Hello everybody! 

Some of you already know me, and I already know some of you. In any case: my name is Jan van Steenbergen. I've created several languages, including Slovianski and Wenedyk, and I just discovered this discussion. Although it has been years ago since I was able to handle high traffic mailing lists, I thought I'd address a few of the points mentioned here, and so I subscribed to AUXLANG. I'm answering to all messages in the same thread in one, so please forgive me for being lengthy! To start from the beginning:

Dave MacLeod:

> Info here:
> 
> http://steen.free.fr/slovianski/
> 
> The reason why I'm asking is because I have yet to be attracted to any
> particular Slavic language to the extent that I'd be willing to spend
> the years it takes to learn one, but as a family of languages overall
> I am interested and if Slovianski is worth learning I'd be willing to
> put in a bit of time every day to become proficient. What does it look
> like to those who speak a Slavic language? It's said to be similar to
> Interlingua vs. Romance languages, but it seems more analogous to
> Romanica.

You are right. But it should be said that Slovianski has evolved to a point where it can't really be compared to any other existing language project I know of anymore. When it was originally conceived (in 2006), it was pretty much an impromptu language. That explains samples of the type you've been discussing here ("Velika demonstracija za nezaležnost' v Černoj Gore" / "Велика демонстрация за незалежность в Черной Горе"), written at a time when Slovianski had neither a complete grammar nor a dictionary. We were mostly discussing the pros and cons of having grammatical gender, noun cases and/or full conjugation of verbs in Slovianski. At the time, the three creators (Ondrej Rečnik, Gabriel Svoboda and I) each developed a separate version of the grammar, and these translations were merely illustrations of that idea (it wasn't until 2009 that it was finally decided that my version would carry the name
 "Slovianski"). That would also explain a certain Polish bias in my choice for the vocabulary: the point was mostly to demonstrate that naturalism would be a better solution for a language of this type than schematicism or other types of extreme simplification. Fortunately, we are well beyond that type of discussions now. Recurring points of discussion, however, are in how far naturalism should be sacrificed for naturalism or vice versa, as well as orthographical issues.

The difference between Slovianski and similar projects (Romanica and Slovio have been mentioned, but another example that comes to mind is Folkspraak, as well as a multitude of other Slavic-based projects) is that every single element in it is the result of research. Every solution, no matter whether it's phonemes, morphological endings or word roots, is chosen in such way that the number of Slavs who can understand it is maximised, either by picking the majority solution or by building a reasonable compromise. To achieve this, we use a system of "votes" assigned to every Slavic language in such way that the East, West and South Slavic languages are treated equally. See http://steen.free.fr/slovianski/design_criteria.html for more about this.

Another difference is that Slovianski is not a hermetic language with fixed rules that MUST be obeyed, because all other solutions would be wrong. I've always treated it rather like a set of recommendations that people can use at will if they want to make themselves understandable to a multi-Slavic audience. There aren't two people who write Slovianski in exactly the same way, which explicitly does not mean that one version is necessarily "better" or "worse" than the other. One thing I know by experience is that Slavs rarely teach themselves Slovianski by knowing the entire grammar by heart and looking up every single word in the dictionary; they learn it by simply reading it and using it. As a result, it grows organically, so to speak. And while the Slovianski written by a Serb or a Macedonian is clearly different from the Slovianski written by a Russian or a Pole, they are completely understandable to each other.

I am not the architect of this liberal attitude, it's just something that came about in the process. Quite recently I found out that the same flexibility can also work in the opposite direction: just like Slovianski spoken by a Pole differs from Slovianski spoken by a Serb, there might also be differences between Slovianski spoken TO a Pole and Slovianski spoken TO a Serb. To elaborate on this idea, I am currently in the process of working out a version of Slovianski with diacritics that contain etymological information, provisorically called "Naučni Slovianski" ("Scientific Slovianski") or "Slovianski Plus". You could treat it as the "source code" of Slovianski and it is fully compatible with Slovianski's simplified grammar, but it can easily be manipulated into many different versions, dependent on the needs of the moment. I'm not sure how this Naučni Slovianski can precisely be put to use, but I have two ideas:
* It can serve as the source code of a huge Interslavic dictionary, from which several languages can be derive their own dictionary (Slovianski, Novoslovienskij, Slovioski); this idea is already in the process of being realised.
* Just with one push of the button, one can generate his own "Slovianski for travellers", tailored to fit. For example: Slovianski as spoken in Serbia by a Pole.

