts. All will become clearer (or should I say less unclear?) later
on…
Once you have got your
head round Czech and Slovak, you can tackle the complex alveolar fricatives of
Polish. If you have Russian as well, there is now nothing stopping you from
venturing into Belarusian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, then Macedonian, Serbian,
Bosnian, Croatian and Slovenian, some of those being almost identical languages.
At the fragmentation of Yugoslavia, the Croatian and Serbian delegations at bilateral
gatherings often took along their own interpreters in order to appear
sovereign. Those languages are so similar, it would be like someone showing up
to a party with a mirror and telling everyone the image in there was someone
else. Imagine the Austrians and Germans or Americans and Australians doing
that.
Now you have opened
the Slavic box, you may as well enjoy the fruits of your labour. Knowing a couple
of them means, because they are really very similar to an almost incestuous
nature, you can understand on a passive level almost all the others: just
beware of the utter madness of the Slavic False Friends Network; this is where
you need to hold on to something sturdy because things are about to get a
little freaky…
Here is an idea of
what you face:
The Czech for “girl”
is divka but in Polish dziwka is a woman who charges per hour for
her affections. It gets worse: the Polish for “I am seeking” is szukam,
but šukam in Czech means “I’m
having sex”. Whatever you do, try not to confuse the two, or you may end up with
your trousers down. Literally.
You may also have some difficulties keeping up with dates: the Czech month
of May is květen, but the Polish kwiecien is
April. So make sure you don’t show up a month late for an interview in Prague.
Then there is the astonishing (but no less magnificent) difference between Czech
and Croatian srpen/srpanj. In Czech, srpen is August, but srpanj
in Croatian is July. This is one of the more romantic stories of the Slavic
languages: the Croatian word for August is kolovoz, as many months are
named after what is most prevalent in nature and agriculture at that time,
known as the labours of the month. Let me enlighten you: srp in Czech is
a sickle, because srpen (August) was the time of the year it was used in
the fields, but in Croatia, further south, it was brought out a whole month
earlier. The meaning of Kolovoz is even more remarkable: kolo is
a wheel, and voz comes from the root voziti, meaning to drive, and
together they signify it’s the month when the grain has to be taken in. So
August is known as “harvest month”. I love these factoids about languages, and
I will touch on the months in a forthcoming post, as they really are worth
gushing over.
One of the most extreme examples of this is what the Russians did to the
word “red”. The word in Czech for “red” is červený, but in Russian it is
красный, pronounced krasniy. However krásný in Czech means
“beautiful”, and once upon a time also did in Russian, but the word for “beautiful”
was converted into “red”, hence “Red Square” was originally meant to be known
as “Beautiful Square”. Some people say it was the Soviets looking for a way to market
their ideology, but its meaning had morphed a long time before they came along.
You can appreciate how certain opinions can be formed when it comes to
misadventures with words: the Polish zachód refers to the west (logically,
it means sunset) Czech záchod is the toilet, which if
mixed up could cause irreparable damage to a friendship if you tell someone who
invites you to their place that their garden is to the west of their house.
Then there’s pivnice/piwnica
and sklep/sklep. In Czech, if you want to go out for some atmosphere
and beer, you go to a pivnice. Pivo is the Czech word for beer,
and the -nice suffix usually signifies a place, so this is literally a “beer
place”. But in Polish, if someone invites you to their piwnica, you
should know them very well, as it is the cellar (pivnice in Polish is piwiarnia).
Anyone who has passed a sklep polski is probably aware that it means
“Polish shop”. However, if a Czech invites you to their sklep, you
should be equally well-acquainted with them, as sklep is a Czech cellar.
Once more, if you want
čerstvý chléb in Czechia, you are asking for fresh
bread. But if you go to dinner at someone’s house in Poland, don’t tell them the
bread is czerstwy as you are saying that it is stale.
So as you see, the
Slavic languages can be delightful, but at the same time quite a minefield to avoid
making semantic mistakes. But I cannot recommend highly enough learning one or
more of them, because you get to see a whole new side to life, and this is
where you really do develop a new soul. You can’t avoid it, because those
languages are so different from Germanic and Latin-based ones, that you need a
whole new personality for them.
For this reason, and for the abundance of examples above, it is no good learning just the words in parrot form; it makes no sense to do that, as you lose out on the history, mentality and mindset, feeling, experiences, or the collective memory of everyone who speaks that language. An example of this is in the very words they use to describe the world around them. This goes for all languages, but especially Slavic, as they contain far stronger connections to natural phenomena, emotions, people and animals. But that is for another article.
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