Interslavic Language (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Interslavic Language (2017)

steen.free.fr

Related ongoing thread:

Slovio, an international simplified Slavic language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30552570 - March 2022 (179 comments)

From a very quick glance, it seems that Interslavic is to Slovio what Interlingua is to Esperanto.

Esperanto is a language that's simple and easy to learn (at least if you're familiar with romance languages), but not necessarily easy to understand if you're not familiar with it.

On the other hand, if you're familiar with 2 or 3 romance languages, try to read https://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua. Even if you've never heard of Interlingua, you'll probably understand most of it. Interlingua is optimized for easy understanding, which means that it adopts common words from romance languages even if they're not totally consistent with the rest of the language. This means that ease of understanding comes at the cost of language consistency and ease of learning. For people in central Europe, I'd say Esperanto is easier to learn (to speak) and Interlingua is easier to understand.

As an Italian, I must admit this is easier to understand than most other romance languages for me.

English native speaker with a few years of academic Spanish, ditto.

Hell, I can understand a lot of this with English alone.

From my experience, a new instance of a panslavic language is inevitably created once different Slavs end up drinking together.

As a Pole, Interslavic "feels" more natural and more intuitive for me. I wonder how other slavic speakers feel.

In the https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30552570 thread there is consensus among Slavs that InterSlavic is easier and more... Slavic.

As a Pole it looks to me like Czech or Slovak.

As a Czech, Interslavic feels to me like a czech written by a dystrophic person. It's really natural.

EDIT: Not "dystrophic" but "dysgraphic".

Dystrophic? (As in: affected by tissue degeneration?)

Oh, no. A typo. I meant "dysgraphic". Someone affected by issues with writing)

To give a second opinion of a Czech person, it doesn't look anything like Czech text to me. If I had to guess, I would say Serbo-Croatian or Slovenian (probably because of the orthography).

It might be interesting to compare these conlangs with actual Slavic languages in terms of pan-Slavic understandability. Slavic languages close to the "center" between western, eastern and southern could score pretty well, like Slovak.

As someone speaking bosnian, I can read & understand it. Feels weird having to replace "y" as "i" in my head as we don't have "y" in our alphabet, and also some cases feel off.

As a Serb, I always need to remember that Bosnian-Serbian written in Cyrillic is basically a 200 year old language.

I like the idea, never heard of it before but from I always lived thinking that reducing variance between Slavic languages is needed because (as a Pole) I understand context but it is hard to perform conversation with different pairs (Slavian PL for example). Good to know that that project exist, maybe it is an niche to use some ml/ai methods to generate pretrained model for generating speech etc. Especially in huggingface like era it could be relatively easy and helpful.And also catchy, just look at that buzzwords ' AI help to unify slavic languages'.

That is amazing and is melting my brain. Not sure how useful it can be for normal communication but would work great for signs and notices as you'd only need one version to cover a quarter of Europe. It's a really well made page, it's fascinating to see the process how is was derived.

Who is funding this? Bless them.

I posted this as a fan of Interlingua, as the name makes clear this is a project from the same philosophy of constructing languages.

The page on Orthography shows the sort of care I would expect from such a project: http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/orthography.html#standard_a...

Your idea of signs and notices could be written in both the Latin and Cyrillic orthographies, and be more legible than not for more than 300 million people.

Interlingua has similar advantages for anyone fluent in a Romance language.

Are there cyrilic using people who don't know the latin alphabet? I mean in reality, not in theory.

If they didn't learn it - why should they?

Sure there is a common application in Math/Algebra and Physics (if the person reading the sign even bothered to learn and didn't forgot everything the second they stepped out) and in product/brand names in the everyday life, but there is a difference between knowing the alphabet and having a vague idea how some letters are pronounced.

Also there is enough of false friends (like `B` or `P`) to completely jumble the pronunciation and consequently fail the understanding.

I didn't know that. We have a strong support for Welsh speakers here but despite that the last person not capable of speaking English has already died many years ago. I imagined it might be the same for Russian people who don't know the latin alphabet since it's taught in school now and everybody goes to school nowadays.

Welsh and English are both use Latin alphabet so it is not quite the same idea.

Russia has an almost mandatory foreign language in their education[0], which is a subject to availability I suppose - if there is no one who can teach the language in some remote village then nothing can be done, though with all that COVID measures I suppose the idea of remote learning is there.

But again, it all depends on the quality of education, the abilities and the will of the student and not being forgotten. People who don't use another language would almost completely lose it in 3-7 years even if they had A+ for it in the school.

Though it all more applies to an older generations, I think, because younger ones should be explicitly exposed to the Latin alphabet through the keyboards of their computers and smartphones, in Instagra/TikTok handles, email addresses and so on.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_State_Exam

> Welsh and English are both use Latin alphabet so it is not quite the same idea.

I am also notice[sic] stuff:

> are both use

From what I’ve read, the 3 Slavic families are mutually intelligible within a family, but not between. Edge cases exist eg in the borderlands between Poland and Belarus/Ukraine.

So this could go a long way towards closer Slavic relations. In the communist days it was common for the northern slavs to vacation in Yugoslavia for example. Maybe a language like this could reignite a sense of unity, but divorced from Russian hegemony as it was in the past. Wishful thinking however.

Not very they're not.

I've travelled in Poland with a bunch of Czechs, and in the Czech Republic and Serbia with Poles.

I understood more than they did!

This language is very similar to my mother tongue Slovenian.

There was even a theory in the 19th century that Slovenian was the ancestor of Old church Slavonic (Panonian theory).

I wonder if it could be integrated with the Cyrillic Polish idea, would be the ultimate conlang, ultimately exotic for non-slavs and possibly practical.

I wonder if there is something similar for English. Of course English is half Germanic, half Romance, but ...

Is this primarily intended to written/read, or spoken?

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