A Brief Comparison of Eastern European Languages

My genealogical research involved the Rusyn people in Eastern Europe. While they have their own language, so does everybody else in that neighborhood! This means that looking at old maps and church documents becomes a crash course in learning a few key words in multiple languages. You quickly begin to see how place names evolved over time, depending on the ruling country of the day. I was curious to compare several of the languages that exist in Rusyn areas. Since place names aren't exactly universal, it makes comparing languages pretty sticky. Since churches are quite vital to genealogical research [they held the records!], I decided to compare the word "church".

Disclaimer time! I don't speak these languages... so Google Translate is my source. So all credit/blame goes to them. :)

Here is a comparison of "church" in Rusyn to "church" in a variety of other languages from nearby countries. Transliteration of words in Cyrillic are in parentheses after each word.

Rusyn		цирков (cyrkov)
Bulgarian		църква (tsŭrkva)
Croatian		crkva
Czech		kostel
Estonian		kirik
Finnish		kirkko
Galician		igrexa
Hungarian		templom
Latvian		baznīca
Lithuanian		bažnyčia
Norwegian		kirke
Polish		kościół
Romanian		biserică
Russian		церковь (tserkov')
Serbian		црква (crkva)
Slovak		kostol
Slovenian		cerkev
Swedish		kyrka
Ukrainian		церква (tserkva)

I was very surprised to see how different the Czech and Slovak words are from Rusyn, especially when considering their proximity to the Rusyn area [Rusyns live in Slovakia and Ukraine] and the fact that a lot of Rusyn words are very similar to their counterparts in Czech/Slovak. No surprise here: the Rusyn word is very similar to Russian and Ukrainian.

I ended up including the Baltic States because of how similar some of their words are to the Romanian word for church. Unexpected!

As always, Hungary is an outlier. :-P

I'm sure you're wondering why I included Galician, as it clearly has nothing to do with anything I'm talking about. I included it simply to point out that the Galician language in Google Translate refers to Galicia in Spain, not Galicia the historic area in Eastern Europe.

To help visualize these variations, I threw together a map:

Fascinating, no?!

Transliteration (Pertaining to Eastern Europe)

I'm sure most of you won't find this the least bit interesting, but... I do! And it's not like the fact that I'm a nerd is a news flash or something.

Over the past year and a half I've done a lot of genealogical research. This has led me to many documents in many languages! These languages include: Russian, Rusyn, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Slovak, German, Slovene, Polish, and Lithuanian. I don't know anything about German, Slovene, Polish or Lithuanian yet... that's for later. Anyway, most of my research has focused on my dad's family. That part of my family comes from the Rusyn areas in western Slovakia and eastern Ukraine. If you're not looking at Rusyn names... this won't be nearly as helpful, but most of these are fairly constant.

Enough background info, here's a breakdown of a few things that I find fairly common in surnames!


*The H is mostly silent in names that begin with Hr. Stick with silent and you're likely to be closer to how it's supposed to sound!
**In most Slavic languages, Г is transliterated to a G. However, in Rusyn (where names that begin with Hr are common) Г is an H, whereas Ґ is a G.
***This isn't a single letter, it's two. Therefore, no IPA pronunciation.


So, if you know me, you know my last name. If you don't... it has a silent H and a bunch of other stuff non-Eastern Bloc people don't like to pronounce. I'm hoping that this might help people understand how to pronounce fun names like mine! :-P