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Comment by sologoub | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty amazing how either conquests or preferences of the aristocracy shaped languages. Being a fluent Russian speaker, I had a chance to interact with a person from Serbia without a translator, who did not speak Russian.

The experience was eye opening in how languages evolved. Though the two started from a common ancestor language, Russian had become extremely "polluted" (using the term loosely) with foreign words for the most basic things. For example the word for Army is now derived from Army, whereas Serbian is using the word "wojsko" (not sure of actual spelling, transliterating), which is very close to what I would consider old Russian or proto-Slavic.

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A verse from a danish satirical poem referring to the 17th and 18th century that has since become a sort of proverb:

    Every learned man
    Only latin wrote
    To the ladies French, German to his dog
    and Danish to his servant he spoke.

(The original, quite more poetic than my translation: http://www.nomos-dk.dk/skraep/1807_1848/wilster.html)

It is a variation of a quote originally misattributed to Charles V:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_V,_Holy_Roman_Emperor

On how words are voiced in modern English, and the contrast with just a few centuries ago, I like this short clip (around 10 minutes) on Shakespeare in 'Original Pronunciation' (and how many of his puns are missed today): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

Interesting example. In Bulgarian, both войска̀ and а̀рмия * mean the exact same thing and you can use whichever you like. I guess it would sound weird if you were to speak about войнѝци in an а̀рмия or армѐйци in a войска̀.

Computer jargon is always interesting to observe, too. "Computer" is simply transliterated "компютър" - because изчислителна машина (calculating machine) is just so unwieldy, while keyboard and mouse are translated to клавиатура and мишка. E-mail seems to have lost its e- prefix and these days is either "мейл" (transliterated) or "поща" (translated) and I don't notice a specific trend one way or the other. Upload and download tend to be translated - качвам (put up, make higher) and свалям (put down, make lower), rather than transliterated - ъплоуд and даунлоуд. I think part of the reason is that words starting with ъ tend to sound ugly, plus the оу combination isn't something usual. Internet is just интернет or less usually мрежата (the net).

* graves added to show pronunciation, we don't write where the stress falls in a word

Войско definitely exists in the language but you won't call the modern army that.

Russian works exactly the same as you described regarding to computer jargon. компьютер, клавиатура, мышка, мейл/почта, загрузить-скачать. Сеть.

My family jokingly uses дупло to refer to email; it's a joke about leaving a letter in a hollow tree for another person to come and look for. I wonder how many other people use what's basically a private dialect to refer to new technology and borrow-words.

I can't help but be reminded of how in "War and Peace", almost all aristocratic characters (which is nearly everyone in the book) speaks French most of the time.

Could be that the aristocracy tended to inter-marry for political/economic reasons, and thus leading to the "pollution" of their mother tongues.

That, and invasions. Quite substantial parts of Europe have spent hundreds of years under rulers from a country with a different language, who'd often mean aristocrats and bureaucrats and military with a different language.

English is the prime example of the effects of this, with it's French/Germanic split (French from the Norman aristocracy).

The French may have originally started to trickle in to English from Norman French, but Norman French and Central French differ greatly and most of the Central French in English actually came much later due to French being a prestige language with-in Europe. The Latin and Greek also came through a similar mechanism, though more because they were scholarly. The idea that Norman French is the source of all English French loans is pretty easy to prove with comparison - Warranty vs Guarantee, liquor vs liqueur, hostel vs hotel, castle vs chateau, catch vs chase, warden vs guardian. Some could equally have come from earlier borrowings (e.g. hostel vs hotel), but the same happens when you compare any two dialects of the same root language (i.e. Norse and Old-English dialects), so nothing is 100%.

You're of course right - I'd entirely forgotten about the later wave of French influence.

Of course that also to a large extent spread via the upper classes first and foremost..

There's a saying I first heard about Danish - a bastardisation of a quote often misattributed to Charles V - about how aristocrats would read Latin in books or use it at court, speak French to the ladies, German to his dog, and would only speak Danish to servants.

The exact set of languages (and animals...) differ in different versions of the saying, but generally it puts Spanish, Italian or Latin at the "top", then French, German and sometimes finally a local language.

> hostel vs hotel

In french there is a common pattern where words lost an "s" while a vowel gained a circumflex. i.e. hospital -> hôpital, forest -> forêt, etc. I'm guessing hostel -> hôtel is another example of that pattern.

Yes. The Norman French retained the S, where as it was lost in Central. Though, I've no idea of the timelines and how Norman ended up later on.

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