Why "x" instead of "z" in cz/sz/rz etc. sounds? It's not used by any Slavic languages AFAIK, some use z, some use ^ (and they used z in the past), others use cyrylic but nobody uses x for these. It's weird.
Also w for szcz makes no sense. Use r for "ja" while you're at it :)
Propbably an attempt to use a letter similar to <Щ, щ> graphically.
> Why "x" instead of "z" in cz/sz/rz etc. sounds?
I think it is something picked up from Esperanto. Traditional way to replace Esperanto-specific letters, when not supported, was to change it to a letter followed by an “h”, but there is also a more widely used method using “x” instead.
> Propbably an attempt to use a letter similar to <Щ, щ> graphically.
Yes but then let's use R for "ja" :) This language seems like someone coming from cyrylic wanted to use latin letters, it's not good for Slavic languages that already used latin letters.
Щ is indeed read as "sht" in Bulgarian, but in Russian it would be read as a softer "sh" or mix between "sh" and "ch". If anything, maybe it can just be dropped in favour of plain "sh"?
That's an option, but the big question is about "where it means sht".
Considering we're talking about constructed languages, whether "it's supposed to read `sh`" or "it's supposed to read `sht`" is defined by the author of the language.
On top of that, even coming to a conclusion on what it's supposed to read like means extrapolating it from present-day languages or from the now-dead languages. In a lot of cases, different languages will just have different readings. I.e. consider these words:
Plus there's the weird separate word [BG "sht" щателен - RU "tshch" тщательный].
Barring the loaned words from mostly Germanic origin, it looks like one language just sticks to "sht", while the other prefers "shch" and considers the "t" redundant. The interesting exception is the "що - что" pair, which is seems to preserve the T sound.
From Ukrainian it gets turned into "shch". Which IMO sounds about right. Mainly because sh and ch are shorter sounds in English (ch can also be a little hard), but shch gets the point across.
This was also the historical Russian educated pronunciation; it only changed by the end of the 19th century.
Speaking as a Russian, I think that "shch" is close enough for an international conlang. It's not a sound that's particularly easy to learn or explain.
Are there Slavic words with separately pronounced "s" and "z"? It's quite a tongue-twister.
As for "X" it exists in some Slavic alphabets, for example in Slovak (but apparently only in loan words). In Polish it theoretically doesn't, but actually does (loan words use x when the word is new, and with time it's replaced with ks).
Mst and vzt aren't hard to pronounce? Pomst and wzwód are regular word.
As for s+z - interesting, in Polish there's no s+z pronounced separately. "Szadi" would be "z zadu" and you do a pause between the z letters. And if we have "from $PLACE" where place starts with S we change "z" to "ze" for exactly this reason. So "Z Rosji" and "Z Zimbabwe" but "Ze Szwecji".
In Russian, the combo s+z is also effectively pronounced as a geminated z. But it's still spelled "sz", because Russian orthography tends to be morphemic rather than phonetic. So from the perspective of reading familiarity, using "z" as a digraph marker would cause a lot of confusion on how to read it properly.
"x" at least has the advantage that it's foreign to almost everyone, and thus forces you to look up what the hell it's supposed to mean! But in general, I think that diacritics work much better for readability of Latin-based Slavic alphabets, with Czech being a decent starting point ("ch" aside).
As for the consonant clusters, they are easy to pronounce to Slavs, because we're used to them. Ask a native English speaker sometime what they think about a combo like "vzt" :)
(The reason why we ended up with these unusual consonant clusters is because of the loss of yers. For example, "pomst" and "мстить" are derived from proto-Slavic "*mьstь", where "ь" was originally short "e". This is also why vowels show up in the middle of those consonant clusters sometimes when words change such that the syllable that used to have a yer in it becomes stressed - as in Russian "месть".)
I'd personally lean towards using english spelling for some of these, which for example pinyin (chinese in latin alphabet) also adopted. It's pretty established already and would be easier to adopt by foreigners.
- ch (č) instead of cx
- sh (š) instead of sx
- zh (ž) instead of zx
- shch instead of wx
- kh instead of 'x' or 'ch' (kharkiv)
Additionally, you might correct the unfortunate use of i, y and j in slavic languages:
- j instead of gx or dž or dzh. It's already well established how to pronounce 'jamaica' worldwide
- y instead of the slavic j. There is no need for i and y to represent the same vowel
- ye instead of ě
- ty instead of ť
- dy instead of ď
- ny instead of ň
- rzh instead of ř
"J" is pronounced in at least 4 different ways (English, French/Portuguese, Spanish, German), each way being used in much more countries than I have mentioned. Each of the 4 ways is used by much more than 100 million people, in wide areas of the world.
I believe that most of them will pronounce Jamaica in their own way and different from the others. Thus there is no established rule about how to pronounce Jamaica.
Therefore, I believe that the only acceptable rule for the sound of "J" is the rule that is the oldest, i.e. to use "I" strictly for the vowel and "J" for its consonant form.
For the voiced form of "č", the best would be to use g with caron, for symmetry, even if currently few fonts include this character.
In my opinion "Y" should not be used for any sound of a Slavic language. It should better be reserved for its original sound, which is missing from the Slavic languages.
As a Polish speaker, Interslavic seems significantly easier and more natural to read, but I wonder if it's actually universally better, or just more suited for western Slavs.
As a speaker of Croatian (southern Slavic) and Ukrainian (western Slavic), both Slavio and InterSlavic are bad from the Croatian POW, but InterSlavic is definitely a better choice in either case.
Many word forms in InterSlavic just seem like strangely archaic versions of Croatian, but might pass as "just strange" for Ukrainian.
As a speaker of Polish (western Slavic) reasonably familiar with Ukrainian I find InterSlavic and madzuslovanski (or whatever it's spelled) much better than this Slavio.
Ukrainian is a Slavic language. It's average of language spoken by 9 tribes with light influence of ancient Greek from Crimea and Byzantine, with almost no German and Latin influence, because they are proxied by Slavic neighborhoods.
Greeks influenced Ukrainian language indirectly: via songs. When Ukrainian salt traders (chumaks, чумаки) visited Crimea, they also picked fresh songs to sing when traveling, and then they spread those new song all over Ukraine. Often, chumaks based their songs on Greek songs, because ancient Greeks were much better in music. Chumaks also created portable copy of harp, which they called «bandura» («big thing»), which then used for hundreds of years.
It did not work out because the binding ideology wasn't pan-slavism, but rather bad mix of communism and socialism.
Also, instead of returning to our root slavic religion, we got atheism. Without any form of religion, people can not feel that deep bond. Especially Slavic people, who are naturaly very religious.
Yugoslavia was a mistake, but not for reasons you might think.
I'm pretty sure that "returning to the root Slavic religion" would involve offering massive cow sacrifices to the thunder god Perun in exchange for long life and prosperity. Not sure if that's what you had in mind, though!
You can colour it any way that you like. Many Americans would likely baulk at the idea of a turkey-less Thanksgiving. It is a central theme of the holiday. What else is it, if not a sacrifice?
There were decentralized Christian-like religions like Bogomils (Cathars in Western Europe) in south Slavic parts before modern centralized religions. Maybe those would work better with Slavs who seem to not organize well around centralized sources of power.
Yugoslavia pre-1945 had nothing to do with communism and socialism - it was created explicitly as a pan-South Slavic state. It ended up being dominated by Serbia, though.
When it comes to "one country" - the USSR aimed at that, and from the perspective of hundreds of millions of people, it wasn't the best idea.
Plus, I think that ethnic states are one of the worst inventions of the 19th century, which accelerated a lot after WWI & WWII. I prefer cities where e.g. 1/3 were Polish, 1/3 German, and 1/3 Jewish (as for my pre-war hometown) rather than monoliths. Even in the middle ages, cities had multiple languages and cultures (e.g. German-speaking for trading cities in Slavic and Baltic countries). Right now, even in many multicultural cities, it is often implicitly assumed that there is the "default language" and an ethnic/national/cultural majority.
There're different levels of authoritarianism and Russia was usually at the far end. Especially compared to the other Slavic countries it annexed like Novogrod Republic of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which had parliaments and elections in 1500s.
But even compared to the absolutist monarchies of the west Russia was more authoritarian. For example serfdom was only abolished in Russia in 1861.
Don't look so far the the west, you have an example of non authoritarian monarchies in central Europe (e.g. Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth where you had a second constitution in the world, just after the US one, a parliament).
Let's bring back to Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, only under a more inclusive name.
Russia wasn't always authoritarian, though. Before the Mongols, it was a bunch of independent, freedom-loving cities. Sort of like the American Wild West.
I feel like we need a new experiment in inclusive governance, and that Slavic countries are the place to do it.
That's a great name for the new entity. Three seas works well in Slavic languages, and is neutral.
