Whoa. My native language is in the Romance group, and I could pretty much muddle through a paragraph of Interlingua with no help. I think the comprehension level was about 90%.
I am Bulgarian and I find that very hard to read. Much harder than Russian or Serbian. Many of the phonemes could be simplified to be made more universal. It feels very influenced by Polish, though, so I'd probably be easier for Central Europe Slavic countries.
I'm Russian, and I can read and understand about 90% of their sample texts. It reminds me Serbian (though I don't know it or any other Slavic languages, and I've read more Serbian and Macedonian than any other Slavic language, so maybe there's a bias because of this).
BTW, Bulgarian is harder to read for me than Serbian or Macedonian.
We have a lot of turkish/altaic, or just old bulgarian (before our tribe came to the Balkans) words. I'm no historian, and even they do not agree, so take my words with a grain of salt.
I have noticed that we have for a lot of things - two words, one slavanian - that russian/serbian/polish/etc would understand, and one turkish-like that arab would understand.
I wonder if it seems close to the languages one is familiar with.
My native tongue is Romanian and I grew up on the border with Serbia - I used to speak Serbian near-fluently (but lost it after 2+ decades of not using it); I also know a little bit of Russian. This language seemed similar to Serbian to me.
My native language is Czech, and all sample texts looks very similar to Croatian or Serbian :-) Not much Polish. And yes, even for me it's very hard to read :-)
(Though, that might be because it has quite different spelling from polish. Spoken, it could be similar. It feels very ancient. :-))
I'm Czech too and it doesn't really resemble any existing language to me. Definitely not Slovak, Polish or Russian. Maybe something several hundreds years old.
Yet, I found that just looking at the samples I'm not having much trouble understanding it.
Suggestion: try to read it out loud -- it helped me quite a lot with Polish. And here too.
I think this is because we look for properties that are foreign to us, and skip properties that we familiar with when trying to understand the language. So, for example, you didn't notice some things taken from Polish, because you already know them, but you noticed things that look Czech to you, and thingie didn't notice Czech things, but noticed Serbian ones.
After looking at the grammar and dictionary, I find it much more similar to Czech than I thought after looking at just samples. Dictionary has quite a lot of Czech words, you'd only have to apply some rules to make it look more "modern" :-) (ija -> [i]e, throw out most of trailing i's, ični -> cký, g -> h…)
I am Bulgarian as well, and I had absolutely no trouble reading and understanding the passage on the home page. However, I also studied a bit of Russian when I was a kid.
I was recently on a trip through Eastern Europe (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria) and did not have much trouble communicating with people in these countries.
<quote>
As in all natural Slavic languages, nouns in Slovianski have three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and two numbers (singular, plural).
</quote>
That's not true - Slovenian has three numbers: singular, dual and plural.
But then - Slovenian is maybe not a natural Slavic language?
Wikipedia says that Proto-Slavic language (the proto-language from which Slavic languages later emerged) had dual. But it was lost in every Slavic language except for Slovene and Sorbian:
Of the living languages, only Slovene and Sorbian have preserved the dual number as a productive form. In all of the remaining languages, its influence is still found in the declension of nouns of which there are commonly only two: eyes, ears, shoulders, in certain fixed expressions, and the agreement of nouns when used with numbers.
Does anyone know of a similar artificial language to unify the Scandinavians?
Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic are similar enough that it should be possible to create a language that could be passably understood by all speakers -- call it "skandiska"...?
A linguist would probably say that Scandinavia already has a common language, and that Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are mere dialects of the same Scandinavian language. They are considered different languages mainly for political and historical reasons, but since they are mutually intelligible (with the possible exception of drunk Danes) "Scandinavian" is really a single language from a linguistic perspective.
Icelandic is a different story, of course. Thankfully, though, the Icelandic speak English rather well...
Danish and Norwegian are dialects, Swedish qualify as a separate language. "Nynorsk" ("New Norwegian") is a new language designed specifically to qualify as a new language, mainly for political reason (Norway was a colony of Denmark).
That all depends on your definition of "language". For most linguists, all that matters is mutual intelligibility. For others, a language is a "dialect with an army and a flag", i.e. a political construct.
