Slovene and Russian Language Similarities
The similarities between languages can be an advantage when a person wants to learn or at least understand another language. The Slovene and Russian languages both belong to the Slavic language branch, so they share some similarities at all levels – be it in-depth structure (spelling, pronunciation, etc.) or general considerations (vocabulary, phonetics etc.). Of course, there are also numerous differences between the two languages thus making them widely different, however, in my post, I’ll try to focus on what they have in common.
To begin with, the Slovenian language belongs to Indo-European languages, the Western subgroup of the South Slavic branch of the Slavic languages. It uses Latin alphabet which has 21 consonants and 8 vowels. Nouns are feminine, masculine or neuter in gender. Masculine nouns tend to end on a consonant, rarely on a vowel; an example of a masculine Slovene noun is ‘stòl’, that is chair. Feminine nouns in most cases end with –a; for example, ‘ígra’ for ‘a game’, ‘vôžnja’ for ‘a fare’, ‘ládja’ for ‘a ship’. Neuter nouns mainly end with -o or –e; for example, ‘mésto’ for ‘a city’ or ‘vesêlje’ for ‘happiness’. In Slovene no articles are used; the definiteness can be indicated with the ending, for example, ‘rdeči televizor’ ([that] red televisor) vs. ‘rdeč televizor’ ([a] red televisor). In a simple sentence, the basic word order is often subject – verb – object however due to the inflections (which I further describe below) the word order is flexible. The most unique characteristics of Slovene are: the dual grammatical number indicating two entities, two accentual norms (one is pitch) and abundant inflections (inflections are used to express a grammatical function of a word or its attribute such as tense, gender, number, mood, etc.). The above characteristics indicate a few basic features of the Slovene language to provide you with some general impressions.
The Russian language also belongs to the Slavic language branch, but it is considered to be an Eastern language. It is written using the Cyrillic alphabet, which has 33 letters. Nouns have feminine, masculine and neutral gender. Masculine nouns usually end in a consonant letter or –й, for example, ‘студент’ (‘student’) for ‘student’, ‘диплом’ (‘diplom’) for ‘diploma, ‘музей’ (’muzej’) for ‘museum’. Feminine nouns usually end in -a or –я, for example, ‘Элен’ (‘Helen’) for ‘Helen’, ‘лампа’ (‘lampa’) for ‘lamp’, ‘станция’ (‘stancija’) for ‘station’. Neuter nouns usually end in -о, -е, -r and –ё, for example, ‘окно’ (‘okno’) for ‘window’, ‘море’ (‘more’) for ‘sea’, ‘бельё’ (‘bel'e’) for ‘linen’. In Russian stress sign is used to indicate the different pronunciation of words that are not common in Russian or to change the meaning of a word, for example, ‘амо́к’ (‘zamо́k’ – ‘lock’) and ‘за́мок’ (‘zа́mok’ – ‘castle’).One of the most prominent features in the Russian language is the distinction of consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and without them, which means the consonants are divided into soft and hard sounds.
As is evident from the brief summary of characteristics of the Slovene and Russian languages, some similarities between the two are: non existence of definite and non-definite articles, the 3 genders of nouns and the same word order in simple sentences, which is however flexible in both languages. These features can be spotted also in other Slavic and non-Slavic languages.
According to the
language learning website How to Learn
Any Language, Russian is extremely similar to Ukrainian - 90%, Bulgarian - 90%,
Serbian and Croatian - 65%, Polish - 60% and Czech - 40% when it comes to
vocabulary.
Slovenian vocabulary
is close to the Chakavian and Kajkavian dialects, which are spoken in some
parts of Croatia, as well as to Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian
languages. Slovenians can easily understand and even communicate with the
Serbians, Croatians and Bosnians, as many words in the vocabularies of all
those languages have the same root. To illustrate this, let’s have a look at
the word ‘milk’ – the Slovenes call
it ‘mleko’, whereas it is ‘mljeko’ in Croatian, ‘mleko’ in Serbian and ‘mlijeko’ in Bosnian.Serbian is the language that is similar both to Slovene and Russian thus indicating the possible similarities also between the Russian and Slovene languages. It is interesting, that the Slovenians, who generally easily understand Serbian, say that they can hardly understand Russian, if at all. Some claim that they can recognize the Russian language by its soft pronunciation and some are even able to spot some similar words.
All in all, the Slovene language has some similarities with the Russian language. Below I will enumerate and discuss examples of a few words that I have heard in Slovenia and can be matched to similar words in Russian.
