71–80 of 141 posts
Very cool. I'm Serbian and I can understand this text: http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/umetny_ili_prirodny.html I have to read it much slower than regular Serbian text, but there were only a few words I couldn't make out of. If speakers of other Slavic languages can read it on the same level, it's awesome.
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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 actu…
Grandparents was easier to read than yours. Turn your phone sideways
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 an…
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’.
This isn't specific to Slavic languages, it's the norm for all sorts of related languages or even the same language evolving over time. Think of the etymology of 'nice' or 'guest'/'host'/'hostile'/'hospital'.
Very cool. I'm Serbian and I can understand this text: http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/umetny_ili_prirodny.html I have to read it much slower than regular Serbian text, but there were only a few words I couldn't make out of. If speakers of other Slavic languages can read it on the same level, it's awesome.
I'm Polish, I'm having more difficulties. I have to read stuff twice and guess a lot.
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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 natio…
In the Hebrew case, the language had been in continuous literary use for thousands of years; the only changes required to make it into a spoken everyday language were to add vocabulary. If that's a constructed language, then French is "constructed" every time the Academie decides on a word to replace an English loanword!
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> 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.
I think it has a remarkable quality, in that the government told everybody to learn a new common language, and that that actually succeeded. That’s the part where created languages usually come to a grinding halt. Whether the language is “created enough” seems open to interpretation to me.
>Alphabet extensions So... all those "Ś ś" and "Ć ć" instead of using Cyrillic? Yeah, no.
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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.…
They did quite a good job. :)
But a language also needs an army (or a central bank, or both).
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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…