• kristina [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    'catholic taliban' isnt an uncommon phrase in czechia when polands government is mentioned

      • kristina [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        they invaded us once as well as all their neighbors and then acted like they were the good guys during ww2 is the jist of it. also super religious, which czechs arent. mostly a beef with the government

        of course we get along with individual poles as long as they arent truckers speeding through highways with wrong driving conventions in play, we basically speak the same language. in fact most slavic languages are very similar, i understand like 50% of russian without even properly learning it. english speakers dont have something like this, closest is like dutch or danish but thats less than 10% understanding imo. with russian so many words are just straight up the same but pronounced funny, you can easily have a convo with most slavic speakers just by sticking to simple language

        • AlexandairBabeuf [they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          i had no impression whatsoever of mutual intelligibility in slavic languages, this is very interesting :very-smart:

          does this go for south slavic too?

          • kristina [she/her]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            south slavic, from what i hear, is easier for czechs to understand but is the hardest for russians to understand. in general west slavs have the most intelligibility imo. i could have easily lived in yugoslavia as there was a big slovak community there... kinda :angery:

            its a big reason why pan slavism was a thing and kinda still is a thing. borders feel a bit arbitrary. a lot of pan slavic stuff happened in prague cause of this apparent mutual intelligibility, made it easy for us to translate. people would flit from slavic country to slavic country all the time. tito for example went all over russia, yugoslavia, bulgaria... all before he became leader. its not too hard to talk to other slavs, so its also why communism became so big too. a lot of things ripple out from russia simply because they have they most slavic speakers

              • kristina [she/her]
                ·
                edit-2
                3 years ago

                i always was for a zapadoslavia as there was a yugoslavia... assuming it was all communist. it was a bit of a headscratcher to me that that did not occur after ww2 considering how linked czech slovak and polish partisans were

                  • kristina [she/her]
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    3 years ago

                    i can only assume it was something the poles didnt want... at that point the soviet union had all the east slavic countries in yugoslavia had all the south besides bulgaria... czechoslovakia obviously had our mix. its a bit strange to me. we're so small now that it actively hurts us in regards to imperialism. but we all speak the same language almost, if we were all united things would be better. then we could even teach people a general slavic dialect in schools to help with basic language skills

            • Collatz_problem [comrade/them]
              ·
              3 years ago

              Bulgarian is weirdly easiest to understand for Russians, despite being the farthest Slavic language in terms of grammar, because Russian took a lot of influences from Church Slavonic, which was basically Old Bulgarian with Greek spice.

              • kristina [she/her]
                ·
                3 years ago

                thats interesting. i just heard from a russian friend that he couldnt understand slovene or serbian at all really but i could understand the simple words quite readily. though i did grow up near a border region so its probably just easier for me to pidgin things by nature of that

                • Collatz_problem [comrade/them]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  I speak Ukrainian and Russian and for me Belorussian, Polish and Bulgarian are quite understandable, while in other Slavic languages I only recognize the simplest words.

          • kristina [she/her]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            yeah im aware its just why i didnt mention it. ive met one frisian speaker in my whole life and i live in an immigrant community and i constantly search for shit like that in trans communities to get new perspectives

            https://youtu.be/aZGyISJ3djo i dont really understand a lick of what shes saying lol. im assuming the grammar is similar so its easier to listen to

            heres a fun video for slavic speakers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsBDoJfU_iE this guy makes a lot of slavic language comparison videos that i find highly amusing to listen to

          • NaturalsNotInIt [any]
            ·
            3 years ago

            English is a weird language because it's like a cross between Dutch and French, so it doesn't exist on a dialect continuum like most other European languages such as Spanish->French->Italian or Czech->Polish->Ukrainian->Russian.

        • Gosplan14 [any]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I'm Polish and went to Czechia for the first time (excluding transit) last month. Ngl, I could maybe understand like 20% of spoken language. (Written czech is way easier, but sounds silly due to many words that also exist in Polish being either extremely informal, antiquated or similar)

          Also I'm assuming you are referring to the invasion of Český Těšín in 1938, as Nazi Germany was annexing the Sudetenland? It was certainly a dick move, but is mostly a footnote in polish teaching of history. Though that isn't surprising, at it glorifies polish nationalism.

          And yeah, Polish drivers are... quality

          • Vncredleader
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            A footnote for Poland perhaps, the legitimization of Nazi annexation for Czechoslovaks. Plus the brief occupation was still upsetting. Czech political orgs got banned, Roman Catholic perishes that belonged to Czech dioecies for a long long time suddenly where forced to leave them and swear to only serve Polish catholics. Pope Pius was close to Poland and let them trample all over them. Enablers all around

            The Roman Catholic parishes in the area belonged either to the Archdiocese of Breslau (Archbishop Bertram) or to the Archdiocese of Olomouc (Archbishop Leopold Prečan), respectively, both traditionally comprising cross-border diocesan territories in Czechoslovakia and Germany. When the Polish government demanded after its takeover that the parishes there be disentangled from these two archdioceses, the Holy See complied. Pope Pius XI, former nuncio to Poland, subjected the Catholic parishes in Zaolzie to an apostolic administrationunder Stanisław Adamski , Bishop of Katowice .

            I can't find a copy of the source, but a Czech historian of Polish descent's work apparently claims that with the socialists ceasing to be allowed to exist post annexation, left with Poles felt as second-class as before.

            btw Kristina have you read 1939: the alliance that never was by Michael jabara Carley? It is about the Czechoslovak scramble and the serious attempts by even the non-leftists in the gov to form a military-alliance with the USSR?

            • kristina [she/her]
              ·
              edit-2
              3 years ago

              yeah i fucking hate edvard benes, though hes jerked off in czechia nonstop. i knew about most of those things its talked about a lot in hardliner czech communist circles

            • Gosplan14 [any]
              ·
              3 years ago

              Interesting. I actually didn't know much of the situation, only that it happened and knowing Poland, was both a bad idea and handled horribly.

          • kristina [she/her]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            really? i think sticking to simple language is very easy, obviously if its difficult words or listening to people not speaking directly to you that might be hard. i also lived along the border with poland for a while... so might be easier since i knew a lot of silesians and poles growing up so we all sort of learned the easiest words to converse with there

            for me i was never properly taught how to write in czech so written language can be difficult for me actually. i should probably go on duolingo at some point and learn how but speaking czech doesnt come up for me a lot in my day to day outside of talking to grandma :sadness: i do think if all the slavic countries came together and found all the words most similar and tried to make a sort of pidgin language that everyone knew thatd be cool

            • Gosplan14 [any]
              ·
              3 years ago

              The main issue was people talking too damn fast lol. For some reason I find slovak easier to understand, even though the sample size isn't that high for me to reliably say so.

              Also have a look at Lusatian languages. They're a fun oddity, as they're the other west slavic language barely anyone knows (the other being Kashubian)

              • kristina [she/her]
                ·
                edit-2
                3 years ago

                ive met sorbians before! they were fun to listen to. a lot actually moved to czechia, they sound a lot like czech but with our german influences even more pronounced. i loved living on the border so many lanaguage shenanigans

              • kristina [she/her]
                ·
                3 years ago

                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsBDoJfU_iE you might find this language video fun btw i love this guy

                • Gosplan14 [any]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  Oh yeah, I think I saw that one already. Like I posted before, I got family near the border and to me Belarusian is hard to distinguish from Russian. But I never spoke to one in person.

                  • kristina [she/her]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    yeah you eventually are just in tune and understand what words are similar and can communicate that way with lived experience... a lot of these words are similar regardless of the language though some languages are trickier

        • Vncredleader
          ·
          3 years ago

          Yeah people just don't know about the OTHER mutual non-aggression pact signed with the Nazis, the one done so Poland and Germany could annex Czechoslovakia. And then there was the fighting during the upheaval of the fall of the Russian empire but.....much as I am loath to say it, Poland was more in the right in that very specific conflict.

          Poland kept invading everyone else, annexing left and right, yet the west eats up nonsensical shit about Poland somehow being the perpetual innocent victim. Like even wikipedia makes the soviet-polish war being Polish aggression coming off of annexing the Western Ukrainian People's republic. It was the 'Kiev _offensive for a reason folks

          • Gosplan14 [any]
            ·
            3 years ago

            The west supporting polish nationalism is very advantageous to it, otherwise who else will reliably rattle the saber at Russia?

            A funny thing in Polish Nationalism is how eagerly it supported the Ukrainian Maidan right wing Revolution, to then go :surprised-pika: when it started doing historical revisionism in favor of OUN groups doing anti-polish ethnic cleansing of Galicia during WW2.

            • Vncredleader
              ·
              3 years ago

              Like Obama when arming the Azov battalion. "wait just a second, you mean arming literal Nazis might be.....bad?"

              • Gosplan14 [any]
                ·
                3 years ago

                Obama probably didn't care. For Poland though, it's supporting an openly hostile political force on the border and probably endangering the remainder of the polish minority in the Ukraine (the article is important as apparently it pisses off nationalists) to attacks.