Kundera article (cont.)

[colkitto@rogers.com]

Turkish is equally distant from Arabic and Persian from the point of view
of language groups, and yet it used to be commonplace to study Arabic and
Persian as part of studying Turkish.  As the late G.L. Lewis put it,
however, that was like learnign Latin and Greek as part of studying English.


Given that Japanese and Chinese don't belong to the same language group, I
don't thing anyone 
argues that Chinese would help in the study of Japanese.   While Japanese
does use a large 
number of characters borrowed from Chinese, I haven't heard any specialist
in Japanese assert that 
a prior knowledge of Chinese is particularly useful in coming to grips with
the vocabulary and 
linguistic paradigms of Japanese, which are quite different from those that
Chinese uses.   
Speaking from my own experience, I do think that a prior knowledge of a
Slavic language can be 
somewhat useful in the transition in studying other Slavic languages.  I
have found that Americans 
who were raised speaking West and South Slavic languages are able to grasp
certain grammatical 
structures more quickly than other students, although of course they later
run into difficulties that 
non-Slavic speaking students don't have (i.e., the dreaded cognates and
"false friends" in 
vocabulary).

Alex Mihailovic

On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 12:30:37 +0100, Peitlova Katarina
<peitlovakatarina at TISCALI.IT> wrote:

>  Such people might start with Russian
>> (as a language), and proceed to other Slavic languages, including Czech
>> -- which would be made much more accessible by prior studies within
>> the same language family (Slavic).
>
>It's rather curious : if I want to study Japanese language  I should at
>first study Chines? I don't think that everybody should at first learn
>Russian language if he wants to know Czech,Slovak,Polish,Serb,Croat - and
so
>long - other Slavic languages.  There's really abyss between Russian and
>Czech. First and not least the alphabet / cyrillic against latin.  We
should
>finally recognize that nowadays  doesn't exist old  geopolitical "division"
>of  part of Europe to so called "EAST " and "WEST"  .I can't hear anymore
>how Italian TV news program continues  to call "paesi dell'est"  non
>distinguishing the existence of present  political changes  after 1989.
>Division "EAST" and "WEST" was purely political  - it came in usage  after
>second WW 1945. Nobody called  Czechoslovakia  ,established in 1918,
>"EAST". It was and still is geografically the Central part of Europe . So
>STOP with this EAST! And I think that  even Kundera  is trying to  call
>attention  to this problem : that  Czechs   with their culture,literature
>and story don't make part of "oriental" Russia.
>
>PhDr.Katarina Peitlova -Tocci
>Italia
>
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