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Interslavic Language
- aasasd 7y agoA sorta-weird thing about Slavic languages is, they evolved different meanings from the same roots—though related. So you constantly have your recognition of words misfiring. E.g. Old East Slavic ‘недѣлꙗ’ (‘nedělja’), meaning ‘Sunday’, somehow come to mean ‘a week’ with Russian ‘неделя’, while even close Belarusian and Ukrainian have ‘нядзеля’ and ‘неділя’ for Sunday, same with Bulgarian ‘неделя’ or Czech ‘neděle’.
- babuskov 7y agoIn Serbian "nedelja" is a homonym - both "Sunday" and "week".
- p1esk 7y ago“Hey boss, I worked 20 days in a row, I’m gonna take Sunday off!” :)
- xixixao 7y agoAlso for non-slavic speakers' interest: “ne” is No, and “dělat" is Work, so Sunday is literally the day of "Nowork".
- pvg 7y agoThis isn't specific to Slavic languages, it's the norm for all sorts of related languages or even the same language evolving over time. Think of the etymology of 'nice' or 'guest'/'host'/'hostile'/'hospital'.
- lacampbell 7y agoWords derived from the same source as 'Loft' seem to universally mean 'sky' or 'air' in almost all germanic languages... except English where it means 'small room near the ceiling'.
- pvg 7y agoAt least it's still in the ballpark! Compare with 'gift' or 'worry'.
- lacampbell 7y agoTIL German 'gift' and English 'gift' are actually the same word! I had assumed it was a coincidence.
- ozzmotik 7y agoim pretty sure that Gift in German means poison, so i can't help but wonder what exactly you think an English gift is :^)
- aasasd 7y agoWell, the word apparently has a bit unusual etymology: > The word has been used as a euphemism for "poison" since Old High German, influenced by Late Latin dosis (“dose”), from Ancient Greek δόσις (dósis, “something given; dose of medicine”). The original meaning "gift" has disappeared in contemporary Standard German. So yeah, the word is the same, it just became divorced from the former meaning.
- 7y ago
- babuskov 7y agoVery cool. I'm Serbian and I can understand this text: http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/umetny_ili_prirodny.html http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/umetny_ili_prirodny.html I have to read it much slower than regular Serbian text, but there were only a few words I couldn't make out of. If speakers of other Slavic languages can read it on the same level, it's awesome.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 7y agoI'm Polish, I'm having more difficulties. I have to read stuff twice and guess a lot.
- oppositelock 7y ago+1. Native Polish speaker here, and I can eventually figure it out, but it's a struggle. Still, cool, though, since I can piece it together without a dictionary.
- yeellow 7y agoVery interesting. I've tried to read some texts and I could easily understand them (as a native Polish speaker). I wonder if it is as easy for other Slavic nationalities. If so, it could be a nice intermediary language, if only for written texts. Unfortunately I guess almost nobody would learn to write or speak it but it is still funny to have a passive ability to read and understand and I guess all Slavic languages could be automatically translated to this interslavic version. It could be tried in museums, restaurants, etc.
- ainar-g 7y agoRussophone here, I can understand most texts, although some words require me to take a few seconds to “parse”.
- xixixao 7y agoAs a Czech, can confirm it’s fairly understandable.
- hellwd 7y agoI'm from Bosnia and I can understand almost everything. There are some words where I have to stop and think but in the end, it's completely understandable. This is a great idea!
- villedepommes 7y agoMy two cents, I skimmed through a few texts and I can understand 60-70% of what I've read. I'm a native Russian speaker, btw. However, I'd say I'd be skeptical about this whole idea, since I'd still need to invest considerable effort to learn the rest. Instead, I'd rather learn English, even though it's even more effort, still, a cost-benefit ratio seems to be much better in my particular case, as English will pretty much let me communicate with 1.5B people, which probably includes most Poles anyway.
- muro 7y agoSlovak - all understandable.
- Keyframe 7y ago
- rezmason 7y agoInterslavic vocabulary, vocabulary, interslavic Don't you tell me to usměhati You stick around, I'll make it zasluženy
- orbital-decay 7y agoThere's also another language designed to be understandable by most Slavic speakers [0]. For some reason, the authors of both seem to hate each other. [1] [0] http://www.slovio.com/ http://www.slovio.com/ [1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html#disclaimer http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html#disclaime...
- viach 7y ago> For some reason, the authors of both seem to hate each other. Not surprising if they visit each others web pages too often.
- gpvos 7y agoSo to reduce hate we should stop people visiting websites? It might actually work. (Yes, I'll get my coat.)
- adimitrov 7y ago> For some reason It's not called Balkanisation for no reason. Sincerely, a person from the Balkan.
- boguslav 7y agoThat's easily explained: jealousy. Slovio was the only Slavic-based auxlang available on the internet for a few years. However, it was not received well among Slavs, who found it too artificial (Slovio is basically Esperanto with Slavic - mostly Russian - words), and thus it became a complete failure. When Interslavic was initiated as a more naturalistic alternative, the author of Slovio first tried to ridicule it, and once it became successful, he started claiming they had stolen his idea and propagating Slovio under the name of Interslavic. Both languages have absolutely nothing in common, except that they are both based on Slavic material. That was years ago though. Slovio has been dead for the last eight or so years.
- gpvos 7y agoInteresting! I have been thinking about a similar "average Germanic" language, but I don't really have enough linguistics background to pull that off yet. Also, I have very roughly compared the Slavic languages to see which one I could learn to be able to communicate with people of most Slavic languages[0] and decided that Slovak was the most "average" language so I am planning to learn that. Too bad there's no Slovak Duolingo yet. [0] Not "most people of Slavic languages", which would obviously mean Russian.
- yeellow 7y agoThan you should consider learning this interslavic language. You would be able to communicate in all Slavic countries and you would sound equally funny in all of them.
- thwave 7y agoIt's not "average Germanic", but you should look at Anglish.
- henrikschroder 7y agoWhat would that Germanic language cover? German, Dutch, Flemish? That's it, right? English is out, because that's half French, and the Scandinavian languages have drifted too far from German to be even half-assed mutually intelligible, no?
- gpvos 7y agoIt would also cover the Scandinavian languages. I'd like it to include English as well, but not use any of the English-only Romance vocabulary; but there's a large chance that that would not result in anything that's useful for interacting with English-speakers. The grammar would be almost entirely based on German and Dutch with maybe one or two Scandinavianisms thrown in to make them feel a bit more at home, but for word choice all languages would take part. Non-Germanic words used in most of those modern languages would be included (like restaurant or station). About mutual intelligibility with Scandinavian: quite a few basic words are identical in pronunciation between e.g. Swedish and Dutch, and many are similar enough that when speaking slowly you can get reasonably far, I would think, although I haven't tried that much since in practice you fall back on English all the time. When you look into the dialects there's even more you can find that's very similar.
- 0xBABAD00C 7y agoIt's near-100% intelligible for a Russian speaker: http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/selo.html http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/selo.html > кде мы знајемо всих и јесмо знајеми од всих Funny enough, this reads like "old Slavic" to me, rather than "new Slavic" :)
- fishnchips 7y agoKinda makes sense, no? Looking for similarities you inadvertently go back to the common root, and you end up with something that reads like Old Church Slavonic.
- 0ld 7y agoit's actually the other way round. interslavic is deliberately based on osl [0]. it is basically "modernized" osl with simplified grammar and lexicon "averaged" from the existing slavic languages. and, btw, osl is no way the "common root", it's absolutely not proto-slavic, just old bulgarian (from the 9th century) which happened to be the orthodox church liturgical language and thus had very significant influence on many slavic languages. [0] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/ http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/
- hugh4life 7y agoThere's a defunct auxlang project called Lingula that aimed to focus on comprehension between romance speakers. https://www.reddit.com/r/Lingula/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Lingula/ I don't think an international auxiliary language besides english would ever be able to take hold, but I think something like Interlingua that just focused on romance languages and used a simplified romance grammar rather than simplifying it further would have been very interesting. I think esperanto would have had a better shot had it adopted Zamenhof's early reform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto
- ainar-g 7y agoThe best Romance IAL I've seen so far is Latino Sine Flexione[1]. As someone who knows Esperanto and some very basic French, it's really easy to understand. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latino_sine_flexione https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latino_sine_flexione
- aasasd 7y agoCan't speak from my experience here, but others say if you know one Romance language, you begin to easily understand words in other ones. So I guess any one of them would work as an international language, but Castellano seems to have a large headstart.
- rodgerd 7y agoI'm learning French (B1 level) and was surprised how much I could pick out of a Romanian movie (the tremendously enjoyable https://www.nziff.co.nz/2019/christchurch/the-whistlers/ https://www.nziff.co.nz/2019/christchurch/the-whistlers/).
- knolax 7y agoI wonder what's the benefit of this versus learning whatever the common ancestor of the Slavic languages is.
- rgblambda 7y agoI (a non-Slavic language speaker) would imagine the divergence between the modern Slavic languages would be dwarfed by the divergence between those languages and Proto-Slavic or Old Church Slavonic.
- fishnchips 7y agoQuite the opposite, I believe. My native tongue is Polish (West Slavic) and I speak decent Russian (East Slavic) as a foreign language. My subjective feeling is that there's more in common between either of those languages and OCS than between the two directly.
- aasasd 7y agoA sane alphabet. Cyrillic before the 20th century had some freaky things and weird use of letters that we still have. Aficionados say that ‘ѣ’ and ‘ъ’ could be properly used only by people who memorized all the words with them. (Which is not how modern Slavic languages work, even though English-speakers wouldn't bat an eye at that inconvenience, hur hur.)
- eequah9L 7y agoIn Czech, some "y" vs. "i" can't be deduced. Schoolchildren need to drill the words that use "y". Similarly to what "ѣ" had with бѣдный блѣдный бѣлый бѣсъ, except our thing doesn't even rhyme :) (Not that I'm complaining. As you note, English is vastly worse in this regard.)
- tom_mellior 7y agoMy knowledge here is limited, but I have noticed that some language families tend to get simplified over time versus their common ancestor. For example, Italian and French (and all other Romance languages, I believe) have lost Latin's case system and all the memorization that entails. Italian is much easier to learn than Latin in my experience. So if the same is true for the common ancestor of the Slavic languages, you would be learning a much more complicated language than any of the current Slavic ones.
- objplant 7y agoThis is interesting and would be rather useful (also sort of cool) to have a common language shared by so many people living rather near each other (except for far-away regions of Russia). Unfortunately, it doesn't look easy at all: 7 cases and 10 plus 6 extra declensions for example. However, in reality such a common language already exists and it's English, especially among young-enough speakers. In my experience, others often prefer to switch to English rather than pursue the fun of trying to connect the foreign words of a similar language with their meaning.
- tomtompl 7y agoTotally, but I found it's always fun to explore interlinguality :)
- jwieczorek 7y agoLudwig Wittgenstein: the borders of my language are the borders of my world. English is a language many young Slavs learn in preparation to or in the course of their professional life as in the world of the Pax Americana it quite simply has become an economical necessity to know it well. However, the English language cannot naturally transmit any of the linguistic particularities (proverbs, turns of phrases) and, generally, cultural notions and historical familiarities that to a certain extent are shared by the various Slavic peoples. English for Slavs is a foreign language in the true sense of the word, whereas a language like Russian is much closer linguistically and culturally. There's the heritage of the Soviet Union which makes Russian the trans-national language of choice for the generations educated in the Soviet times. And indeed that could be the very same reason why these days it's rather unpopular among the young people in, say, Poland. Which is a real shame because as a trans-Slavic language IMO it does a great job and is a very beautiful language as well. I am Polish and when speaking to a fellow Slav, I much prefer to try to get us to speak in our own languages, even if it requires effort. Otherwise, I prefer to speak Russian if the person I'm communicating with knows it too. I find it very, very awkward using English in those situations, i.e. in conversations with a Serb or a Czech (but not with a German or a Swede).
- p1esk 7y ago
- strenholme 7y agoAs someone who has followed the constructed language and international auxiliary language community for a couple of decades, and as someone with an undergraduate degree in linguistics, I do not see a constructed language catching on with the mainstream public any time soon. A constructed language is a language that someone sits down and creates; this is different from a natural language which just forms as people communicate with each other. There are many constructed languages: Klingon in Star Trek is an actual constructed language, as is the language the Elves spoke in The Lord of the Rings. Esperanto, and Interslavic, are examples of International Auxiliary Languages (IAL), languages specially made to be easy to learn to facilitate international communication. We have had those languages for well over a century, and none of them have caught on. The reason why an IAL has not caught on is because people are motivated to learn a language when it has prestige, not because it’s easier to learn. Right now, for better or for worse, English is that language (with all of its warts: Auxiliary words to carry tense, the rather strange tense/lax vowel distinction, etc.) right now. I would love to see an IAL to catch on, but there’s a serious marketing issue, especially since a lot of people just don’t have the mind to learn a new language as an adult, no matter how easy the language is to learn.
- DiogenesKynikos 7y agoAnd in practice, if one Slavic language comes close to serving as a lingua franca in Eastern Europe, isn't it Russian? If you're going to learn a second language in order to communicate with people, you're going to learn a language with a large existing community - English, Modern Standard Arabic, Standard Chinese (Mandarin), Russian, French (in West Africa), etc.
- p1esk 7y agoThere are many reasons why this hasn’t happened, but I think you pointed out the main one: English is the language with the largest existing community, so I think most Slavs would rather learn it as the second language, unless there’s a good reason to choose a different one due to some circumstances (eg proximity to a border, widespread business with a certain country, etc).
- konart 7y ago>Alphabet extensions So... all those "Ś ś" and "Ć ć" instead of using Cyrillic? Yeah, no.
- p1esk 7y agoIt seems like they support both Latin and Cyrillic transliterations.
- kemitchell 7y agoCame for the orthography fight. Disappointed. But progress?
- ijzeren_jan 7y agoDon't worry, those letters are not part of the standard orthography of Interslavic. Although some people insist on using them, they are merely meant for educational purposes, and to make a direct link to Old Church Slavonic. The only non-ASCII letters in the Latin alphabet that are mandatory are Č Š Ž and Ě (although in Interslavic nothing is mandatory). And of course, Interslavic can be written in Cyrillic as well, as is done by many users.
- ivanhoe 7y agoMy impression (as being Slav myself and speaking Serbian/Croatian as a mother tongue, and a bit of Russian that I've learned in school) is that Slavs can understand each others fairly well when everyone is simply just speaking in their own language. I really see no point in making the artificial language, as while understanding it is probably not hard, learning a language like this would be super hard because of how close, but still different it is to the existing languages. So you end up with a language that everyone understands, but no one is able to speak it...
- olah_1 7y agoThere was recently a video posted of Interslavic being used with a Bulgarian, a Polish and a Croatian. https://youtu.be/NztgXMLwv4A https://youtu.be/NztgXMLwv4A
- mancerayder 7y agoDid anyone see the strange disclaimer at the bottom? It reminds one of ancient BBS or online flamewars.
- cpursley 7y agoIsn't Bulgarian a better candidate as it's simpler than Russian, for example (fewer cases, less gender-specific things).
- axegon 7y agoNative Bulgarian here. Better candidate: yes. Good candidate: no. Yes, it is considerably simpler but it is also vastly different from the larger Slavic languages: I have friends from other Slavic countries and I've observed that Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and Ukrainians for instance have far less difficulties understanding each other than understanding me. I would assume it's the same story with Russian but I have almost 0 interaction with Russians. And even for me, it took me days in Poland to start picking up on words, phrases and sentences. Then again I can understand over 70% of Serbo-Croatian without even trying but again, those make up for a very small number of the total Slavic population.
- kazinator 7y agoFrom tutorial: > Neoslavonic has 7 grammatical cases. Fascinating. The vocative case has disappeared from Slovak (but not Czech). It exists historically, and is still available for ironic contexts, but scholars consider it dead. Historically, for instance in the Lord's Prayer: Otče náš, ktorý si na nebesiach, ... (Our Father who art in Heaven ...). This "otče" is the vocative case of "otec" (father), something a modern speaker wouldn't use to address his or her father. Ironically, in phrases like chlapče môj ... (my dear fellow/boy ...), vocative of "chlapec" (boy).
- michalu 7y agoA friend once told me that you need to know 3 slavic languages to understand all of them very well. I learned that to be true from my own experience. If you're born in a slavic country, learning second and third slavic language can be a matter of few months. Perhaps, the value such language comes in that it could be designed to cut this process down to simply learning one additional language. The point is, you don't need another language to speak with other slavs. Most slavs can understand each other you just need put effort into it. Such language can perhaps broaden your ability to understand each other while speaking your native slavic language, instead of being a replacement language for all. That's where it could work in my opinion.
- kwhitefoot 7y agoPlease make the page readable without Javascript. It looks fine in Firefox Reader mode.