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About LinkBacksRussian, Belorussian and Ukrainian are essentially the same language. A man on Lingvoforum (Wulfilla) said he heard strange Swedish and it turned to be Danish.Norwegian, Danish and Swedish is ESSENTIALLY the same language
Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian are essentially the same language. A man on Lingvoforum (Wulfilla) said he heard strange Swedish and it turned to be Danish.Norwegian, Danish and Swedish is ESSENTIALLY the same language
Судя по тому, что он не заметил гопоты на Украине, он из вуйков. =)Originally Posted by Marcus
But if two people are speaking Belarussian or Ukrainian to each other, how much can you, as a Russian, understand? I understand everything (95% or more) if it's Norwegian and 85-90% if it is Danish.
I have also been wondering whether it isn't a problem for some peole in Belarus and Ukraine that some signs are only in Belarussian / Ukrainian. I asked LOTS of people in Belarus if they could speak Belarussian and I met only two people who said they could speak it.
When I was in Ukraine I did not ask about it.
It depends. I had very little experiance with Ukrainian and no experiance with Belorussian. When people speak slowly, I can understand them, but I don't understand films. That's the question of practice. If you hear Ukrainian for the first time, it's hard. If you watch TV for two weeks, you start understand nearly everything. It is important to know the most common different words and to know some phonetical differences. Like Russian "o" - Ukrainian "i".But if two people are speaking Belarussian or Ukrainian to each other, how much can you, as a Russian, understand?
Of course, it's not.I have also been wondering whether it isn't a problem for some peole in Belarus and Ukraine that some signs are only in Belarussian / Ukrainian.
The situation in Ukraine and in Belarus is very different.I asked LOTS of people in Belarus if they could speak Belarussian and I met only two people who said they could speak it.
When I was in Ukraine I did not ask about it.
In Ukraine there are probably more people whose mothertoungue is Ukrainian than those whose mothertoungue is Russian. But I'm not sure.
Belarus - Latvia border and one of the few remaining border crossing duty free shops on the European continent.... Haven't seen one for 15 years, probably!
Funny do's and don'ts on trains in Belarus:
"Palace of Marriages" (Soviet idea, I think) in a city called Novopolotsk in Belarus. Right behind it was a Catholic church that was being renovated.
Some members of a historical society that was putting on a show at a cultural event in Vitebsk.
A park in Vitebsk, Belarus
A canal running through Vitebsk, with a waterfall feature
A memorial park in Vitebsk. All throughout Belarus there were flowers on soldiers graves. I did not see when these soldiers were killed, or where (because the flowers were obscuring the stone). Not sure what's going on with that...
Interesting street scene from Vitebsk, Belarus: Renovation is going on everywhere... a nun is supervising the work... a married couple is walking around town to have their picture taken at various famous spots.
Me in the village of Narach with a Russian tourist to Belarus, who could speak Swedish.
Rural Belarus, photo from bus window. Small village that had a nice Catholic church
This is the Victory Square in Vitebsk, Belarus. It looks a lot more sterile than it is! There are a few shops in the building with the slogan on. They are selling very nice linen clothes and fabrics. Also some restaurants.
A playground near the Vitebsk Victory Square where kids can climb on real Soviet army tanks and helicopters.
MORE LATER!
"A playground near the Vitebsk Victory Square where kids can climb on real Soviet army tanks and helicopters."
Never happen in USA. Too many lawyers.
I'm easily amused late at night...
Very interesting to know that, Hanna! We have almost no information on those languages here in Brazil.... well, it's reasonable why, but anyway, good to know! Do you consider any of the languages easier than the others? Might be an option after I finish my studies in Russian and Dutch.
By the way, great pictures! =)
I think the situation with the Scandinavian languages are the same as with Portuguese and Spanish only they are a bit more similar, and since our countries are smaller, there is even more interaction between them.
I think Russian and Dutch will keep you busy enough!
More picture coming soon, but here is one of the very nice beach in Liepaja.
The temperature in the water is about 18C I think.
I have also visited the nearby "must see" attraction, an old Soviet navy base which is in a terrible shape along with the poor souls still living there. I did not enjoy the visit much so I won't write about it unless someone is particularly interested.
1 vote for a photo and paragraph about the navy base. Perhaps the name so I can look it up on-line.
And trains.
Nice beach, I guess I'm surprised at the water temp and it's being empty of people.
We had a Latvian kid at work a few years ago but he didn't talk very much.
