9 ms·

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

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.
- cleancoder0 5y ago
  Yep, Croatian/Serbian have a phonemic orthography. Quite easy to write given that sounds map directly to a letter.
  - medo-bear 5y ago
    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
    - mongrelion 5y ago
      I always found this funny. In Russian "second hand" is spelled секонд хэнд, which I find hilarious.
- smcl 5y ago
  In Czech it's "jsem Rus" and "jsi Rus", the latter can have a "ty" but it's not necessary and I think Slovak is the same.
  - mongrelion 5y ago
    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.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian#Transliteration_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian#Transl...
bsedlm 5y ago
[retracted]
- mentalpiracy 5y ago
  in Russian it is есть / yest, but very commonly dropped from sentences.
zmxz 5y ago
> 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.
- AeroNotix 5y ago
  Americans telling Slavic speakers what's a more natural alphabet. Feels like a parallel to something.
  - msrenee 5y ago
    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.
- dhosek 5y ago
  Numerically, sure, because of the sheer numbers of Russian speakers, but Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Bosniaks (among others) might beg to differ.
- msrenee 5y ago
  Shows how little I know about Slavic languages besides my elementary understanding of Russian. I appreciate the correction. Definitely didn't expect so many replies, but I'm learning a lot.
qwerty456127 5y ago
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.
- medo-bear 5y ago
  > 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
  - ajuc 5y ago
    He probably meant that Russian is an outlier is many respects when it comes to Slavic languages. Something like Slovakian would be much better as a base.
  - krzyk 5y ago
    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.
    - AeroNotix 5y ago
      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.
      - qwerty456127 5y ago
        > 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.
medo-bear 5y ago
> 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
adrian_b 5y ago
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.

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.

cleancoder0 5y ago
Yep, Croatian/Serbian have a phonemic orthography. Quite easy to write given that sounds map directly to a letter.
- medo-bear 5y ago
  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
  - mongrelion 5y ago
    I always found this funny. In Russian "second hand" is spelled секонд хэнд, which I find hilarious.
smcl 5y ago
In Czech it's "jsem Rus" and "jsi Rus", the latter can have a "ty" but it's not necessary and I think Slovak is the same.
- mongrelion 5y ago
  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.
mananaysiempre 5y ago
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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian#Transliteration_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian#Transl...

bsedlm 5y ago

[retracted]

mentalpiracy 5y ago
in Russian it is есть / yest, but very commonly dropped from sentences.

zmxz 5y ago

> 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.

AeroNotix 5y ago
Americans telling Slavic speakers what's a more natural alphabet. Feels like a parallel to something.
- msrenee 5y ago
  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.
dhosek 5y ago
Numerically, sure, because of the sheer numbers of Russian speakers, but Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Bosniaks (among others) might beg to differ.
msrenee 5y ago
Shows how little I know about Slavic languages besides my elementary understanding of Russian. I appreciate the correction. Definitely didn't expect so many replies, but I'm learning a lot.

qwerty456127 5y ago

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.

medo-bear 5y ago
> 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
- ajuc 5y ago
  He probably meant that Russian is an outlier is many respects when it comes to Slavic languages. Something like Slovakian would be much better as a base.
- krzyk 5y ago
  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.
  - AeroNotix 5y ago
    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.
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      > 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.

medo-bear 5y ago

> 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

adrian_b 5y ago

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.