My impression (as being Slav myself and speaking Serbian/Croatian as a mother tongue, and a bit of Russian that I've learned in school) is that Slavs can understand each others fairly well when everyone is simply just speaking in their own language. I really see no point in making the artificial language, as while understanding it is probably not hard, learning a language like this would be super hard because of how close, but still different it is to the existing languages. So you end up with a language that everyone understands, but no one is able to speak it...
Interslavic Language
61–70 of 141 posts
Re: Interslavic Language
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Please don’t indent quoted text as code. It makes reading on mobile a chore and isn’t great on desktop either. Use
> 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.
Re: Interslavic Language
#63As 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 an…
Serbo-croatian might go to that list as well, as it was an official language in the former Yugoslavia. French too. Spanish (Castillan). Seems like interslavic might have a chance only in a hypothetical panslavic country.
Re: Interslavic Language
#64As 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 an…
Hebrew had over a million speakers even when it wasn't anyone's native language. It was known to Jewish men who studied in a cheder as boys (those who did not continue to higher studies/seminary in a yeshiva), the way I think Arabic is known to Muslims who are not native speakers. Hebrew was used for literature and poetry and for communication between Jewish communities that didn't share a native language. It wasn't reconstructed from literary sources, it was only modernized for everyday use.
Re: Interslavic Language
#65Earlier 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.
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 tha…
Yes, there's strong anti-Russian feeling in several countries, but Russian is still, by far, the Slavic language with the most second-language speakers.
According to Ethnologue, there are more than 100 million Russian speakers outside of Russia. It is the primary language in Belarus and half of the Ukraine (and is known by most people in the country). Almost 7 million people in Poland know how to speak it.[1]
English is probably becoming more of the lingua franca of Eastern Europe, but still, if any Slavic language were to serve as the lingua franca, it would be Russian. It's the Slavic language with the largest international presence, and in contrast to constructed languages, it actually has a large speaker base and significant cultural heritage.
Re: Interslavic Language
#66As 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 an…
The Israeli case is illustrative for two reasons:
* Most of the people involved had some familiarity with written and liturgical Hebrew already.
* The revival was kicked off with a seed population of self-selected, ideologically-motivated Zionists in-country.
* When that seed of fluent speakers spread it to larger waves of immigration, there was no alternative lingua franca.
Italy was also a case where there was no alternative lingua franca, and it was in fact a dialect which was both mutually-intelligible with extant dialects, and was in fact made official in many Italian states well before unification.
More generally, these both are exactly in line with GP's point: "people are motivated to learn a language when it has prestige". Both languages were absolutely high prestige at the time.
Re: Interslavic Language
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
The Israeli case is illustrative for two reasons: * Most of the people involved had some familiarity with written and liturgical Hebrew already. * The revival was kicked off with a seed population of self-selected, ideologically-motivated Zionists in-country. * When that seed of fluent speakers spread it to larger waves of immigration, there was no alternative lingua franca. Italy was also a case where there was no a…
> and it was in fact a dialect
Based on Tuscan dialect, but my understanding (correct me if I am wrong) is it was not 100% the same as that dialect and drew from historical written forms.
The fact that mutual intelligibility exists with other dialects certainly helps. But the same is attempted here to bridge Slavic languages.
But yes. My two examples are high prestige, emerging at the right time alongside a new national identity. It has better chances than some Slavic language bufs on the internet. Just trying to say that the line between "constructed" language and a real native tongue is sometimes blurry. Failure of these attempts is not inevitable, given the right circumstances.
Re: Interslavic Language
#68As 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 an…
[deleted]
Re: Interslavic Language
#69As 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?
No, it's a standardized dialect of Malay, in the same way that Filipino is a standardized dialect of Tagalog.
Re: Interslavic Language
#70Earlier 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.
Russian is definitely way to go. Any slavic language is similar to Russian.
If you ignore the politics and that it uses an entirely different alphabet than half of the other slavic countries. I am a native Polish speaker and have trouble reading Russian text even with repeated, limited text (genealogy resources such as birth acts). I definitely don't understand most of casual Russian.