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Comment by dvh | Hacker News Reader

Slovio uses -s suffix for plural which is completely weird in any slavic language, -i would be much more natural (ulcas, domis, glovis vs ulci, domi, glovi) and that is what another panslavic language interslavic/Medžuslovjansky uses (ulici, domi, glavi): http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/

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I'm only familiar with Russian, but "es" for "to be" feels weird too. And it's used where Russian would just omit it. Are there Slavic languages that are more liberal with it? And I feel like some form of Cyrillic would be much more natural both because of the available phonemes and because I believe most Slavic speakers would be more familiar with it than the Latin alphabet. As a non-native learner, I've always had trouble trying to parse out Russian transliterated into Latin script.

This almost looks like something a speaker of a romance language would put together.

> And it's used where Russian would just omit it. Are there Slavic languages that are more liberal with it?

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?

Yeah and I think that’s also why this conlang uses it. Having an explicit “be” enables simpler grammar and is much easier to learn. Nominative case is sort of an implicit “is a” in context and without cases that falls apart.

Even though Russian does drop the "to be" in present tense for all pronouns, other Slavic languages do feature it either as a separate word or together. For example this is how you say "I am Russian" and "You are Russian" in:

Slovenian:

  Jaz sem Rus

  Ti si Rus

Croatian:

  Ja sam Rus

  Ti si Rus

Slovak:

  Som Rus

  Ty si Rus

Whereas in Polish is a joint word (but the to be is still merged in there):

  Jestem z Rosji

  Jesteś Rosjaninem

I also thought that using the Latin alphabet feels a bit of a hack and Cyrillic would be a more "natural" way to put things. However, using Cyrillic would impose a higher learning curve for those who do not it. This is mostly for phonemes that don't have a 1-to-1 representation in the Latin alphabet, like ш, щ, ж and what not. For these cases, languages like Croatian, Slovenian and others have come up with, what is my personal opinion, are quite acceptable workarounds (I just found out that this is called Gaj's Latin alphabet [1]) č, ć, dž, đ, š, ž (I skipped a few). Without knowing initially how they are pronounced, read in context you do get an idea of what the target sound is.

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.

Yep, Croatian/Serbian have a phonemic orthography. Quite easy to write given that sounds map directly to a letter.

the maxim is to "speak as you write and write as you speak". however there are variations to adoptions of the rule. croatians will tend write foreign words as written in that language, while in serbia you always follow this rule. so for example in serbia it is Majkl Džordan while in croatia its just Michael Jordan

I always found this funny. In Russian "second hand" is spelled секонд хэнд, which I find hilarious.

In Czech it's "jsem Rus" and "jsi Rus", the latter can have a "ty" but it's not necessary and I think Slovak is the same.

Which makes sense. The verb has already been declined and gives away which person it's addressing. Same in Spanish: Yo soy (you can drop the yo because soy only applies for yo). Same for other pronouns.

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 [the romanization conventions].

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...

I'd for a long time puzzled over the mysterious \t accent in TeX. Why did DEK implement this obscure diacritical and leave out the more useful Ogonek?¹ It was only when I stumbled across it (somewhat garbled) in an online card catalog entry that I discovered that it was used in some Russian transliteration schemes to represent digraphs like t͡s for ц.

⸻

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.

I see you didn’t spend a week sick in bed with no fresh reading material except for a copy of the TeXbook :) Exercises 9.4 and 9.5 from the chunk of exercises on diacritics there mention ‹Akademii͡a› for ‹Академия› (usually ‹-ija› or ‹-iya›) and ‹I͡urʼev› for ‹Юрьев› (usually ‹Ju-› or ‹Yu-›), which I remember (sans the numbers of course) exactly because I had never before seen that romanization[1] and thought it weird. But apparently the Library of Congress does use it, and if you can get hold of official English translations/selections of Soviet physics or mathematics journals from the 70s and 80s you’ll see the authors’ names spelt according to it as well.

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...

Alas, I read the TeXbook originally in 1986 and while I've dipped into it a lot since then, I've not re-read it in its entirety since that first read. I'm the one responsible for adding a section about the ALA-LC romanization in Tie (typography) on Wikipedia.

On the other hand we commonly omit the "I"/"Jaz" in Slovenian - there's more than enough info in the conjugated verb.

Same in Spanish

Polish example seems to be some mix up of forms:

  Jestem z Polski == I am from Poland
  Jesteś z Polski == You are from Poland
  Jestem Polakiem == I am Polish
  Jesteś Polakiem == You are Polish

Both have very close meaning but 3&4 seem to be equivalent of examples in other languages given above.

Source: I am Polish

Thanks for all the info. I definitely underestimated the number of languages that don't use Cyrillic. I also had it in my head that dropping "to be" in the present tense was more common. Do you know anything about the history of that as far as where, linguistically, it started being dropped? Like which Slavic language groups drop the verb and which don't? I don't know if that makes sense.

I truly have no idea. My knowledge in Russian is very limited. Maybe someone else can chip in

[retracted]

in Russian it is есть / yest, but very commonly dropped from sentences.

> And I feel like some form of Cyrillic would be much more natural both because of the available phonemes and because I believe most Slavic speakers would be more familiar with it than the Latin alphabet.

(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.

Americans telling Slavic speakers what's a more natural alphabet. Feels like a parallel to something.

I feel like I was pretty forthright about how little I know about the Slavic world. I'm certainly not telling anyone anything. I stated what my assumptions were based on what I knew and asked questions hoping for someone with firsthand knowledge to let me know if/where I was off-base.

Numerically, sure, because of the sheer numbers of Russian speakers, but Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Bosniaks (among others) might beg to differ.

Shows how little I know about Slavic languages besides my elementary understanding of Russian.

I appreciate the correction. Definitely didn't expect so many replies, but I'm learning a lot.

Russian just is not a great example of a Slavic language. It is a Slavic language in general yet way too different from the rest of them for a number of reasons.

> Russian just is not a great example of a Slavic language.

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

He probably meant that Russian is an outlier is many respects when it comes to Slavic languages.

Something like Slovakian would be much better as a base.

Having no neighbor to the east helped with that a bit.

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.

All the Balkan Slavic languages also feel just like dialects. I could very easily converse in Polish throughout all Baltic countries. Along with the ones you mentioned. I find Ukrainian very difficult though. I'm not a native Polish speaker so I chalk it up to that.

> All the Balkan Slavic languages also feel just like dialects.

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.

There was a neighbor to the east about a thousand years ago. Ever since, there are a lot of Tatar and Mongolian words in Russian.

When I was doing some canvassing for the election in 2016, I was able to use my limited Czech to speak with some Polish speakers. My grandfathers, one who spoke Czech, the other Slovene, both at a native level (they were raised bilingually in their ancestral language plus English) were able to understand each other. My father was able to leverage his Czech (another bilingual kid) to understand Polish and Slovene and he had a fairly easy time learning Russian.

in south slavic family there is a one-to-one mapping between cyrilic and latin scripts. in serbia, for example, both scripts are official

I see that the front page has language examples both in Cyrillic and in Latin alphabets.

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.

yea that's weird, but in practice they both work I can understand both and don't understand Russian and Polish at all

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