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Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

slovio.com

231–240 of 255 posts

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#231
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd for a long time puzzled over the mysterious \t accent in TeX. Why did DEK implement this obscure diacritical and leave out the more useful Ogonek?¹ It was only when I stumbled across it (somewhat garbled) in an online card catalog entry that I discovered that it was used in some Russian transliteration schemes to represent digraphs like t͡s for ц. ⸻ 1. I suspect the other reason was that implementing the tie was…

I see you didn’t spend a week sick in bed with no fresh reading material except for a copy of the TeXbook :) Exercises 9.4 and 9.5 from the chunk of exercises on diacritics there mention ‹Akademii͡a› for ‹Академия› (usually ‹-ija› or ‹-iya›) and ‹I͡urʼev› for ‹Юрьев› (usually ‹Ju-› or ‹Yu-›), which I remember (sans the numbers of course) exactly because I had never before seen that romanization[1] and thought it weir…

Alas, I read the TeXbook originally in 1986 and while I've dipped into it a lot since then, I've not re-read it in its entirety since that first read. I'm the one responsible for adding a section about the ALA-LC romanization in Tie (typography) on Wikipedia.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#232
post #46
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…

> 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.

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.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#233
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Americans telling Slavic speakers what's a more natural alphabet. Feels like a parallel to something.

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.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Slavs were never for communism i disagree to some extent. historically slavic culture tends to be much more communal than rest of europe. even in eu you can see this manifested in thr resistance to liberalism that comes from all (?) slavic countries

I think Slavs historically tended more towards decentralized structure. So maybe communal in a small community structure.

Decentralized structures and communism are not mutually exclusive.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#235
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…

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…

Thanks for all the info. I definitely underestimated the number of languages that don't use Cyrillic. I also had it in my head that dropping "to be" in the present tense was more common. Do you know anything about the history of that as far as where, linguistically, it started being dropped? Like which Slavic language groups drop the verb and which don't? I don't know if that makes sense.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#236
post #228

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 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

correct if you are world traveler. but if you travel in Europe it is better to learn a language widely understood in all of Europe rather that just slavic states.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#237
post #212

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.

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 wan…

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.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#238
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.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#239
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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".

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".

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#240

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.

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was hardly exemplar, either, given the state of the peasants there, and religious persecution of non-Catholics. 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.

> religious persecution of non-Catholics

There was some of that (especially in lat 1600s), but compared to basically any other country at the time it was significantly better. PLC even had a law that each newly elected king had to sign where he promised not to persecute anybody because of religion or he stops being the king: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Confederation

Majority of magnates (the big nobility that actually decided things by buying other nobles during elections) weren't Catholic in 1500s.

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