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.
I'm curious what you would think of the history of Standard Italian or Modern Hebrew. In both cases, there was no such thing as a native speaker 300 years ago, but they were revived from historical literary sources to coincide with a new political identity or state, and today millions of people count them as their native language.
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.
* 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.
These were absolutely not constructed. The Italian case was a process of making official a register that had evolved naturally over 700 years; as it had been in continuous use in modern states, updating was not necessary.
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 don’t see either Hebrew or Italian as constructed languages. Hebrew, as other posters has pointed out, has been a liturgical language (akin to Latin or Coptic) for a long time, and is a direct derivative of a natural language. Italian is also a natural language, derived from the Florentine dialect of the Tuscan language.
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).
Modern Hebrew is just one example of the fact that there is no such thing is a binary distinction between natural and constructed languages. The main difference between both extremes is that a natural language is the result of a process of gradual evolution, whereas a a constructed language can be defined as "any language that is based on deliberate invention, modification or selection of the core material by a concrete author or group of authors with a discernible purpose in mind".
However, every natural language has invented elements and every constructed language has naturalistic elements. Some languages that are usually considered natural display an exceptionally high level of human intervention, and some of them even have an author. Other examples are Old Church Slavonic, Nynorsk, Bahasa Indonesia, Revived Cornish, Katharevousa Greek, Rumantsch Grischun and Euskara Batua (Standardised Basque).
All we can say is that these languages, along with languages like Interslavic, Interlingua, Latino Sine Flexione etc. belong to a gray area between natural and artificial ("semiconstructed languages").
Hebrew had over a million speakers even when it wasn't anyone's native language. It was known to Jewish men who studied in a cheder as boys (those who did not continue to higher studies/seminary in a yeshiva), the way I think Arabic is known to Muslims who are not native speakers. Hebrew was used for literature and poetry and for communication between Jewish communities that didn't share a native language. It wasn't reconstructed from literary sources, it was only modernized for everyday use.
The problem that there were several dialects, each having a significant number of speakers, both in medieval Hebrew and medieval Italian languages, to say nothing of Germanic languages.
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.
Because it was used for international communication (e.g. for da Volterra's travel memoir and rabbinical responsa), and so was standardized across a wide geographic area. For example, before the expulsion Ashkenazis would send legal questions to Spain for answers from prestigious rabbis, and the resulting legal rulings would be distributed across the Mediterranean and as far as Iran.
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.
Serbo-croatian might go to that list as well, as it was an official language in the former Yugoslavia. French too. Spanish (Castillan). Seems like interslavic might have a chance only in a hypothetical panslavic country.
There is a critical difference between Esperanto and Interslavic. Esperanto is meant for communication between Esperanto speakers. Interslavic, on the other hand, is meant to be understandable for Slavs who haven't actually learned it. In other words, the success of Interslavic cannot only be judged by the number of people who learnt it. Basically, one speaker is enough to serve an entire audience, one translator is enough to serve all Slavic readers. Creating a community of Interslavic speakers has never been the primary purpose of creating the language.
The thing Interslavic is doing has also been tried before, but the illustrative example isn't Esperanto (which is an ad-hoc mixture of words taken arbitrarily from existing languages and put into a synthetic grammar) but rather Interlingua, which is a kind of streamlined Romance language. It too is more-or-less comprehensible by people who speak any Romance language, and was intended to be used in much the same way. In fact, to quote the creator of Interlingua writing in Interlingua:
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.
(Edit: to translate for non-Romance speakers, this means, "The only important fact (from the point of view of Interlingua itself) is that Interlingua, thanks to its goal of reflecting the cultural—and therefore linguistic—homogeneity of the West, is capable of providing tangible services at this precise moment in the history of the world. It is for its actual contributions, and not the promises of its adherents, that Interlingua wishes to be judged.")
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.
Please don’t indent quoted text as code. It makes reading on mobile a chore and isn’t great on desktop either. Use
> 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.
