[vkazanov]

What is also interesting is how written Russian was heavily influenced by old Bulgarian. In fact, written russian includes a lot of older written bulgarian vocabulary.

This results in a weird paradox: for literate Russians it is easy enough to read written bulgarian but almost impossible to understand the spoken language.

[RugnirViking]

This happens in other languages too - danish and Norwegian are almost the same written, such that most products just combine the two on the packaging. But spoken it can be very difficult to comprehend

[vkazanov]

So... codified written languages are similar but real spoken ones have diverged? Is this only in the way things are pronouced or the differemce is deeper?