Posted: Mar 21, 2015 10:30 am
Saim wrote:lpetrich wrote:Are they something like the Continental Scandinavian languages? Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Mutually intelligible with a little bit of study, but treated as different languages because of their national-language statuses.
No, because the continuum extends into the rest of the Slavic language area, with the biggest jump between the western and southern branches because of all the Hungarians in the middle.
Although grammar and pronunciation are more similar to Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian are often lexically closer to Polish. Indeed, as far as I can tell, Poles are better at understanding these two languages than Russians are; I wouldn't discount, however, that this is very sociological reasons, Russians as speakers of an imperial language have little need to go out of their way to understand other people who've already learned Russian.
It is my impression, however, that Russians do tend to understand Polish, whereas Poles tend not to understand Russian. I suspect the latter is due to Poles wanting to project a dislike for Russia, however (much like Norwegians refuse to understand my Swedish until they realize I'm not from Sweden, but one of the harmless Swedes from Finland, and therefore it's okay to understand me and suddenly there's no problem at all.)