A Swedish person like me most of the time have no trouble at all understanding spoken Norwegian, and reading both bokmål and nynorsk is quite easy. Spoken Danish requires some effort and getting used to, but it is still quite possible to have a conversation.
As a Dane I have not no problems understanding Norwegian and Swedish, but with a bit of getting used to it, and an open mind(1), it's my experience that most Scandinavians will be able to understand each other perfectly well.
1: Especially young people will switch into English immediately, and I find that I have to force myself to not do that when talking to fellow Scandinavians. It's a shame since there's often much meaning lost in the double translation + our languages are quite beautiful, IMHO.
Ah. I didn't realize that Scandinavians already understand each other so well. I'm a Finn who studied mandatory 6 years of Swedish at school, yet I can't understand a word of Danish...
I wish they would teach us something more useful than Finland's regional Swedish dialect and accent -- it only has a few hundred thousand native speakers, of whom 95% speak Finnish anyway :(
Regarding Danish, have you tried reading it? Spoken Danish can be pretty hard for Norwegians and Swedes too at times. There's a common expression in Norway that Danes speak as if they have a potato in their mouth - a lot of sounds in Norwegian (and Swedish) are a lot harder/sharper than in Danish.
Funny that you should mention a potato. I remember my late grandfather saying, that speaking english is like speaking german with hot potato in one's mouth. Btw. I'm neither english nor german, but slovene (living right next to Italian border).
For me (Polish) it is very understandable, but if I were to say what it seems like - I would say that it is like Slovak/Czech with some Russian (mostly verbs).
However, these are the three slavic languages I had most contact with. I can speak some Russian and I can recognize Slovak and Czech (but I wouldn't be able to tell one from the other). And I guess this might be similar for other slavic HN readers - they might speak one or two extra languages, they might have had contact with two or three more. This means that similarities described here ("sounds like ...") will be greatly influenced by the level of contact between nations.
This is pretty silly given that if you teleported any slav living in the range of Gdansk to Podgorica and Ljubljana to Ekaterinburg, it would probably take them a couple of weeks to gain enough proficiency to buy groceries. Hilarious misunderstandings will undoubtedly occur but if you take out the severe outliers like Bulgarian and Macedonian, this is about as useful as another hole in the head.
Russian serves reasonably well as a Slavic lingua franca, in the few marginal cases such a thing is needed to begin with.
One of the values of Esperanto is as a learning tool for Western European languages--according to one study, students with 1yr Esperanto + 3yr French instruction speak better French than students with 4yr French instruction.
Since I am about to start learning Bulgarian, I am particularly interested to know if this language has similar properties with respect to Slavic languages. Obviously since it's only been around since 2006 there isn't a comparable 4-year study, but even anecdotal evidence would be appreciated.
Co do języka, to nie mam wiele do powiedzenia /bo przecież kieliszek wódki i każdy się doskonale porozumie/, ale cieszy mnie niezmiernie, że mamy tu tylu słowian...
My biggest problem with understanding some Slavic languages (I'm a native Russian speaker) is the fact that I'm not sure how some of these consonants and vowels are pronounced. j, ż, ę, etc.
I think only Vietnamese is more of a disaster than when it comes to shoehorning a language into the Latin script.
I used to have a script that Cyrillicized Polish, for the benefit of my Russian speaking friend, who found it made it possible to half-understand things.
The ideal part of Slovianski is that it is primarily a WRITTEN LANGUAGE and not a spoken one - although it would be quite easy to do so - and phonetically, in either latin or cyrillic letters (we use both).
I'm English and have lived in Poland for the past five months, and I like this! As much as I'm enjoying the challenge that Polish presents, the grammar doesn't half kill my head sometimes. That and I'm still finding my natural inability to roll my Rs embarrassing in public ;)
That's funny. I am fluent in Russian and can read/understand and speak some Polish and that text is understandable as-is.
So at least one way it works really well.
Generally speaking, a language where every phrase contains the connotation "I am barely refraining you from killing you where you stand", excepting the phrases that flat-out contain "I am killing you where you stand", are not the best languages for international human peace and brotherhood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua