>>The entire Russian language departs heavily from other Slavic languages...
Thanks for that chart. I had no idea Russian was *so* different from the other slavic languages. Is the grammar similar? I know slavic language grammars are quite different from English, much more flexible in word placement - mostly from a Russiaphone friend who was going on about Russian poetry and that it was pretty much only translatable into freeverse - which lost a lot. I got him to read some Pushkin and Blok for me in Russian (as I was familiar with the English translations) and it was IMO impressive.
BTW/FWIW I got a friend who speaks modern Greek to read some of the Oddesy for me in Greek. Even more impressive - and he was reading essentially a translation from the original (much the way we read Chaucer these days).