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Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

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Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#161

Post by larodi »

Nice idea, but if it was me to implement it - would definitely go for Cyrillic rather than x for ч, ш, щ etc.

Sxto es Slovio? -> Що е словйо? Ucxijte Slovio tper! -> Учайте словйо тпер!

or something like it. seems way more Slavic to me... even though the old cyrillic (original if u want) is nothing like the modern cyrillic. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Cyrillic_alphabet#/media...

Interestingly the original script by Cyril and Methodius was called Glagolic and was quite hard (see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script). It was not until their scholar Kliment took to simplify the script, and it seems is mostly his decision to make the characters more like the Coptic and Greek. Even though his interpretation of the Glagolic alphabet bears the name of his teacher.

you may be interested in this also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#162

Post by kazinator »

larodi wrote: post #161

Nice idea, but if it was me to implement it - would definitely go for Cyrillic rather than x for ч, ш, щ etc. Sxto es Slovio? -> Що е словйо? Ucxijte Slovio tper! -> Учайте словйо тпер! or something like it. seems way more Slavic to me... even though the old cyrillic (original if u want) is nothing like the modern cyrillic. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Cyrillic_alphabet#/media... Interestingly the…

The notation used by Slovio could easily be replaced by diacritics.

For instance zx is really ž written digraphs.

Cyrillic, not to mention Glagolic, would make this kind of language less accessible to the world at large.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#163

Post by kazinator »

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Slavic_language

"Slovio was the first Slavic-based constructed language with a substantial dictionary and a small user community, at its peak consisting of 10-15 users (mostly diaspora Slavs) and a number of interested bystanders. In spite of heavy marketing on the part of its creator, Slovio gained little support; it was heavily criticized for its artificial, un-Slavic character and the radical Slavic-nationalist views expressed by its users. Perhaps due to Hučko's insistence on owning the language and his hostile attitude towards proposed changes (similar to the situation with Volapük), people interested in a pan-Slavic language moved on to other projects. It became defunct by about 2011."

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#164

Post by kazinator »

tpoacher wrote: post #110

Choice of 'x' for softness is very weird. I get that in the cyrillic alphabet, 'x' is the 'h' character, but once you transliterate to a latin alphabet, it makes no sense to use it in that way... Especially when the role of 'h' in latin alphabets has been hard-to-soft conversion specifically in most languages (and transliterations) using it.

Slovio is from 1999 and peaked in 2001. The thinking was probably based on lower rates of acceptance of Unicode. Today "any" device can display ž, without changing languages or "code pages" or whatever, so there is much less of a need to encode that in ASCII zx. You can pop ž into an e-mail without worrying that it will be mojibake on the other end.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#165

Post by syntaxfree »

stared wrote: post #66
wheelerof4te wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interslavic seems just as understandable to me. Sometimes I wish all slavic people had one country, one language. Let's call it Slavia.

There is such an idea of a greater connection between Slavic nations called Pan-Slavism ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Slavism ). When it comes to "one country" - the USSR aimed at that, and from the perspective of hundreds of millions of people, it wasn't the best idea. Plus, I think that ethnic states are one of the worst inventions of the 19th century, which accelerated a lot after WWI & WWII. I prefer cities…

Have you read Vilem Flusser’s Bodenlos?

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#166

Post by smcl »

singularity2001 wrote: post #103
ajuc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal was to use only basic latin letters. But even then - many Slavic languages use or used z for this purpose, none uses x. So why make it arfitically less understandeable? It's not Cxechia it's Czechia.

why not sh, ch and zh then?

In some slavic languages "sh" and "ch" already exist. In fact in Czech "ch" is considered a single letter

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#167

Post by romwell »

ajuc wrote: post #31
ivoras wrote: post #21

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.

Ukrainian is eastern Slavic though? As a speaker of Polish (western Slavic) reasonably familiar with Ukrainian I find InterSlavic and madzuslovanski (or whatever it's spelled) much better than this Slavio.

As a Ukrainian & Russian speaker, I find Polish intelligelible, and Polish people generally understand me when I speak Ukrainian.

The languages are much closer than any of them is to Russian.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#168

Post by Mikeb85 »

hurflmurfl wrote: post #67
Tenoke wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Щ is already a pretty pointless letter. If you are simplifying anything then just using шт is one of the lowest hanging fruits. Ditto for я and ю.

Щ is indeed read as "sht" in Bulgarian, but in Russian it would be read as a softer "sh" or mix between "sh" and "ch". If anything, maybe it can just be dropped in favour of plain "sh"?

From Ukrainian it gets turned into "shch". Which IMO sounds about right. Mainly because sh and ch are shorter sounds in English (ch can also be a little hard), but shch gets the point across.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#169

Post by kemiller »

Liquid_Fire wrote: post #24
msrenee wrote: 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 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?

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.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#170

Post by dhosek »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #78
mongrelion wrote: post #27

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;…

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 technically simple since, by allowing it to extend pass its spacing width, it can be treated like any other above-character accent. Ogonek, on the other hand, unlike a cedilla or the dot-under diacritic, requires positioning based on the letter that it's attached to so can't be programmed as easily as a floating diacritic mark.

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