SLOVIO - voprosis - frequently asked questions

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QUESTION: about transliteration: using #x sounds like good idea, but allowing using cyrilic creates exception: why this should be only exception? why not to allow other transliterations to take place too with #x transliteration as official variations with computers providing automatic 'national' transliteration? ANSWER: Even though majority of Slavic speakers write in cyrilic, about a quarter of Slavic speakers doesn't know any cyrilic at all, while practically all Slavic speakers know the latin alphabet. Therefore, at least for now Slovio is being written primarily using the latin alphabet which is understood by all. How things might develop in the future we don't know.

QUESTION: Why conjugation 'bez zamenslov' includes j? idijm idijsh ... ? how it should be pronouced? It sounds to me like too many consonants. And what is the reason for not using idim,idish... I see no conflict with other conjugations and the version without j sounds to me more natural. ANSWER: The Slovio conjugations are a compromise between the west and south Slavic dialects on one side and Russian on the other side. If the endings in "idijm, idijsx, idijt" are difficult to pronounce for some speakers, in their pronunciation they can simply leave out the "j" and say "idim, idisx, idit". However, they should keep the "j" in the written form, because these a bit unusual endings make to the reader immediately clear what they are. These unorthodox endings are less ambiguous than the less orthodox endings you have suggested. As a matter of fact in the earlier versions of Slovio we had used those other ending but felt that the change was positive and decreased ambiguity while increasing comprehension.

QUESTION: What about tper? Is seems to me there is a missing vowel - is it 'i'? Or if there is nothing missing, how to pronouce it? ANSWER: How about the english word "today" or the words "to pay"? In both cases you write an "o" after the "t" but is it really pronounced? The word "tper" is really based on the Russian word "teper" only it is a bit shortened. If it seems too difficult to pronounce in your pronunciation you could insert in the questionable space between "t" and "p" the same sound that you insert between "t" and "p" in "to pay".

QUESTION: From where did you take the words of the language? Do you have some dictionary which includes words of all slavic languages and you took the most commonly used? ANSWER: We have commercial electronic dictionaries of all the Slavic languages and thus can quickly compare the same word in all the Slavic languages. Naturally, as much as possible, we try to select the simplest and the most widely understood variant. In addition to that in many cases we simplify the spelling of the word, or change it a bit to make it easier to learn and use and to fit it in with the Slovio grammar. In a few cases we had invented a new word which we felt would be understood, without learning and without much difficulty by as many speakers as possible.

QUESTION: From where did you take the words of the language? Do you have some dictionary which includes words of all slavic languages and you took the most commonly used? I think that it would be great idea if you would publish the source of the words and create a 'panslavic' dictionary. ANSWER: Yes it would be a great idea, and if there was such a dictionary it would have made our work much easier. We felt that to start with the creation of Slovio would in the long run facilitate the creation of exactly such an all-slavic dicitonary you mentioned.

QUESTION: It would be also very nice to have some text written in all slavic languages to be able see that one can hope speaking slovio will really help in slavic countries as opinion in update on http://qualitycode.com/html/LanguageLinks.html is not very hopeful. Is it true that the language is based mainly on russian? ANSWER: Yes it would be great to have simple texts written in all Slavic languages so one could compare them. In time we will present such pages .. but time is money. Slovio is not based mainly on Russian, in fact it attempts to use words from all Slavic languages. However, since more than half of Slavic speakers speak at least some Russian, it is important that they have to be taken into consideration.

QUESTION: I am also curious what do you think about slovjensxcxina, artifitial language created from church slavonic by Stefan Pilat and others? The guy mentioned on summary page is the same one and you are now working on slovio together? I found some reference of it here: http://mujweb.cz/www/mdok/umeljayzk.htm ANSWER: We know of this effort, however that was a few years ago and we don't know it Mr Pilat is continuing with the project. The last we have seen the project his work was very rudimentary and had a long way to a complete language. However we wish him and others success.

QUESTION: Somewhere on the Slovio website you say that: one should try to avoid such sounds as "sx, cx, zx," or use them as little as possible. These sounds tend to reduce the clarity and the comprehensibility of languages." I don't understand this. Aren't these sound slavics? Together with others which has been ommited? Do they not exist in all slavic languages? I really see no reason for this unless
target audience is western people not knowing and not used to hear these phones. ANSWER: Yes these sounds are definitely in all Slavic languages and they belong into Slovio. However many Slavic words have variants of the same word with and without these sounds, and we feel that overuse of these sounds leads to reduced clarity of the language. Polish seems to be a typical example where the sounds "sx" and "cx" are a bit overused and somewhat reduce the clarity of this beautiful language.

