On a trip to Europe I learned that Yugo means South so Yugoslavia was the land of the Southern Slavs. Also Bela means white and when I was a kid our maps had White Russia where now we have Belarus.
A favorite story of mine is that of a friend going to a Yugoslavian restaurant in Chicago. The hostess was an elderly lady with a thick accent that reminded my friend of his grandmother. Feeling playful he greated her using what he thought was her accent. However, she was Serbian and responded you don't sound like me. You sound like a damn Croat from . . . and named the exact village his family had come from.
About 10 years ago, I took a river cruise down the Dnieper River from Kiev to Odessa. Almost all the passengers were Canadians who were descendants of Ukrainian immigrants. In the early part of the 20th century, Canada was trying to settle its western provinces and it recruited Ukrainians, who knew how to farm that type of land. (There were also some New Yorkers whose Jewish ancestors had fled pogroms, mostly in Odessa.) I made friends with a Canadian couple who lived in a Ukrainian speaking town, and they were surprised to find that they couldn't communicate that well with their relatives in Lviv. Canadian Ukrainian had diverged just enough from Ukrainian Ukrainian to make conversation difficult.
Livonian is Finno-Ugrian language , related to Finnish and Estonian , not a. Baltic one . It went extinct some years ago but there are current attempts to revive it .
I feel better learning that this would happen to you, too: I can normally catch the essence of a conversation in Japanese, so naturally I listen in if an opportunity presents itself. At least on two occasions I found myself wondering what strange dialect these Japanese people were speaking, to later realize it was Korean.
Apologies if someone has already told you, but there's an erratum in this episode. Bulgarian does have a vocative case, but the -che in Agliche isn't it. That -che actually is a diminutive (Bulgarian has many). The vocative would be Aglikó (accent on the -o) and it would be rude. As far as I can tell all feminine vocatives are rude, except when children call their mothers mamo or grandmother's babo. The male vocative isn't rude, it can be friendly. It's -é as in Ivané (cognate to the name in the Ukrainian Frere Jacques song). If the word already ends in e, the vocative is yù. I once made a killing in Scrabble with the word "museyu" or "oh, museum!"
On a trip to Europe I learned that Yugo means South so Yugoslavia was the land of the Southern Slavs. Also Bela means white and when I was a kid our maps had White Russia where now we have Belarus.
A favorite story of mine is that of a friend going to a Yugoslavian restaurant in Chicago. The hostess was an elderly lady with a thick accent that reminded my friend of his grandmother. Feeling playful he greated her using what he thought was her accent. However, she was Serbian and responded you don't sound like me. You sound like a damn Croat from . . . and named the exact village his family had come from.
About 10 years ago, I took a river cruise down the Dnieper River from Kiev to Odessa. Almost all the passengers were Canadians who were descendants of Ukrainian immigrants. In the early part of the 20th century, Canada was trying to settle its western provinces and it recruited Ukrainians, who knew how to farm that type of land. (There were also some New Yorkers whose Jewish ancestors had fled pogroms, mostly in Odessa.) I made friends with a Canadian couple who lived in a Ukrainian speaking town, and they were surprised to find that they couldn't communicate that well with their relatives in Lviv. Canadian Ukrainian had diverged just enough from Ukrainian Ukrainian to make conversation difficult.
Livonian is Finno-Ugrian language , related to Finnish and Estonian , not a. Baltic one . It went extinct some years ago but there are current attempts to revive it .
I feel better learning that this would happen to you, too: I can normally catch the essence of a conversation in Japanese, so naturally I listen in if an opportunity presents itself. At least on two occasions I found myself wondering what strange dialect these Japanese people were speaking, to later realize it was Korean.
Apologies if someone has already told you, but there's an erratum in this episode. Bulgarian does have a vocative case, but the -che in Agliche isn't it. That -che actually is a diminutive (Bulgarian has many). The vocative would be Aglikó (accent on the -o) and it would be rude. As far as I can tell all feminine vocatives are rude, except when children call their mothers mamo or grandmother's babo. The male vocative isn't rude, it can be friendly. It's -é as in Ivané (cognate to the name in the Ukrainian Frere Jacques song). If the word already ends in e, the vocative is yù. I once made a killing in Scrabble with the word "museyu" or "oh, museum!"