- cross-posted to:
- europe@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- europe@lemmit.online
Ukraine’s security service blew up a railway connection linking Russia to China, in a clandestine strike carried out deep into enemy territory, with pro-Kremlin media reporting that investigators have opened a criminal case into a “terrorist attack.”
The SBU set off several explosions inside the Severomuysky tunnel of the Baikal-Amur highway in Buryatia, located some 6,000 kilometers east of Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian official with direct knowledge of the operation told POLITICO.
“This is the only serious railway connection between the Russian Federation and China. And currently, this route, which Russia uses, including for military supplies, is paralyzed,” the official said.
Four explosive devices went off while a cargo train was moving inside the tunnel. “Now the (Russian) Federal Security Service is working on the spot, the railway workers are unsuccessfully trying to minimize the consequences of the SBU special operation,” the Ukrainian official added.
Ukraine’s security service has not publicly confirmed the attack. Russia has also so far not confirmed the sabotage.
Can anyone explain how different the languages are? Super different or “they kind of get eachother, just are noticably different”
They have similar alphabets, grammar and a lot of cognates. If you only spoke one you’d be able to recognize most of a sentence with these things, but sometimes words are totally different. They probably sound similar to someone unfamiliar with both, but they are quite distinct.
So like Spanish and Italian or closer?
It appears, lexically they are closer than Spanish and Italian, close to like Italian and Romanian, but a bit further. There are many ways to measure language distance though, so this is just a vague analogy
I thought they were mutually intelligible?
Actually they are not. It’s just that knowing a bit of the other language is too common to understand that for many people. Also very often for person asked some kind of surzhik (a mix) is imagined instead of one of these languages.
That’s a bit like how English speakers often imagine Scots - just English with weird accent. It’s obviously not that.
Russian has too much Church Slavic influence, Ukrainian has a bit more Polish, German etc influence, and also the Church Slavic influence there is a bit different (say, the loanwords were adapted for East Slavic phonetics mostly).
In Russian the prestigious language was Church Slavic, in Ukrainian - a written East Slavic language, so Ukrainian is a bit more consistent.
If we hypothetically remove that, I’m not sure they’d be considered different languages (despite there being dialectal differences even in XII century).
Similar enough for mutual intelligibility but different enough that Russian only speakers will probably run into a shiboleth
Like Spanish from Mexico and Spanish from Spain?
No need for people to even speak different languages to run into shibboleth, the pronunciation of Russian is very different in different regions, the Ukrainian is not homogeneous either.
Somebody once said to me that it’s rather like the difference between English and Dutch.
If you ever hear Dutch it rather sounds like English and you’ve just not quite heard them correctly. If you were in another room and just heard the ebb and flow of the language you’d probably not be able to tell the difference, but in person directly you can.
And as a non-speaker of both languages they sound basically the same to me so I think it is true
There is a lexical tree that gives some insight. Lexicostatistical distance would have worked better, I think, but I cant seem to find the numbers for that kind of metric.
Here I’ve edited an excerpt from the table, that shows how far Russian and Ukrainian are and how that compares to some other European languages
I don’t have data, but feels wrong. Maybe if this is about historical, genetic distance, then yes, Belarusian is quite a lot closer to Russian.
But in reality Ukrainian and Belarusian have mostly the same West Russian lexicon, while Russian is different (say, more South Slavic, as in Church Slavic, loanwords), for historical reasons (in GDL West Russian written language was used for administration in its East Slavic parts ; in Muscovy Church Slavic was prestigious, so the official language was heavily influenced by that).
You can as well download the PDF and read the description, the thing is not based on historical reasons, it analyses a selected part of each language core using algorithm that is used to analyse DNA distance, as far as I understand.
To address what you’ve said, it sais:
So the Ukrainian and Belarussian are likely different enough in everything else than the lexicon you’ve mentioned
They are similar in lexicon and grammar, but phonetically very different, almost as if they were in the opposite directions from Russian.
I’d say, Ukrainian have more brutal (deep throat) sounding than russian, but maybe it’s only local thing with Ukrainian guys i was talking with. So, usually it’s like 14 years old kid in Ukraine sounds like grown up Russian dude
That may be about pronunciation of a few sounds, anybody from the southwest of Russia sounds the same.
Also intonation in Ukrainian can on the contrary feel more gentle\polite.