As a French, the text is also really easy to understand, except for the two words "vole esser". That being said, writing in this language would still require months of learning.
i don't particularly speak any romance language, but that being said, i still more or less had a vague understanding of what was being said. granted, there was a period of my life where I studied several different world languages, back when I was obsessed with linguistics, and even though I don't speak really any of them with any fluency, it would seem that through osmosis i at least gained an appreciation of some fundamental etymological patterns across those languages
Well it was based off a particular dialect of Malay, but it’s certainly not exactly the same as that dialect, nor the language spoken in Malaysia today. The Interslavic language in the OP is also based on existing languages. It was also implemented the same way you’d imagine a created language would be. A central authority came up with the language, told the people to learn it, and then a couple hundred million of them actually did.
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.
Esperanto would have had a good chance of becoming a useful language had the League of Nations adopted it as its official language. However the French veto prevented this and essentially killed the movement.
It is not our purpose to build a community of Interslavic speakers and we do not ask anybody to actually learn it; we merely offer suggestions that will enable people to make themselves understandable to (other) Slavs in a language that is essentially their own. Given the character of the Slavic language family, it should be possible to speak or write in such way that ca. 90% of it will be readily understandable for virtually every Slavic speaker. [1]
I have high hopes for a constructed language to someday become the dominant language. But I think it would need to be heavily modelled along multiple dimensions, serious computational power would need to be brought to bear on it to make it accessible and useful, and it would need to be tested on multiple focus groups with wildly different first languages, etc.
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
> 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.
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)
Sounds like they mean prestige of the language, as in people will often learn the most prestigious language they can to avail themselves of the opportunities available only to those who speak that language.
> 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.
But strenholme, all official national languages are constructed. Someone sat down and constructed that language.
And in practice, if one Slavic language comes close to serving as a lingua franca in Eastern Europe, isn't it Russian? If you're going to learn a second language in order to communicate with people, you're going to learn a language with a large existing community - English, Modern Standard Arabic, Standard Chinese (Mandarin), Russian, French (in West Africa), etc.
Definitely not - among other things - for social/political reasons. Russia has occupied central/eastern countries for four decades and most people prefer to be as far away from it culturally as possible.
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.
Yes, there's strong anti-Russian feeling in several countries, but Russian is still, by far, the Slavic language with the most second-language speakers.
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.
I think feelings tend to run negative towards the Russian government rather than Russian people. I feel that Russian and American people are more alike than we care to admit at least.
>but Russian is still, by far, the Slavic language with the most second-language speakers
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.
What a negative comment! The same could be said of English, which is the dominant international language because of British imperialism.
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.
The second-language speakers skew old, though. People under 30 are much more likely to speak English or German. (Not trying to say that English should be the preferred lingua franca here, just that Russian doesn't have the headstart your statistics suggest).
We're talking about Slavic languages. I've said repeatedly that English is the international language, but if it comes down to Russian vs. a constructed Slavic language, Russian is obviously more attractive, given its existing speaker base and culture.
There are many reasons why this hasn’t happened, but I think you pointed out the main one: English is the language with the largest existing community, so I think most Slavs would rather learn it as the second language, unless there’s a good reason to choose a different one due to some circumstances (eg proximity to a border, widespread business with a certain country, etc).
In Czechia, English is definitely the most reasonable L2 to learn, by far. Even for L3 I wouldn't be sure Russian is a better choice than German, which is just super useful around here.
I learned Russian basically for irrational reasons. I'm glad I did, but I can't say it is very useful.
The main problem with Russian is that Russia/the USSR have been trying to impose it as a lingua franca in Central and Eastern Europe, and failed. Most people in those countries simply won't accept it.
Besides, Russian is a complex language, with lots of elements that are different from other Slavic languages. Most people who haven't learned it won't understand it either.
> The main problem with Russian is that Russia/the USSR have been trying to impose it as a lingua franca in Central and Eastern Europe, and failed. Most people in those countries simply won't accept it.
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.
If you ignore the politics and that it uses an entirely different alphabet than half of the other slavic countries. I am a native Polish speaker and have trouble reading Russian text even with repeated, limited text (genealogy resources such as birth acts). I definitely don't understand most of casual Russian.
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.
My two cents,
I skimmed through a few texts and I can understand 60-70% of what I've read. I'm a native Russian speaker, btw. However, I'd say I'd be skeptical about this whole idea, since I'd still need to invest considerable effort to learn the rest. Instead, I'd rather learn English, even though it's even more effort, still, a cost-benefit ratio seems to be much better in my particular case, as English will pretty much let me communicate with 1.5B people, which probably includes most Poles anyway.
