Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language
slovio.com
slovio.com
Interslavic Language (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30553292 - March 2022 (19 comments)
This almost looks like something a speaker of a romance language would put together.
My data point is Bulgarian where you generally can't omit "to be". This may have to do with the fact that Bulgarian has mostly lost its case system?
Slovenian:
Jaz sem Rus
Ti si Rus
Ja sam Rus
Ti si Rus
Som Rus
Ty si Rus
Jestem z Rosji
Jesteś Rosjaninem
I also think that on-boarding Cyrillic-first cultures would be easier because normally countries that use Cyrillic as their main alphabet also teach the Latin alphabet at school (Russia for example does and they also teach you how to write "Russian" using Latin characters because they understand the importance of this). Whereas it's not the same way around: a lot of the Slavic countries do not teach the Cyrillic alphabet at school.
> I've always had trouble trying to parse out Russian transliterated into Latin script. I also think this is because when you're learning Russian as a non-native speaker, the courses focus mainly on Cyrillic (naturally so) so you never really learn that ж -> zsh
ш -> sh
щ -> sch
х -> kh
ь -> '
etc.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaj's_Latin_alphabet
Edit: answer question about Russian transliteration, add missing link and try to fix formatting.
There’s a number of romanization standards for Cyrillic, and which one is the most intuitive might be language-dependent (e.g. what Russian writes as a stressed ‹и› Ukrainian writes as ‹і›, which post-1918 Russian doesn’t use; what Ukrainian writes as ‹и› is closer but not identical to what Russian denotes ‹ы›, which Ukrainian doesn’t use).
Wikipedia has a good summary table[1] of some of the formal standards, but these don’t cover some of the vernacular usage, so to say. The most frequent quirk is probably writing ‹щ› as ‹sch›, as you do, when standards insist on ‹shch› (my guess is because the Belarusian counterpart of ‹щ› is ‹шч›, which would also be written ‹shch›); most confusing is perhaps writing the masculine adjectival ending ‹-ий›, ‹-ый› as ‹-y› or rarely ‹-yy› (writing ‹Navalny› for the surname ‹Навальный› or ‹Zelenskyy› for the surname ‹Зеленський›, maybe because old 19th-century German-inspired romanizations usually wrote it as ‹-i›, merging the ending with its Polish counterpart). I have to say I’ve never seen ‹zsh› instead for ‹zh› for ‹ж›, though.
Empirically, I’ve also found that French people struggle with pronouncing an English-inspired transliteration (‹sh› for ‹ш›, ‹ch› for ‹ч›), but have no problem with finding at least a pronounceable fallback using a Czech/Serbo-Croatian-inspired one (‹š› for ‹ш›, ‹č› for ‹ч›), so diacritics might indeed be underrated here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian#Transl...
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1. I suspect the other reason was that implementing the tie was technically simple since, by allowing it to extend pass its spacing width, it can be treated like any other above-character accent. Ogonek, on the other hand, unlike a cedilla or the dot-under diacritic, requires positioning based on the letter that it's attached to so can't be programmed as easily as a floating diacritic mark.
Note that in modern times, you’re supposed to use the tie to spell affricates and such in IPA as well, like in ‹t͡ʃ› and ‹d͡ʒ› and, yes, ‹t͡s›, even though nobody does as far as I’ve seen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALA-LC_romanization_for_Russia...
Jestem z Polski == I am from Poland
Jesteś z Polski == You are from Poland
Jestem Polakiem == I am Polish
Jesteś Polakiem == You are Polish
Source: I am Polish
(South) Slavic speaker here. Cyrillic would not be much more natural, we haven't used Cyrillic in over 30 years. Latin would be something all of us Slavenes would be able to read.
I appreciate the correction. Definitely didn't expect so many replies, but I'm learning a lot.
i am not sure what you mean but russian is by far the biggest slavic language in terms of number of speakers. i also think it is the biggest in terms of number of litterary and academic works
Something like Slovakian would be much better as a base.
From my west-slavic (Polish) perspective I can understand Czech, Slovakian (a bit harder) and Ukrainian semi-ok. But Russian is way, way harder (there are some similar words but most are alien to me).
I didn't have chance to listen to south slavic languages so I don't know how similar they are to west slavic ones.