Austria should be replaced by Ukraine and Moldova, though. Austria definitely doesn't belong.
Ukraine and Poland really do belong together. Ukraine is more faithful to traditional Polish culture than Poland. Poland westernized a lot since joining the EU and NATO, and Ukranian cultural influence would be awesome. Conversely, Ukraine could use some economic assistance, where Poland's economy has exploded, for much the same reason of NATO/EU.
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was hardly exemplar, either, given the state of the peasants there, and religious persecution of non-Catholics.
Grand Duchy of Lithuania is a better model, IMO - a state with a Lithuanian pagan ruler, and a mix of pagan, Catholic, and Orthodox elites and population all living together.
(1) The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had elected kings and a parliament. It was a republic to the same degree as Rome or some of the more democratic Greek city-states. The only people who could vote were nobles, but nobles were about 10% of the population. That's about on-par with with Athens or the Roman Empire. Even in the US, only white landowners could vote when it was first founded. That's not too dissimilar from the Polish nobility.
(2) Jews emigrated to the Commonwealth from all over Europe for better treatment. Good treatment? No. Better treatment? Without a doubt.
The Commonwealth wasn't a modern enlightened democracy, but this was 1600, not 1900. It did incredibly well for 1600.
The problem, ultimately, is that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was dominated by Poland, and said Polish nobility was not interested in treating religious minorities equally, as GDL did. Republic or not doesn't matter here - republics can quite easily become tyrannies of the majority. There's a reason why there were so many uprisings on the territory that is Ukraine today, back when it was a part of the Commonwealth:
It changed with time, but the Polish nobility wasn't the ones persecuting religious minorities for the most part.
For one thing nobles took a lot of Jewish immigrants, used them as middle management (which frustrated the church, who in turn sent angry peasant mobs against Jews, which meant Jews had to work with nobility for their protection).
Also a lot of nobles weren't Catholic, especially in 1500s protestantism was very popular (about 1/3rd of nobles and majority of magnates were protestant). Only in times of Zygmunt 3 Waza who was super Catholic and introduced some discrimination it changed significantly.
Majority of nobles from eastern parts of PLC were orthodox at first (later they polonized and switched to Catholicism mostly), and there were some Jewish and Muslim nobles (but it was very rare). They still had all the rights including voting for kings, wars and taxes.
> There's a reason why there were so many uprisings on the territory that is Ukraine today, back when it was a part of the Commonwealth
Mostly economic, but yes, there has been some religious persecution there. Especially after the attempts to create orthodox-style pope-sanctioned religion in Ukraine.
The Orthodox nobility had the same rights at first. But, as you say yourself, almost all of them have switched to Catholicism over time. And the reason for that was that it was the only way to preserve both the rights and the social standing in the long term.
As for nobles not carrying out religious persecution, I don't even know what to say. Local magnates were the main drivers of the religious persecution of Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians. And sure, that persecution was often economic in nature, but it was also very clearly carried out along religious lines.
I'll grant you that religious intolerance in Poland was primarily between Catholics and Orthodox, rather than Catholics and Protestants as elsewhere in Europe. But that's to be expected from a country where most subjects are either Catholic or Orthodox, no?
EDIT: I suppose our perspectives are so different because we're focusing on different time periods. My take on this is that early Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth inherited many of the political arrangements of GDL, and tolerance was one of them. But as the center of political power shifted over to Poland over time, they were weakened.
There was some of that (especially in lat 1600s), but compared to basically any other country at the time it was significantly better. PLC even had a law that each newly elected king had to sign where he promised not to persecute anybody because of religion or he stops being the king: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Confederation
Majority of magnates (the big nobility that actually decided things by buying other nobles during elections) weren't Catholic in 1500s.
i disagree to some extent. historically slavic culture tends to be much more communal than rest of europe. even in eu you can see this manifested in thr resistance to liberalism that comes from all (?) slavic countries
What does resistance to liberalism manifest about being more communal or communist? Is resistance to privatisation a "resistance to liberalism" or "communist"? I don't think so. It is nationalistic, conservative and social democratic.
Was the economic structure of USSR the real problem? I thought it was the power structure (dictatorship) and general lack of accountability of management.
The economic structure wasn't great, but people can disagree as to whether it was due to the power structure (a militarism and imperialism-obsessed dictatorship), and how much of it due to the fundamental problems of... The weird, state-capitalism flavour of 'communism' that was used in practice in the second world.
Then you get into no true Scottsman arguments about what is, and what isn't communism, and whether or not state capitalism is guaranteed to be a failure, or whether it was state capitalism, as practiced by the Eastern Block is guaranteed to be a failure. And then you can further split hairs as to whether or not having some aspects of state capitalism in your economy are better than having no aspects of it, and where the optimal line is.
And then you find that you've wasted hours of time arguing, but haven't actually convinced anyone, or learned anything new.
I think single language would be wonderful and Interslavic sounds really good to me (btw. Serbian).
The one country thing, I think USSR made it unpalatable, but a lot of conflicts would not be happening if there was some construct that allow simpler work and life in Slavic worls. Something like EU, without bureaucracy, maybe just rule that people can cross countries easier and live and work.
I don't think it would be problem of Russians being the most numerous, as long as people would use Interslavic in communication and be able to travel and work more easily.
draw a possible map of Slavia and see it from a perspective of neighbouring non-Slavic countries. would you find such a political structure threatening? this is the reason i think it would be a bad idea. what would be nice in my opinion is a larger inter-slavic cultural exchange: in academic research, text books, litterature, music, film, etc
I don't know, I think after two decades of Cold War II, Western Europe will warm up to Slavs living east of Bialystok. Nothing brings people closer together than a common enemy. [1]
[1] See: The Brits and the French, the French and the Germans, etc, etc.
its certainly strange but im not sure if "bad" is fair here. what i can say is that i understood what was being said on very first reading for both. i imagine if travelling to poland or russia and seeing instructions written in slovio/inter-slavic would be quite easy to follow
"Slovio is not very Slavic at all: its grammar is almost entirely based on Esperanto, its word building mechanisms are mostly Germanic, and its vocabulary, although clearly dominated by (often mutilated) Russian words, does not relate in any predictable way to the Slavic languages either. As a result, its educational value is practically zero."
This was also my impression of Slovio after attempting to read a few texts. Interslavic feels much more natural, coming from the perspective of a heavy dialect speaker of one of the south Slavic languages.
From comments here, my impression as a completely non-Slavic speaker, is that Slovio is more artificial, designed to be easy to learn by non-Slavic speakers and still somewhat understandable by all Slavic speakers, whereas Interslavic is much closer to a real Slavic language, but might be harder to learn for non-Slavic speakers.
WTF/wow. As a native speaker of Croatian I can understand 80% directly and additional 10-15% by "interpolating into the context". Good work. EDIT: I don't like Slovio either, especially because of using x/cx/etc. instead of proper diacritics. EDIT2: I might event invest into learning it. I wouldn't speak any particular "native" language, but could find my way around all Slavic countries.
As a Pole, both languages are readable, but InterSlavic takes less effort and feels more natural. This FAQ matches my intuitions.
That said, I would be curious how it works for other Slavic languages. Or, in other words, is it sort of equidistant or favors one language or the other?
I mean, the FAQ claims that it is the easiest for Czechs and Slovaks (is it because of their geographical centrality and possibility that these languages are the closest to the "Slavic average"?) and harder for the South Slavs. However, and always, I would love to see any data.
As a Slovak I can confirm it's pretty easy to read both, although I hate the usage of cx, sx, ... instead of č, š, ... in Slovio.
I feel like Interslavic is closer in vocabulary to Slovak, but the form of the words is a bit foreign (reminds me of some other Slavic languages, although I can't quite figure out which one), while the opposite is the case with Slovio - the form of the words feels closer to Slovak, but the vocabulary itself feels more "Russian" to me.
Wow, what a great idea! I'm originally from Bulgaria and I've enjoyed this kind of "universal understanding" to some level with almost all nearby Slavic countries (e.g. Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine).
I really like the approach of Slovio, it was instantly clear and understandable. I think with some practice it won't be a challenge to adopt it in writing (e.g. plurals with "-s" for some words is a bit strange at first).
interesting. From my perspective (Slovenian native, know some Serbo-Croatian & Russian), Slovio is much better.
At first glance:
- Interslavic needlessly complicates the alphabet - there is no need for "y" where "i" would suffice, there is no need for "Ě" where "je" would suffice
- Interslavic needlessly complicates spelling / words - surely there should be a drive towards simplification and shortening, especially in a "shared" langauge:
as a Bulgarian and Russian speaker, I find Interslavic easier to understand. Slovio has some stuff that takes me a bit longer to process.
I have always enjoyed the closeness of Slavic languages. I don't know a lick of Polish, but I can read and understand maybe 70-80% of a polish paragraph. same for a lot of Slavic languages.
As a Slovak, Interslavic feels easier to read and understand, though I can understand Slovio as well.
From my experience, Slovak speakers can understand other Slavic languages pretty well: Czech is basically our second native language (although for some reason it seems Czechs don't understand Slovak quite to the same degree), Polish, Slovenian and Croatian are understandable as well. Russian is a lot harder, even when written in Latin. I don't have experience with Ukrainian.
Very interesting. And indeed easy to understand even if words barely resemble my own mother-tongue. Seems like the authors captured the common core and created some kind of average meaning.
Constructed slavic languages have a long history, with many before and some after Slovio. I have a Polish friend who was learning Interslavic a few years ago, mostly for fun.
Has your friend ever had any real experience using it? I'm curious how viable these uniting languages are in practice. It feels like he might be able to understand people from different languages, but they wouldn't necessarily understand him when he's using Interslavic, right?
They did some experimentation with a Czech/Slovak colleagues, but those two languages are quite close already. I'm not sure if they ever got the chance to practice with a slavic language that is further removed from Polish.
I recall watching this video at the time (which might have been their inspiration to start learning it).
I like the idea, never heard of it before but from I always lived thinking that reducing variance between Slavic languages is needed because (as a Pole) I understand context but it is hard to perform conversation with different pairs (Slavian PL for example). Good to know that that project exist, maybe it is an niche to use some ml/ai methods to generate pretrained model for generating speech etc. Especially in huggingface like era it could be relatively easy and helpful.And also catchy, just look at that buzzwords ' AI help to unify slavic languages'.
Slovio uses -s suffix for plural which is completely weird in any slavic language, -i would be much more natural (ulcas, domis, glovis vs ulci, domi, glovi) and that is what another panslavic language interslavic/Medžuslovjansky uses (ulici, domi, glavi): http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/
I'm only familiar with Russian, but "es" for "to be" feels weird too. And it's used where Russian would just omit it. Are there Slavic languages that are more liberal with it? And I feel like some form of Cyrillic would be much more natural both because of the available phonemes and because I believe most Slavic speakers would be more familiar with it than the Latin alphabet. As a non-native learner, I've always had trouble trying to parse out Russian transliterated into Latin script.
This almost looks like something a speaker of a romance language would put together.
Yeah and I think that’s also why this conlang uses it. Having an explicit “be” enables simpler grammar and is much easier to learn. Nominative case is sort of an implicit “is a” in context and without cases that falls apart.
Even though Russian does drop the "to be" in present tense for all pronouns, other Slavic languages do feature it either as a separate word or together. For example this is how you say "I am Russian" and "You are Russian" in:
Slovenian:
Jaz sem Rus
Ti si Rus
Croatian:
Ja sam Rus
Ti si Rus
Slovak:
Som Rus
Ty si Rus
Whereas in Polish is a joint word (but the to be is still merged in there):
Jestem z Rosji
Jesteś Rosjaninem
I also thought that using the Latin alphabet feels a bit of a hack and Cyrillic would be a more "natural" way to put things. However, using Cyrillic would impose a higher learning curve for those who do not it.
This is mostly for phonemes that don't have a 1-to-1 representation in the Latin alphabet, like ш, щ, ж and what not. For these cases, languages like Croatian, Slovenian and others have come up with, what is my personal opinion, are quite acceptable workarounds (I just found out that this is called Gaj's Latin alphabet [1])
č, ć, dž, đ, š, ž (I skipped a few).
Without knowing initially how they are pronounced, read in context you do get an idea of what the target sound is.
I also think that on-boarding Cyrillic-first cultures would be easier because normally countries that use Cyrillic as their main alphabet also teach the Latin alphabet at school (Russia for example does and they also teach you how to write "Russian" using Latin characters because they understand the importance of this). Whereas it's not the same way around: a lot of the Slavic countries do not teach the Cyrillic alphabet at school.
> I've always had trouble trying to parse out Russian transliterated into Latin script.
I also think this is because when you're learning Russian as a non-native speaker, the courses focus mainly on Cyrillic (naturally so) so you never really learn that
ж -> zsh
the maxim is to "speak as you write and write as you speak". however there are variations to adoptions of the rule. croatians will tend write foreign words as written in that language, while in serbia you always follow this rule. so for example in serbia it is Majkl Džordan while in croatia its just Michael Jordan
Which makes sense. The verb has already been declined and gives away which person it's addressing. Same in Spanish:
Yo soy (you can drop the yo because soy only applies for yo). Same for other pronouns.
I also think this is because when you're learning Russian as a non-native speaker, the courses focus mainly on Cyrillic (naturally so) so you never really learn [the romanization conventions].
There’s a number of romanization standards for Cyrillic, and which one is the most intuitive might be language-dependent (e.g. what Russian writes as a stressed ‹и› Ukrainian writes as ‹і›, which post-1918 Russian doesn’t use; what Ukrainian writes as ‹и› is closer but not identical to what Russian denotes ‹ы›, which Ukrainian doesn’t use).
Wikipedia has a good summary table[1] of some of the formal standards, but these don’t cover some of the vernacular usage, so to say. The most frequent quirk is probably writing ‹щ› as ‹sch›, as you do, when standards insist on ‹shch› (my guess is because the Belarusian counterpart of ‹щ› is ‹шч›, which would also be written ‹shch›); most confusing is perhaps writing the masculine adjectival ending ‹-ий›, ‹-ый› as ‹-y› or rarely ‹-yy› (writing ‹Navalny› for the surname ‹Навальный› or ‹Zelenskyy› for the surname ‹Зеленський›, maybe because old 19th-century German-inspired romanizations usually wrote it as ‹-i›, merging the ending with its Polish counterpart). I have to say I’ve never seen ‹zsh› instead for ‹zh› for ‹ж›, though.
Empirically, I’ve also found that French people struggle with pronouncing an English-inspired transliteration (‹sh› for ‹ш›, ‹ch› for ‹ч›), but have no problem with finding at least a pronounceable fallback using a Czech/Serbo-Croatian-inspired one (‹š› for ‹ш›, ‹č› for ‹ч›), so diacritics might indeed be underrated here.
I'd for a long time puzzled over the mysterious \t accent in TeX. Why did DEK implement this obscure diacritical and leave out the more useful Ogonek?¹ It was only when I stumbled across it (somewhat garbled) in an online card catalog entry that I discovered that it was used in some Russian transliteration schemes to represent digraphs like t͡s for ц.
⸻
1. I suspect the other reason was that implementing the tie was technically simple since, by allowing it to extend pass its spacing width, it can be treated like any other above-character accent. Ogonek, on the other hand, unlike a cedilla or the dot-under diacritic, requires positioning based on the letter that it's attached to so can't be programmed as easily as a floating diacritic mark.
I see you didn’t spend a week sick in bed with no fresh reading material except for a copy of the TeXbook :) Exercises 9.4 and 9.5 from the chunk of exercises on diacritics there mention ‹Akademii͡a› for ‹Академия› (usually ‹-ija› or ‹-iya›) and ‹I͡urʼev› for ‹Юрьев› (usually ‹Ju-› or ‹Yu-›), which I remember (sans the numbers of course) exactly because I had never before seen that romanization[1] and thought it weird. But apparently the Library of Congress does use it, and if you can get hold of official English translations/selections of Soviet physics or mathematics journals from the 70s and 80s you’ll see the authors’ names spelt according to it as well.
Note that in modern times, you’re supposed to use the tie to spell affricates and such in IPA as well, like in ‹t͡ʃ› and ‹d͡ʒ› and, yes, ‹t͡s›, even though nobody does as far as I’ve seen.
Alas, I read the TeXbook originally in 1986 and while I've dipped into it a lot since then, I've not re-read it in its entirety since that first read. I'm the one responsible for adding a section about the ALA-LC romanization in Tie (typography) on Wikipedia.
Thanks for all the info. I definitely underestimated the number of languages that don't use Cyrillic. I also had it in my head that dropping "to be" in the present tense was more common. Do you know anything about the history of that as far as where, linguistically, it started being dropped? Like which Slavic language groups drop the verb and which don't? I don't know if that makes sense.
> And I feel like some form of Cyrillic would be much more natural both because of the available phonemes and because I believe most Slavic speakers would be more familiar with it than the Latin alphabet.
(South) Slavic speaker here. Cyrillic would not be much more natural, we haven't used Cyrillic in over 30 years. Latin would be something all of us Slavenes would be able to read.
I feel like I was pretty forthright about how little I know about the Slavic world. I'm certainly not telling anyone anything. I stated what my assumptions were based on what I knew and asked questions hoping for someone with firsthand knowledge to let me know if/where I was off-base.
Numerically, sure, because of the sheer numbers of Russian speakers, but Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Bosniaks (among others) might beg to differ.
Russian just is not a great example of a Slavic language. It is a Slavic language in general yet way too different from the rest of them for a number of reasons.
> Russian just is not a great example of a Slavic language.
i am not sure what you mean but russian is by far the biggest slavic language in terms of number of speakers. i also think it is the biggest in terms of number of litterary and academic works
Having no neighbor to the east helped with that a bit.
From my west-slavic (Polish) perspective I can understand Czech, Slovakian (a bit harder) and Ukrainian semi-ok. But Russian is way, way harder (there are some similar words but most are alien to me).
I didn't have chance to listen to south slavic languages so I don't know how similar they are to west slavic ones.
All the Balkan Slavic languages also feel just like dialects. I could very easily converse in Polish throughout all Baltic countries. Along with the ones you mentioned. I find Ukrainian very difficult though. I'm not a native Polish speaker so I chalk it up to that.
> All the Balkan Slavic languages also feel just like dialects.
If you mean Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin - they are only recognized as languages for political reasons. They actually are a particularly rich continuum of dialects but it is impractical to recognize this because it would imply there should be one literary norm.
When I was doing some canvassing for the election in 2016, I was able to use my limited Czech to speak with some Polish speakers. My grandfathers, one who spoke Czech, the other Slovene, both at a native level (they were raised bilingually in their ancestral language plus English) were able to understand each other. My father was able to leverage his Czech (another bilingual kid) to understand Polish and Slovene and he had a fairly easy time learning Russian.
> And I feel like some form of Cyrillic would be much more natural both because of the available phonemes and because I believe most Slavic speakers would be more familiar with it than the Latin alphabet
in south slavic family there is a one-to-one mapping between cyrilic and latin scripts. in serbia, for example, both scripts are official
I see that the front page has language examples both in Cyrillic and in Latin alphabets.
Also I do not believe that there can be a better choice than "es", because I suppose that in order to simplify the grammar they have removed the personal terminations from the verbs, in which case "est" of the 3rd person singular becomes "es", just the simple stem of the verb.
Also, even if their examples show an explicit "es", optionally omitting redundant words is a trivial rule to add to any language grammar.
It is likely that there are other aspects of the language that can be criticized, but these 3 points seem OK.
The goal was to use only basic latin letters. But even then - many Slavic languages use or used z for this purpose, none uses x. So why make it arfitically less understandeable? It's not Cxechia it's Czechia.
Historical baggage. The 'c' doesn't contribute to the sound of the czech 'ch' (russian 'x'), unless you read the 'c' as an english 'k'. Kh as in Kharkiv makes more sense.
True. I don’t know much about other Slavic alphabets (other than my own, Serbo-Croatian). It looks like Polish has ć, ś, ź for this purpose. I’d be interested to learn more about the alphabets in Cyrillic. I assume they also have special letters for these three phonemes.
Lithuanian and Latvian are in the Baltic language family which shares a direct ancestor with the Slavic (Balto-Slavic languages). (The Germanic and Italo-Celtic languages are in the closest "sibling" branch to Balto-Slavic). So it's not impossible for an interlanguage to be understood by both Baltic and Slavic speakers.
I speak Latvian, russian and a bit of Polish. I could easily imagine a Slavic interlanguage, as knowing russian helped a lot with Polish. Learning russian took a lot of effort, though.
So, besides having a bunch of shared nouns, adding Baltic languages to the mix does not make much sense IMO. Despite having a shared ancestor (in theory), Baltic languages are not very mutually intelligible with Slavic.
Edit:
And also, if it does take on this impossible mission, it should at least be called Balto-Slovio.
Lithuanian native speaker here. Reading the examples in the site I couldn't understand anything, and it sounds nothing like Lithuanian or Latvian. Being able to understand Russian to some extent didn't help either.
I find it hard to imagine such a language, as the languages really are far off from each other.
Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic have separated much, much earlier than various Slavic language families. Balto-Slavic is typically dated to somewhere between 3000-1000 BCE. On the other hand, the Common Slavic period is 600-1000 CE (and mutual intelligibility went on even longer). The degree of similarity between the languages is simply not comparable.
Fairly easy to understand, but looks weird in places as others have mentioned (the X especially). Interslavic looks like a real slavic language, and is easy to understand as well (though I would say a bit harder).
I speak Slovak and Czech, and both of the above seem easier to me than Polish or Slovenian for example.
Which brings me to, is there some sort of visualization of proximity of different Slavic languages? How much they differ between each other, which ones for closer groups, etc...
I've learned some Czech about 10 years ago. Not much left, since i didn't need it that much (yes, shame on me), but i actually understand several words. Nice. Now i wonder if something like this exists for germanic languages.
> Now i wonder if something like this exists for germanic languages.
Dutch.
Only half joking. Dutch would at least make a great starting point in terms of written language.
As a native speaker with English as a second language and German as my third, I can read a whole lot of Dutch because it's closer in spelling to Scandinavian languages than German is, but has kept many words that are still used in German but archaic or different in Scandinavian languages.
It's not unusual for me to find it easier to read Dutch than to read the same text in German despite having actually had German at school but never having had any formal Dutch (and I have no hope of understanding spoken Dutch).
Consider a few examples: skip (Norwegian), skib (Danish), ship (English), schip (Dutch), Schiff (German). Or dag (Norwegian, Danish, Dutch), day (English), Tag (German). Dans (Norwegian, Danish, Dutch), dance (English), Tanz (German).
Where there's broad concordance between the Germanic languages, Dutch is usually close to the majority of the languages, but it often retains some spellings that are readily recognisable to the others when it's closer to German, and in the cases where it's closer to English those words are usually recognisable to other Germanic speakers anyway.
I would have said English, but you are probably right - as long as we are talking about written language. As a Scandinavian I understand the other Scandinavian languages as well as English, German, French and a few other languages. But Dutch is hard to understand due to a lot of guttural sounds.
In terms of shared second language English would probably just remove the need for trying to find a middle ground. But as a middle ground understandable without knowing a second language, it loses out because so much of its vocabulary comes from French. E.g. chair vs. stol, stoel, Shtul, a word that even has close cognates in Slavic languages (but the Germanic is hanging on in English in "stool"). An English with French influence replaced with pre-existing Germanic-sourced English words with Dutch as fallback might be a fun experiment.
Regarding spoken Dutch, I agree, it's painful to listen to. And I just got a horrible thought: A mix of Danish and Dutch pronunciation... I imagine it'd sound somewhat like death metal ;-)
A Germanicized English would probably work well enough given that English has such a pidgin-like grammar anyway. You wouldn't have to deal with the whole part of simplifying the language, there's already a widely used standard for that.
Interesting, but really odd and seemingly with very different goals than what I had in mind.
As a native Norwegian speaker, on one hand there are lots of words used there which are easier for me to understand than they would be for a native English speaker, but at the same time many are unnecessary reversions towards Old English or pointless changes where modern Germanic languages are closer to modern English.
It seems like a reversion without any thought to how these terms have kept evolving in the rest of the Germanic sphere.
E.g. "riche" on one hand sounds closer to "rike" or "Reich", but "state" has close cognates in most Germanic languages (stat, staat etc.) and stat/staat and rike/Reich have different connotations - we'd tend to use rike/Reich in contexts relating to monarchy or evoking history or tradition. E.g. kongerike/Königreich for kingdom (but also kongedømme), but stat/staat when talking about a modern state.
And e.g. "Hof" as in "Speaker of the Hof", while it has close cognates, is an unnecessary leap given "house" has close cognates too (hus, Haus) which are used in the same context, and the "problem" there isn't the word "house" but the whole construction.
Translating United States to Oned Riches also takes it further away from modern Germanic languages rather than moving closer to them (e.g. Forenede Stater, Vereinigten Staaten).
Similarly, the month names in most Germanic languages are close to modern English. Meadowmonth for July is far harder for me to understand than July - in Norwegian it is juli.
And "lawmoot" for Congress is harder too. Compare kongress, Kongress... At least if they wanted to go that way, e.g. landthing would be far more understandable for speakers of other Germanic languages as a reference to a parliamentary house (moot works fine for meeting, compare e.g. møte, but feels no simpler to me than meeting)
Similarly "landtung" for "language" is weird. In e.g. Norwegian we have "tunge" for "tongue" and it can sort of be used that way, but "tale" is more understandable if you want to go that way, but "speak" as in "to speak" is a closer cognate to the words used for language in other Germanic languages (e.g. språk, Sprache) without sounding archaic.
And "narrowing" for "strait" while in e.g. Norwegian it is "stred", or "landstretch" for "landmass" vs. "landmasse" in Norwegian.
As an "alternate history English" it kinda works. As a "modern Germanic English" it's tiresome to try to read...
> pointless changes where modern Germanic languages are closer to modern English.
I agree that there's a lot of these, but arguably English still seems to have way more Latinate/Romance borrowings than your average Germanic language. So the direction they're going for seems correct, they're just overdoing it (which after all is the whole point of that project!) and, more worryingly, sometimes missing the most appropriate Germanic word for their desired concept, like "Thing" for a democratic assembly.
"State", "July", "congress", "strait" are disqualified because they come from Latin, "mass" comes from Greek. Do you accept Anglish's design goal to only include words derived (through various mechanisms) from Germanic languages?
I agree that "tung" could as well be a modernised form of Old English "sprǣc". I have no explanation for "Hof". I am not qualified to objectively discern whether "thing" is a better conceptual fit than "moot".
Anyone can contribute to Anglish and improve on its imperfections.
> Do you accept Anglish's design goal to only include words derived (through various mechanisms) from Germanic languages?
No, I don't. That is exactly my point. Or rather, I don't agree with what they're actually doing, which is to only include words derived from old Germanic languages. E.g. modern Germanic languages have had words like Congress/kongress/Kongress for centuries. I'd be happy with a language trying to stick to words closer to the consensus of modern Germanic languages.
If you want a mid-point between modern Germanic languages, stripping the language of imports does not work, as then you're creating friction for speakers of other Germanic languages which have also imported those words, not reducing it. I don't see any value in that.
It's fine that this is not Anglish' goal - they can do what they want -, but it makes it unsuitable as an attempt at a shared Germanic language. Their translation of names in particular is outright obnoxious and goes in the opposite direction of a trend to reduce the use of translated names in a lot of languages and reduces understanding rather than increasing it. That's their choice, but it's a very different one.
If I were to try to create a mid-point out of English, I'd narrow the focus massively to deprecate words that have decent Germanic replacements in common use in the other languages, and aim to shift meanings to accommodate it, such as e.g. giving "stool" the same broad meaning as a replacement for "chair" as its cognates have in other Germanic languages. And I'd leave words that have close cognates in other Germanic languages entirely alone, irrespective of the source, such as congress, because they're more likely to be understood by other Germanic speakers than many of the Anglish replacements.
iirc, Dutch got rid of the case system in the 40s, thus making it easier than German. You're right about Scandinavian langauges. I took a few Duolingo courses in Swedish and Norwegian and my several months of Dutch helped me.
This actually makes sense. One of the sales agents in the company i work for is Dutch. He can speak German, but he mixes several words in that sound kinda English or are maybe Dutch. I'm still able to understand him good enough, so i can usually help him (i'm in IT). Maybe i'll look into it some day. Would make a fun exercise.
I don't speak any Slavic language, but I can make a reasonable guess at what the first half of that sentence means. Starting with the word "jazika" I have no idea anymore.
ludis ~ ljudi in Croatian but it's so far apart that I didn't even connect it, dnes would then be ~ danas, again this is completely wrong structure and doesn't sound familiar at all so I'd say this is not a language I could pick up.
Slovio is wacky but the other one linked here, Interslavic, is pretty good. It's easy to understand from my north slav perspective and others here seem to be reporting the same. I thought the differences between languages were too great for a language this effective to be constructed, I certainly can't understand Croatian or Russian, for one. So I'm impressed, and I like the idea.
Agreed. As a South Slavic native speaker I could understand Interslavic about 80% directly, and 20% from context, but what's more surprising to me is to see that speakers of North, East and West Slavic languages in the comments are reporting similar numbers!
This sounds to have a Russian angle to me (e.g., the word 'vse'). Why not base on Serbian instead (which would use e.g. 'sve')? It sounds more traditional and often makes more sense etymologically (to my ears as a native Russian speaker; I can't properly speak Serbian but I did a brief foray into it).
>This sounds to have a Russian angle to me (e.g., the word 'vse')
Proto-Slavic *vьśi ("all") would yield "vsi", not that far off. Many modern Slavic languages add additional suffixes: wszystcy, všichni, vsichki etc., which are secondary. Serbian comes close but they swapped the first two consonants: svi.
They did not just swap it, did they? Svi (everything) is also related to svit (the world), which is also in Russian as svet. This is why I say Serbian made more sense to me as a native Russian speaker.
Likewise Serbian sutra, which in Russian is zavtra, same idea (in the morning, i.e. tomorrow) but with seemingly more unnecessary manipulations (considering morning is still utro in Russian).
Proto-Slavic světъ => Serbian svet/svit, Russian svet.
It's two unrelated words which just happen to start with the same two consonants in Serbo-Croatian out of all Slavic languages, after the phonetical change vs- => sv-
>No one speaks proto slavic, so it is all conjectures based on languages that were spoken more recently
Not really. Written Slavic exists since 9 century and it was spelt vs- already back then. Serbo-Croatian is an outlier here because all other Slavic languages have vs-.
Baltic languages are related to Slavic and Old Prussian had "wissa" for "all" (not "siva")
>Likewise Serbian sutra, which in Russian is zavtra, same idea (in the morning, i.e. tomorrow) but with seemingly more unnecessary manipulations (considering morning is still utro in Russian).
I'm not sure what the argument is here. Can you elaborate?
utro = morning, sutra = in the morning, zavtra = also in the morning but weirdly distorted for no obvious reason. There seems less etymological distortion in Serbian.
That's not an opinion, that's how basic Slavic morphology/grammar works.
For example, some Russians say "v ogorode" ("in the garden"), while others say "na ogorode". We don't say "v" somehow got "distorted"/morphed into "na". Some dialects simply choose to use a different, unrelated preposition in the same context.
As a Bulgarian speaker I was surprised that I could understand the entirety of this (though I assumed "лудис" means "people"; something I learned from listening to the Ukranian president's speech a few days ago)
> Новйу межународйу йазика! Што ес Словио? Словио ес новйу межународйу йазика ктор разумийут чтирсто милион лудис на целойу земла. Словио можете употребит дла гворение со чтирсто милион славйу Лудис от Прага до Владивосток; от Санкт Петербург через Варшава до Варна; от Средземйу Морие и от Северйу Морие до Тихйу Океан. Словио имайт простйу, логикйу граматиа и Словио ес идеалйу йазика дла днесйу лудис. Учийте Словио тпер!
...Esperanto anyone? People only use languages which have a historic legacy, continuity and in which literature and poetry has been written, despite how horrible they are.
FFS, even programming language choice is oftern dictated by the ecosystem of already existing libraries nowadays :)
If Russia sponsored this for their imperialist dreams, they should've instead build a Simplified Russian, like you have Simplified Chinese. At least it would be rewarding to read some Dostoevski in something close to the original, and X% of SR learners would also grow up to learn Traditional Russian too...
(Though judging by how things are going, not likely.)
It seems to me (a Pole) this language is much biased towards South Slavic languages. Possibly also towards East Slavic. It's not very similar to Polish.
I wish something like this existed in Turkic languages. There's a billion of them with very small communities, so it would be nice to see some of their properties preserved in a unifying language. Not to mention there's also a lot of documented, but dead ones, mostly because of communities integrating and taking on a Slavic language (mostly Russian and Bulgarian, name of which probably comes from the nomadic Turkish tribe Bulgars).
Many Turkic-language-speaking communities are getting influenced by Turkish or Russian, and given that Turkish being heavily influenced by French, Persian and Arabic in the history, it feels like the languages are losing their essence.
I know the whole deal with spoken language development as they borrow, grow, die and stuff but just like sometimes people want to code in a much simpler programming language / framework, I also have the dream of inventing a toy-but-maybe-even-useful Turkic spoken language.
That’s great idea but might be much more difficult in practice than a common Slavic language. Turkic languages are way more diverse where you have some languages that are extremely similar and some that are not mutually intelligible with an exception of a small number of words (e.g. Turkish and Sakha). Maybe this means there can be several common languages with a smaller number of speakers in each.
It is a common misconception. Knowing two slavic languages from different branches (e.g. west and east slavic groups) improves your comprehension of other slavic langauges a lot, but even that still often not enough. I speak 2 slavic languages but found myself confused with simple everyday phrases in others.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadAlso w for szcz makes no sense. Use r for "ja" while you're at it :)
Propbably an attempt to use a letter similar to <Щ, щ> graphically.
> Why "x" instead of "z" in cz/sz/rz etc. sounds?
I think it is something picked up from Esperanto. Traditional way to replace Esperanto-specific letters, when not supported, was to change it to a letter followed by an “h”, but there is also a more widely used method using “x” instead.
Yes but then let's use R for "ja" :) This language seems like someone coming from cyrylic wanted to use latin letters, it's not good for Slavic languages that already used latin letters.
Ditto for я and ю.
Considering we're talking about constructed languages, whether "it's supposed to read `sh`" or "it's supposed to read `sht`" is defined by the author of the language.
On top of that, even coming to a conclusion on what it's supposed to read like means extrapolating it from present-day languages or from the now-dead languages. In a lot of cases, different languages will just have different readings. I.e. consider these words:
Group 1 - BG reads sht, RU reads shch
BG щипя - RU щипаю BG щастие - RU счастье BG ущърб - RU ущерб BG щит - RU щит BG вещ - RU вещь
Group 2 - BG reads sht, RU reads sht
BG нещо - RU нечто (Russian reads as "cht" here, but close enough) BG що - RU что (Russian reads "shto", at least in modern reading)
Group 3 - loaned words mostly try to mimic original
BG щора - RU штора BG поща - RU почта BG щанга - RU штанга
Plus there's the weird separate word [BG "sht" щателен - RU "tshch" тщательный].
Barring the loaned words from mostly Germanic origin, it looks like one language just sticks to "sht", while the other prefers "shch" and considers the "t" redundant. The interesting exception is the "що - что" pair, which is seems to preserve the T sound.
Speaking as a Russian, I think that "shch" is close enough for an international conlang. It's not a sound that's particularly easy to learn or explain.
As for "X" it exists in some Slavic alphabets, for example in Slovak (but apparently only in loan words). In Polish it theoretically doesn't, but actually does (loan words use x when the word is new, and with time it's replaced with ks).
Slavic languages are generally tongue twisters for non-Slavic speakers, what with consonant clusters like "mst" or "vzd".
As for s+z - interesting, in Polish there's no s+z pronounced separately. "Szadi" would be "z zadu" and you do a pause between the z letters. And if we have "from $PLACE" where place starts with S we change "z" to "ze" for exactly this reason. So "Z Rosji" and "Z Zimbabwe" but "Ze Szwecji".
"x" at least has the advantage that it's foreign to almost everyone, and thus forces you to look up what the hell it's supposed to mean! But in general, I think that diacritics work much better for readability of Latin-based Slavic alphabets, with Czech being a decent starting point ("ch" aside).
As for the consonant clusters, they are easy to pronounce to Slavs, because we're used to them. Ask a native English speaker sometime what they think about a combo like "vzt" :)
(The reason why we ended up with these unusual consonant clusters is because of the loss of yers. For example, "pomst" and "мстить" are derived from proto-Slavic "*mьstь", where "ь" was originally short "e". This is also why vowels show up in the middle of those consonant clusters sometimes when words change such that the syllable that used to have a yer in it becomes stressed - as in Russian "месть".)
I believe that most of them will pronounce Jamaica in their own way and different from the others. Thus there is no established rule about how to pronounce Jamaica.
Therefore, I believe that the only acceptable rule for the sound of "J" is the rule that is the oldest, i.e. to use "I" strictly for the vowel and "J" for its consonant form.
For the voiced form of "č", the best would be to use g with caron, for symmetry, even if currently few fonts include this character.
In my opinion "Y" should not be used for any sound of a Slavic language. It should better be reserved for its original sound, which is missing from the Slavic languages.
http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/index.html
http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/faq.html#slovio
No real slavsman!
Many word forms in InterSlavic just seem like strangely archaic versions of Croatian, but might pass as "just strange" for Ukrainian.
As a speaker of Polish (western Slavic) reasonably familiar with Ukrainian I find InterSlavic and madzuslovanski (or whatever it's spelled) much better than this Slavio.
The languages are much closer than any of them is to Russian.
Greeks influenced Ukrainian language indirectly: via songs. When Ukrainian salt traders (chumaks, чумаки) visited Crimea, they also picked fresh songs to sing when traveling, and then they spread those new song all over Ukraine. Often, chumaks based their songs on Greek songs, because ancient Greeks were much better in music. Chumaks also created portable copy of harp, which they called «bandura» («big thing»), which then used for hundreds of years.
Let's call it Slavia.
Also, instead of returning to our root slavic religion, we got atheism. Without any form of religion, people can not feel that deep bond. Especially Slavic people, who are naturaly very religious.
Yugoslavia was a mistake, but not for reasons you might think.
In most Slavic countries, it is customary to slay and eat a pig on certain holidays, like Christmas and our Slava.
In the US you kill turkeys for Thanksgiving. How different is that compared to other "sacrifices"?
Perun is a "pseudo" God, as much as Zeus was a pseudo God.
And if they are pseudo gods, then Jesus Christ is a pseudo God, too.
Gods exist as long as people believe in them.
Many Slavs feel the same.
When it comes to "one country" - the USSR aimed at that, and from the perspective of hundreds of millions of people, it wasn't the best idea.
Plus, I think that ethnic states are one of the worst inventions of the 19th century, which accelerated a lot after WWI & WWII. I prefer cities where e.g. 1/3 were Polish, 1/3 German, and 1/3 Jewish (as for my pre-war hometown) rather than monoliths. Even in the middle ages, cities had multiple languages and cultures (e.g. German-speaking for trading cities in Slavic and Baltic countries). Right now, even in many multicultural cities, it is often implicitly assumed that there is the "default language" and an ethnic/national/cultural majority.
Yet, this idea would be dangerous even with very different cultures - vide "Ein Reich".
Almost all former European monarchies, from England to Belgium, were authoritarian imperialistic countries.
But even compared to the absolutist monarchies of the west Russia was more authoritarian. For example serfdom was only abolished in Russia in 1861.
Russia wasn't always authoritarian, though. Before the Mongols, it was a bunch of independent, freedom-loving cities. Sort of like the American Wild West.
I feel like we need a new experiment in inclusive governance, and that Slavic countries are the place to do it.
Austria should be replaced by Ukraine and Moldova, though. Austria definitely doesn't belong.
Ukraine and Poland really do belong together. Ukraine is more faithful to traditional Polish culture than Poland. Poland westernized a lot since joining the EU and NATO, and Ukranian cultural influence would be awesome. Conversely, Ukraine could use some economic assistance, where Poland's economy has exploded, for much the same reason of NATO/EU.
Grand Duchy of Lithuania is a better model, IMO - a state with a Lithuanian pagan ruler, and a mix of pagan, Catholic, and Orthodox elites and population all living together.
(1) The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had elected kings and a parliament. It was a republic to the same degree as Rome or some of the more democratic Greek city-states. The only people who could vote were nobles, but nobles were about 10% of the population. That's about on-par with with Athens or the Roman Empire. Even in the US, only white landowners could vote when it was first founded. That's not too dissimilar from the Polish nobility.
(2) Jews emigrated to the Commonwealth from all over Europe for better treatment. Good treatment? No. Better treatment? Without a doubt.
The Commonwealth wasn't a modern enlightened democracy, but this was 1600, not 1900. It did incredibly well for 1600.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cossack_uprisings
For one thing nobles took a lot of Jewish immigrants, used them as middle management (which frustrated the church, who in turn sent angry peasant mobs against Jews, which meant Jews had to work with nobility for their protection).
Also a lot of nobles weren't Catholic, especially in 1500s protestantism was very popular (about 1/3rd of nobles and majority of magnates were protestant). Only in times of Zygmunt 3 Waza who was super Catholic and introduced some discrimination it changed significantly.
In fact nobility forced kings to sign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Confederation which banned religious persecution.
Majority of nobles from eastern parts of PLC were orthodox at first (later they polonized and switched to Catholicism mostly), and there were some Jewish and Muslim nobles (but it was very rare). They still had all the rights including voting for kings, wars and taxes.
> There's a reason why there were so many uprisings on the territory that is Ukraine today, back when it was a part of the Commonwealth
Mostly economic, but yes, there has been some religious persecution there. Especially after the attempts to create orthodox-style pope-sanctioned religion in Ukraine.
As for nobles not carrying out religious persecution, I don't even know what to say. Local magnates were the main drivers of the religious persecution of Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians. And sure, that persecution was often economic in nature, but it was also very clearly carried out along religious lines.
I'll grant you that religious intolerance in Poland was primarily between Catholics and Orthodox, rather than Catholics and Protestants as elsewhere in Europe. But that's to be expected from a country where most subjects are either Catholic or Orthodox, no?
EDIT: I suppose our perspectives are so different because we're focusing on different time periods. My take on this is that early Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth inherited many of the political arrangements of GDL, and tolerance was one of them. But as the center of political power shifted over to Poland over time, they were weakened.
There was some of that (especially in lat 1600s), but compared to basically any other country at the time it was significantly better. PLC even had a law that each newly elected king had to sign where he promised not to persecute anybody because of religion or he stops being the king: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Confederation
Majority of magnates (the big nobility that actually decided things by buying other nobles during elections) weren't Catholic in 1500s.
Slavs were never for communism.
i disagree to some extent. historically slavic culture tends to be much more communal than rest of europe. even in eu you can see this manifested in thr resistance to liberalism that comes from all (?) slavic countries
Then you get into no true Scottsman arguments about what is, and what isn't communism, and whether or not state capitalism is guaranteed to be a failure, or whether it was state capitalism, as practiced by the Eastern Block is guaranteed to be a failure. And then you can further split hairs as to whether or not having some aspects of state capitalism in your economy are better than having no aspects of it, and where the optimal line is.
