Hacker News Reader

Comment by thingie | Hacker News Reader

My native language is Czech, and all sample texts looks very similar to Croatian or Serbian :-) Not much Polish. And yes, even for me it's very hard to read :-)

(Though, that might be because it has quite different spelling from polish. Spoken, it could be similar. It feels very ancient. :-))

View on HN

I'm Czech too and it doesn't really resemble any existing language to me. Definitely not Slovak, Polish or Russian. Maybe something several hundreds years old.

Yet, I found that just looking at the samples I'm not having much trouble understanding it.

Suggestion: try to read it out loud -- it helped me quite a lot with Polish. And here too.

I speak both Polish and Czech and this is very easy for me! I think I understand it all, but it really feels to me like Croatian/Serbian language :)

Wow, I'm Polish and it looks Czech/Slovakian to me.

I think this is because we look for properties that are foreign to us, and skip properties that we familiar with when trying to understand the language. So, for example, you didn't notice some things taken from Polish, because you already know them, but you noticed things that look Czech to you, and thingie didn't notice Czech things, but noticed Serbian ones.

After looking at the grammar and dictionary, I find it much more similar to Czech than I thought after looking at just samples. Dictionary has quite a lot of Czech words, you'd only have to apply some rules to make it look more "modern" :-) (ija -> [i]e, throw out most of trailing i's, ični -> cký, g -> h…)

I don't know. It could be Czech… but 500 years ago :-)

I'm Czech and i think i understand almost everything

Reply on news.ycombinator.com