If you mean Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin - they are only recognized as languages for political reasons. They actually are a particularly rich continuum of dialects but it is impractical to recognize this because it would imply there should be one literary norm.
in south slavic family there is a one-to-one mapping between cyrilic and latin scripts. in serbia, for example, both scripts are official
Also I do not believe that there can be a better choice than "es", because I suppose that in order to simplify the grammar they have removed the personal terminations from the verbs, in which case "est" of the 3rd person singular becomes "es", just the simple stem of the verb.
Also, even if their examples show an explicit "es", optionally omitting redundant words is a trivial rule to add to any language grammar.
It is likely that there are other aspects of the language that can be criticized, but these 3 points seem OK.
No real slavsman!
Many word forms in InterSlavic just seem like strangely archaic versions of Croatian, but might pass as "just strange" for Ukrainian.
As a speaker of Polish (western Slavic) reasonably familiar with Ukrainian I find InterSlavic and madzuslovanski (or whatever it's spelled) much better than this Slavio.
The languages are much closer than any of them is to Russian.
Greeks influenced Ukrainian language indirectly: via songs. When Ukrainian salt traders (chumaks, чумаки) visited Crimea, they also picked fresh songs to sing when traveling, and then they spread those new song all over Ukraine. Often, chumaks based their songs on Greek songs, because ancient Greeks were much better in music. Chumaks also created portable copy of harp, which they called «bandura» («big thing»), which then used for hundreds of years.
Let's call it Slavia.
Also, instead of returning to our root slavic religion, we got atheism. Without any form of religion, people can not feel that deep bond. Especially Slavic people, who are naturaly very religious.
Yugoslavia was a mistake, but not for reasons you might think.
In most Slavic countries, it is customary to slay and eat a pig on certain holidays, like Christmas and our Slava.
In the US you kill turkeys for Thanksgiving. How different is that compared to other "sacrifices"?
Perun is a "pseudo" God, as much as Zeus was a pseudo God.
And if they are pseudo gods, then Jesus Christ is a pseudo God, too.
Gods exist as long as people believe in them.
Many Slavs feel the same.
When it comes to "one country" - the USSR aimed at that, and from the perspective of hundreds of millions of people, it wasn't the best idea.
Plus, I think that ethnic states are one of the worst inventions of the 19th century, which accelerated a lot after WWI & WWII. I prefer cities where e.g. 1/3 were Polish, 1/3 German, and 1/3 Jewish (as for my pre-war hometown) rather than monoliths. Even in the middle ages, cities had multiple languages and cultures (e.g. German-speaking for trading cities in Slavic and Baltic countries). Right now, even in many multicultural cities, it is often implicitly assumed that there is the "default language" and an ethnic/national/cultural majority.
Yet, this idea would be dangerous even with very different cultures - vide "Ein Reich".
Almost all former European monarchies, from England to Belgium, were authoritarian imperialistic countries.
But even compared to the absolutist monarchies of the west Russia was more authoritarian. For example serfdom was only abolished in Russia in 1861.
Russia wasn't always authoritarian, though. Before the Mongols, it was a bunch of independent, freedom-loving cities. Sort of like the American Wild West.
I feel like we need a new experiment in inclusive governance, and that Slavic countries are the place to do it.
Austria should be replaced by Ukraine and Moldova, though. Austria definitely doesn't belong.
Ukraine and Poland really do belong together. Ukraine is more faithful to traditional Polish culture than Poland. Poland westernized a lot since joining the EU and NATO, and Ukranian cultural influence would be awesome. Conversely, Ukraine could use some economic assistance, where Poland's economy has exploded, for much the same reason of NATO/EU.
Grand Duchy of Lithuania is a better model, IMO - a state with a Lithuanian pagan ruler, and a mix of pagan, Catholic, and Orthodox elites and population all living together.
(1) The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had elected kings and a parliament. It was a republic to the same degree as Rome or some of the more democratic Greek city-states. The only people who could vote were nobles, but nobles were about 10% of the population. That's about on-par with with Athens or the Roman Empire. Even in the US, only white landowners could vote when it was first founded. That's not too dissimilar from the Polish nobility.
(2) Jews emigrated to the Commonwealth from all over Europe for better treatment. Good treatment? No. Better treatment? Without a doubt.
The Commonwealth wasn't a modern enlightened democracy, but this was 1600, not 1900. It did incredibly well for 1600.