And then you find that you've wasted hours of time arguing, but haven't actually convinced anyone, or learned anything new.
The one country thing, I think USSR made it unpalatable, but a lot of conflicts would not be happening if there was some construct that allow simpler work and life in Slavic worls. Something like EU, without bureaucracy, maybe just rule that people can cross countries easier and live and work.
I don't think it would be problem of Russians being the most numerous, as long as people would use Interslavic in communication and be able to travel and work more easily.
But yes, cultural exchange can be a good first step.
[1] See: The Brits and the French, the French and the Germans, etc, etc.
"Slovio is not very Slavic at all: its grammar is almost entirely based on Esperanto, its word building mechanisms are mostly Germanic, and its vocabulary, although clearly dominated by (often mutilated) Russian words, does not relate in any predictable way to the Slavic languages either. As a result, its educational value is practically zero."
This was also my impression of Slovio after attempting to read a few texts. Interslavic feels much more natural, coming from the perspective of a heavy dialect speaker of one of the south Slavic languages.
Does that make sense?
That said, I would be curious how it works for other Slavic languages. Or, in other words, is it sort of equidistant or favors one language or the other?
I mean, the FAQ claims that it is the easiest for Czechs and Slovaks (is it because of their geographical centrality and possibility that these languages are the closest to the "Slavic average"?) and harder for the South Slavs. However, and always, I would love to see any data.
This seems enough to allow me to understand effortlessly the examples that I see for both InterSlavic and Slovio.
However I would need to study them more in detail, to form an opinion about which is better.
At least they achieve the goal of easy understanding for someone familiar with Slavic languages.
I feel like Interslavic is closer in vocabulary to Slovak, but the form of the words is a bit foreign (reminds me of some other Slavic languages, although I can't quite figure out which one), while the opposite is the case with Slovio - the form of the words feels closer to Slovak, but the vocabulary itself feels more "Russian" to me.
I really like the approach of Slovio, it was instantly clear and understandable. I think with some practice it won't be a challenge to adopt it in writing (e.g. plurals with "-s" for some words is a bit strange at first).
At first glance:
- Interslavic needlessly complicates the alphabet - there is no need for "y" where "i" would suffice, there is no need for "Ě" where "je" would suffice
- Interslavic needlessly complicates spelling / words - surely there should be a drive towards simplification and shortening, especially in a "shared" langauge:
In general, I can understand most of Interslavic and most of Slovio, but Slovio is easier.I have always enjoyed the closeness of Slavic languages. I don't know a lick of Polish, but I can read and understand maybe 70-80% of a polish paragraph. same for a lot of Slavic languages.
From my experience, Slovak speakers can understand other Slavic languages pretty well: Czech is basically our second native language (although for some reason it seems Czechs don't understand Slovak quite to the same degree), Polish, Slovenian and Croatian are understandable as well. Russian is a lot harder, even when written in Latin. I don't have experience with Ukrainian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Slavic_language
http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/constructed_slavic_language...
I recall watching this video at the time (which might have been their inspiration to start learning it).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NztgXMLwv4A
This almost looks like something a speaker of a romance language would put together.
My data point is Bulgarian where you generally can't omit "to be". This may have to do with the fact that Bulgarian has mostly lost its case system?
Slovenian:
Croatian: Slovak: Whereas in Polish is a joint word (but the to be is still merged in there): I also thought that using the Latin alphabet feels a bit of a hack and Cyrillic would be a more "natural" way to put things. However, using Cyrillic would impose a higher learning curve for those who do not it. This is mostly for phonemes that don't have a 1-to-1 representation in the Latin alphabet, like ш, щ, ж and what not. For these cases, languages like Croatian, Slovenian and others have come up with, what is my personal opinion, are quite acceptable workarounds (I just found out that this is called Gaj's Latin alphabet [1]) č, ć, dž, đ, š, ž (I skipped a few). Without knowing initially how they are pronounced, read in context you do get an idea of what the target sound is.I also think that on-boarding Cyrillic-first cultures would be easier because normally countries that use Cyrillic as their main alphabet also teach the Latin alphabet at school (Russia for example does and they also teach you how to write "Russian" using Latin characters because they understand the importance of this). Whereas it's not the same way around: a lot of the Slavic countries do not teach the Cyrillic alphabet at school.
> I've always had trouble trying to parse out Russian transliterated into Latin script. I also think this is because when you're learning Russian as a non-native speaker, the courses focus mainly on Cyrillic (naturally so) so you never really learn that ж -> zsh
ш -> sh
щ -> sch
х -> kh
ь -> '
etc.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaj's_Latin_alphabet
Edit: answer question about Russian transliteration, add missing link and try to fix formatting.
There’s a number of romanization standards for Cyrillic, and which one is the most intuitive might be language-dependent (e.g. what Russian writes as a stressed ‹и› Ukrainian writes as ‹і›, which post-1918 Russian doesn’t use; what Ukrainian writes as ‹и› is closer but not identical to what Russian denotes ‹ы›, which Ukrainian doesn’t use).
Wikipedia has a good summary table[1] of some of the formal standards, but these don’t cover some of the vernacular usage, so to say. The most frequent quirk is probably writing ‹щ› as ‹sch›, as you do, when standards insist on ‹shch› (my guess is because the Belarusian counterpart of ‹щ› is ‹шч›, which would also be written ‹shch›); most confusing is perhaps writing the masculine adjectival ending ‹-ий›, ‹-ый› as ‹-y› or rarely ‹-yy› (writing ‹Navalny› for the surname ‹Навальный› or ‹Zelenskyy› for the surname ‹Зеленський›, maybe because old 19th-century German-inspired romanizations usually wrote it as ‹-i›, merging the ending with its Polish counterpart). I have to say I’ve never seen ‹zsh› instead for ‹zh› for ‹ж›, though.
Empirically, I’ve also found that French people struggle with pronouncing an English-inspired transliteration (‹sh› for ‹ш›, ‹ch› for ‹ч›), but have no problem with finding at least a pronounceable fallback using a Czech/Serbo-Croatian-inspired one (‹š› for ‹ш›, ‹č› for ‹ч›), so diacritics might indeed be underrated here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian#Transl...
⸻
1. I suspect the other reason was that implementing the tie was technically simple since, by allowing it to extend pass its spacing width, it can be treated like any other above-character accent. Ogonek, on the other hand, unlike a cedilla or the dot-under diacritic, requires positioning based on the letter that it's attached to so can't be programmed as easily as a floating diacritic mark.
Note that in modern times, you’re supposed to use the tie to spell affricates and such in IPA as well, like in ‹t͡ʃ› and ‹d͡ʒ› and, yes, ‹t͡s›, even though nobody does as far as I’ve seen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALA-LC_romanization_for_Russia...
Source: I am Polish
(South) Slavic speaker here. Cyrillic would not be much more natural, we haven't used Cyrillic in over 30 years. Latin would be something all of us Slavenes would be able to read.
I appreciate the correction. Definitely didn't expect so many replies, but I'm learning a lot.
i am not sure what you mean but russian is by far the biggest slavic language in terms of number of speakers. i also think it is the biggest in terms of number of litterary and academic works
Something like Slovakian would be much better as a base.
From my west-slavic (Polish) perspective I can understand Czech, Slovakian (a bit harder) and Ukrainian semi-ok. But Russian is way, way harder (there are some similar words but most are alien to me).
I didn't have chance to listen to south slavic languages so I don't know how similar they are to west slavic ones.
If you mean Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin - they are only recognized as languages for political reasons. They actually are a particularly rich continuum of dialects but it is impractical to recognize this because it would imply there should be one literary norm.
in south slavic family there is a one-to-one mapping between cyrilic and latin scripts. in serbia, for example, both scripts are official
Also I do not believe that there can be a better choice than "es", because I suppose that in order to simplify the grammar they have removed the personal terminations from the verbs, in which case "est" of the 3rd person singular becomes "es", just the simple stem of the verb.
Also, even if their examples show an explicit "es", optionally omitting redundant words is a trivial rule to add to any language grammar.
It is likely that there are other aspects of the language that can be criticized, but these 3 points seem OK.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaj's_Latin_alphabet
Also, it would just make it harder to type on current layouts.
I speak Latvian, russian and a bit of Polish. I could easily imagine a Slavic interlanguage, as knowing russian helped a lot with Polish. Learning russian took a lot of effort, though.
So, besides having a bunch of shared nouns, adding Baltic languages to the mix does not make much sense IMO. Despite having a shared ancestor (in theory), Baltic languages are not very mutually intelligible with Slavic.
Edit:
And also, if it does take on this impossible mission, it should at least be called Balto-Slovio.
