Interslavic Language
steen.free.fr
steen.free.fr
A constructed language is a language that someone sits down and creates; this is different from a natural language which just forms as people communicate with each other. There are many constructed languages: Klingon in Star Trek is an actual constructed language, as is the language the Elves spoke in The Lord of the Rings.
Esperanto, and Interslavic, are examples of International Auxiliary Languages (IAL), languages specially made to be easy to learn to facilitate international communication. We have had those languages for well over a century, and none of them have caught on.
The reason why an IAL has not caught on is because people are motivated to learn a language when it has prestige, not because it’s easier to learn. Right now, for better or for worse, English is that language (with all of its warts: Auxiliary words to carry tense, the rather strange tense/lax vowel distinction, etc.) right now.
I would love to see an IAL to catch on, but there’s a serious marketing issue, especially since a lot of people just don’t have the mind to learn a new language as an adult, no matter how easy the language is to learn.
I learned Russian basically for irrational reasons. I'm glad I did, but I can't say it is very useful.
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.
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.
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.
Only because Russia tried to destroy the language and culture of all the nations it occupied. They forced citizens of other countries to speak Russian and not their native languages. It is only the most spoken by older generations while the younger generations of other countries are being raised in their native language.
Given enough time, the Russian language will only be spoken by Russians.
It's also, historically speaking, simply not true that Russia tried to wipe out the languages of the countries it occupied (also, liberated from the Nazis) after WWII. Russian was taught in school as a second language, but there wasn't any plan to wipe out the Polish language, for example.
'Liberated' by invading first you mean. As was done in my country, among others.
Nope.
Doesn’t Indonesian technically fit the definition of a constructed language?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Grandparents was easier to read than yours. Turn your phone sideways
They did quite a good job. :)
But a language also needs an army (or a central bank, or both).
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.
It took certain development of compromise standards and getting used to them, when a single state appeared which needed a unifying language: Israel, Italy, Germany.
All these countries still have a number of dialects spoken casually, but at least there is a common standard to use when in doubt.
WRT the Italian and German cases, these are not really exceptional; standard French wasn't a common native language in France until a post-revolutionary homogenization campaign, Castilian Spanish still isn't universally a native language in Spain, etc.
Making an existing lingua franca into a more common native tongue is a standard and early step in the formation of a nation-state (in the old-world sense) from Norway to, less successfully, India. None of these phenomena set any useful precedent for the establishment of a conlang as an international language.
* 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.
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.
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!
I see a constructed language as something created when someone sits down and deliberately makes a language, as did Zamenhof did when he sat down and made the Esperanto language. This has been a number of times; a partial list is at https://ial.fandom.com/wiki/Linguas
Natural languages occur when two or more people together realize they need to communicate, but do not have a common language to do it with. Nicaraguan Sign Language is a notable example of a language just appearing out of the blue in the last 50 years. Idioglossia languages also frequently pop up, seemingly out of the blue. Pidgin languages (where two or more groups of people who speak different languages need to speak to each other) also pop up pretty quickly when communication needs to be done (and if children are exposed to a pidgin language, it then transforms and becomes a creole language because children will fill out all the “gaps” in the language to make it a full bodied language).
I think there would be huge gains if a language was designed right. It could give us the tools to communicate complex ideas effectively for example, and perhaps make it easier to reduce ambiguity. Numbers 1-10 could be single syllables (or even shorter?) to take advantage of our auditory memory. etc etc
Is this really why people learn a language? I would have thought that people learned a language when they wanted to be able to communicate with people that they couldn't, which also explains why people don't learn these languages (network effect, really)
But strenholme, all official national languages are constructed. Someone sat down and constructed that language.
[1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html#purpose
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.
What is this, Geocities?
As an example, without learning any Russian you have no chance to understand "govorju" which is like the Russian verb "govorit'", which is "mówić" in Polish.
One thing I found interesting is that the cyrillic versions are actually easier to read, as many Slavic sounds can more easily be represented (like "ч" or "щ").
[1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html#disclaime...
Not surprising if they visit each others web pages too often.
It's not called Balkanisation for no reason.
Sincerely, a person from the Balkan.
That was years ago though. Slovio has been dead for the last eight or so years.
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’.
> The word has been used as a euphemism for "poison" since Old High German, influenced by Late Latin dosis (“dose”), from Ancient Greek δόσις (dósis, “something given; dose of medicine”). The original meaning "gift" has disappeared in contemporary Standard German.
So yeah, the word is the same, it just became divorced from the former meaning.
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 interesting.
I think esperanto would have had a better shot had it adopted Zamenhof's early reform.
Also, I have very roughly compared the Slavic languages to see which one I could learn to be able to communicate with people of most Slavic languages[0] and decided that Slovak was the most "average" language so I am planning to learn that. Too bad there's no Slovak Duolingo yet.
[0] Not "most people of Slavic languages", which would obviously mean Russian.
About mutual intelligibility with Scandinavian: quite a few basic words are identical in pronunciation between e.g. Swedish and Dutch, and many are similar enough that when speaking slowly you can get reasonably far, I would think, although I haven't tried that much since in practice you fall back on English all the time. When you look into the dialects there's even more you can find that's very similar.
Of the two that have their own Wikipedia pages linked from there (Tutonish and Folkspraak) I can just about understand almost all of the examples given, though they are very short and selection bias may be at play. Also I speak English, German, and Norwegian, so I guess I have an advantage over speakers of only one Germanic language.