For one thing nobles took a lot of Jewish immigrants, used them as middle management (which frustrated the church, who in turn sent angry peasant mobs against Jews, which meant Jews had to work with nobility for their protection).
Also a lot of nobles weren't Catholic, especially in 1500s protestantism was very popular (about 1/3rd of nobles and majority of magnates were protestant). Only in times of Zygmunt 3 Waza who was super Catholic and introduced some discrimination it changed significantly.
In fact nobility forced kings to sign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Confederation which banned religious persecution.
Majority of nobles from eastern parts of PLC were orthodox at first (later they polonized and switched to Catholicism mostly), and there were some Jewish and Muslim nobles (but it was very rare). They still had all the rights including voting for kings, wars and taxes.
> There's a reason why there were so many uprisings on the territory that is Ukraine today, back when it was a part of the Commonwealth
Mostly economic, but yes, there has been some religious persecution there. Especially after the attempts to create orthodox-style pope-sanctioned religion in Ukraine.
As for nobles not carrying out religious persecution, I don't even know what to say. Local magnates were the main drivers of the religious persecution of Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians. And sure, that persecution was often economic in nature, but it was also very clearly carried out along religious lines.
I'll grant you that religious intolerance in Poland was primarily between Catholics and Orthodox, rather than Catholics and Protestants as elsewhere in Europe. But that's to be expected from a country where most subjects are either Catholic or Orthodox, no?
EDIT: I suppose our perspectives are so different because we're focusing on different time periods. My take on this is that early Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth inherited many of the political arrangements of GDL, and tolerance was one of them. But as the center of political power shifted over to Poland over time, they were weakened.
There was some of that (especially in lat 1600s), but compared to basically any other country at the time it was significantly better. PLC even had a law that each newly elected king had to sign where he promised not to persecute anybody because of religion or he stops being the king: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Confederation
Majority of magnates (the big nobility that actually decided things by buying other nobles during elections) weren't Catholic in 1500s.
Slavs were never for communism.
i disagree to some extent. historically slavic culture tends to be much more communal than rest of europe. even in eu you can see this manifested in thr resistance to liberalism that comes from all (?) slavic countries
Then you get into no true Scottsman arguments about what is, and what isn't communism, and whether or not state capitalism is guaranteed to be a failure, or whether it was state capitalism, as practiced by the Eastern Block is guaranteed to be a failure. And then you can further split hairs as to whether or not having some aspects of state capitalism in your economy are better than having no aspects of it, and where the optimal line is.
And then you find that you've wasted hours of time arguing, but haven't actually convinced anyone, or learned anything new.
The one country thing, I think USSR made it unpalatable, but a lot of conflicts would not be happening if there was some construct that allow simpler work and life in Slavic worls. Something like EU, without bureaucracy, maybe just rule that people can cross countries easier and live and work.
I don't think it would be problem of Russians being the most numerous, as long as people would use Interslavic in communication and be able to travel and work more easily.
But yes, cultural exchange can be a good first step.
[1] See: The Brits and the French, the French and the Germans, etc, etc.
"Slovio is not very Slavic at all: its grammar is almost entirely based on Esperanto, its word building mechanisms are mostly Germanic, and its vocabulary, although clearly dominated by (often mutilated) Russian words, does not relate in any predictable way to the Slavic languages either. As a result, its educational value is practically zero."
This was also my impression of Slovio after attempting to read a few texts. Interslavic feels much more natural, coming from the perspective of a heavy dialect speaker of one of the south Slavic languages.
Does that make sense?
That said, I would be curious how it works for other Slavic languages. Or, in other words, is it sort of equidistant or favors one language or the other?
I mean, the FAQ claims that it is the easiest for Czechs and Slovaks (is it because of their geographical centrality and possibility that these languages are the closest to the "Slavic average"?) and harder for the South Slavs. However, and always, I would love to see any data.
This seems enough to allow me to understand effortlessly the examples that I see for both InterSlavic and Slovio.
However I would need to study them more in detail, to form an opinion about which is better.
At least they achieve the goal of easy understanding for someone familiar with Slavic languages.
I feel like Interslavic is closer in vocabulary to Slovak, but the form of the words is a bit foreign (reminds me of some other Slavic languages, although I can't quite figure out which one), while the opposite is the case with Slovio - the form of the words feels closer to Slovak, but the vocabulary itself feels more "Russian" to me.
