from Hacker News

Interslavic Language

by platform on 8/18/19, 5:01 PM with 137 comments

by strenholme on 8/18/19, 8:17 PM
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 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.
by yeellow on 8/18/19, 6:36 PM
Very interesting. I've tried to read some texts and I could easily understand them (as a native Polish speaker). I wonder if it is as easy for other Slavic nationalities. If so, it could be a nice intermediary language, if only for written texts. Unfortunately I guess almost nobody would learn to write or speak it but it is still funny to have a passive ability to read and understand and I guess all Slavic languages could be automatically translated to this interslavic version. It could be tried in museums, restaurants, etc.
by orbital-decay on 8/18/19, 6:44 PM
There's also another language designed to be understandable by most Slavic speakers [0]. For some reason, the authors of both seem to hate each other. [1]
[0] http://www.slovio.com/
[1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html#disclaime...
by aasasd on 8/18/19, 6:31 PM
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’.
by hugh4life on 8/18/19, 6:58 PM
There's a defunct auxlang project called Lingula that aimed to focus on comprehension between romance speakers.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto
by gpvos on 8/18/19, 6:48 PM
Interesting! I have been thinking about a similar "average Germanic" language, but I don't really have enough linguistics background to pull that off yet.
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.
by babuskov on 8/18/19, 6:34 PM
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.
by 0xBABAD00C on 8/18/19, 6:50 PM
It's near-100% intelligible for a Russian speaker: http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/selo.html
> кде мы знајемо всих и јесмо знајеми од всих
Funny enough, this reads like "old Slavic" to me, rather than "new Slavic" :)
by michalu on 8/19/19, 7:33 AM
A friend once told me that you need to know 3 slavic languages to understand all of them very well. I learned that to be true from my own experience.
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.
by ivanhoe on 8/18/19, 10:38 PM
My impression (as being Slav myself and speaking Serbian/Croatian as a mother tongue, and a bit of Russian that I've learned in school) is that Slavs can understand each others fairly well when everyone is simply just speaking in their own language. I really see no point in making the artificial language, as while understanding it is probably not hard, learning a language like this would be super hard because of how close, but still different it is to the existing languages. So you end up with a language that everyone understands, but no one is able to speak it...
by objplant on 8/18/19, 7:28 PM
This is interesting and would be rather useful (also sort of cool) to have a common language shared by so many people living rather near each other (except for far-away regions of Russia). Unfortunately, it doesn't look easy at all: 7 cases and 10 plus 6 extra declensions for example. However, in reality such a common language already exists and it's English, especially among young-enough speakers. In my experience, others often prefer to switch to English rather than pursue the fun of trying to connect the foreign words of a similar language with their meaning.
by olah_1 on 8/19/19, 12:43 AM
There was recently a video posted of Interslavic being used with a Bulgarian, a Polish and a Croatian.
https://youtu.be/NztgXMLwv4A
by kazinator on 8/19/19, 1:42 AM
From tutorial:
> 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).
by cpursley on 8/19/19, 1:41 AM
Isn't Bulgarian a better candidate as it's simpler than Russian, for example (fewer cases, less gender-specific things).
by mancerayder on 8/19/19, 12:46 AM
Did anyone see the strange disclaimer at the bottom? It reminds one of ancient BBS or online flamewars.
by knolax on 8/18/19, 7:26 PM
I wonder what's the benefit of this versus learning whatever the common ancestor of the Slavic languages is.
by kwhitefoot on 8/19/19, 9:23 AM
Please make the page readable without Javascript. It looks fine in Firefox Reader mode.
by konart on 8/18/19, 8:39 PM
>Alphabet extensions
So... all those "Ś ś" and "Ć ć" instead of using Cyrillic? Yeah, no.
by rezmason on 8/18/19, 6:37 PM
Interslavic vocabulary, vocabulary, interslavic
Don't you tell me to usměhati You stick around, I'll make it zasluženy