[Lingo] Bulgarian and Russian and Romanian (oh my?) (was: Alternatives to sed + awk)

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

On 4 March 2011 09:47, Lewske Wada <ryu@example.com> wrote:

> Bulgarian is very much like Russian, while Romanian remains similar pronunciations
> to Latin.  I'm interested in the history.

Bulgarian is a South Slavic language, as are Macedonian (Bulgarian
with a regional accent for all intents and purpose) and Serbo-Croat.
[1] Russian is an East Slavic language.

Bulgarians can understand a lot of Russians; the ones in my and
Nikolay's generation and the previous two or three generations because
they studied it for a bit in school, but also because Bulgarian is
spoken by 8 million people, and Russian by between 160 and 285 million
people,[3] so Bulgarians try harder to understand Russian than
vice-versa. In my experience, native speakers of Russian have the same
sort of attitude towards the other Slavic languages that Americans
have towards, erm, all other languages: YAGNI. ;)

Romanian, OTOH, is a Romance language. [4]

Cross-posted to lingo@ :)

Cheers,
Josh

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Slavic_languages#Classification
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Slavic_languages#Classification
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language#Geographic_distribution
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages#Classification_and_related_languages