Re: 90,000 Russians Invade Finland

On Jan 2, 11:16 pm, Eugene Holman <hol...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<snip>

Lithuania is also in the unique position of being Russia's eastern
neighbor. A Schengen visa costs only ¤35, and Lithuania and the
Kaliningrad exclave differ so much that there is always going to be
tourism in both directions simply because the two places are so
different.


This is true - if one could tell the difference in the soviet times;
nowadays the difference is even more striking. Lithuanians from the
border regions go to Kaliningrad enclave for cheap goods,
Kaliningraders go to Lithuania for 'culture', shopping malls and water
parks. Perhaps the same goes for Belarus.

I hear Prague has even more of them - for the same reason,
also Czech being a Slav language.

Prague is, of course, a jewel in central Europe, and it is full of
tourists from all over the world. Interestingly, Czech is the odd man
out among the Slavic languages. Knowing Russian, although not totally
useless in trying to decipher Czech, does not help you understand Czech
the way that it helps you  understand Bulgarian, Serbian, Ukrainian,
Polish, or even Slovak. Czech has undergone some radical sound changes
(south is *jíh*, cf other Slavic *jug*) in addition to systematically
rejecting international loanwords. Thus, for example, in the other
Slavic languages including the otherwise closely related Slovak, theater
is *teatr*, in Czech it is *divádlo*.


But still, compared say to 1993, the amount of Russian speakers in
Prague is striking. It seems that they replaced all the Germans that
were there in 1990s.

*divadlo* might be hard to understand for a Russian, and Russians
might choose not to try speaking Czech, but at least in written
language, one can recognize many words. For example both Czech
"zmrzlina" and Russian "morozhennoe" (ice cream) come from the same
root.

Best regards,
EZ
.

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