Citizens of Former Soviet Republics View the Russian Language as a Remnant of the Soviet Union

[Harold Schiffman]

I once had a very negative experience in Poland when trying to use Russian.
I was in
Warsaw during the winter of 1961, and had taken a streetcar to an outlying
area to
try to find someone who lived there. When I got off the tram all I saw was
identical
high rise buildings, so I said to a passerby "Gde Ulica (suchandsuch)".

"Nicht verstehen!" was his answer, so we had to use German (a language I
assumed
Poles would detest). The next day I asked people how to say "where is X
street" in Polish, and
discovered that it's almost identical, with the exception that "gde" is more
like "dje".
So I never tried Russian in Poland again, but it also taught me that "mutual
intelligibility"
is often a matter of volition.   But more recently, I was in Moldova for a
conference and Russian became the lingua franca among participants from the
former
USSR (and me, too), since many didn't know English.  There was no animosity
whatever.  Maybe
it depends on the context?

Hal Schiffman

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Ronald Kephart <rkephart at unf.edu> wrote:

> On 4/2/08 11:06 AM, "Robert Lawless" <robert.lawless at wichita.edu> wrote:
>
> > At any rate, I certainly and almost inevitably encountered hostility
> when
> > using Russian with these people. Robert.
> >
> I was pretty fluent in Russian in 1968, when I hitch-hiked through
> Slovenia
> and what was then Czechoslovakia (Bratislava to Prague). Of course I had
> to
> use Russian, but interestingly people seemed at that time to be genuinely
> amazed that a USAniac knew anything at all in any Slavic language and they
> were very willing to let me try Russian on them and to use it in return if
> they could. For some years afterwards I even carried on a good deal of
> correspondence with some of the people I met, nearly always in Russian,
> the
> only thing we shared. Of course at that time most had studied Russian in
> school.
>
> By the way, Italians seemed happy to accommodate to my Spanish; French,
> not
> so much.
>
> In Paris (Bois de Bologne), I found myself camped between a group of
> Argentine boy scouts and a troop of Czech girl scouts. Naturally, they
> wanted to interact. For several hours I acted as interpreter between them,
> one of the most exhausting linguistic experiences I've ever had.
>
> Ron
>
>


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Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone: (215) 898-7475
Fax: (215) 573-2138

Email: haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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