31
Looking at the meanings of cognates of the Proto-Slavic čь̑rstvъ, one can notice the common meaning 'hard', 'strong', 'sharp'. I guess the Czechs and the Slovaks view fresh bread as 'hard on the outside', i.e. having a crispy crust, while Russian, Polish and others see it as 'hard on the inside', i.e. stale. It's just my guess.
There are other examples of ...
22
The new vocative has nothing to do with the old vocative (whose forms would've been *Маше, *Зино and *Димо, indistinguishable by ear from the nominative but probably reflected in writing).
If we are to count all such case-like forms limited to a single paradigm and/or context, we'd end up with quite a few: partitive (чашка чаю vs. вкус чая), locative (...
21
Станислау (Станіслаў to be precise) is a Belarusian version of name Stanislav.
Keep in mind that Belarusian "ў" is more like w, so it does not sound like "oo".
Let's not dive into political issues here, but de-facto in all three eastern European Slavic countries there's a tendency to translate name into local variant.
Nobody says Павел Маккартни, but ...
18
I totally agree with the answer Nikolay provided, I just want to add one other important points made by opponents of calling this new forms vocative case, here's a quote:
Основное различие – с существительными в новой звательной форме, в
отличие от звательного падежа в древнерусском и других славянских
языках («Боже правый»), невозможно согласовать ...
15
I decided to turn my comment into an answer and add some references, etc.
It is a very common phenomenon in related (but, nonetheless, different !) languages. A common language splits into branches and a word starts evolving in different directions. Over the centuries the meanings of the word in those 'branches' (which gradually develop into fully-fledged ...
12
I highly doubt that Belorussian mutually understandable with Polish. On the other hand it is quite mutually understandable with Russian, a little more so than Ukrainian.
The relation is following: Belorussian, Russian, Ukrainian and Rusyn belong to East Slavic branch of Slavic languages, with Belorussian, Rusyn and Ukrainian belonging to Ruthenian subbranch....
6
I think there are two distinct phenomena here.
One is transliteration or re-spelling. All Slavic languages have phonetic spelling, but different reading rules. This means that to write the pronunciation of certain word they have to re-spell them in their own rules. This happens not only with names but with any borrowed words. Slavic languages do not tolerate ...
6
The original meaning of the proto-Slavic etymon seems to have been "robust, sturdy".
It had later shifted its meaning to "hard" in Russian and to "good, wholesome" in Czech.
5
The history of the modern Russian language is remarkable in that it appeared from convergence of two distinct dialects in about equal parts (Nothern and South-Eastern; only the latter you might call 'the speech of Kievan Rus'). The 'Northern' (or Novgorod/Pskov) dialect predates the Ukranian/Russian/etc. languages per se; it stands in equal opposition to ...
4
Your claim is just wrong. While Russian and Ukrainian are very closely related indeed (so this is an answer to your question - why the majority of words that share same origin share same stress pattern as well), there are like a lot of words where the Ukrainian stress is counter-intuitive to a Russian monolingual speaker. In fact, if you'll give a Ukrainian ...
3
Belarusian is, in a sense, in between other slavic languages.
Its grammar is close to that of Russian.
Its vocabulary has lots of common words with all of Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish, so it's sort of mutually intelligible with all of them.
Its spelling, however, is quite different from any of them. Also, it's probably the most phonetic of all, you can ...
3
Иногда одно и то же слово, встречаясь в двух языках, имеет в них значение не то что «несходное», а скорее прямо противоположное. Вот пример: мы говорим «черствый» о хлебе, который уже остыл и засох; «теплый», мягкий хлеб у нас противопоставляется холодному, «черствому». А у чехов слово «черстви» означает как раз наоборот: «свежий», «прохладный». Каким же ...
2
I traveled to Kyiv and Berdichev many years ago, and couldn't understand anything when listening to Ukrainians talking to each other. I couldn't even pick the subjects of their conversations. Though when they spoke to me, I could understand quite a bit.
I had somewhat similar experience when listening to Scottish people, but could understand much more, and ...
2
are ꙗ and ѧ likewise obsolete in terms of writing Church Slavonic? No current texts I can find online (e.g. the Elizabeth Bible) avoid Я.
You've probably found some sort of transcript into the modern orthography. In fact, it should look like this (Genesis 1:2):
Землѧ́ же бѣ̀ невиди́ма и҆ неустро́ена, и҆ тма̀ верху̀ бе́здны, и҆ дх҃ъ бж҃їй ноша́шесѧ ...
2
Church Slavonic orthography is quite complicated: there are different letters used to distinshuish between some homonyms, several types of stresses, commonly used abbreviations and all kind of other weird stuff.
Я is a letter from so called "civil script": a variation of Cyrillic alphabet used to write down Russian. It was never intended to be used for ...
1
"Appropriate" is a term that is heavily context-dependent. In linguistics text thanks to existence of Unicode (and even before it) the original Church Slavonic typeset is usually used. Exactly like usually for transmitting Ancient Greek texts original letters are used.
It's all a matter of tradition. For instance, to my knowledge for Gothic text "regular" ...
1
I am a Native Russian speaker, and to me Ukrainian is like country to me. And Serbian is as American English is to Jamaican English. The words are there, but not the same. So it really depends on where you live in Russia, and that is what ultimately defines whether or not you can comprehend other Slavic Languages. But, put it this way: there's a lot more ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible