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Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

• viach 5y ago
  I think if you speak slowly any of the Slavic languages it will be understandable enough "from Prague to Vladivostok"
  • Mikeb85 5y ago
    Yup. Grammar is the same just with some different vocabulary (mainly because of loanwords from other languages that got inserted because of history).
  • vzaliva 5y ago
    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.
• ArekDymalski 5y ago
  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.
• ajuc 5y ago
  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 :)
  • mkotowski 5y ago
    > Also w for szcz makes no sense. 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.
    • ajuc 5y ago
      > 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.
    • Tenoke 5y ago
      Щ is already a pretty pointless letter. If you are simplifying anything then just using шт is one of the lowest hanging fruits. Ditto for я and ю.
      • hurflmurfl 5y ago
        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"?
        • wheelerof4te 5y ago
          I propose we just read it as "shit" from now on :)
        • Tenoke 5y ago
          Just use sh where it is read as sh, sht where it means sht etc.
          • hurflmurfl 5y ago
            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: 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.
  • tomp 5y ago
    Because "sz" has another pronunciation (like "s" "z"), where "x" has no pronunciation at all.
    • ajuc 5y ago
      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).
      • int_19h 5y ago
        E.g Russian "сзади", "from the rear". Slavic languages are generally tongue twisters for non-Slavic speakers, what with consonant clusters like "mst" or "vzd".
        • ajuc 5y ago
          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".
          • int_19h 5y ago
            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".)
  • snidane 5y ago
    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
    • adrian_b 5y ago
      "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.
• elcapitan 5y ago
  Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Slavic_language#Slovio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Slavic_language#Slovio
• zone411 5y ago
  Interslavic is another similar project. They don't like Slovio too much: http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/index.html http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/index.html http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/faq.html#slovio http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/faq.html#slovio
  • k__ 5y ago
    lol No real slavsman!
  • stychos 5y ago
    This one looks much better.
  • exitb 5y ago
    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.
    • helge9210 5y ago
      Same for me (as a native Ukrainian speaker).
  • ivoras 5y ago
    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.
    • ajuc 5y ago
      Ukrainian is eastern Slavic though? 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.
• waffleiron 5y ago
  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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Slavic_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Slavic_language http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/constructed_slavic_languages.html http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/constructed_slavic_language...
  • WilTimSon 5y ago
    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?
    • waffleiron 5y ago
      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). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NztgXMLwv4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NztgXMLwv4A
• pavlovskyi 5y ago
  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'.
• orkaa 5y ago
  Can confirm that as a Slovenian, I can read it fairly easily.
• dvh 5y ago
  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/ http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/
  • msrenee 5y ago
    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.
    • Liquid_Fire 5y ago
      > And it's used where Russian would just omit it. Are there Slavic languages that are more liberal with it? 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?
      • kemiller 5y ago
        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.
    • mongrelion 5y ago
      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 ш -> sh щ -> sch х -> kh ь -> ' etc. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaj's_Latin_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaj's_Latin_alphabet Edit: answer question about Russian transliteration, add missing link and try to fix formatting.
• grishka 5y ago
  It's surprising how easily I understand this as a Russian speaker.
• roschdal 5y ago
  I once discussed this language with a Russian woman, and she said this language made her eyes bleed. Настя.
• zagrebian 5y ago
  Why cx, sx, zx instead of č, š, ž? That’s a step backwards. Slavic languages have perfectly fine letters for those phonemes.
  • ajuc 5y ago
    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.
    • singularity2001 5y ago
      why not sh, ch and zh then?
      • ajuc 5y ago
        Slavs don't use these AFAIK but that would also be preferable to sx etc.
        • political12345 5y ago
          Bulgarians use those when transliterating bulgarian in thr latin alphabet
      • smcl 5y ago
        In some slavic languages "sh" and "ch" already exist. In fact in Czech "ch" is considered a single letter
        • snidane 5y ago
          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.
  • mongrelion 5y ago
• greencore 5y ago
  Lithuanian and Latvian is not slavic and Slovio would not be understood by their native speakers.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    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.
    • ggx2 5y ago
      My 2c: 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.
    • laurynasl 5y ago
      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.
    • int_19h 5y ago
      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.
• rplnt 5y ago
  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...
• BurningPenguin 5y ago
  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.
  • vidarh 5y ago
    > 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.
    • BurningPenguin 5y ago
      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.
    • ochrist 5y ago
      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.
• notorandit 5y ago
  Question: is slovio actually in use? Is it actually useful?
• moonchrome 5y ago
  >logikju gramatia i Slovio es idealju jazika dla dnesju ludis. I can't guess what that last part means even with context
  • mcv 5y ago
    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.
    • moonchrome 5y ago
      jazika ~ jezika ~ language (literal translation tongue), but the italic part I can't decipher.
      • petargyurov 5y ago
        > Slovio es idealju jazika dla dnesju ludis. 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.
        • Liquid_Fire 5y ago
          "dla" seems similar to Russian "для". I guess there will always be compromises and some words may not make sense to speakers of some Slavic languages.
        • moonchrome 5y ago
          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.
  • gostsamo 5y ago
    would be something like "logical grammar and slovio is an ideal language for the people of today".
• arc-in-space 5y ago
  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.
  • lpapez 5y ago
    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!
• throwaway290 5y ago
  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).
  • kgeist 5y ago
    >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.
    • throwaway290 5y ago
      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).
      • kgeist 5y ago
        Pretty sure Serbian swapped vs- > sv-, the word is not related to "svit" (it's a folk etymology). Russian vs'ak "everyone" = Serbian svak "everyone"
        • throwaway290 5y ago
          I cannot respond without looking into what grounds are there to believe svet in proto-slavic is not related to sve. 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.
• petargyurov 5y ago
  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! Pretty cool.
  • andrey-p 5y ago
    You already knew лудис from люде :)
    • petargyurov 5y ago
      You're right. You see, after not having much of an outlet for my Bulgarian in the past ~18 years I have forgotten some words!
  • rimliu 5y ago
    As someone fluent in Russian and able to read Polish I had zero problems with it too.
• zmxz 5y ago
  Croatian here - surprisingly, I was able to understand every word. It was slow to read it but I admit I liked this more than I thought I would.
• wheelerof4te 5y ago
  Well, as a Serbian language speaker I understood almost entire introduction. It's a nice way to spread slavic love and understanding around the world.
• catchclose8919 5y ago
  ...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.)
• odiroot 5y ago
  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.
  • yreg 5y ago
    Slovak here, I'm able to understand Slovio better than Polish (better than any slavic language other than Czech and Serbo-Croatian actually).
• egeozcan 5y ago
  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.
  • lostinroutine 5y ago
    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.
• jarek-foksa 5y ago
  Given the current circumstances, why is this the top story on HN? Panslavism is basically Russian imperialism in disguise.
  • kuboble 5y ago
    I don't think so. Purely anecdotally but being from Poland when I hear pan-slavic I imagine a North-south belt starting with Baltic states all the way to Croatia that somehow borders Russia which is a separate entity.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      Yes, a unified political and cultural counterweight to Russian authoritarianism (with the inherent advantage of having massive links to highly developed and democratic Western Europe) would be very helpful indeed. A Pan-Slavic interlanguage can usefully contribute to that goal. It's not a "bad" effort at all.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• rdeselby 5y ago
  As a Slovak / Czech speaker I find Slovio a bit easier to understand than Interslavic, despite the mentioned non-slavic choices. Interslavic seems to be south-slavic biased. Purely subjectively, Slovio text reads more aesthetically pleasing. I think this might be because the south-slavic roots are more prominent in our east dialects spoken in the country side, while Slovio seems closer to me to the standard codified language.
  • int_19h 5y ago
    Interslavic is based on Old Church Slavonic, which was originally a codification of the spoken language of the Slavs of Thessalonica (where Cyril and Methodius lived). Which would be the ancestors of modern Bulgarians and Macedonians, so yeah, I'd expect it to be a bit closer to Southern Slavic.
  • lproven 5y ago
    Seconded. I'm a native English speaker in the Czech Republic. I've been struggling to learn Czech for 8 years now. It is my 6th language, not that I'm very fluent in any of the others, but by far the hardest. I find Slovio much easier to read and understand than Interslavic, which with my A2-to-B1 level Czech remains quite impenetrable. I've travelled around 5 or 6 Slavic-speaking countries now and often show people Slovio, and though they've never heard of it, they all find that they can read and understand it without problem. I find that an interesting data point.
  • Toutouxc 5y ago
    Czech here. I agree that there's a lot of that southern-slavic vibe in Interslavic, which I don't really mind, it's kinda nice and exotic, but I totally don't find Slovio more aesthetically pleasing, mainly because of the weird "x" thing. My mind keeps pronouncing the Czech "ks" sound.
• smcl 5y ago
  > do Tihju Okean Every day is a school day. As a middling Czech speaker I wondered WTF this was until I did a bit of googling to find out I didn't know the name of the world's largest ocean in Czech :D I was thinking "what on earth is the 'quiet ocean'?" ("tichý" = "quiet")
  • Tajnymag 5y ago
    We are not used to reading 'h' as 'ch' and 'c' as 'k'.
• brabel 5y ago
  Just tried with my Russian/Ukrainian speaking wife: she understood almost all of it!
• 7six 5y ago
  i speak serbian and i underatand ~80% of the text there, thats very good imo +
• hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  Let me be devil's advocate here. I understand there are many negative feelings not just towards Putin but also, unfortunately, to Russians as people - in spite of the fact that they long lost any ability to influence the events at the top. However, the international community should go in exactly the opposite direction. Russia will be there after Putin. They have a very rich culture with excellent poets, some of the best mathematicians in the world etc. All this is trod upon by a merciless clique - and even though they have managed to brainwash a part of the population, and even though the sanctions we impose hurt ordinary citizens, it is crucial not to forget it is not and it will never be a war against Russian people. Otherwise we risk becoming just like those beasts we're fighting against. (This is only tangential to the topic - Slovio is a good idea but, just like all artificial languages, will have problems becoming more popular.)
• tpoacher 5y ago
  Choice of 'x' for softness is very weird. I get that in the cyrillic alphabet, 'x' is the 'h' character, but once you transliterate to a latin alphabet, it makes no sense to use it in that way... Especially when the role of 'h' in latin alphabets has been hard-to-soft conversion specifically in most languages (and transliterations) using it.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    'x' is just intended as a generic character I think. Its use in digraphs is straight from Esperanto. You're right that canonically it connotes "harshness" as opposed to "softness", but clear alternatives are kinda lacking and it's better than nothing.
  • kazinator 5y ago
    Slovio is from 1999 and peaked in 2001. The thinking was probably based on lower rates of acceptance of Unicode. Today "any" device can display ž, without changing languages or "code pages" or whatever, so there is much less of a need to encode that in ASCII zx. You can pop ž into an e-mail without worrying that it will be mojibake on the other end.
• randstring 5y ago
  I'm a Bulgarian and I find Slovio a bit easier/faster to read, compared to Interslavic, while both seem to me equally understandable. Nevertheless it's amusing there is more than one such project and the results are quite satisfying!
• dav_Oz 5y ago
  As a linguist I find such community-driven projects fascinating as you can literally see before your very eyes in a time-lapse enabled through an artifically imposed restraint (here in reference to "Old Church Slavonic"; a different approach: Tonki Pona) the language "evolution" and get an humbling appreciation of the multitude of contingences under which languages evolve. A simplified "linear" scheme I'm referring to: From perfect "intelligibility" (universal language/Proto-language) --> mostly ("dialects") to limited ("seperate" language) to virtually none at all (seperate "language family"). Of course this gets complicated when e.g. different language families get in 'contact'. The current Persian language "Farsi" (an Indo-European language, the oldest well-attested Indo-Iranian languages being "Vedic Sanskrit", "Avestan" etc.) is heavily soaked with 'Arabic words' (Semitic language family) through the Islamic Conquest. One of many such examples: Farsi: کتاب‎ (ketâb) "book", Old Hindi: कतेब (kateba) "book", "Qu'ran" comes from the Arabic root of ك ت ب‎ (k-t-b): "related to writing". "Arabic" in turn is related as a Semitic language to "Hebrew" which has exactly the same root כ־ת־ב: "forming words pertaining to writing". The constructed Proto-West Semitic word *katab: "prick, cut, scratch, scrape". That being said, from a sociologist/ethnologist/historian perspective such artifical constructions are hardly compatible to the cultural complexities in the real world, so mostly it remains a very limited scholarly exercise or it gets "imposed" in order to "stick". As someone speaking West-Slavic "Polish", learning East-Slavic "Russian" really unlocked for me a big cultural treasury chest which I would argue is even a better pay-off than trying to ideally reconstruct a "neutral" language to circumvent the deep rooted "political" resentments. As a fun "cognitive"/"evolutionary" exercise, I'm all for it but in order to really appreciate the cultural richness (language as an expression) immersing yourself in a 'living' language is so much "brain-compatible: (1) Don't obssess over "correctness" and (2) realize the more languages you actually learn the easier it gets to aquire more. (If you speak French and learn Spanish, Latin will connect a lot of things and in the end Italian will be a "breeze") Transfered to "Slavic" from a "Polish" perspective in learning some "Bulgarian" and "Lithuanian" with my "Russian" in the end you get more bang for the buck. 3 languages are not 3 languages. E.g. "Russian", "Japanese" and "Arabic" would be 1-2 orders of magnitude "costlier". To sum it all up: The most elegant and beautiful solution in one's mind ([...] what Old Church Slavonic would have become had it been allowed to develop naturally over the centuries [...]) can distract you from the obivous and the most feasible solution, now, in the real world of "communicating". Just learn the languages "and" at the same time enjoy the beauty of the interconnectedness of languages. There is no pure language, they are all connected, in my eyes: beautifully, as they to my constant surprise succinctly bear our cultural heritages.
• larodi 5y ago
  Nice idea, but if it was me to implement it - would definitely go for Cyrillic rather than x for ч, ш, щ etc. Sxto es Slovio? -> Що е словйо? Ucxijte Slovio tper! -> Учайте словйо тпер! or something like it. seems way more Slavic to me... even though the old cyrillic (original if u want) is nothing like the modern cyrillic. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Cyrillic_alphabet#/media/File:Codex_Colbertinus_700.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Cyrillic_alphabet#/media... Interestingly the original script by Cyril and Methodius was called Glagolic and was quite hard (see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script). It was not until their scholar Kliment took to simplify the script, and it seems is mostly his decision to make the characters more like the Coptic and Greek. Even though his interpretation of the Glagolic alphabet bears the name of his teacher. you may be interested in this also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script
  • kazinator 5y ago
    The notation used by Slovio could easily be replaced by diacritics. For instance zx is really ž written digraphs. Cyrillic, not to mention Glagolic, would make this kind of language less accessible to the world at large.
    • bitcurious 5y ago
      Cyrillic would make it accessible to 2/3rds of Slavic speakers, and would require that other interested parties learn just a few additional characters. It's really not that hard.
      • kazinator 5y ago
        A good chunk of those 2/3rds speak English and can wield Latin script (and if not, they should). Latin script has eaten the world; suggesting Cyrillic for any new language is lunacy. The number of languages using Cyrillic is vastly smaller than Latin script, and are geographically clustered in areas that belonged to the Soviet Union.
• kazinator 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Slavic_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Slavic_language "Slovio was the first Slavic-based constructed language with a substantial dictionary and a small user community, at its peak consisting of 10-15 users (mostly diaspora Slavs) and a number of interested bystanders. In spite of heavy marketing on the part of its creator, Slovio gained little support; it was heavily criticized for its artificial, un-Slavic character and the radical Slavic-nationalist views expressed by its users. Perhaps due to Hučko's insistence on owning the language and his hostile attitude towards proposed changes (similar to the situation with Volapük), people interested in a pan-Slavic language moved on to other projects. It became defunct by about 2011."
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• ulzeraj 5y ago
  Not a slav. I must comment tho on the website aesthetic. I was thrown back to the 90s as soon as I clicked the link.
  • ozim 5y ago
    As a slav after I opened the page I stopped being interested in whatever that language is. I was amazed by the design and only thing I miss would be marquee text. I loved animated gifs though and table layout.
• benwr 5y ago
  Interlingua is a similar project for primarily Romance languages: https://www.interlingua.com/interlingua-en/ https://www.interlingua.com/interlingua-en/
• dang 5y ago
  Related ongoing thread: Interslavic Language (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30553292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30553292 - March 2022 (19 comments)
• mbar84 5y ago
  It seems that today, a data-driven computer model might be able to produce a much better artificial language than was previously possible. If you have grammar, vocabulary and text corpus for each language, parameters for number of speakers who would presumably learn the language, then you could perhaps optimize for minimal learning curve for the most people.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    AIUI, this was tried for the Lojban lexicon and didn't really work all that well - the result ended up being extremely unintuitive no matter what your "source" language.
    • kinghajj 5y ago
      The goal of Lojban's lexicon generation wasn't to make the vocabulary easy for everyone to learn, but to remove bias in word generation so that no region or language family would have any advantage over others in learning the language.
• Koshkin 5y ago
  Using Cyrillic would allow to avoid digraphs and diacritic.
• skratlo 5y ago
  That web page is like a time capsule, serious 90s vibes. Just add <marquee> tag somewhere in there to make it complete.
• josefrichter 5y ago
  As a Czech (i.e. slav) I have to say I understand 99% of Interslavic when reading it, or even listening to it. With Slovio it's slightly less, and some forms don't feel very slavic.
• vzaliva 5y ago
  If one to spend time learning a new language for international communication the choice of the language must maximize the number of people you can comminicate with. Unless you want to talk only to other slavs, I would say English, Spanish and French would be my first choices, which are admittedly little Europe and Americas-centric.
  • dahart 5y ago
    Why must one maximize? Depends on where you want to go, and who you want to talk to. There’s nothing at all wrong with learning a language that is spoken by fewer people. I learned some Icelandic which has fewer total speakers globally than the medium sized city I live it, and it was a blast. It also made my trip to Iceland more fun, and people there were excited to have foreigners learning their language. If you want to maximize, then you should prioritize Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic over Spanish & French.
    • vzaliva 5y ago
      if you not maximizing, it is pefectly fine to learn any language. It is fun and not totally useless exercice. Hey, I tried to learn Latin, what can I say? :) But if you maximize you need to decide where you plan to travel and use the new language. I assume people learning these pan-slavic artificial languages want to travel salic states in Europe. But once you cross a border from Polan to Germany, from Ukraine to Romania, from Solovakia to Hungary, from Czech republic to Austria, from Belarus to Lithuania, your laguage skills will become usless. My advice to learn a language which you can use over all of Europe, not just slavic countries.
  • vkou 5y ago
    > If one to spend time learning a new language for international communication the choice of the language must maximize the number of people you can comminicate with. If that's your goal, you should be learning three languages, in the following order of priority: 1. English 2. Mandarin 3. Hindi
    • vzaliva 5y ago
• nhod 5y ago
  If anyone wants to learn Slovio they will need an internationally simplified version of that website first. I had to run to the eye wash station.
• SagelyGuru 5y ago
  It is worth mentioning Jan Hus: Orthographia Bohemica, 1406 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographia_bohemica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographia_bohemica which introduced diacritical marks to facilitate expressing all the sounds of Slavic languages in Latin alphabet by single symbols. They have logical phonetic meanings, for example háček (the hook) indicating the placing of the tip of the tongue on the palate. Though, admittedly, they are somewhat inconvenient on modern keyboards, usually relegated to the top row. Jan Hus was later burned at the stake for his 'heresies', which probably slowed down the uptake of his eminently useful invention in the rest of the world. It is my opinion that even English more than 600 years later could benefit from it, as in: 'caš ček' instead of 'cash cheque', thus also finally attaining much simpler, logical and phonetic spelling.
• kistanod 5y ago
  As a Russian language native, this one is beyond weird. Plus, Russian is the most popular version of the Slavic language, which actually makes it easier for everyone to adopt Russian instead of having to use their versions imo. Not too sound too russian centric ofc, especially during these times.