See http://steen.free.fr/slovianski/nauczni_slovianski.html for more about this project, and http://steen.free.fr/slovianski/nauczni_slovianski_examples.html for several texts written in Naučni Slovianski, with the option of displaying them in several other versions.

> Olivier Simon:
> 
> Slovianski seems to have been deviced more naturally than Slovio 

That is true. I should perhaps mention that among the family of Slavic interlanguages Slovio is pretty much the odd man out. That is explained pretty well by its goal. Unlike Slovianski, Slovio quite explicitly claims to be a "universal language", and the reasoning behind it is that instead of picking words from many different languages, one might as well pick vocabulary in such way that a considerable part of the world population can already understand it passively without prior learning. That's at least how I have understood it. The thing is only that there is nothing Slavic at all about Slovio grammar, and that most of the vocabulary is taken straight from Russian (sometimes mutilated beyond recognisability). For a world language that might work, but definitely not for a zonal language.

> It has conjugations with rules of agreement and full declensions. It is 
> written it has aspects though, unfortunately, I haven't found where it is 
> explained how to use them (when you already know a Slavix natlang, you can 
> guess how it works, but that's a regrettable omission).

Yes, you're completely right about that, Olivier. The whole presentation on my website goes back to 2006, and initially it was directed mostly at my fellow creators, like: "This is what I think a paradigm should look like, any objections?" When Langmaker.com was gone, so was Slovianski's grammar, and that's why I moved it to my own pages. In the meantime, I have rewritten most stuff in order to make it look more like an explanation for a broader audience, but it's undeniably true that in the current format knowledge of a Slavic language is more or less taken for granted. Of course, I should also explain what a genitive is and when/how it should be used, and same goes (even more so!) for aspect as well. Please bear with me, because Slovianski is pretty much a work in progress and until recently I always stated that Slovianski is far from ready to be launched; in fact, it's all the recent publicity about it that forced us to speed things up a little. In
 any case, I hope to correct all these omissions soon. 
BTW, aspect is a really hard thing to deal with. All Slavic languages have it, but there are major differences in the way how both aspects are used, and also in how perfective and imperfective verbs are derived from each other. To tell you the truth, this is one of the hardest nuts to crack. I'm currently studying the aspect system in Serbo-Croat and Church Slavonic to get a better understanding of these differences.

Olivier Simon:

> A fully excusable error; I've checked on the site and all Slovianski
> verbs seem to bear "-m" as the 1st person singular ending (the plural 
> is "me") though, to my knowledge, this is only the case of a minority 
> of "real" Slavic verbs; so, even Sambahsa "kaupo" is closer to common 
> Slavic *kupiu !

Until recently, Slovianski offered both options: "-(e)m" and "-(j)u". Some Slavic languages ALWAYS use -(j)u, some others ALWAYS use -(e)m, while most of them use both, dependent on conjugation.

Being Dutch myself, I do know quite a lot about the difficulties in learning Slavic languages. My own experience is that one of the hardest things to handle is the huge number of nominal and verbal classes, and in the case of Slovianski I've tried to tackle that problem with a one-ending-fits-all approach. Polish has "kupię" here, but many other verbs have -m, so that "kupim" is understandable for Poles as well; it just reminds them of the kind of mistakes small children tend to make. Besides, "kupju" is supported by more languages than "kupim", but "delam" is supported by more languages than "delaju". Slovianski used to have both "kupim" and "kupju" (optionally), but the latter was recently abolished. First of all, because it requires additional phonological rules; and because Slovianski is still an IAL, the fewer rules, the better. And secondly, because hardly anybody ever used the -(j)u ending anyway. Too much optionality doesn't make things easier
 either, so we just decided to do away with this one. The alternative would be introducing conjugations or verbal classes, which is something I wanted to avoid at all cost. In fact, I'm quite proud of the Slovianski solution (similar in a way to De Wahl's rule), which eliminates them completely but still gives a result that almost always reflects the situation in natlangs.

lingwadeplaneta:

> > >> Hey, you did not recognize the nearly similar Russian word "ohrana"
> > >> = "protection".
> > >
> > > Alas, it looked strange. It seems to be a specifically Polish word.
> > > Czech has ohrana, Serian and Croatian have zashtita which I would 
> > > have understood.
> >
> > Wasn't the old Tzarist police "ohrana"? I suspect it is Church Slavic
> > originally.
> 
> > And wasn't the old Russian hymn "Boh carja hrani!" ?
> 
> Yes, ohrana is a R word, but not ohrona. Maybe with more context I would
> have guessed it. Like in the case of "main", it seems that Slovianski 
> favours Polish/Ukrainian variants over Bulgarian/Serbian/Chech/Russian.

and

> glovoj for "main" seems to be a Polish variant. In R glavnij, in Czech 
> hlavni, Serbian glavni, Slovene glaven. In Ukrainian golovny, though, 
> IIMNM. 

That's not a bug, it's a feature! :)

Seriously, let me explain: Slovianski doesn't merely pick majority solutions, it also follows a regular pattern of derivation. This is an example of a so-called "TorT sequence", one of the sequences of vowel + liquid + consonant in Proto-Slavic. How these sequences develop in the contemporary languages is remarkably regular. TorT becomes "ToroT" in East Slavic, "TorT" in Polish and Sorbian, "TarT" in Czech, Slovak and South Slavic. "TorT" is not the majority solution, but it is the best compromise among those three. And once we've established that, we apply it consistently, to avoid sometimes having one solution and sometimes the other. This makes the whole thing predictable. 
So for example, the PSl. "gord" becomes "город" in Russian and Ukrainian, "gród" in Polish, "hrád" in Czech, "grad" in South Slavic... and so, Slovianski has "grod". Once a "grad" speaker has seen "grod", "roz-" and "glova" in a text, it won't be hard for him to imagine that "zloto" and "broda" are his "zlato" and "brada" either.

Russian dóes have a huge number of occurrences of TraT as well, but these are generally borrowings from Old Church Slavonic (Russian is cloakfull of those). Note that Ukrainian follows the regular pattern, "охорона". 

In other words, this has nothing to do with favouring Polish/Ukrainian over anything else, but with sticking to a regular pattern. Slovianski has more of these patterns (see: http://steen.free.fr/slovianski/word_formation.html#vocabulary_patterns), some of which happen to coincide with West Slavic, others with East Slavic, others with South Slavic.

I should add that indeed Slovianski sometimes tends to be easier for Russians, Czechs and Poles than for Serbs or Bulgarians. Initially, Slovianski was the work of people who knew Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech and Slovak, while South Slavic was heavily underrepresented. Of course, we did you best to take it into account as much as we could, but we missed somebody with real knowledge of South Slavic. Now that we have active participants from Serbia and Macedonia, we are correcting previous errors.
But there is also a second reason, and a harder one to tackle. West and East Slavic are significantly closer to each other than South Slavic is to either of them. In terms of number of speakers, South Slavic is already overrepresented in the "voting" process (1/3 + a bit via Russian), but this doesn't change the fact that South Slavic is often outvoted by the rest. Which is a sad thing, but there is little that can be done about it, unless we'd decide to make it harder for 90% in order to make it easier for 10%. For what it is worth, in cases of doubt the South Slavic solution often gets precedence just for that reason.

Dmitry Ivanov:

> All in all, a Russian can understand it. The question is, will a person 
> knowing Slovianski understand Russian too? If you learn Russian, you 
> will not only understand Slovianski but also have access to a great 
> culture.

Well, it should be sufficient to get a basic understanding of it. But of course, I would lie if I told you you'd understand 90-100% of it. But speaking for myself, thanks to Slovianski, I can understand the basics of texts in f.ex. Serbian and Bulgarian fairly well, without ever having studied them.

In the case of Russian: what you'd need to know is basically three things: 
- Slovianski
- the Russian Cyrillic alphabet
- the basic differences between Slovianski and Russian.

That said, I'm certainly not discouraging anybody from learning Russian! It depends on what your interests and needs are, really. Russian is definitely an important language, but surely not an easy one. Besides, it won't be of much help if you want to communicate with other Slavs (especially also because there are still a lot of people in Central and Eastern Europe who identify it is "the language of the former oppressor") - unless they already know it of course, but then, English is a safer bet nowadays.