I find it hard to imagine such a language, as the languages really are far off from each other.
I speak Slovak and Czech, and both of the above seem easier to me than Polish or Slovenian for example.
Which brings me to, is there some sort of visualization of proximity of different Slavic languages? How much they differ between each other, which ones for closer groups, etc...
Dutch.
Only half joking. Dutch would at least make a great starting point in terms of written language.
As a native speaker with English as a second language and German as my third, I can read a whole lot of Dutch because it's closer in spelling to Scandinavian languages than German is, but has kept many words that are still used in German but archaic or different in Scandinavian languages.
It's not unusual for me to find it easier to read Dutch than to read the same text in German despite having actually had German at school but never having had any formal Dutch (and I have no hope of understanding spoken Dutch).
Consider a few examples: skip (Norwegian), skib (Danish), ship (English), schip (Dutch), Schiff (German). Or dag (Norwegian, Danish, Dutch), day (English), Tag (German). Dans (Norwegian, Danish, Dutch), dance (English), Tanz (German).
Where there's broad concordance between the Germanic languages, Dutch is usually close to the majority of the languages, but it often retains some spellings that are readily recognisable to the others when it's closer to German, and in the cases where it's closer to English those words are usually recognisable to other Germanic speakers anyway.
Regarding spoken Dutch, I agree, it's painful to listen to. And I just got a horrible thought: A mix of Danish and Dutch pronunciation... I imagine it'd sound somewhat like death metal ;-)
https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/What_is_Anglish%3F
As a native Norwegian speaker, on one hand there are lots of words used there which are easier for me to understand than they would be for a native English speaker, but at the same time many are unnecessary reversions towards Old English or pointless changes where modern Germanic languages are closer to modern English.
It seems like a reversion without any thought to how these terms have kept evolving in the rest of the Germanic sphere.
E.g. "riche" on one hand sounds closer to "rike" or "Reich", but "state" has close cognates in most Germanic languages (stat, staat etc.) and stat/staat and rike/Reich have different connotations - we'd tend to use rike/Reich in contexts relating to monarchy or evoking history or tradition. E.g. kongerike/Königreich for kingdom (but also kongedømme), but stat/staat when talking about a modern state.
And e.g. "Hof" as in "Speaker of the Hof", while it has close cognates, is an unnecessary leap given "house" has close cognates too (hus, Haus) which are used in the same context, and the "problem" there isn't the word "house" but the whole construction.
Translating United States to Oned Riches also takes it further away from modern Germanic languages rather than moving closer to them (e.g. Forenede Stater, Vereinigten Staaten).
Similarly, the month names in most Germanic languages are close to modern English. Meadowmonth for July is far harder for me to understand than July - in Norwegian it is juli.
And "lawmoot" for Congress is harder too. Compare kongress, Kongress... At least if they wanted to go that way, e.g. landthing would be far more understandable for speakers of other Germanic languages as a reference to a parliamentary house (moot works fine for meeting, compare e.g. møte, but feels no simpler to me than meeting)
Similarly "landtung" for "language" is weird. In e.g. Norwegian we have "tunge" for "tongue" and it can sort of be used that way, but "tale" is more understandable if you want to go that way, but "speak" as in "to speak" is a closer cognate to the words used for language in other Germanic languages (e.g. språk, Sprache) without sounding archaic.
And "narrowing" for "strait" while in e.g. Norwegian it is "stred", or "landstretch" for "landmass" vs. "landmasse" in Norwegian.
As an "alternate history English" it kinda works. As a "modern Germanic English" it's tiresome to try to read...
I agree that there's a lot of these, but arguably English still seems to have way more Latinate/Romance borrowings than your average Germanic language. So the direction they're going for seems correct, they're just overdoing it (which after all is the whole point of that project!) and, more worryingly, sometimes missing the most appropriate Germanic word for their desired concept, like "Thing" for a democratic assembly.
I agree that "tung" could as well be a modernised form of Old English "sprǣc". I have no explanation for "Hof". I am not qualified to objectively discern whether "thing" is a better conceptual fit than "moot".
Anyone can contribute to Anglish and improve on its imperfections.
No, I don't. That is exactly my point. Or rather, I don't agree with what they're actually doing, which is to only include words derived from old Germanic languages. E.g. modern Germanic languages have had words like Congress/kongress/Kongress for centuries. I'd be happy with a language trying to stick to words closer to the consensus of modern Germanic languages.
If you want a mid-point between modern Germanic languages, stripping the language of imports does not work, as then you're creating friction for speakers of other Germanic languages which have also imported those words, not reducing it. I don't see any value in that.
It's fine that this is not Anglish' goal - they can do what they want -, but it makes it unsuitable as an attempt at a shared Germanic language. Their translation of names in particular is outright obnoxious and goes in the opposite direction of a trend to reduce the use of translated names in a lot of languages and reduces understanding rather than increasing it. That's their choice, but it's a very different one.
If I were to try to create a mid-point out of English, I'd narrow the focus massively to deprecate words that have decent Germanic replacements in common use in the other languages, and aim to shift meanings to accommodate it, such as e.g. giving "stool" the same broad meaning as a replacement for "chair" as its cognates have in other Germanic languages. And I'd leave words that have close cognates in other Germanic languages entirely alone, irrespective of the source, such as congress, because they're more likely to be understood by other Germanic speakers than many of the Anglish replacements.
I can't guess what that last part means even with context
I think this means "Slovio is the ideal language for/of everyday/today's people"
"ludis" is 100% "people". Not sure what "dla" and "dnesju" mean. In Bulgarian, "dnes" (днес) means "today" so that's where I'm coming from.
Proto-Slavic *vьśi ("all") would yield "vsi", not that far off. Many modern Slavic languages add additional suffixes: wszystcy, všichni, vsichki etc., which are secondary. Serbian comes close but they swapped the first two consonants: svi.
Likewise Serbian sutra, which in Russian is zavtra, same idea (in the morning, i.e. tomorrow) but with seemingly more unnecessary manipulations (considering morning is still utro in Russian).
Russian vs'ak "everyone" = Serbian svak "everyone"
No one speaks proto slavic, so it is all conjectures based on languages that were spoken more recently.
I believe linguist academics are citizens of their countries, and their interpretations of things in the past are influenced by languages they speak.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_linguistics
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology
Proto-Slavic světъ => Serbian svet/svit, Russian svet.
It's two unrelated words which just happen to start with the same two consonants in Serbo-Croatian out of all Slavic languages, after the phonetical change vs- => sv-
Not really. Written Slavic exists since 9 century and it was spelt vs- already back then. Serbo-Croatian is an outlier here because all other Slavic languages have vs-.
Baltic languages are related to Slavic and Old Prussian had "wissa" for "all" (not "siva")
Also:
I'm not sure what the argument is here. Can you elaborate?
S utra = "starting from the morning"
Za utra (utrom) = "after the morning"
Both have a right to exist, just slightly different original meanings.
For example, some Russians say "v ogorode" ("in the garden"), while others say "na ogorode". We don't say "v" somehow got "distorted"/morphed into "na". Some dialects simply choose to use a different, unrelated preposition in the same context.
I can give an example from Germanic languages.
Old English: tōdæġ (modern English "today")
Swedish: idag "today"
Dutch: vandaag "today"
Same root ("day"), same meaning ("today"), but different languages chose different prepositions/prefixes (to-, van-, i-).
Just like with s- vs. za- in Russian/Serbian.
> Новйу межународйу йазика! Што ес Словио? Словио ес новйу межународйу йазика ктор разумийут чтирсто милион лудис на целойу земла. Словио можете употребит дла гворение со чтирсто милион славйу Лудис от Прага до Владивосток; от Санкт Петербург через Варшава до Варна; от Средземйу Морие и от Северйу Морие до Тихйу Океан. Словио имайт простйу, логикйу граматиа и Словио ес идеалйу йазика дла днесйу лудис. Учийте Словио тпер!
Pretty cool.
You see, after not having much of an outlet for my Bulgarian in the past ~18 years I have forgotten some words!
It's a nice way to spread slavic love and understanding around the world.
FFS, even programming language choice is oftern dictated by the ecosystem of already existing libraries nowadays :)
If Russia sponsored this for their imperialist dreams, they should've instead build a Simplified Russian, like you have Simplified Chinese. At least it would be rewarding to read some Dostoevski in something close to the original, and X% of SR learners would also grow up to learn Traditional Russian too...
(Though judging by how things are going, not likely.)
Many Turkic-language-speaking communities are getting influenced by Turkish or Russian, and given that Turkish being heavily influenced by French, Persian and Arabic in the history, it feels like the languages are losing their essence.
I know the whole deal with spoken language development as they borrow, grow, die and stuff but just like sometimes people want to code in a much simpler programming language / framework, I also have the dream of inventing a toy-but-maybe-even-useful Turkic spoken language.