Especially when learning Norwegian I noticed that many words are obviously cognages with either German or English, but not both. For this reason I'm skeptical about the possibility of one vocabulary that is understandable to speakers from all branches. I don't know any Slavic language but know French and some Italian, and the Pan-Romance languages listed elsewhere in this thread seem much more readable to me than these Pan-Germanic ones because their vocabularies are more similar, I think.
There's some extra hilarity there because it's not like all three Scandinavian languages have chosen the same cognates as each other. Swedish more often picked the German version of a word instead of the Old Norse that Norwegian and Danish picked.
"window" is "vindue" in da/no, but "fönster" in se, from "fenster" in ge.
"question" is "spørsmål" in da/no, but "fråga" in se, from "frage" in ge. (Oh look, English picked the French word here!)
There's probably examples of the opposite where Swedish picked the Old Norse word, and Danish or Norwegian picked something from German instead, but I can't think of any right now.
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.
> кде мы знајемо всих и јесмо знајеми од всих
Funny enough, this reads like "old Slavic" to me, rather than "new Slavic" :)
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.
If you're born in a slavic country, learning second and third slavic language can be a matter of few months.
Perhaps, the value such language comes in that it could be designed to cut this process down to simply learning one additional language.
The point is, you don't need another language to speak with other slavs. Most slavs can understand each other you just need put effort into it.
Such language can perhaps broaden your ability to understand each other while speaking your native slavic language, instead of being a replacement language for all.
That's where it could work in my opinion.
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, generally, cultural notions and historical familiarities that to a certain extent are shared by the various Slavic peoples. English for Slavs is a foreign language in the true sense of the word, whereas a language like Russian is much closer linguistically and culturally. There's the heritage of the Soviet Union which makes Russian the trans-national language of choice for the generations educated in the Soviet times. And indeed that could be the very same reason why these days it's rather unpopular among the young people in, say, Poland. Which is a real shame because as a trans-Slavic language IMO it does a great job and is a very beautiful language as well.
I am Polish and when speaking to a fellow Slav, I much prefer to try to get us to speak in our own languages, even if it requires effort. Otherwise, I prefer to speak Russian if the person I'm communicating with knows it too. I find it very, very awkward using English in those situations, i.e. in conversations with a Serb or a Czech (but not with a German or a Swede).
Unless it's a literal matter of life and death to understand what the other person is saying without too much of a delay, it's a pretty asshole-y thing to do:
a) The other person will "immediately" know that you think that their Russian is not up to snuff. b) They'll know their well intended effort isn't appreciated.
Exactly because each communication setting is different, in a number of them, switching to English unconditionally, which is what the parent was suggesting, is indeed an "asshole-y" thing to do.
> Sometime the most important thing is to be understood quickly
Isn't this exactly what I said, "Unless it's a literal matter of life and death to understand what the other person is saying without too much of a delay?"
> Deciding which language to use with which person is a taxing effort in itself, especially in a group setting
In a group -- yes. Else, you just sound lazy at best and like a person who doesn't give a duck at worst.
> On the other hand, if the goal is to build some emotional rapport, trying harder in the other person's native language is worth doing.
The goal is to just be a decent human-being who is at least sometimes considerate of others' wants.
Why would consideration of other person wants trump the consideration of the first preson wants? If is a symmetric situation, then preferences of both sides has equal value.
Also, this is not a thing people need to agree on. There is no problem if each side of dialog uses a different language, if each side comes to a different conclusion about optimal language.
Also, there are a couple of nuances:
- sometimes people assume that if I'm Russian I always prefer speaking in Russian. I don't see why I shouldn't let them know when it is to the contrary.
- even if for some reason they want me to speak Russian when the goal of the conversation would be better served by using English, how should I speak to them? The way I normally speak to my Russian friends, or artificially slowing down my speech and choosing simple phrases? Which one is more offensive?
p.s. I see your point though (i.e. not appreciating the effort). I've heard it's common in some parts of France, where people don't want to you speak French if you don't speak it perfectly. Agreed on the "asshole'iness" of that :)
> I much prefer to try to get us to speak in our own languages, even if it requires effort.
Also, when it does work, we'd get to experience the glimpse of the sense of some shared heritage (e.g. cultural, historical, etc) and at the same time we'd feel good about the uniqueness and differences of our own languages/cultures.
> Otherwise, I prefer to speak Russian if the person I'm communicating with knows it too.
If someone spoke Russian to me, I'd be a) very flattered and b) try accommodating them with their effort as much as possible.
> Neoslavonic has 7 grammatical cases.
Fascinating. The vocative case has disappeared from Slovak (but not Czech). It exists historically, and is still available for ironic contexts, but scholars consider it dead.
Historically, for instance in the Lord's Prayer: Otče náš, ktorý si na nebesiach, ... (Our Father who art in Heaven ...). This "otče" is the vocative case of "otec" (father), something a modern speaker wouldn't use to address his or her father.
Ironically, in phrases like chlapče môj ... (my dear fellow/boy ...), vocative of "chlapec" (boy).
So... all those "Ś ś" and "Ć ć" instead of using Cyrillic? Yeah, no.
But progress?
Don't you tell me to usměhati You stick around, I'll make it zasluženy