What is the difference between Slovak, Czech, and Russian languages?

Comments ( 3 )

1. Mike says

   well i am Czech, and a lot of Slovak words are the same but some are very different. and Russian is a totally different language.

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2. Julian Crane says

   same difference there is between Italian, French and Spanish. (which are Romance languages) Russian, Slovak & Czech are Slavic languages.

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3. Laurence says

   Apart from using the Latin and not the Cyrillic alphabet, the most obvious difference is that they do not have movable word stress, i.e. like English and German (mostly), they consistently stress the first syllable of every word. A second difference is with words that originally had L or R before another consonant, which in Russian acquired an extra vowel ("gorOd" is a cognate of "yard", "molOko" is Russian for "milk,"); the non-Russian Slavs went on to drop the first vowel, so "mleko" is Polish for "milk", "grad" is Church Slavonic (Old Bulgarian) for "city." But sometimes the exact opposite happened, so that Czech "robot" is a cognate of German "arbeit" (work). Also, while Russian has been influenced by the Orthodox Church's liturgical use of Church Slavonic, the Slav languages in the West were influenced by the Roman Church's similar use of Latin–whence the difference in the alphabet.
   The difference between Czech and Slovak is that the speakers of the latter were an isolated, traditional, peasant community ruled and culturally dominated until 1918 by Hungary, while those of the former inhabited Bohemia, long an intrinsic and important state of the "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation," and one whose early industrialisation exposed it to all the influences of the modern world. The Czechs were the bureaucrats of the Austrian empire and the creators of its armament industry.

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