Re: good news

Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
Russian words have different roots than the Roman ones. While sometimes I tend to confuse the Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, English and German incarnation of the same word, I can almost be sure that a Russian word will definitely mean something different from similarly sounding words in western Europe languages - except for some (technical) terms, imported from Roman languages (Radioapparat, Bananoi Schtepsel, Karandasch=Caran d'Age...). But if you have no problems in remembering totally different words of the same meaning...

Discounting all the late borrowings of words that obviously bear the structures of other languages, Russian words in general have exactly the same roots as Roman ones. They are simply more changed, than say a Portuguese and a Spanish word that has a common ancestor (a cognate), simply because the two languages split at a later date.

For instance, Russian has porosenok (little pig), which has the same root as pork (porkus?, my Latin is growing vaguer over the years). Russian videt' corresponds to Latin videre (veni widi wici). I could go on and on.

If you look at the world's languages as a whole, Russian is extremely close to Latin. After all, not long ago (2500 years?) they were exactly the same language. Interesting when you think that the Slavic languages themselves did not start to split into their current flavors until approx. 1700 years ago.

Loren sZendre
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