Slovio: Slavic Esperanto

Hello all!

I have seen this on Facebook a couple of times and I am curious if anyone has wanted to learn this language. Personally I think it’s cool; but I just wanted to see how others thought.

http://slovio.com/index.html

Chase

Amazing.

As a speaker of Russian, I was able to understand almost every text on that site (albeit with some difficulty). Yet I have doubts that spoken communication in Slovio is as easy as written: you may have to employ pantomime and heavy gesturing to get through.
The grammar looks somewhat weird: endings for plural and “object or direction” have nothing to do with real endings in slavic languages, so expect some confusion on the part of unsuspecting natives. :slight_smile: Still, adjectives are identifiable.

All in all, the language looks usable enough. It may also be used as an aid in learning real slavic languages.

“I was able to understand almost every text”
Did you listen to the videos? It is harder to understand while listening.

Yes I did (to some of them). While texts seem quite legible, spoken Slovio is hard to understand, at least for an untrained ear.

I can understand quite a lot with some difficulty.

Still it is just another artificial language and as such has no chance of becoming popular or practical. Just like any other language of this type.

I don´t really get the point. It´s relatively easy for slavs(?) to learn each others languages anyway. Having a language as a bridge between…say…slavic languages and romance languages would be much more useful.

It´s the same problem with esperanto. It´s basically a romance language.

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I’d say it was made as an easy language for foreigners who need to speak with Slavs. Real Slavic languages are much more difficult.
Esperanto helped me with non-Slavic languages at the beginning, Italian was a piece of cake after that.
I think Slovio may also help with Slavic ones.

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Alright, that makes sense.

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Yea I am thinking it is more of a stepping stone for people interested in learning a Slavic language and they use this to get used to aspects of Slavic languages.

For some reason I support Slovio, and at the same time don’t support esperanto. My opinion of esperanto is the same as Steve’s opinion, because esperanto has no sort of real culture with the language. Unlike Slovio which has a culture of the slavic people, which I’ve started to get interested in for some reason. In my opinion is that Slovio could be a very good teaching tool for people who want to learn some of the better, and Real slavic languages. Such as learning Slovio first, then learn Russian or Serbian. So this language is somewhat ok in my lingua radar( language radar). I’d love to experiment with Slovio in the future for teaching purposes, hopefully I get to that stage one day.

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Whilst I think it’s a really interesting project; for anyone thinking of using it as gateway to learning actual slavic languages, I would think they would be better off simply jumping into a real language.

The core vocabulary is shared across all the slavic family anyway, and the relatively complex grammar would be need to be tackled sooner or later.

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@maths

I can’t see why not have a little experiment with this artificial language. To introduce like at the begging of some sort of course at a slavic language college. For example: You want to learn Czech, but you’ve never had any sort of experience with slavic languages or even maybe you first foreign language. So the college will/might use slovio as a begging base, then you’ll have enough experience( Note as orbioal: written slovio is comprehensible to Russian, so if my guess is right. It should also be comprehensible to Czech as well as Polish, and all the other Slavic languages. Spoken slovio is different from all the other languages, as well as slovio’s grammar. But if there is enough vocab there to gain inorder to better learn Czech, and if you wanted. To learn other Slavic languages as well) That might only be my hypothesis, but may seem as a plausible one. You can also can similarities with the others just by learning one of them, to learn the other Slavic languages. That’s only my opinion.

@OzzyHellBack : Sure, I do agree to an extent, and from what I hear, a simplified related langauge ( like Esperanto / Slovio) can take away some of the fear for a learner, like " Hey, this is actually possible".

But, one of the main unifying ( and difficult ) features of Slavic is the case system, which Slovio of course does not have, and well, a learner will have to make a start on those cases at some point. Sooner the better.

I can see that the core vocabulary in Slovio might help, but in a way could also confuse. One would learn these core words, and then have to learn similar but different versions ( in some cases totally differtent words) when starting on one of the " real " languages.

Again, I’m not totally against it, and any exposure is good, but the time spent on Slovio could equally be spent on the real nuts and bolts of one of the national languages. I mean " If y’wanna learn Czech, then start learning Czech " : )

Still, I’m really interested in the Cross-Slavic language projects, and the fact that such a thing is possible with that language family.

@maths: "But, one of the main unifying ( and difficult ) features of Slavic is the case system, which Slovio of course does not have, and well, a learner will have to make a start on those cases at some point. Sooner the better. "

Here I disagree with you entirely. Let me explain:

Artificial slavic language can have two roles:

  1. As a means of (somewhat awkward) communication with native speakers of real Slavic languages, and
  2. As a stepping stone to learning real Slavic languages.

Besides fulfilling these two aims, it has almost no other value. Poetry in artificial language? That’s for real language geeks. Unifying all Slavic languages into one? That’s very unrealistic, no matter how cool the new language is.

So, let us see how adding 7 grammar cases to Slovio helps us here. For brevity, I’ll call this new language Slovio 1.

  1. Case endings are different in different slavic languages. So, Slovio 1 will have to resort to some common denominator which only partially matches endings in any real language. Will it make the language more understandable by a slav? I tell you a firm NO: weird endings do not help understand the meaning. Besides, endings do not “stand out” in the phrase: they are usually weakly stressed and reduced. Prepositions, on the other hand, can be pronounced as separate words, which immediately gives hints to the listener.

So, having a bunch of case endings does not make the language more understandable, whereas having a bunch of prepositions makes grammar relations at least noticeable (and sometimes even clear).

  1. Steve said this many times, and I believe he is right: grammar is not important. What is important is the vocabulary. Slovio is exactly this sort of a language: very little grammar, but vast vocabulary of Slavic words. As a stepping stone, it is almost ideal. Thus, adding complex grammatical concepts to Slovio would only make learning it more difficult, without adding any actual benefits.

I don’t see how this is disagreeing with me.

In short: there is no need to start learning Slavic grammar cases early. Words are much more important.

well I agree with that

Quite interesting, but there are two questions:

  1. How to learn this language? There are no native speakers to speak with or correct your mistakes, there are no books to read, no movies to watch etc. etc.
  2. For what purpose? I doubt if it makes any difference to memorize a Slovian (i hope that’s correct spelling) word or, say, actual Russian one. If the main goal is to be understandable… well, you can throw away all case endings and your Russian will still remain understandable. Atrocious, but clear in the sense of what you’re trying to say. That’s the way Slovio sounds to me.
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