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Interslavic Language

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Re: Interslavic Language

#51

Post by ijzeren_jan »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #32
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…

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.

The main problem with Russian is that Russia/the USSR have been trying to impose it as a lingua franca in Central and Eastern Europe, and failed. Most people in those countries simply won't accept it. Besides, Russian is a complex language, with lots of elements that are different from other Slavic languages. Most people who haven't learned it won't understand it either.

Re: Interslavic Language

#52

Post by fishnchips »

rgblambda wrote: post #28
knolax wrote: post #20

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

I (a non-Slavic language speaker) would imagine the divergence between the modern Slavic languages would be dwarfed by the divergence between those languages and Proto-Slavic or Old Church Slavonic.

Quite the opposite, I believe. My native tongue is Polish (West Slavic) and I speak decent Russian (East Slavic) as a foreign language. My subjective feeling is that there's more in common between either of those languages and OCS than between the two directly.

Re: Interslavic Language

#53

Post by aasasd »

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…

Can't speak from my experience here, but others say if you know one Romance language, you begin to easily understand words in other ones. So I guess any one of them would work as an international language, but Castellano seems to have a large headstart.

Re: Interslavic Language

#54

Post by 0ld »

fishnchips wrote: post #26
0xBABAD00C wrote: post #10

It's near-100% intelligible for a Russian speaker: http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/selo.html > кде мы знајемо всих и јесмо знајеми од всих Funny enough, this reads like "old Slavic" to me, rather than "new Slavic" :)

Kinda makes sense, no? Looking for similarities you inadvertently go back to the common root, and you end up with something that reads like Old Church Slavonic.

it's actually the other way round.

interslavic is deliberately based on osl [0].

it is basically "modernized" osl with simplified grammar and lexicon "averaged" from the existing slavic languages.

and, btw, osl is no way the "common root", it's absolutely not proto-slavic, just old bulgarian (from the 9th century) which happened to be the orthodox church liturgical language and thus had very significant influence on many slavic languages.

[0] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/

Re: Interslavic Language

#55

Post by decebalus1 »

ijzeren_jan wrote: post #51
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.

The main problem with Russian is that Russia/the USSR have been trying to impose it as a lingua franca in Central and Eastern Europe, and failed. Most people in those countries simply won't accept it. Besides, Russian is a complex language, with lots of elements that are different from other Slavic languages. Most people who haven't learned it won't understand it either.

> The main problem with Russian is that Russia/the USSR have been trying to impose it as a lingua franca in Central and Eastern Europe, and failed. Most people in those countries simply won't accept it.

As a native of that area in Europe and having lived through some of the traces of russification I can confirm I have a strong bias against the Russian language. When I was a kid, Russian and French were the foreign languages they taught in school and after '89, everyone agreed it was best to switch Russian with English or German. Nobody there wants to learn Russian or immigrate to a Russian speaking country.

Re: Interslavic Language

#56

Post by kolinko »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #32
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…

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.

Definitely not - among other things - for social/political reasons. Russia has occupied central/eastern countries for four decades and most people prefer to be as far away from it culturally as possible.

Even though my parents' generation was all forced to learn Russian, the current generation doesn't learn it. Even if it would be practical.

Also, Russian may be easy to learn, but it won't be easier to understand than my native Polish to my Czech and Slovakian friends. Interslavic on the other hand would be understood relatively easily.

I just read a chapter from the little prince that's on the page, and I understood it almost perfectly with no training in Interslavic, just with my knowledge of Polish language.

Re: Interslavic Language

#57

Post by andolanra »

ijzeren_jan wrote: post #49
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…

The thing Interslavic is doing has also been tried before, but the illustrative example isn't Esperanto (which is an ad-hoc mixture of words taken arbitrarily from existing languages and put into a synthetic grammar) but rather Interlingua, which is a kind of streamlined Romance language. It too is more-or-less comprehensible by people who speak any Romance language, and was intended to be used in much the same way. In fact, to quote the creator of Interlingua writing in Interlingua:

    Le sol facto que importa (ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme) es que
    interlingua, gratias a su ambition de reflecter le homogeneitate cultural e ergo
    linguistic del occidente, es capace de render servicios tangibile a iste precise
    momento del historia del mundo. Il es per su contributiones actual e non per le
    promissas de su adherentes que interlingua vole esser judicate.
(Edit: to translate for non-Romance speakers, this means, "The only important fact (from the point of view of Interlingua itself) is that Interlingua, thanks to its goal of reflecting the cultural—and therefore linguistic—homogeneity of the West, is capable of providing tangible services at this precise moment in the history of the world. It is for its actual contributions, and not the promises of its adherents, that Interlingua wishes to be judged.")

It too has met with only limited success: there were some short-lived scientific publications in Interlingua, for example, for the intended audience of all Romance-speaking scientists. Even so, it never attracted much of an audience. That's not to say such a thing could never happen: merely that it's not unreasonable to be pessimistic here.

Re: Interslavic Language

#58

Post by rodgerd »

aasasd wrote: post #53
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…

Can't speak from my experience here, but others say if you know one Romance language, you begin to easily understand words in other ones. So I guess any one of them would work as an international language, but Castellano seems to have a large headstart.

I'm learning French (B1 level) and was surprised how much I could pick out of a Romanian movie (the tremendously enjoyable https://www.nziff.co.nz/2019/christchurch/the-whistlers/).

Re: Interslavic Language

#59

Post by asveikau »

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'm curious what you would think of the history of Standard Italian or Modern Hebrew. In both cases, there was no such thing as a native speaker 300 years ago, but they were revived from historical literary sources to coincide with a new political identity or state, and today millions of people count them as their native language.

It seems awfully like the story of a constructed language with high state, political and cultural support, that succeeds and grabs a foothold. Seems like it can work if it captures a particular zeitgeist.

I am sure that stories like this exist elsewhere, these are just 2 cases I happened to have read about and come to mind.

Re: Interslavic Language

#60

Post by vbezhenar »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #32
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…

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.

Russian is definitely way to go. Any slavic language is similar to Russian.
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