I really like the approach of Slovio, it was instantly clear and understandable. I think with some practice it won't be a challenge to adopt it in writing (e.g. plurals with "-s" for some words is a bit strange at first).
At first glance:
- Interslavic needlessly complicates the alphabet - there is no need for "y" where "i" would suffice, there is no need for "Ě" where "je" would suffice
- Interslavic needlessly complicates spelling / words - surely there should be a drive towards simplification and shortening, especially in a "shared" langauge:
"koristajut" -> "koristaju"
"medžuslovjansky" -> "medslovanski"
"jest" -> "je" or "es"
I have always enjoyed the closeness of Slavic languages. I don't know a lick of Polish, but I can read and understand maybe 70-80% of a polish paragraph. same for a lot of Slavic languages.
From my experience, Slovak speakers can understand other Slavic languages pretty well: Czech is basically our second native language (although for some reason it seems Czechs don't understand Slovak quite to the same degree), Polish, Slovenian and Croatian are understandable as well. Russian is a lot harder, even when written in Latin. I don't have experience with Ukrainian.
Many Turkic-language-speaking communities are getting influenced by Turkish or Russian, and given that Turkish being heavily influenced by French, Persian and Arabic in the history, it feels like the languages are losing their essence.
I know the whole deal with spoken language development as they borrow, grow, die and stuff but just like sometimes people want to code in a much simpler programming language / framework, I also have the dream of inventing a toy-but-maybe-even-useful Turkic spoken language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Slavic_language
http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/constructed_slavic_language...
I recall watching this video at the time (which might have been their inspiration to start learning it).
Also w for szcz makes no sense. Use r for "ja" while you're at it :)
Propbably an attempt to use a letter similar to <Щ, щ> graphically.
> Why "x" instead of "z" in cz/sz/rz etc. sounds?
I think it is something picked up from Esperanto. Traditional way to replace Esperanto-specific letters, when not supported, was to change it to a letter followed by an “h”, but there is also a more widely used method using “x” instead.
Yes but then let's use R for "ja" :) This language seems like someone coming from cyrylic wanted to use latin letters, it's not good for Slavic languages that already used latin letters.
Ditto for я and ю.
Considering we're talking about constructed languages, whether "it's supposed to read `sh`" or "it's supposed to read `sht`" is defined by the author of the language.
On top of that, even coming to a conclusion on what it's supposed to read like means extrapolating it from present-day languages or from the now-dead languages. In a lot of cases, different languages will just have different readings. I.e. consider these words:
Group 1 - BG reads sht, RU reads shch
BG щипя - RU щипаю BG щастие - RU счастье BG ущърб - RU ущерб BG щит - RU щит BG вещ - RU вещь
Group 2 - BG reads sht, RU reads sht
BG нещо - RU нечто (Russian reads as "cht" here, but close enough) BG що - RU что (Russian reads "shto", at least in modern reading)
Group 3 - loaned words mostly try to mimic original
BG щора - RU штора BG поща - RU почта BG щанга - RU штанга
Plus there's the weird separate word [BG "sht" щателен - RU "tshch" тщательный].
Barring the loaned words from mostly Germanic origin, it looks like one language just sticks to "sht", while the other prefers "shch" and considers the "t" redundant. The interesting exception is the "що - что" pair, which is seems to preserve the T sound.
Speaking as a Russian, I think that "shch" is close enough for an international conlang. It's not a sound that's particularly easy to learn or explain.
As for "X" it exists in some Slavic alphabets, for example in Slovak (but apparently only in loan words). In Polish it theoretically doesn't, but actually does (loan words use x when the word is new, and with time it's replaced with ks).
Slavic languages are generally tongue twisters for non-Slavic speakers, what with consonant clusters like "mst" or "vzd".
As for s+z - interesting, in Polish there's no s+z pronounced separately. "Szadi" would be "z zadu" and you do a pause between the z letters. And if we have "from $PLACE" where place starts with S we change "z" to "ze" for exactly this reason. So "Z Rosji" and "Z Zimbabwe" but "Ze Szwecji".
"x" at least has the advantage that it's foreign to almost everyone, and thus forces you to look up what the hell it's supposed to mean! But in general, I think that diacritics work much better for readability of Latin-based Slavic alphabets, with Czech being a decent starting point ("ch" aside).
