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Comment by cafard | Hacker News Reader

> He's only been in America a few years so as soon as he speaks the entire bar knows he's Russian.

Because Americans are so good at distinguishing Slavic languages by ear in a noisy room?

I live near a Russian Orthodox church. People complain about the congregants, but mostly about their parking. A house opposite the church as a Ukrainian flag prominently hung; on the other hand one of the congregants has a sticker of the Ukrainian flag with the don't-tread-on-me rattlesnake. I don't think most Americans care enough to be rude to Russians.

We visited St. Petersburg some years ago, probably 2012. I very much enjoyed the visit. Everyone seemed to be much too preoccupied to give a damn where we came from. The cases of Griner, Gershkovich, and the NCO in Vladivostok do make one wonder about the prospects of American tourists.

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> Because Americans are so good at distinguishing Slavic languages by ear in a noisy room?

There is a simpler explanation: Russian is probably the only Slavic language most Americans know about.

Unfortunately it's just due to the number of people. It's unlikely a random person could tell a difference between Polish and Russian, much less Ukrainian and Russian.

I doubt many Russians can tell the difference between Ukrainian and Polish either. I unironically think that some of them convinced themselves they were fighting Polish mercenaries just because they heard western Ukrainian accents.

Not true.

Hearing Ukrainian for the first time, if you're Russian, sounds like you're hearing a Russian dialect you never heard before but understand 90% of, bar some words you've never heard. The languages are that close.

Polish, otoh, would baffle a Russian at first, you'd grasp quite a bit but you know you're hearing a foreign language, Slavic but foreign.

There is a bigger lexical distance between UA and RU than between UA and PL: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/a-map-of-lexical-distances...

Nifty diagrams, but they should be taken with a huge grain of salt of course.

For example it shows EN/DE and EN/NO as having equivalent distances (49) when obviously EN/DE are much closer than either is to NO (in any holistic comparison of the three languages). It also shows IT/FR as being significantly closer (31) than IT/SP (40) when that's also plainly not the case -- again if we consider the distance between respective language pairs holistically (which includes a whole lot of other factors like phonemic footprint, meter, etc).

In short this reads like pretty much the kind of post one would expect from a "brain candy" site like this.

Less harshly (assuming good indent on the author's part), it demonstrates the pitfalls of relying on a single score (which in itself can be subject to all kinds of weighting and sampling biases) simply because it's a "score" and we're all supposed to be "data-driven" in our analyses these days.

But again -- nifty diagrams, and they do at least give a feel for the topic of mutual intelligibility and language distance (even if the scores themselves don't seem to be particularly meaningful).

As a Pole I have a similar reaction to Czech and Slovak. Except it feels less like a strange accent (because we don’t have these as much) and more like baby talk. We get the words, just how they’re used feels unusual, and often funny.

From the other side, my Czech friends told me that Polish sounded to them like something from deep antiquity. Like reading an ancient manuscript where again you get the words but no sane person these days would use them like this.

Yup - Polish is in a different family (Western Slavic), with lots of unknown words and a different phoneme density that immediately lights up as "foreign".

I doubt most of Ukrainians knows Ukrainian language.

Not a Ukrainian but I know a good few. The language is taught at schools so you if you’re not educated in the Soviet Union you will know it. Whether you choose to use it is a different matter. And data would suggest that the usage is on the rise.

I've been in Ukraine last year and one thing I noticed that while people speak in Russian or in a dialect in private, they instantly switch to Ukrainian in public, like when ordering an ice cream from the street stall. They then switch back among them. It's fascinating how things changed in a few years.

That what I mean above, most people don't speak "modern Ukrainian". Even the language itself drastically changed on TV just in years.

> if you’re not educated in the Soviet Union you will know it

My grandparents and parents and siblings all learned Ukrainian in school during Soviet times. This is in what now would be considered a predominantly Russian-speaking part of Ukraine btw.

Ukrainians should pray to USSR because of active Stalin times ukrainization.

If only there were some way of fact checking such a claim . . .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine

This is meant in jest, of course.

I'm Norwegian. For my first few years living in the UK people regularly asked if I was Polish when they heard my accent. It seems a lot of people just try to map an accent to one of a very few stereotypes whether or not it fits, and if it doesn't they assume [nationality they've recently read about]. It changed to Romanian - which notably sounds nothing like Polish - after the papers moved on to worrying about Romanian immigrants.

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