I'm easily amused late at night...
Church in Karosta, an imperial Russian/Soviet ex-navy town in Western Latvia. If I understood things correctly, it was more or less shut off from the rest of Liepaja and people could not cross the bridge into Karosta unless they had legit business there. Lots of military families lived there, and some are still there.
Karosta is not exactly a chic place to live nowadays.
It was getting dark while I was getting to the military sights and I did not want to walk around there by myself so I left without having seen all of it. I am not particularly interested in this kind of stuff anyway.
However I noticed that a few radar towers were still in use, and a large building that looked very much like a military kaserne (baracks) had been fixed up, was in use but there was no signs at all to indicate what it was for and lots of dogs were guarding it. Maybe Nato is doing something there now, what an irony!
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Sorry about my absence from this thread.
It was very interesting to read Nulle's post. Thank you for taking the time to respond!
I was expressing an opinion and he was expressing another, from a much more solid perspective than me, since he is Latvian. I don't think there is any problem and I respect his opinion and everything he says.
I don't think that the Russians in Latvia are actively discriminated against in a brutal way, or anything like that. There are more problems with this in Estonia as I understand. The groups are mixing quite a bit between themselves in Latvia. In Liepaja, the mix seems to be exactly 50-50 based on languages spoken in the street.
The thing that seems wrong to me is that there isn't more usage of Russian on town. Clearly it's either banned or strongly discouraged. Normally in bilingual countries you see both languages in use, consistently.
However, lots of papers etc are available to buy in Russian and lots of cafes etc play Russian speaking radio stations.
I have not watched TV but I noticed that there are plenty of Russian TV channels when I flicked through.
I spoke with a girl whose father was Russian and mother Latvian. She said most people who took a strong stand on this were extremists and that she could understand the arguments of both sides. However she said that in Riga there are gangs fighting each other Russians vs Latvians. But most people simply don't think about it.
Andrei, the guide I met in Belarus was born in Latvia. He said that his family "escaped" because they were being discriminated against, language-wise. They lived in Ventspils and his dad was an operator of some piece of navy monitoring equipment.
The view that the USSR liberated Latvia which then more or less voluntarily entered the USSR (which incidentally I more or less believed while growing up) is simply not something that normal Latvians agree with.
Practically nobody over the age of 25 can speak English to a useful level, but everyone can communicate in Russian, or in many cases speak native sounding Russian even though they are Latvian. I usually ask people if I can speak English with them, they usually look panicked and indicate "no" and I then speak Russian with them. Young people are happy to speak English though. There are plenty of young Latvians who are practically trilingual - very impressive.
My personal opinion about this is:
The state should provide services in both languages, like Belgium, UK, Finland, Switzerland etc do... That is the norm in the EU which Latvia has chosen to be in. The only reason why Latvia is not following EUs standard on minorities is because of the bad reputation of the USSR.
Anyone who was born in Latvia, or who grew up there, including in USSR times should automatically get citizenship, regardless of language skills. Anything else is discrimination in my opinion.
Russians who live in Latvia definitely ought to make a serious effort to learn Latvian unless they have a very solid reason not to (like if they are very old or have a learning disability). It is disrespectful and arrogant not to.
Russians who are not prepared to respect Latvia should move somewhere else.
I spoke with a man whose age was a bit unclear to me. We spoke in English because he wanted to practice. He said his mother was in her 50s but he looked like he was in his forties or fifties himself. He first said he could speak Latvian. Later he changed the story, it seemed, and said he could understand it but not speak well at all. He was born in Latvia, so this situation was not very impressive to me. Hard to believe he managed to learn decent English and was not a fluent Latvian speaker.
He said that his mother was getting a pension from the state, but when she went to get it, the staff at the office refused to speak Russian with her, even though they knew it. For that reason he needed to go with her every time she had to go to this pensions agency. He himself was unemployed but if I understood him right he was a specialist on a piece of software that is used for steel production. He was off to a job interview the next day.
I also think he said that he himself was not currently a Latvian citizen, but in the process of becoming one. People who are not citizens have a document that cannot be used for travelling anywhere other than Russia. Of course, there is nobody to stop them going elsewhere in the EU since there are no borders anymore. But they could not for example travel to the USA on this document.
With a few exceptions it is almost impossible to look at people and guess whether they are Russian or Latvian speakers. Only if somebody has very dark complexion and look almost impossible as a Northern European - then they are likely to be Russian. But the dress sense is the same and peoples behaviour is similar. The Russian people seem very un-Russian in many ways. Or maybe my stereotypes of Russian people are wrong.