As for the consonant clusters, they are easy to pronounce to Slavs, because we're used to them. Ask a native English speaker sometime what they think about a combo like "vzt" :)
(The reason why we ended up with these unusual consonant clusters is because of the loss of yers. For example, "pomst" and "мстить" are derived from proto-Slavic "*mьstь", where "ь" was originally short "e". This is also why vowels show up in the middle of those consonant clusters sometimes when words change such that the syllable that used to have a yer in it becomes stressed - as in Russian "месть".)
- ch (č) instead of cx
- sh (š) instead of sx
- zh (ž) instead of zx
- shch instead of wx
- kh instead of 'x' or 'ch' (kharkiv)
- j instead of gx or dž or dzh. It's already well established how to pronounce 'jamaica' worldwide
- y instead of the slavic j. There is no need for i and y to represent the same vowel
- ye instead of ě
- ty instead of ť
- dy instead of ď
- ny instead of ň
- rzh instead of řI believe that most of them will pronounce Jamaica in their own way and different from the others. Thus there is no established rule about how to pronounce Jamaica.
Therefore, I believe that the only acceptable rule for the sound of "J" is the rule that is the oldest, i.e. to use "I" strictly for the vowel and "J" for its consonant form.
For the voiced form of "č", the best would be to use g with caron, for symmetry, even if currently few fonts include this character.
In my opinion "Y" should not be used for any sound of a Slavic language. It should better be reserved for its original sound, which is missing from the Slavic languages.
Sxto es Slovio? -> Що е словйо? Ucxijte Slovio tper! -> Учайте словйо тпер!
or something like it. seems way more Slavic to me... even though the old cyrillic (original if u want) is nothing like the modern cyrillic. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Cyrillic_alphabet#/media...
Interestingly the original script by Cyril and Methodius was called Glagolic and was quite hard (see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script). It was not until their scholar Kliment took to simplify the script, and it seems is mostly his decision to make the characters more like the Coptic and Greek. Even though his interpretation of the Glagolic alphabet bears the name of his teacher.
you may be interested in this also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script
For instance zx is really ž written digraphs.
Cyrillic, not to mention Glagolic, would make this kind of language less accessible to the world at large.
Latin script has eaten the world; suggesting Cyrillic for any new language is lunacy.
The number of languages using Cyrillic is vastly smaller than Latin script, and are geographically clustered in areas that belonged to the Soviet Union.
I speak Slovak and Czech, and both of the above seem easier to me than Polish or Slovenian for example.
Which brings me to, is there some sort of visualization of proximity of different Slavic languages? How much they differ between each other, which ones for closer groups, etc...
> Новйу межународйу йазика! Што ес Словио? Словио ес новйу межународйу йазика ктор разумийут чтирсто милион лудис на целойу земла. Словио можете употребит дла гворение со чтирсто милион славйу Лудис от Прага до Владивосток; от Санкт Петербург через Варшава до Варна; от Средземйу Морие и от Северйу Морие до Тихйу Океан. Словио имайт простйу, логикйу граматиа и Словио ес идеалйу йазика дла днесйу лудис. Учийте Словио тпер!
Pretty cool.
You see, after not having much of an outlet for my Bulgarian in the past ~18 years I have forgotten some words!
FFS, even programming language choice is oftern dictated by the ecosystem of already existing libraries nowadays :)
If Russia sponsored this for their imperialist dreams, they should've instead build a Simplified Russian, like you have Simplified Chinese. At least it would be rewarding to read some Dostoevski in something close to the original, and X% of SR learners would also grow up to learn Traditional Russian too...
(Though judging by how things are going, not likely.)
Also, it would just make it harder to type on current layouts.
Every day is a school day. As a middling Czech speaker I wondered WTF this was until I did a bit of googling to find out I didn't know the name of the world's largest ocean in Czech :D I was thinking "what on earth is the 'quiet ocean'?" ("tichý" = "quiet")
I get that in the cyrillic alphabet, 'x' is the 'h' character, but once you transliterate to a latin alphabet, it makes no sense to use it in that way...
Especially when the role of 'h' in latin alphabets has been hard-to-soft conversion specifically in most languages (and transliterations) using it.
