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Interslavic Language

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Re: Interslavic Language

#41

Post by p1esk »

babuskov wrote: post #4
aasasd wrote: 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’.

In Serbian "nedelja" is a homonym - both "Sunday" and "week".

“Hey boss, I worked 20 days in a row, I’m gonna take Sunday off!” :)

Re: Interslavic Language

#42

Post by AmericanChopper »

strenholme wrote: post #30

As someone who has followed the constructed language and international auxiliary language community for a couple of decades, and as someone with an undergraduate degree in linguistics, I do not see a constructed language catching on with the mainstream public any time soon. A constructed language is a language that someone sits down and creates; this is different from a natural language which just forms as people com…

> I do not see a constructed language catching on with the mainstream public any time soon.

Doesn’t Indonesian technically fit the definition of a constructed language?

Re: Interslavic Language

#43

Post by eequah9L »

p1esk wrote: post #37
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in practice, if one Slavic language comes close to serving as a lingua franca in Eastern Europe, isn't it Russian? If you're going to learn a second language in order to communicate with people, you're going to learn a language with a large existing community - English, Modern Standard Arabic, Standard Chinese (Mandarin), Russian, French (in West Africa), etc.

There are many reasons why this hasn’t happened, but I think you pointed out the main one: English is the language with the largest existing community, so I think most Slavs would rather learn it as the second language, unless there’s a good reason to choose a different one due to some circumstances (eg proximity to a border, widespread business with a certain country, etc).

In Czechia, English is definitely the most reasonable L2 to learn, by far. Even for L3 I wouldn't be sure Russian is a better choice than German, which is just super useful around here.

I learned Russian basically for irrational reasons. I'm glad I did, but I can't say it is very useful.

Re: Interslavic Language

#44

Post by boguslav »

orbital-decay wrote: post #7

There's also another language designed to be understandable by most Slavic speakers [0]. For some reason, the authors of both seem to hate each other. [1] [0] http://www.slovio.com/ [1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html#disclaime...

That's easily explained: jealousy. Slovio was the only Slavic-based auxlang available on the internet for a few years. However, it was not received well among Slavs, who found it too artificial (Slovio is basically Esperanto with Slavic - mostly Russian - words), and thus it became a complete failure. When Interslavic was initiated as a more naturalistic alternative, the author of Slovio first tried to ridicule it, and once it became successful, he started claiming they had stolen his idea and propagating Slovio under the name of Interslavic. Both languages have absolutely nothing in common, except that they are both based on Slavic material.

That was years ago though. Slovio has been dead for the last eight or so years.

Re: Interslavic Language

#45

Post by ainar-g »

hugh4life wrote: post #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 int…

The best Romance IAL I've seen so far is Latino Sine Flexione[1]. As someone who knows Esperanto and some very basic French, it's really easy to understand.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latino_sine_flexione

Re: Interslavic Language

#46

Post by eequah9L »

sologoub wrote: post #40
yeellow wrote: 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…

It seems to succeed at being understandable, but I’m guessing it will be on par in difficulty to learning another Slavic language if you already speak one. Also, the written part is not hard - if you pause enough most Slavic language menus at a restaurant for example can be understood. It’s the spoken version that often makes it hard to communicate across these languages.

... and my experience is that even fairly similar languages are really hard to understand. I have no problem talking in Russian, I understand Slovak and Czech is my mother tongue, but Ukrainian is still fairly opaque to me. I suspect any spoken intermediate language will just do the same. A soup of words of which I'll understand every second and struggle to make sense of.

Re: Interslavic Language

#47

Post by pferde »

yeellow wrote: 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 also from a Slavic country, and I couldn't understand anything, because I closed the website in disgust two seconds after loading it. I mean, black text on dark-blue background? Even the hyperlinks are using default html blue color.

What is this, Geocities?

Re: Interslavic Language

#48

Post by p1esk »

jwieczorek wrote: post #27
objplant wrote: post #21

This is interesting and would be rather useful (also sort of cool) to have a common language shared by so many people living rather near each other (except for far-away regions of Russia). Unfortunately, it doesn't look easy at all: 7 cases and 10 plus 6 extra declensions for example. However, in reality such a common language already exists and it's English, especially among young-enough speakers. In my experience,…

Ludwig Wittgenstein: the borders of my language are the borders of my world . English is a language many young Slavs learn in preparation to or in the course of their professional life as in the world of the Pax Americana it quite simply has become an economical necessity to know it well. However, the English language cannot naturally transmit any of the linguistic particularities (proverbs, turns of phrases) and, ge…

I think it depends on the fluency of your Russian vs fluency of your English. I’m Russian and I’m fluent in English so if I sensed you don’t quite understand what I’m saying in Russian I’d immediately try English. I’d have probably ended up mixing the two.

Re: Interslavic Language

#49

Post by ijzeren_jan »

strenholme wrote: post #30

As someone who has followed the constructed language and international auxiliary language community for a couple of decades, and as someone with an undergraduate degree in linguistics, I do not see a constructed language catching on with the mainstream public any time soon. A constructed language is a language that someone sits down and creates; this is different from a natural language which just forms as people com…

There is a critical difference between Esperanto and Interslavic. Esperanto is meant for communication between Esperanto speakers. Interslavic, on the other hand, is meant to be understandable for Slavs who haven't actually learned it. In other words, the success of Interslavic cannot only be judged by the number of people who learnt it. Basically, one speaker is enough to serve an entire audience, one translator is enough to serve all Slavic readers. Creating a community of Interslavic speakers has never been the primary purpose of creating the language.

Re: Interslavic Language

#50

Post by eequah9L »

aasasd wrote: post #29
knolax wrote: post #20

I wonder what's the benefit of this versus learning whatever the common ancestor of the Slavic languages is.

A sane alphabet. Cyrillic before the 20th century had some freaky things and weird use of letters that we still have. Aficionados say that ‘ѣ’ and ‘ъ’ could be properly used only by people who memorized all the words with them. (Which is not how modern Slavic languages work, even though English-speakers wouldn't bat an eye at that inconvenience, hur hur.)

In Czech, some "y" vs. "i" can't be deduced. Schoolchildren need to drill the words that use "y". Similarly to what "ѣ" had with бѣдный блѣдный бѣлый бѣсъ, except our thing doesn't even rhyme :) (Not that I'm complaining. As you note, English is vastly worse in this regard.)
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