
Interslavic Language - platform
http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html
======
strenholme
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.

~~~
asveikau
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.

~~~
azernik
The Israeli case is illustrative for two reasons:

* 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.

~~~
asveikau
> and it _was_ in fact a dialect

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.

~~~
azernik
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!

------
yeellow
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.

~~~
jwr
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").

~~~
rimliu
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.

------
orbital-decay
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/](http://www.slovio.com/)

[1]
[http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html#disclaime...](http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html#disclaimer)

~~~
viach
> For some reason, the authors of both seem to hate each other.

Not surprising if they visit each others web pages too often.

~~~
gpvos
So to reduce hate we should stop people visiting websites? It might actually
work. (Yes, I'll get my coat.)

------
aasasd
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’.

~~~
xixixao
Also for non-slavic speakers' interest: “ne” is No, and “dělat" is Work, so
Sunday is literally the day of "Nowork".

~~~
mv4
I am Russian, and you just blew my mind with that piece of info.

~~~
p1esk
Same! :)

------
hugh4life
There's a defunct auxlang project called Lingula that aimed to focus on
comprehension between romance speakers.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Lingula/](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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto)

~~~
aasasd
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.

~~~
rodgerd
I'm learning French (B1 level) and was surprised how much I could pick out of
a Romanian movie (the tremendously enjoyable
[https://www.nziff.co.nz/2019/christchurch/the-
whistlers/](https://www.nziff.co.nz/2019/christchurch/the-whistlers/)).

------
babuskov
Very cool. I'm Serbian and I can understand this text:

[http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/umetny_ili_prirodny.html](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.

~~~
isbvhodnvemrwvn
I'm Polish, I'm having more difficulties. I have to read stuff twice and guess
a lot.

~~~
oppositelock
+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.

------
0xBABAD00C
It's near-100% intelligible for a Russian speaker:
[http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/selo.html](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" :)

~~~
fishnchips
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.

~~~
0ld
it's actually the other way round.

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/](http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/)

------
michalu
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.

------
ivanhoe
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...

------
objplant
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.

~~~
jwieczorek
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).

~~~
p1esk
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.

~~~
villedepommes
> I’d immediately try English.

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.

~~~
tasogare
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.

~~~
villedepommes
> 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.

~~~
p1esk
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
:)

------
olah_1
There was recently a video posted of Interslavic being used with a Bulgarian,
a Polish and a Croatian.

[https://youtu.be/NztgXMLwv4A](https://youtu.be/NztgXMLwv4A)

------
gpvos
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.

~~~
henrikschroder
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?

~~~
gpvos
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.

~~~
tom_mellior
There are some attempts at Pan-Germanic listed at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-
Germanic_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Germanic_language)

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.

~~~
henrikschroder
> 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.

------
kazinator
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).

------
cpursley
Isn't Bulgarian a better candidate as it's simpler than Russian, for example
(fewer cases, less gender-specific things).

~~~
axegon
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.

------
mancerayder
Did anyone see the strange disclaimer at the bottom? It reminds one of ancient
BBS or online flamewars.

------
knolax
I wonder what's the benefit of this versus learning whatever the common
ancestor of the Slavic languages is.

~~~
aasasd
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.)

~~~
eequah9L
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.)

------
kwhitefoot
Please make the page readable without Javascript. It looks fine in Firefox
Reader mode.

------
konart
>Alphabet extensions

So... all those "Ś ś" and "Ć ć" instead of using Cyrillic? Yeah, no.

~~~
p1esk
It seems like they support both Latin and Cyrillic transliterations.

~~~
kemitchell
Came for the orthography fight. Disappointed.

But progress?

------
rezmason
Interslavic vocabulary, vocabulary, interslavic

Don't you tell me to usměhati You stick around, I'll make it zasluženy

