211–220 of 255 posts
I think if you speak slowly any of the Slavic languages it will be understandable enough "from Prague to Vladivostok"
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.
If you want to maximize, then you should prioritize Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic over Spanish & French.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Fre…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Interslavic seems just as understandable to me. Sometimes I wish all slavic people had one country, one language. Let's call it Slavia.
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…
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;…
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yep, it’s the Three Seas Initiative. Bring it on! We’ll take on board some non-Slavic speakers from Hungary, the Baltics, Romania, and Albania.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with panslavism is that Russians would have majority, and Russian states were almost always authoritharian and oppressive.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We had Yugoslavia, for southern Slavic people. Didn’t work out.
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.