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Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

slovio.com

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Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#21

Post by ivoras »

zone411 wrote: post #4

Interslavic is another similar project. They don't like Slovio too much: http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/index.html http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/faq.html#slovio

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.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#23

Post by tut-urut-utut »

zone411 wrote: post #4

Interslavic is another similar project. They don't like Slovio too much: http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/index.html http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/faq.html#slovio

From the linked page:

"Slovio is not very Slavic at all: its grammar is almost entirely based on Esperanto, its word building mechanisms are mostly Germanic, and its vocabulary, although clearly dominated by (often mutilated) Russian words, does not relate in any predictable way to the Slavic languages either. As a result, its educational value is practically zero."

This was also my impression of Slovio after attempting to read a few texts. Interslavic feels much more natural, coming from the perspective of a heavy dialect speaker of one of the south Slavic languages.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#24

Post by Liquid_Fire »

msrenee wrote: post #19
dvh wrote: 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 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?

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#26

Post by ajuc »

zagrebian wrote: post #16

Why cx, sx, zx instead of č, š, ž? That’s a step backwards. Slavic languages have perfectly fine letters for those phonemes.

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.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#27

Post by mongrelion »

msrenee wrote: post #19
dvh wrote: 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…

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 Rosjaninem
I also thought that using the Latin alphabet feels a bit of a hack and Cyrillic would be a more "natural" way to put things. However, using Cyrillic would impose a higher learning curve for those who do not it. This is mostly for phonemes that don't have a 1-to-1 representation in the Latin alphabet, like ш, щ, ж and what not. For these cases, languages like Croatian, Slovenian and others have come up with, what is my personal opinion, are quite acceptable workarounds (I just found out that this is called Gaj's Latin alphabet [1]) č, ć, dž, đ, š, ž (I skipped a few). Without knowing initially how they are pronounced, read in context you do get an idea of what the target sound is.

I also think that on-boarding Cyrillic-first cultures would be easier because normally countries that use Cyrillic as their main alphabet also teach the Latin alphabet at school (Russia for example does and they also teach you how to write "Russian" using Latin characters because they understand the importance of this). Whereas it's not the same way around: a lot of the Slavic countries do not teach the Cyrillic alphabet at school.

> I've always had trouble trying to parse out Russian transliterated into Latin script. 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 that ж -> zsh

ш -> sh

щ -> sch

х -> kh

ь -> '

etc.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaj's_Latin_alphabet

Edit: answer question about Russian transliteration, add missing link and try to fix formatting.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#29

Post by ajuc »

mkotowski wrote: post #12
ajuc wrote: post #2

Why "x" instead of "z" in cz/sz/rz etc. sounds? It's not used by any Slavic languages AFAIK, some use z, some use ^ (and they used z in the past), others use cyrylic but nobody uses x for these. It's weird. Also w for szcz makes no sense. Use r for "ja" while you're at it :)

> Also w for szcz makes no sense. Propbably an attempt to use a letter similar to graphically. > Why "x" instead of "z" in cz/sz/rz etc. sounds? I think it is something picked up from Esperanto. Traditional way to replace Esperanto-specific letters, when not supported, was to change it to a letter followed by an “h”, but there is also a more widely used method using “x” instead.

> Propbably an attempt to use a letter similar to graphically.

Yes but then let's use R for "ja" :) This language seems like someone coming from cyrylic wanted to use latin letters, it's not good for Slavic languages that already used latin letters.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#30

Post by mcv »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #23
zone411 wrote: post #4

Interslavic is another similar project. They don't like Slovio too much: http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/index.html http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/faq.html#slovio

From the linked page: "Slovio is not very Slavic at all: its grammar is almost entirely based on Esperanto, its word building mechanisms are mostly Germanic, and its vocabulary, although clearly dominated by (often mutilated) Russian words, does not relate in any predictable way to the Slavic languages either. As a result, its educational value is practically zero." This was also my impression of Slovio after attempt…

From comments here, my impression as a completely non-Slavic speaker, is that Slovio is more artificial, designed to be easy to learn by non-Slavic speakers and still somewhat understandable by all Slavic speakers, whereas Interslavic is much closer to a real Slavic language, but might be harder to learn for non-Slavic speakers.

Does that make sense?

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