Thread: Languages
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Old 07-10-2007, 03:52 AM   #11 (permalink)
scathe30
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Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Russia, Moscow
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Re: Languages

Quote:
Originally Posted by kinbard View Post
I like Russian because of the crispness, and the fact it was the first language I studied that uses a different writing system.
Although I'm Russian I'm not fond of my native language very much. Maybe it is not very patriotic, I don't know. Russian is a very expressive language, it has a lot of different means to express different emotions and feelings, it is rich with synonyms. Russians themselves... i mean WE usually call it 'the great and the mighty Russian'That's what I don't like about it. I hear the term 'the great and the mighty' from my early schooldays - it all looks like some kind of language chauvinism! The fact is that previous generations of Russians know little languages. This tradition to study linguistics became popular in our country only in the middle of the 'Perestroyka' years. That's why I don't like that people don't know any foreign language and try to persuade others that their own language is the mightiest.
No, I don't mean that it is poor and weak - we have a well-developed complicated language that has a lot of syntactic, semantic and phonetic (I mean syntagmatics, for example - emphasizing by phonetic means) levels to be rather flexible to depict any type of human endeavor. But I don't like slavonic languages phonetically at all. Russian is the best exception, because we speak it from our birth and get used to the awkwardness of the sounds and words they form.
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