Anybody speak Russian or Bulgarian? - The Terminal (2004) Discussion

[–] id-entity 15 years ago

Although Hanks worked with Bulgarian as his root language, the language he was supposed to be speaking in the film was "Kracozhian," so your question is moot. We can assume whatever we want about the linguistic similarities between Russian and "Kracozhian."

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[–] Meats_Of_Evil 15 years ago

maria as in your case I speak spanish and can understand most things in a conversation of Italian and portuguese. Pretty similar languages.

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[–] pawi59 15 years ago

i speak neither Bulgarian or Russian
i speak very poor Polish AND I COULD MAKE OUT what he was saying

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[–] jlprizm21 15 years ago

I'm from Macedonia and I speak Macedonian and it's really close to Bulgaria so I could pretty much understand what Victor was saying. But that's what I was wondering too. I know some of their words are similar to ours but I really don't think that he could understand him let alone translate. My friend is Russian and although alot of the words we use are similar we could definitely not talk to each other or translate what we're saying. But maybe he knew more Russian than me. haha.

I love the Internet.

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[–] thegreatdarktrooper 15 years ago

Yeah jlprizm21, it's pretty clear that you understood the Bulgarian speech since the so called Macedonian language is actually a Bulgarian dialect, but that's a different story.

Нали така приятелю? :)

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[–] stanbutler-inc 15 years ago

Most of the Bulgarian people speak russian (we learn it at scool), but in the movie he was speaking bulgarian and the other guy was speaking russian. Yes they are similar languages and it is posible for a bulgarian and a russian people to understand eachother.

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[–] elaineqqq 14 years ago

Americans think everybody in the Eastern Europe speaks roughly the same language, be it Russian, Bulgarian, Polish or Albanian. They all are unintelligible, so they must be the same, right?

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[–] sian-kneller 14 years ago

They are similar languages (my Bulgarian friend could make out words in Russian and Polish), but actually most Eastern Europeans can speak Russian as well as their native language.

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[–] spaminput 14 years ago

Until the end of the cold war, Bulgaria was, for all practical purposes, occupied by the Soviet Union. Bulgarian children were forced to learn Russian and even had their names Russianized. Or so I was told by a Bulgarian au pair named Daskalov who had been able to change it back from Daskalova once the Russians left Bulgaria. So it's not surprising that the Hanks character was bilingual.

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[–] elly_l 12 years ago

your friend was either very pretentious or was bulsh*tting you.

Daskalov is a male surname; Daskalova is a female surname; It's similar in all slavic languages. It was at some time during the 70s, 80s, modern to use russian names, but since both languages are very similar, names like Sergey and Jury are not concidered as foreign to bulgarians as are Ryan and Vanessa ( also modern names, but during 2000s). It's just that government was kissing russian as* back then and is kissing american as* nowadays.

usually women from Bulgaria who lived abroad during the 80 and 90s changed their surname from female to male, sometimes adding "off" at the end. Maybe they wanted to "blend in" and not sound so "slavic", maybe they wanted to avoid confusion, but there never was time in Bulgaria when someone changed their surname, espessially from male to female! because of "russian occupation", for 2 reasons: 1) there never was russian ocupation, only political kissing of soviet as*. 2) it's the same way names are formed both in bulgarian and in russian, as well as a number of other languages, so you can't really russianize your name.

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[–] mikeklondyke 9 years ago

Bulgarian children were forced to learn Russian

Almost in every EU country (or anywhere in world) the children learn English, nobody asks them if they want or not.
Will you say that they are forced to learn English?

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[–] romelova 7 years ago

Thanks for mentioning it. Knowledge can't be forced through a funnel into one's brain. This "forcing" argument is such a poor excuse for people's ignorance.

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[–] BillKendich89 12 years ago

Both languages are similar and their alphabets are almost identical, but yet there are differences between Bulgarian and Russian language.

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