I speak Latvian, russian and a bit of Polish. I could easily imagine a Slavic interlanguage, as knowing russian helped a lot with Polish. Learning russian took a lot of effort, though.
So, besides having a bunch of shared nouns, adding Baltic languages to the mix does not make much sense IMO. Despite having a shared ancestor (in theory), Baltic languages are not very mutually intelligible with Slavic.
Edit:
And also, if it does take on this impossible mission, it should at least be called Balto-Slovio.
I find it hard to imagine such a language, as the languages really are far off from each other.
Interslavic seems to be south-slavic biased.
Purely subjectively, Slovio text reads more aesthetically pleasing. I think this might be because the south-slavic roots are more prominent in our east dialects spoken in the country side, while Slovio seems closer to me to the standard codified language.
I'm a native English speaker in the Czech Republic. I've been struggling to learn Czech for 8 years now. It is my 6th language, not that I'm very fluent in any of the others, but by far the hardest.
I find Slovio much easier to read and understand than Interslavic, which with my A2-to-B1 level Czech remains quite impenetrable.
I've travelled around 5 or 6 Slavic-speaking countries now and often show people Slovio, and though they've never heard of it, they all find that they can read and understand it without problem. I find that an interesting data point.
Jan Hus was later burned at the stake for his 'heresies', which probably slowed down the uptake of his eminently useful invention in the rest of the world.
It is my opinion that even English more than 600 years later could benefit from it, as in: 'caš ček' instead of 'cash cheque', thus also finally attaining much simpler, logical and phonetic spelling.
Russia will be there after Putin. They have a very rich culture with excellent poets, some of the best mathematicians in the world etc. All this is trod upon by a merciless clique - and even though they have managed to brainwash a part of the population, and even though the sanctions we impose hurt ordinary citizens, it is crucial not to forget it is not and it will never be a war against Russian people. Otherwise we risk becoming just like those beasts we're fighting against.
(This is only tangential to the topic - Slovio is a good idea but, just like all artificial languages, will have problems becoming more popular.)
Proto-Slavic *vьśi ("all") would yield "vsi", not that far off. Many modern Slavic languages add additional suffixes: wszystcy, všichni, vsichki etc., which are secondary. Serbian comes close but they swapped the first two consonants: svi.
Likewise Serbian sutra, which in Russian is zavtra, same idea (in the morning, i.e. tomorrow) but with seemingly more unnecessary manipulations (considering morning is still utro in Russian).
Russian vs'ak "everyone" = Serbian svak "everyone"
No one speaks proto slavic, so it is all conjectures based on languages that were spoken more recently.
I believe linguist academics are citizens of their countries, and their interpretations of things in the past are influenced by languages they speak.
Proto-Slavic světъ => Serbian svet/svit, Russian svet.
It's two unrelated words which just happen to start with the same two consonants in Serbo-Croatian out of all Slavic languages, after the phonetical change vs- => sv-
Not really. Written Slavic exists since 9 century and it was spelt vs- already back then. Serbo-Croatian is an outlier here because all other Slavic languages have vs-.
Baltic languages are related to Slavic and Old Prussian had "wissa" for "all" (not "siva")
Also:
svak => svako
svit => svetI'm not sure what the argument is here. Can you elaborate?
S utra = "starting from the morning"
Za utra (utrom) = "after the morning"
Both have a right to exist, just slightly different original meanings.
For example, some Russians say "v ogorode" ("in the garden"), while others say "na ogorode". We don't say "v" somehow got "distorted"/morphed into "na". Some dialects simply choose to use a different, unrelated preposition in the same context.
I can give an example from Germanic languages.
Old English: tōdæġ (modern English "today")
Swedish: idag "today"
Dutch: vandaag "today"
Same root ("day"), same meaning ("today"), but different languages chose different prepositions/prefixes (to-, van-, i-).
Just like with s- vs. za- in Russian/Serbian.
"Slovio was the first Slavic-based constructed language with a substantial dictionary and a small user community, at its peak consisting of 10-15 users (mostly diaspora Slavs) and a number of interested bystanders. In spite of heavy marketing on the part of its creator, Slovio gained little support; it was heavily criticized for its artificial, un-Slavic character and the radical Slavic-nationalist views expressed by its users. Perhaps due to Hučko's insistence on owning the language and his hostile attitude towards proposed changes (similar to the situation with Volapük), people interested in a pan-Slavic language moved on to other projects. It became defunct by about 2011."
