thank you to A Duck, Jordan Stein, 1234fireball, and probably others for requesting this episode.
welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang!
I’m jan Misali, and in this episode, we’ll be looking at what I’m pretty sure is Interslavic.
Interslavic is a name given to a large number of very similar conlangs, the oldest of which
was created by the late Juraj Križanić in 1659.
the various versions of Interslavic are designed to work for communication between speakers
of different Slavic languages.
unlike certain other limited-scope international languages, Interslavic makes no claims of
being universal, and is very clear about who it is for.
the version of Interslavic I’ll be focusing on in this episode was based on two other
versions, called Slovianski and Neoslavonic, created in 2006 and 2009 respectively, each
by groups of people too numerous to properly credit.
this version is a unification of the two, also created by a large committee, which started
being made in summer 2017.
Interslavic’s consonants are:
in
addition to these consonants, there’s also an additional six “optional” consonants,
which only appear in what’s called “flavorized Interslavic”, a more complicated form of
the language, more optimized for preserving pronunciations.
excluding the optional flavorized consonants, this inventory is more or less compatible
with every major Slavic language.
the voiced postalveolar slash retroflex affricate is the most iffy sound here, as it isn’t
phonemic in Russian, which is by far the most spoken Slavic language, but since it’s pretty
much equivalent to a consonant cluster that might as well be a phonemic affricate, it
gets a pass here.
Interslavic’s vowels are:
much like the consonants, there’s a decent amount of “optional” vowels here.
also like the optional consonants, I’ll be ignoring these.
this six monophthong inventory is pretty much standard in Slavic languages.
the only real issue I have with this inventory as a whole is just how non commital it is.
there’s so much variation in pronunciation that there isn’t any real way to know how
any given word “should” be pronounced.
Interslavic can be written either with the Latin alphabet or with the Cyrillic alphabet,
both in many different ways.
you’re encouraged to use whichever orthography is most intuitive for you, but “prototypical”
Latin and Cyrillic orthographies do exist.
this is uh, not a great choice?
having the orthography be like a “do what you want” thing means that, say, a Russian
speaker writing Interslavic and a Polish speaker writing Interslavic will be essentially writing
two completely different written languages which look more like their writers’ first
languages than each other.
Interslavic vocabulary is derived in a rather systematic way, designed to ensure that any
given word will be as recognizable as possible without putting too much of a bias on any
given Slavic language.
the ten source languages are Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene,
Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian. to determine what word to use for something,
the Interslavic committee looks at what words each of the ten source languages use for that
thing, and goes with whatever word is used by the most languages, counting Russian and
Polish as two languages each.
ties are resolved based on the number of speakers each language has.
this results in a natural bias towards Russian, but not an overwhelming one.
for example, the Interslavic word for human, člověk / чловек, is very similar to
the Russian, Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Bulgarian, and Macedonian words for
the same thing.
as another example, the word for water, voda / вода, is similar to Russian, Ukrainian,
Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian.
of course, in a case like that where all ten source languages have basically the same word
for something, it would be somewhat difficult to mess up, but I’ve seen more ambitious
languages do worse.
so, here’s the thing.
I don’t speak any Slavic languages.
Interslavic isn’t made for me.
I could go on describing how Interslavic’s grammar works but, honestly, it wouldn’t
actually be all that helpful.
Interslavic’s grammar is complex, but less complex than its source languages.
I’m sure if I were fluent in a Slavic language then I would have more to say about this,
but I don’t, so I don’t.
all in all, as I said, Interslavic wasn’t made for me.
this episode is probably the least qualified I’ve ever been to talk about how good a
language is.
as much as I have learned about how Interslavic itself works, I simply do not have the necessary
background to form an informed opinion on how well Interslavic achieves its goals.
it was designed to be beneficial to a culture that I am simply not a part of.
that in mind, I don’t feel confident enough in my opinions about Interslavic to give it
an actual ranking.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing Folkspraak.
well, that was kinda disappointing.
but hey, I actually am in a position to talk about my thoughts on Folkspraak.
ALSO, in the next episode, I’ll reveal what conlangs will be the subjects of the next
batch of episodes.
I’ve been slowly eating through this batch for the past year and a half, and in that
time, you guys have requested some pretty big name langs that I’m pretty excited to
talk about.
see you then.