Croatian here. I understood everything as well. No way I could write / construct anything with it without full-blown learning. However, I also understood all of English used to describe it and I can use English to write and construct text already. So, there’s that too.
I'm from Bosnia and I can understand almost everything. There are some words where I have to stop and think but in the end, it's completely understandable. This is a great idea!
I am a native Polish speaker as well, and I can understand the texts very well, but I think they might be more difficult for younger readers, who did not learn any Russian. It seems to me that Polish has drifted away from most other Slavic languages.
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").
To anecdotally confirm this point: I am not a native Russian speaker, but I am fluent and Russian, and I am also very familiar with Polish (it's complicated). Those texts are very readable to me, so knowing Russian and Polish is likely to cover the widest base.
It seems to succeed at being understandable, but I’m guessing it will be on par in difficulty to learning another Slavic language if you already speak one.
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.
... and my experience is that even fairly similar languages are really hard to understand. I have no problem talking in Russian, I understand Slovak and Czech is my mother tongue, but Ukrainian is still fairly opaque to me. I suspect any spoken intermediate language will just do the same. A soup of words of which I'll understand every second and struggle to make sense of.
Same. I noticed some words use the letter "g" in place of "h" like in the word "another" -> "drugy" -> in Czech "druhý", otherwise it is very similar to Czech.
I'm also from a Slavic country, and I couldn't understand anything, because I closed the website in disgust two seconds after loading it. I mean, black text on dark-blue background? Even the hyperlinks are using default html blue color.
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]
That's easily explained: jealousy. Slovio was the only Slavic-based auxlang available on the internet for a few years. However, it was not received well among Slavs, who found it too artificial (Slovio is basically Esperanto with Slavic - mostly Russian - words), and thus it became a complete failure. When Interslavic was initiated as a more naturalistic alternative, the author of Slovio first tried to ridicule it, and once it became successful, he started claiming they had stolen his idea and propagating Slovio under the name of Interslavic. Both languages have absolutely nothing in common, except that they are both based on Slavic material.
That was years ago though. Slovio has been dead for the last eight or so years.
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’.
This isn't specific to Slavic languages, it's the norm for all sorts of related languages or even the same language evolving over time. Think of the etymology of 'nice' or 'guest'/'host'/'hostile'/'hospital'.
Words derived from the same source as 'Loft' seem to universally mean 'sky' or 'air' in almost all germanic languages... except English where it means 'small room near the ceiling'.
I guess Wiktionary might be mistaken, but it says the not-really-so-modern meaning of ‘loft’ is shared among Germanic languages: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loft
Well, the word apparently has a bit unusual etymology:
> 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.
oh wow i was actually completely unaware of the etymological history of it, but after reading what you said i did some research and confirmed it for myself. thank you for sharing that with me, and for allowing me to turn an unknown unknown into a more productive form :^)
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.
The best Romance IAL I've seen so far is Latino Sine Flexione[1]. As someone who knows Esperanto and some very basic French, it's really easy to understand.
Can't speak from my experience here, but others say if you know one Romance language, you begin to easily understand words in other ones. So I guess any one of them would work as an international language, but Castellano seems to have a large headstart.
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.
Than you should consider learning this interslavic language. You would be able to communicate in all Slavic countries and you would sound equally funny in all of them.
What would that Germanic language cover? German, Dutch, Flemish? That's it, right? English is out, because that's half French, and the Scandinavian languages have drifted too far from German to be even half-assed mutually intelligible, no?
It would also cover the Scandinavian languages. I'd like it to include English as well, but not use any of the English-only Romance vocabulary; but there's a large chance that that would not result in anything that's useful for interacting with English-speakers. The grammar would be almost entirely based on German and Dutch with maybe one or two Scandinavianisms thrown in to make them feel a bit more at home, but for word choice all languages would take part. Non-Germanic words used in most of those modern languages would be included (like restaurant or station).
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.
> Especially when learning Norwegian I noticed that many words are obviously cognages with either German or English, but not both.
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.
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.