In Slovene ‘moj’
stands for ‘my’ and ‘hobi’ for hobby. In Russian ‘мой’ (‘moj’)
has the same primary meaning. The word ‘хобби’
(‘hobbi’) is written almost the same,
only with additional b and has the
same primary meaning - hobby.
Slovenian word ‘prodaja’, the primary meaning is sale. In Russian similar words
are: ‘продажа’ (‘prodazha’) and ‘продал’ (‘prodal’) as the past tense of
sell. In the Slovene language the
masculine singular verb ‘prodal’ has
the same meaning – ‘Prodal sem stol.’
means ‘I sold the car’. It is easy to
grasp the meaning for a Russian speker for the Slovenian word since the root of
the word is the same in both languages.
The primary meaning of ‘podvodni’ in Slovenian is ‘underwater’.
In Russian word ‘подводный’
(‘podvodniy’) has the same primary meaning. There is only one additional
letter at the end of the word, but the root is identical in both languages.
Slovene stands for ‘the world’. In Russian ‘cвет’ (‘svet’)
primarily means ‘light’. The pronunciation
is the same in both languages, but the meaning is completely different.
However, looking at other meanings of the world ‘svet’ in Slovene reveals a similarity. Namely, another meaning of
word ‘svet’ in Slovene is ‘holy’, for example, Sveti Peter (Saint Peter). In Russian Saint Petersburg/ Санкт-Петербург has the same meaning Saint Peter’s city. The word ‘bright’ translates into Slovene as ‘svetel’, ‘svetloba’ means ‘light’, which still has the same root as the
Russian word cвет (svet).
Sladoled’ in Slovenian means ‘ice cream’.
In Russian, the word ‘сладкий’ (‘sladkiy’)
has an additional ending, but sounds similar and the meaning is ‘sweet’. The word ‘лед(‘led’) means ‘ice’,
thus literal translation of the Slovene ‘sladoled’
that might come up in mind to some Russian speaker could be “sweet ice” and
perhaps it could also lead to the real meaning as ice cream is sweet. In Slovene
sweet translates to ‘sladek’ , whereas ‘led’ means ‘ice’, which
reveals that apparently the word formation of ‘ice-cream’ in both languages is the same.The primary meaning of ‘živim’ in Slovenian is ‘I live’, as the ending indicates that first person masculine form. In Russian ‘живем’ (‘zhivyem’) has a slight change in the ending but the meaning is the same.
‘Polno’ in Slovenian means ‘full’. In Russian ‘полный’ (‘polniy’)
has the same primary meaning.
In Slovenian ‘pijem’
means ‘I drink’, but in Russian case ‘пьем’ (‘p'yem’) is used only for the third
person plural without definite gender (‘мы
пьем’ – ‘we are drinking’). Both words are alike, but with slight change
regarding the indication of speakers. The Slovene ‘voda’ means ‘water’ and,
in Russian, ‘вода’ (‘voda’) has the
same meaning.
To sum up, there are some similarities between both
languages - Russian and Slovenian. Some of them might be easily spotted by
Slavic language speakers, and it is quite interesting to find some words that sound
alike and have a similar or even the same meaning, especially when you take
into consideration the fact that there are thousands of kilometres
between Slovenia and Russian speaking countries. Generally, similarities among
languages are always possible to find, it only depends on one’s ability to look
for them and use them. For Russian and Slovene speaking people learning and
researching each other’s languages might not be the first on the list to learn
or explore due to the fact that other languages are more influencial, namely,
for Russians it is English for international communication, but for Slovenes
because of neighbours Italian and German as well as English as an international
communication language. However, knowing some characteristics is always useful
especially when the nationalities are mixing. In Slovenia the demand for
Russian language is especially high in tourism, since Russian tourists
regularly visit Slovene spa centres.
References:
Table of languages significantly similar to Russian (Accessed: http://www.how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/similarities/russian/index.html)
Slovene Declension (Accessed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_declension#Feminine_nouns)
Slovene Language
(Accessed: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/slovenian-language)
Russian Language (Accessed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language)
Introduction to the Russian Language (Accessed: http://learningrussian.net/russianlanguage)
Gender of Russian Nouns (Accessed: http://study-languages-online.com/russian-nouns-gender.html)
How close are the slavic languages to each other? Bulgarian
and Ukrainian are similar? (Accessed: https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20130530222520AA57IhQ)
In the article used author’s photos.
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