To put it differently, Russian gives you full access to one great culture, Slovianski gives you limited access to many great cultures. ;)

> I wonder how they decide idioms of which Slavic language should be used 
> in every particular case.

There are no rules for that. You know, Slovianski is not meant to be the language of a community of Slovianski speakers, so there's no need for it to have its own idioms or whatever either. In general it is better to avoid constructions that might not be understood by people of different nationalities. Just like that, it is recommended that pro-drop is avoided for reasons of clarity, but it is not forbidden or something.

Returning to the text about Montenegro, like I said, that was merely a text I wrote to demonstrate my ideas. I know it's still on my site, but nowadays it is completely obsolete. Here is an example of a more recent text:

Strižik imel svoje gnezdo v garaže. Jedin raz oba roditeli odleteli - oni hoteli prinesti jedu svojim malim - i ostavili ih same.
Posle nekakogo vremena, otec strižik vrotil do doma.
«Čo stalo se tut?», on pital. «Kto vam zlo učinil, detka? Vi jeste celo prestrašene!» 
«Oj, tata», skazali oni, «tut bil tolko čo nekake velike čudovišče. On bil zaisto grozni i strašni! On gledel svojimi velikimi okami bezposrednjo v naše gnezdo. Zato mi jesme take prestrašene!»
«Aha, jasno», otec strižik skazal, «a kude on pošel?» 
«Nu», odpovedali detka, «on pošel v tamtu stronu.»
«Čakajte tut», otec strižik skazal, «ja idem za nim. Už ne bojte se, detka. Ja sohvatim jego.» Potom on odletel za čudoviščem. 
Kogda dosegnul za vuglom, on uvidel, čo tam ide lev.
Ali strižik ne imel strah. On prizemil na hrebet lva i načel napominati jego. «Kake ti imaš pravo prijdti k mojemu domu», on skazal, «i čemu ti strašil moje detka?!»
Lev vpolno ignoroval jego i hodil dalej.
To rozgnevalo malogo krikuna, ktori načel kričati ješče glosnej. «Ti ne imaš tam ničego do roboti, ja ti govorim! I jesli ti ješče raz tam prijdeš», on skazal, «togda nečo uvidiš! Ja napravdu ne hočem izdelati to», on skazal i podimal jednu nogu, «ali ja s tuttoju nogu izlomem ti hrebet v jednoj sekunde!»
Posle togo on odletel nazad do svojego gnezda.
«Dobro, detka», on povedal, «ja dal jemu lekciju. Toj už nikogda tut ne vroti.»

Стрижик имел свое гнездо в гараже. Един раз оба родители одлетели - они хотели принести еду своим малим - и оставили их саме.
После некакого времена, отец стрижик вротил до дома.
«Чо стало се тут?», он питал. «Кто вам зло учинил, детка? Ви есте цело престрашене!» 
«Ой, тата», сказали они, «тут бил толко чо некаке велике чудовишче. Он бил заисто грозни и страшни! Он гледел своими великими оками безпосредньо в наше гнездо. Зато ми есме таке престрашене!»
«Аха, ясно», отец стрижик сказал, «а куде он пошел?» 
«Ну», одповедали детка, «он пошел в тамту строну.»
«Чакайте тут», отец стрижик сказал, «я идем за ним. Уж не бойте се, детка. Я сохватим его.» Потом он одлетел за чудовишчем. 
Когда досегнул за вуглом, он увидел, чо там иде лев.
Али стрижик не имел страх. Он приземил на хребет лва и начел напоминати его. «Каке ти имаш право прийдти к моему дому», он сказал, «и чему ти страшил мое детка?!»
Лев вполно игноровал его и ходил далей.
То розгневало малого крикуна, ктори начел кричати ешче глосней. «Ти не имаш там ничего до роботи, я ти говорим! И если ти ешче раз там прийдеш», он сказал, «тогда нечо увидиш! Я направду не хочем изделати то», он сказал и подимал едну ногу, «али я с туттою ногу изломем ти хребет в едной секунде!»
После того он одлетел назад до своего гнезда.
«Добро, детка», он поведал, «я дал ему лекцию. Той уж никогда тут не вроти.»


Best regards,
Jan