Lexical Distance Among the Languages of Europe.

@SFR: With a dash of Dutch and Lithuanian, apparently.

Any realistic representation of lexical impact, it should be directional. For example, there’s much more French in English, German in Polish or Latin in Albanian than vice versa. And… whassat? Hungarian influence in Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian? I beg your pardon?

“The original research data for the chart comes from K. Tyshchenko (1999), Metatheory of Linguistics.” Not from real-world text corpora?

Did some googling and found that the author of the original research for the map is this great Ukrainian linguist (in every sense of the word):

Тищенко, Константин Николаевич (укр. Костянти́н (Кость) Микола́йович Ти́щенко) (30 июля 1941, Глухов Сумская область) — украинский лингвист, педагог, переводчик. Доктор филологических наук (1992), профессор (1995). Автор более 180 трудов по метатеории языкознания, знаковой теории языка, лингвистических закономерностей, вопросов оптимизации морфологического описания языка, преподавания языков, проблем развития языка, романского и восточного языкознания, а также цикла статей по германистике, славистике, кельтологии, баскскому языку, финскому языку, балканистике и алтаистике. Преподаватель нескольких десятков различных языков. Читает лекции по общему языкознанию, ведет практические занятия по французскому, фарси, финскому, итальянскому, баскскому, валлийскому и др. языкам. В 2001–2010 гг. был заведующим основанного им Лингвистического музея при Киевском университете. С 2011 — профессор кафедры Ближнего Востока.

check the Ukrainian Wikipedia article on Tyshchenko.

https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Тищенко_Костянтин_Миколайович

It’s simply overwhelming…

I have strange feelings about this character.

His credentials are amazing, but so far I’ve never heard of him (and I bet none of the Hatters have). And his metatheory of linguistics or theory of lexical distances or theory of Avestan influence on Ukrainian and so on all sound like the stuff of usual nationalistic pseudo-science.

I don’t know.

or theory of Avestan influence on Ukrainian and so on all sound like the stuff of usual nationalistic pseudo-science

Sounds like Balkan-style nationalism to me, except that would tend to go in the other direction: I bet somebody has proposed Serbian influence on Avestan somewhere.

Well, one thing that pretty map indicates is an empirical contention that there is less lexical distance between Ukrainian and Polish than there is between Ukrainian and Russian. Which seems a bit implausible . . .

No surprises but one link caught my attention, the link between Irish and Portuguese. It makes sense, it’s just that you don’t often see it noted.

Let me try another essentialist definition: Russian is East Slavic spoken as the L form of Church Slavonic, and Ukrainian is East Slavic spoken as the L form of Polish.

And both are on the queue for the next Essentialist Explanations edition.

I certainly don’t find it implausible that Ukrainian would be lexically closer to Polish than Russian is. I only find it implausible that it diverges from Russian toward Polish by greater than 50% of the total “distance” between Russian and Polish, at least if your metric for distance is a sensible one. And that perhaps not coincidentally seems like the exactly the sort of implausible claim you would make if you were incentivized to overstate the degree of difference between Ukrainian and Russian because your nationalism was overriding your scholarship. Note that the same pretty map shows English as closer to German than to French, despite the massive number of French-origin loanwords in English.

The question is, of course, what vocabulary list is used to make these comparisons. It can’t be the whole vocabulary of every language; it might be just one of the Swadesh lists. The Ethnologue says: “The percentage of lexical similarity between two linguistic varieties is determined by comparing a set of standardized wordlists and counting those forms that show similarity in both form and meaning”, but it doesn’t say what wordlists.

Thanks!

J. W. Brewer: I don’t know about the data either. I still consider such a result not intrinsically improbable, because classification and lexical similarity measure very different things. Classification in general prefers shared sound changes, while lexical similarity would be based on cognacy and/or superposability. Ukrainian koróva “cow” is of course more similar to Russian koróva than to Polish krowa, but any sane measure of lexical similarity will give an equal point for Ukrainian-Russian and Ukrainian-Polish. Slavic languages being too similar one another (we Chinese would consider all of them subdialects of a single Chinese macrodialect), with only a couple of examples of Ukrainian robíti “to do” = robić ≠ delát’, the balance will be seriously tilted towards Polish.

An old joke: a Polish and a Russian (Soviet) border guards walk opposite each other on two sides of the border.
– How do you say “zhopa” [ass] in Polish? – cries the Russian guard.
– Dupa!
– That’s just as good.

“She gave her acceptance speech in Russian, except for one brief portion where she deliberately code-switched into Belarusian and then back out again, which was sort of beautiful and sort of heartbreaking.”

Does anyone actually speak Belarusan? Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that Belarusan is a artifact of 19th century nationalism that was cobbled together out of several west-Russian rural dialects and perpetuated in the Soviet era as a token nod to nationalism within the centralized Russocentric Soviet state; and that business in Belarus is universally conducted in Russian, with Belarusan as essentially window-dressing–even more so than Irish in most of Ireland.

Maybe someone who knows about this can give me a more nuanced picture.

See also this comment by SFReader.

It would have been great if the author had included Turkish, since many Balkan languages have many Turkish loanwords. Also, Romanian has a lot of Slavic loanwords (e.g. even da = yes), but it’s somehow invisible.

even da = yes

Perhaps less surprising given the fact that there was no Latin word for “yes”; the Romance languages have innovated words for this new concept in different ways, and Romanian borrowed one instead of repurposing an existing word or contracting a longer phrase.

Sometimes Romanian is the only one to have kept a Latin word; Italian and everything to the west of it has imported “fresh”, while Romanian uses rece, Latin recens.

– Потяг.

A rather etymological rendering of pociąg. 🙂

«dupa – дупа – zhopa
Where does the humor come in? The Polish guard’s answer is straightforwardly correct, and the Soviet guard’s answer makes no sense to me.»

Hat, John, the [additional] humour here is that the Russian word zhopa means asshole, and the Polish word dupa to a Russian ear also sounds vaguely like ‘hole’ as in duplo – hollow, cavity in a tree (or in a tooth). That’s why the Russian soldier says ‘it’s also nice’. Back passage – asshole, zhopa, dupa.

In fact, Vasmer puts them as cognates: укр. дупло́, ст.-слав. доупина σπήλαιον (Супр.), русск.цслав. дупль “пустой, полый”, болг. ду́пъл “полый”, сербохорв. ду́пља “дупло”, словен. dúpǝlj “полый”, dúplo “дупло”, чеш. doupa, doupě ж. – то же, польск. dupa “задница”, dupel м. “дупло”. (here: https://classes.ru/all-russian/russian-dictionary-Vasmer-term-3479.htm)

Also, I didn’t know but the word dupa apparently circulates in Russian in regional dialects and in youth slangs.

And! This is the best bit. some commenters suggest that zhopa comes from the common French colloquial jais pas meaning je ne sais pas – dunno. see here: https://словарь-синонимов.рф/blog/istoriya-proishozhdeniya-slova-zhopa-

That’s decadent Parisian garble! Same as shuui for je suis.