Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language • Hacker News Board

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#251

Post by Claude_Shannon » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 3:45 PM UTC

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…

And the issue that Panslavism inheritently supposes Russians to be the protectors of other Slavic nations. Thank you, we had enough of their "help".

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#252

Post by larodi » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #199

bitcurious wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cyrillic would make it accessible to 2/3rds of Slavic speakers, and would require that other interested parties learn just a few additional characters. It's really not that hard.

A good chunk of those 2/3rds speak English and can wield Latin script (and if not, they should). Latin script has eaten the world; suggesting Cyrillic for any new language is lunacy. The number of languages using Cyrillic is vastly smaller than Latin script, and are geographically clustered in areas that belonged to the Soviet Union.

Latin and English script share common ancestry and really are not that different. Likewise people don’t suggest to French and Germans to not use umlauts and accentuation, even though the characters are different.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#253

Post by int_19h » Sun, Mar 06, 2022, 1:24 AM UTC

ajuc wrote: post #239

int_19h wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

In Russian, the combo s+z is also effectively pronounced as a geminated z. But it's still spelled "sz", because Russian orthography tends to be morphemic rather than phonetic. So from the perspective of reading familiarity, using "z" as a digraph marker would cause a lot of confusion on how to read it properly.

"x" at least has the advantage that it's foreign to almost everyone, and thus forces you to look up what the hell it's supposed to mean! But in general, I think that diacritics work much better for readability of Latin-based Slavic alphabets, with Czech being a decent starting point ("ch" aside).

As for the consonant clusters, they are easy to pronounce to Slavs, because we're used to them. Ask a native English speaker sometime what they think about a combo like "vzt" :)

(The reason why we ended up with these unusual consonant clusters is because of the loss of yers. For example, "pomst" and "мстить" are derived from proto-Slavic "*mьstь", where "ь" was originally short "e". This is also why vowels show up in the middle of those consonant clusters sometimes when words change such that the syllable that used to have a yer in it becomes stressed - as in Russian "месть".)

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#254

Post by int_19h » Sun, Mar 06, 2022, 1:30 AM UTC

ajuc wrote: post #241

int_19h wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem, ultimately, is that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was dominated by Poland, and said Polish nobility was not interested in treating religious minorities equally, as GDL did. Republic or not doesn't matter here - republics can quite easily become tyrannies of the majority. There's a reason why there were so many uprisings on the territory that is Ukraine today, back when it was a part of the Commonwea…

It changed with time, but the Polish nobility wasn't the ones persecuting religious minorities for the most part. For one thing nobles took a lot of Jewish immigrants, used them as middle management (which frustrated the church, who in turn sent angry peasant mobs against Jews, which meant Jews had to work with nobility for their protection). Also a lot of nobles weren't Catholic, especially in 1500s protestantism wa…

The Orthodox nobility had the same rights at first. But, as you say yourself, almost all of them have switched to Catholicism over time. And the reason for that was that it was the only way to preserve both the rights and the social standing in the long term.

As for nobles not carrying out religious persecution, I don't even know what to say. Local magnates were the main drivers of the religious persecution of Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians. And sure, that persecution was often economic in nature, but it was also very clearly carried out along religious lines.

I'll grant you that religious intolerance in Poland was primarily between Catholics and Orthodox, rather than Catholics and Protestants as elsewhere in Europe. But that's to be expected from a country where most subjects are either Catholic or Orthodox, no?

EDIT: I suppose our perspectives are so different because we're focusing on different time periods. My take on this is that early Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth inherited many of the political arrangements of GDL, and tolerance was one of them. But as the center of political power shifted over to Poland over time, they were weakened.

Re: Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language

#255

Post by BurningPenguin » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 6:55 AM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #45

BurningPenguin wrote: post #22

I've learned some Czech about 10 years ago. Not much left, since i didn't need it that much (yes, shame on me), but i actually understand several words. Nice. Now i wonder if something like this exists for germanic languages.

> Now i wonder if something like this exists for germanic languages. Dutch. Only half joking. Dutch would at least make a great starting point in terms of written language. As a native speaker with English as a second language and German as my third, I can read a whole lot of Dutch because it's closer in spelling to Scandinavian languages than German is, but has kept many words that are still used in German but archa…

This actually makes sense. One of the sales agents in the company i work for is Dutch. He can speak German, but he mixes several words in that sound kinda English or are maybe Dutch. I'm still able to understand him good enough, so i can usually help him (i'm in IT). Maybe i'll look into it some day. Would make a fun exercise.