+1. Native Polish speaker here, and I can eventually figure it out, but it's a struggle. Still, cool, though, since I can piece it together without a dictionary.
Kinda makes sense, no? Looking for similarities you inadvertently go back to the common root, and you end up with something that reads like Old Church Slavonic.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: the borders of my language are the borders of my world.
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).
I agree with pretty much everything what you've said here!
> 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.
I think it depends on the fluency of your Russian vs fluency of your English. I’m Russian and I’m fluent in English so if I sensed you don’t quite understand what I’m saying in Russian I’d immediately try English. I’d have probably ended up mixing the two.
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.
I'm living in a foreign country and speak fluently 3 languages, and known a few things in a forth one. Deciding which language to use with which person is a taxing effort in itself, especially in a group setting. There is no such thing as "asshole-y thing" to use English because each communication setting is different. Sometime the most important thing is to be understood quickly, then using English if there is any friction makes sense. 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.
> There is no such thing as "asshole-y thing" to use English because each communication setting is different
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.
It heavily depends on the goals of conversation, imo. If someone tells me he wants to practice his Russian, I have no problem with that. If I'm talking to a girl in a romantic setting, and she wants me to speak Russian to her, regardless of her understanding of it, sure. But if the goal is to actually exchange information, and their English is more suitable, then I don't see why they would be offended.
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 :)
> 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.
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).
Native Bulgarian here. Better candidate: yes. Good candidate: no. Yes, it is considerably simpler but it is also vastly different from the larger Slavic languages: I have friends from other Slavic countries and I've observed that Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and Ukrainians for instance have far less difficulties understanding each other than understanding me. I would assume it's the same story with Russian but I have almost 0 interaction with Russians. And even for me, it took me days in Poland to start picking up on words, phrases and sentences. Then again I can understand over 70% of Serbo-Croatian without even trying but again, those make up for a very small number of the total Slavic population.
A sane alphabet. Cyrillic before the 20th century had some freaky things and weird use of letters that we still have. Aficionados say that ‘ѣ’ and ‘ъ’ could be properly used only by people who memorized all the words with them. (Which is not how modern Slavic languages work, even though English-speakers wouldn't bat an eye at that inconvenience, hur hur.)
In Czech, some "y" vs. "i" can't be deduced. Schoolchildren need to drill the words that use "y". Similarly to what "ѣ" had with бѣдный блѣдный бѣлый бѣсъ, except our thing doesn't even rhyme :)
(Not that I'm complaining. As you note, English is vastly worse in this regard.)
My knowledge here is limited, but I have noticed that some language families tend to get simplified over time versus their common ancestor. For example, Italian and French (and all other Romance languages, I believe) have lost Latin's case system and all the memorization that entails. Italian is much easier to learn than Latin in my experience. So if the same is true for the common ancestor of the Slavic languages, you would be learning a much more complicated language than any of the current Slavic ones.
I (a non-Slavic language speaker) would imagine the divergence between the modern Slavic languages would be dwarfed by the divergence between those languages and Proto-Slavic or Old Church Slavonic.
Quite the opposite, I believe. My native tongue is Polish (West Slavic) and I speak decent Russian (East Slavic) as a foreign language. My subjective feeling is that there's more in common between either of those languages and OCS than between the two directly.
Don't worry, those letters are not part of the standard orthography of Interslavic. Although some people insist on using them, they are merely meant for educational purposes, and to make a direct link to Old Church Slavonic. The only non-ASCII letters in the Latin alphabet that are mandatory are Č Š Ž and Ě (although in Interslavic nothing is mandatory).
And of course, Interslavic can be written in Cyrillic as well, as is done by many users.
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.
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.
* 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).
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.
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).
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.
[1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html#purpose
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.
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.
1. http://www.ethnologue.com/21/language/rus/
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.
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.
Nope.
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").
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?
[0] http://www.slovio.com/
[1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html#disclaime...
That was years ago though. Slovio has been dead for the last eight or so years.
It's not called Balkanisation for no reason.
Sincerely, a person from the Balkan.
Not surprising if they visit each others web pages too often.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latino_sine_flexione
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.
[0] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/
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).
> 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.
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.
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 :)
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.
https://youtu.be/NztgXMLwv4A
> 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