i think if you made a reasonable, adequate 30-40 character alphabet that covers all of the european language phonemes (bulgarian and russian and serbian combined have all of them, i think) and then render the phonetic form of every european language in this text, you'd be quite surprised to learn how many common sounds, and direct or orthogonal meanings there is.
it was one of the most amusing things after getting quite decent at bulgarian, going to serbia, and how many ways the languages were similar, by being opposite.
like:
zato shto
za shtoto
both of these words (serbian first, bulgarian second) means the same thing
the bulgarian word i put the space to show where the accented syllable is, it's written all as one word using the W symbol with the tail on it, SHT.
za to shto
zash to to
it's a tongue twister trying to say one word after you learn the other word.
there's a lot of funny connections between sounds too, like "baixo" (bai-sho) meaning "low" sounds a lot like the southern slavic word for father - bashta, and in serbian "bash" means "extremely"
there is a generally accepted hypothesis that all of the eurasian languages have a common ancestor and they have all been jumbled up. funny that. like it describes in genesis with the tower of babel. which sounds a lot like ... skyscrapers... and then a disaster that blew them up including mainly stuff falling out of the sky and the ground shaking.
it was kinda shocking to me reading the Book of Jasher how many references to modern european places it makes. Lombardy, the Seine river, and several other words that are clearly mangled versions of modern versions of european place names.
Book of Jasher... I better read it. I think I searched it once after you mentioned it before.
I definitely prefer "zato shto" - easier to pronounce, looks like maybe the same shto as Russian.
Baixo looks Chinese... It even works with meaning below - xo/sho could be a version of xia, which is below in Chinese. That was my first and most memorable Chinese lesson - one of my bosses couldn't speak English, and started teaching me Chinese. "Shang" "Xia" while indicating above and below a book. Very nice lady.
yeah, shto is related to the latin word 'est' also, but it means "why", in bulgarian they say "zashto" which basically sounds like "for why" and so "zashtoto" is "the why" because -to means "the" similar to the scheme that they also use in nordic countries with the postfix definite article, to, ta, and ut/at.
as a rule, serbian is much easier to pronounce for an english or west european speaker, compared to bulgarian, and bulgarian is like russian but faster and more staccato. russians can pretty much understand what serbs are saying without learning serbian also, and i have heard it referred to as being like "baby russian"
and yeah, that whole thing wish jest, which is written ECT in russian is the same as the latin "est" and there is some similar uses in portuguese too, it basically means "it is" and it's the same as the root of the english word "yes" and sounds very similar, yes, yest, yeste, eshte.
other words that are very close along these are "za" "fuer" "para" "por" the word "for" in english. that word "zato" means "for it" more or less literally, to is the neuter second person pronoun, what you use when refering to a child.
More staccato, eh? I might be good at it then. My Russian pronunciation always sounded like Italian. The rythm...
the hardest part is the rolled R, for me it was anyway. i did eventually get used to it, most southern and eastern european languages have it.
bulgarian's voicing rules makes it so you don't have to stop between syllables at all. in dutch they have similar rules but bulgarian takes it to an extreme.
Will people understand if your R-rolls are bad? I never aim for fluency. I have a trick, which is basically "talk too fast for my pronunciation to matter." And I know its annoying! But it works... Usually.
they can generally understand if you can't roll well, it's more about the vowels that makes it hard to understand.
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