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Interslavic Language

steen.free.fr

11–20 of 141 posts

Re: Interslavic Language

#11
post #5

Very interesting. I've tried to read some texts and I could easily understand them (as a native Polish speaker). I wonder if it is as easy for other Slavic nationalities. If so, it could be a nice intermediary language, if only for written texts. Unfortunately I guess almost nobody would learn to write or speak it but it is still funny to have a passive ability to read and understand and I guess all Slavic languages…

As a Czech, can confirm it’s fairly understandable.

Re: Interslavic Language

#12
post #8

Interesting! I have been thinking about a similar "average Germanic" language, but I don't really have enough linguistics background to pull that off yet. Also, I have very roughly compared the Slavic languages to see which one I could learn to be able to communicate with people of most Slavic languages[0] and decided that Slovak was the most "average" language so I am planning to learn that. Too bad there's no Slova…

Than you should consider learning this interslavic language. You would be able to communicate in all Slavic countries and you would sound equally funny in all of them.

Re: Interslavic Language

#13
post #2

A sorta-weird thing about Slavic languages is, they evolved different meanings from the same roots—though related. So you constantly have your recognition of words misfiring. E.g. Old East Slavic ‘недѣлꙗ’ (‘nedělja’), meaning ‘Sunday’, somehow come to mean ‘a week’ with Russian ‘неделя’, while even close Belarusian and Ukrainian have ‘нядзеля’ and ‘неділя’ for Sunday, same with Bulgarian ‘неделя’ or Czech ‘neděle’.

Also for non-slavic speakers' interest: “ne” is No, and “dělat" is Work, so Sunday is literally the day of "Nowork".

Re: Interslavic Language

#14
There's a defunct auxlang project called Lingula that aimed to focus on comprehension between romance speakers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Lingula/

I don't think an international auxiliary language besides english would ever be able to take hold, but I think something like Interlingua that just focused on romance languages and used a simplified romance grammar rather than simplifying it further would have been very interesting.

I think esperanto would have had a better shot had it adopted Zamenhof's early reform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto

Re: Interslavic Language

#15
post #5

Very interesting. I've tried to read some texts and I could easily understand them (as a native Polish speaker). I wonder if it is as easy for other Slavic nationalities. If so, it could be a nice intermediary language, if only for written texts. Unfortunately I guess almost nobody would learn to write or speak it but it is still funny to have a passive ability to read and understand and I guess all Slavic languages…

I'm from Bosnia and I can understand almost everything. There are some words where I have to stop and think but in the end, it's completely understandable. This is a great idea!

Re: Interslavic Language

#16
post #2

A sorta-weird thing about Slavic languages is, they evolved different meanings from the same roots—though related. So you constantly have your recognition of words misfiring. E.g. Old East Slavic ‘недѣлꙗ’ (‘nedělja’), meaning ‘Sunday’, somehow come to mean ‘a week’ with Russian ‘неделя’, while even close Belarusian and Ukrainian have ‘нядзеля’ and ‘неділя’ for Sunday, same with Bulgarian ‘неделя’ or Czech ‘neděle’.

This isn't specific to Slavic languages, it's the norm for all sorts of related languages or even the same language evolving over time. Think of the etymology of 'nice' or 'guest'/'host'/'hostile'/'hospital'.

Re: Interslavic Language

#17
post #5

Very interesting. I've tried to read some texts and I could easily understand them (as a native Polish speaker). I wonder if it is as easy for other Slavic nationalities. If so, it could be a nice intermediary language, if only for written texts. Unfortunately I guess almost nobody would learn to write or speak it but it is still funny to have a passive ability to read and understand and I guess all Slavic languages…

My two cents, I skimmed through a few texts and I can understand 60-70% of what I've read. I'm a native Russian speaker, btw. However, I'd say I'd be skeptical about this whole idea, since I'd still need to invest considerable effort to learn the rest. Instead, I'd rather learn English, even though it's even more effort, still, a cost-benefit ratio seems to be much better in my particular case, as English will pretty much let me communicate with 1.5B people, which probably includes most Poles anyway.

Re: Interslavic Language

#18
post #5

Very interesting. I've tried to read some texts and I could easily understand them (as a native Polish speaker). I wonder if it is as easy for other Slavic nationalities. If so, it could be a nice intermediary language, if only for written texts. Unfortunately I guess almost nobody would learn to write or speak it but it is still funny to have a passive ability to read and understand and I guess all Slavic languages…

Slovak - all understandable.

Re: Interslavic Language

#19
post #5

Very interesting. I've tried to read some texts and I could easily understand them (as a native Polish speaker). I wonder if it is as easy for other Slavic nationalities. If so, it could be a nice intermediary language, if only for written texts. Unfortunately I guess almost nobody would learn to write or speak it but it is still funny to have a passive ability to read and understand and I guess all Slavic languages…

Croatian here. I understood everything as well. No way I could write / construct anything with it without full-blown learning. However, I also understood all of English used to describe it and I can use English to write and construct text already. So, there’s that too.
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