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Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

slovio.com

91–100 of 255 posts

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#91
post #19
post #11

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…

> 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

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Many of us offer sacrifices today, too. 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"?

We do it for the fun and food, not for some pseudo gods.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#93

Lithuanian and Latvian is not slavic and Slovio would not be understood by their native speakers.

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.

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.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Rosjan…

Yep, Croatian/Serbian have a phonemic orthography. Quite easy to write given that sounds map directly to a letter.

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

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#95

Lithuanian and Latvian is not slavic and Slovio would not be understood by their native speakers.

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.

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.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#96
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#97

Given the current circumstances, why is this the top story on HN? Panslavism is basically Russian imperialism in disguise.

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.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#99
post #45

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 archa…

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.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#100
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us offer sacrifices today, too. 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"?

We do it for the fun and food, not for some pseudo gods.

We can do it for both. Why not?

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.

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