I saw a churchyard where people of all faiths and backgrounds were buried together. Orthodox, Lutheran and Catholic.
Some Russians actually had stars and even hammer and sickle on their gravestones. Hm! Communism is not the way to get into heaven! Lots of people had a photo of themselves on their gravestone. I have never seen that before.
There was a very strange part of the church yard that consisted of about 200 white identical graves of people with Latvian names. They were all born in 1919 or 1920. An obelisk with a swastika (nazi symbol) was raised near these graves, and there were some swastikas on the gates to this area too. There was a text in Latvian which I could not understand at all.
I have no idea what this was about. If it was something raised by the Nazis during the war, then I really can't understand that the Soviets let it stay as it was. I saw this on the way to the "Karosta" navy base town.
My camera was having some problems, so the pictures in this post have been taken by other people.
Basically some of Karosta has been re-instated as it was (although without any maintenance, so it looks crap...) Tourists can even sleep in a Soviet military prison, as a "hotel".
In my childhood there were some problems with foreign (unknown) submarines sneaking around the cost of Sweden. Most people thought they were from the USSR, namely from the Liepaja navy base (i.e. Karosta). However later, long after the end of the Cold War it turned out that the majority of the incidents involved Nato submarines.
PICTURES OF THE NICE TOWN OF "LIEPAJA" COMING SOON!
Now we're talking! See the upload speed. And Telia is a Swedish company, hehe!
Last edited by Hanna; July 11th, 2011 at 06:19 PM.
Oh, I just have to finish this blog by saying that I have arrived in Sweden.
At the moment I am in the rather erm... rural village.... the name translates to "Sauna-swamp!... lol!) It's literally in the middle of the forest, however it is on the main railroad connecting the North of the country with the South. I ended up here because the train had a breakdown. (Interesting that this did not happen at all in Romania, Ukraine or Belarus. The state railway has been privatized and must make a profit.. Hence they are skimping on the maintenance I imagine. Never before can I remember a Swedish train breaking down.)
Luckily the train was standing on this station when it broke down, and I noticed that woman was letting a cottage practically for free, so I thought, "why not"?
Here, you cannot buy alcohol, shop on a Sunday... voting for any party other than the Social democrats would probably be unthinkable. The finest Christians don't have a TV or internet because it may lure you into sin.... People greet each other with "God's peace", even the teenage boys!
Everybody has a snow machine and in the winter they see the Northern Lights all the time!
It's all rather charming and this place is extremely cheap to stay in. People are super friendly and I am sorting out my affairs.My neighbours are super friendly have already invited me over for coffee several times and I have sampled some very tasty home baked bread and waffles. Half of what they are saying is very hard to understand because the speak such strong dialect and use some Finnish and Sami words.
It's a part of my country that is very foreign to me and I would never have thought it could be so nice.
Will upload more pictures of Belarus and Latvia as soon as I can!
They do have Internet as I see
I am using a mobile modem! Only one mobile company even covers this area.They do have Internet as I see
There is no broadband in the house where I am staying unfortunately. I might run out of allowance on this card quite soon... they don't even sell the top up cards in the local shops and I can't buy it online because I have no Swedish credit card.
The next possible place to buy a topup is two hours away!
My neighbours think that the demise of the USSR was a great tragedy and that all the bad information about it was propaganda and lies.
When TV showed a feature about the 20 year anniversary of the August coup in 1991, they both thought it was a great shame that the coup failed! Oh dear.
They are so incredibly friendly that I am not getting time for all the stuff that I am here to do, chatting all the time and inviting me to dinner etc. Today I got fish straight from the local lake.
This lifestyle is really lovely.
This is the type of fish that I ate:
Это окунь?My neighbours think that the demise of the USSR was a great tragedy and that all the bad information about it was propaganda and lies.
When TV showed a feature about the 20 year anniversary of the August coup in 1991, they both thought it was a great shame that the coup failed! Oh dear.
They are so incredibly friendly that I am not getting time for all the stuff that I am here to do, chatting all the time and inviting me to dinner etc. Today I got fish straight from the local lake.
This lifestyle is really lovely.
This is the type of fish that I ate:
Да, правильно! Наконец слово нашла в словаре!
Ты рыбак?
Нет. Рыбачил только в 12 лет, когда отдыхали на Волге. Очень нравилась рыбалка.Ты рыбак?
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