If you want to maximize, then you should prioritize Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic over Spanish & French.
But if you maximize you need to decide where you plan to travel and use the new language. I assume people learning these pan-slavic artificial languages want to travel salic states in Europe. But once you cross a border from Polan to Germany, from Ukraine to Romania, from Solovakia to Hungary, from Czech republic to Austria, from Belarus to Lithuania, your laguage skills will become usless. My advice to learn a language which you can use over all of Europe, not just slavic countries.
If that's your goal, you should be learning three languages, in the following order of priority:
1. English
2. Mandarin
3. Hindi
Dutch.
Only half joking. Dutch would at least make a great starting point in terms of written language.
As a native speaker with English as a second language and German as my third, I can read a whole lot of Dutch because it's closer in spelling to Scandinavian languages than German is, but has kept many words that are still used in German but archaic or different in Scandinavian languages.
It's not unusual for me to find it easier to read Dutch than to read the same text in German despite having actually had German at school but never having had any formal Dutch (and I have no hope of understanding spoken Dutch).
Consider a few examples: skip (Norwegian), skib (Danish), ship (English), schip (Dutch), Schiff (German). Or dag (Norwegian, Danish, Dutch), day (English), Tag (German). Dans (Norwegian, Danish, Dutch), dance (English), Tanz (German).
Where there's broad concordance between the Germanic languages, Dutch is usually close to the majority of the languages, but it often retains some spellings that are readily recognisable to the others when it's closer to German, and in the cases where it's closer to English those words are usually recognisable to other Germanic speakers anyway.
Regarding spoken Dutch, I agree, it's painful to listen to. And I just got a horrible thought: A mix of Danish and Dutch pronunciation... I imagine it'd sound somewhat like death metal ;-)
As a native Norwegian speaker, on one hand there are lots of words used there which are easier for me to understand than they would be for a native English speaker, but at the same time many are unnecessary reversions towards Old English or pointless changes where modern Germanic languages are closer to modern English.
It seems like a reversion without any thought to how these terms have kept evolving in the rest of the Germanic sphere.
E.g. "riche" on one hand sounds closer to "rike" or "Reich", but "state" has close cognates in most Germanic languages (stat, staat etc.) and stat/staat and rike/Reich have different connotations - we'd tend to use rike/Reich in contexts relating to monarchy or evoking history or tradition. E.g. kongerike/Königreich for kingdom (but also kongedømme), but stat/staat when talking about a modern state.
And e.g. "Hof" as in "Speaker of the Hof", while it has close cognates, is an unnecessary leap given "house" has close cognates too (hus, Haus) which are used in the same context, and the "problem" there isn't the word "house" but the whole construction.
Translating United States to Oned Riches also takes it further away from modern Germanic languages rather than moving closer to them (e.g. Forenede Stater, Vereinigten Staaten).
Similarly, the month names in most Germanic languages are close to modern English. Meadowmonth for July is far harder for me to understand than July - in Norwegian it is juli.
And "lawmoot" for Congress is harder too. Compare kongress, Kongress... At least if they wanted to go that way, e.g. landthing would be far more understandable for speakers of other Germanic languages as a reference to a parliamentary house (moot works fine for meeting, compare e.g. møte, but feels no simpler to me than meeting)
Similarly "landtung" for "language" is weird. In e.g. Norwegian we have "tunge" for "tongue" and it can sort of be used that way, but "tale" is more understandable if you want to go that way, but "speak" as in "to speak" is a closer cognate to the words used for language in other Germanic languages (e.g. språk, Sprache) without sounding archaic.
And "narrowing" for "strait" while in e.g. Norwegian it is "stred", or "landstretch" for "landmass" vs. "landmasse" in Norwegian.
As an "alternate history English" it kinda works. As a "modern Germanic English" it's tiresome to try to read...
I agree that there's a lot of these, but arguably English still seems to have way more Latinate/Romance borrowings than your average Germanic language. So the direction they're going for seems correct, they're just overdoing it (which after all is the whole point of that project!) and, more worryingly, sometimes missing the most appropriate Germanic word for their desired concept, like "Thing" for a democratic assembly.
I agree that "tung" could as well be a modernised form of Old English "sprǣc". I have no explanation for "Hof". I am not qualified to objectively discern whether "thing" is a better conceptual fit than "moot".
Anyone can contribute to Anglish and improve on its imperfections.
No, I don't. That is exactly my point. Or rather, I don't agree with what they're actually doing, which is to only include words derived from old Germanic languages. E.g. modern Germanic languages have had words like Congress/kongress/Kongress for centuries. I'd be happy with a language trying to stick to words closer to the consensus of modern Germanic languages.
If you want a mid-point between modern Germanic languages, stripping the language of imports does not work, as then you're creating friction for speakers of other Germanic languages which have also imported those words, not reducing it. I don't see any value in that.
It's fine that this is not Anglish' goal - they can do what they want -, but it makes it unsuitable as an attempt at a shared Germanic language. Their translation of names in particular is outright obnoxious and goes in the opposite direction of a trend to reduce the use of translated names in a lot of languages and reduces understanding rather than increasing it. That's their choice, but it's a very different one.
If I were to try to create a mid-point out of English, I'd narrow the focus massively to deprecate words that have decent Germanic replacements in common use in the other languages, and aim to shift meanings to accommodate it, such as e.g. giving "stool" the same broad meaning as a replacement for "chair" as its cognates have in other Germanic languages. And I'd leave words that have close cognates in other Germanic languages entirely alone, irrespective of the source, such as congress, because they're more likely to be understood by other Germanic speakers than many of the Anglish replacements.
It's a nice way to spread slavic love and understanding around the world.
I was amazed by the design and only thing I miss would be marquee text.
I loved animated gifs though and table layout.
I can't guess what that last part means even with context
I think this means "Slovio is the ideal language for/of everyday/today's people"
"ludis" is 100% "people". Not sure what "dla" and "dnesju" mean. In Bulgarian, "dnes" (днес) means "today" so that's where I'm coming from.
A simplified "linear" scheme I'm referring to:
From perfect "intelligibility" (universal language/Proto-language) --> mostly ("dialects") to limited ("seperate" language) to virtually none at all (seperate "language family").
Of course this gets complicated when e.g. different language families get in 'contact'. The current Persian language "Farsi" (an Indo-European language, the oldest well-attested Indo-Iranian languages being "Vedic Sanskrit", "Avestan" etc.) is heavily soaked with 'Arabic words' (Semitic language family) through the Islamic Conquest. One of many such examples:
Farsi: کتاب (ketâb) "book", Old Hindi: कतेब (kateba) "book", "Qu'ran" comes from the Arabic root of ك ت ب (k-t-b): "related to writing". "Arabic" in turn is related as a Semitic language to "Hebrew" which has exactly the same root כ־ת־ב: "forming words pertaining to writing". The constructed Proto-West Semitic word *katab: "prick, cut, scratch, scrape".
That being said, from a sociologist/ethnologist/historian perspective such artifical constructions are hardly compatible to the cultural complexities in the real world, so mostly it remains a very limited scholarly exercise or it gets "imposed" in order to "stick".
As someone speaking West-Slavic "Polish", learning East-Slavic "Russian" really unlocked for me a big cultural treasury chest which I would argue is even a better pay-off than trying to ideally reconstruct a "neutral" language to circumvent the deep rooted "political" resentments. As a fun "cognitive"/"evolutionary" exercise, I'm all for it but in order to really appreciate the cultural richness (language as an expression) immersing yourself in a 'living' language is so much "brain-compatible: (1) Don't obssess over "correctness" and (2) realize the more languages you actually learn the easier it gets to aquire more. (If you speak French and learn Spanish, Latin will connect a lot of things and in the end Italian will be a "breeze") Transfered to "Slavic" from a "Polish" perspective in learning some "Bulgarian" and "Lithuanian" with my "Russian" in the end you get more bang for the buck. 3 languages are not 3 languages. E.g. "Russian", "Japanese" and "Arabic" would be 1-2 orders of magnitude "costlier".
To sum it all up: The most elegant and beautiful solution in one's mind ([...] what Old Church Slavonic would have become had it been allowed to develop naturally over the centuries [...]) can distract you from the obivous and the most feasible solution, now, in the real world of "communicating". Just learn the languages "and" at the same time enjoy the beauty of the interconnectedness of languages. There is no pure language, they are all connected, in my eyes: beautifully, as they to my constant surprise succinctly bear our cultural heritages.