QUESTION: Is the main target audience of Slovio Western non-Slavic speakers? ANSWER: No that is not our main target audience. But apart from Slavic speakers we wanted to make Slovio easy to learn and pronounce for speakers of all languages. Be it German, Italian, English, Mandarin, Arabic or Hindi. The primary purpose of any language is communication, and to achieve the maximum communication-effect the language has to be also simple and easy to learn for all.

QUESTION: How should I use and understand the dictionary? ANSWER: The dictionary which you can download here is in an microsoft excel format and it is zipped. With every new version of Slovio the dictionary is also updated. Currently there are several columns in the dictionary table. "TYPE" column describes the type of the word (F= frase, expression consisting of several words; N= noun, A= adjective, ADV= adverb...) "L" column assignes to each translation a number (1= the most frequent, the most usual translation.) "EXPLANATION" clarify the meaning of the word, since many words have several meanings. The "TYPE" and "L" columns are especially useful for machine translation programs.

QUESTION: Why does Slovio have such a strange ending "-ju" for adjectives? Does it really exist in Slavic languages? ANSWER: Yes, it exists in the feminine accusative. Since Slovio doesn't have any accusative, nor makes any distinction between feminine nor masculine forms, the ending "-ju" is appropriate. In the early versions of Slovio we had used the ending "-ja" but that had created too many conflicts and too much confusion with other words.

QUESTION: Why does Slovio use the ending "-uo" for adverbs? Is it Slavic? ANSWER: In most Slavic languages adverbs end with "-o". However the ending "-o" would be confusing, because it occurs also in other instances. There are some isolated Slavic dialects which use the ending "-uo". The ending "-uo" is very similar to "-o" and it does not create any conflicts nor confusion.

QUESTION: Why do Slovio nouns use the endings "-f" and "-uf" to denote object? ANSWER: The sound "F" did not exist in the proto-Slavic language. It has infiltrated the Slavic languages in the last centuries. And because "f" is new to Slavic languages it is also relatively rare in Slavic words, and that's why the use of the endings "-f" and "-uf" leads to the least confusion and misunderstanding.

QUESTION: Does Slovio need a question word such as "LI" at the beginning of each sentence? ANSWER: The languages that don't use such question words at the beginning of a sentence create questions by changing the word order within the sentence. Example: "He is a man. Is he a man?". This change of word order is for most people more complicated to learn than adding the simple question word at the beginning of the sentence.

QUESTION: Why does Slovio use for questions the word "LI"? Why doesn't it use "CXI"? ANSWER: We have considered the word "cxi" instead of "li". Question is whether the word "cxi" will be understood also by russian, bulgarian and serbo-croatian speakers? While the question word "LI" is very similar to "ESLI" it is intuitively understood by all Slavic speakers. The word "CXI" is used in Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, but it is almost totally incomprehensible to Russian speakers. The compromise we have made is to use the word "LI" but to use it as a universal question word, the same way "CXI" is being used among Polish, Ukrainian and Slovak speakers.

QUESTION: Why does Slovio use cx, sx, zx? Was it copied after Esperanto? ANSWER: No, it was not copied after Esperanto at the time we started to use it we didn't know that Esperanto used similar letter combinations. However, these three letter combinations create the fewest conflicts with Slavic spelling. By the way the official Esperanto spelling doesn't use cx, sx, zx combinations, they use various types of accents over the letters.

QUESTION: Why are there so many similarities between Slovio and Esperanto? ANSWER: Slovio was based 99% on contemporary Slavic languages, Slavic grammar and pronounciation. Esperanto was created by a Polish and Russian speaker, who had taken a lot of his inspiration from Slavic languages.

QUESTION: Why does Slovio use so many short words? Is that inspired by the Czech language? ANSWER: Slovio doesn't use czech-like forms, but it attempts to use the shortest possible forms, abbreviated forms. If you pronounce it the Belorussian, the Russian, the Serbian or the Bulgarian way it doesn't matter. We are sure you will be understood. Slovio has great tolerance for various accents and pronounciations.

QUESTION: Why does Slovio use the endings "-is, and -s" for plural? ANSWER: The most common plural ending among Slavic languages is "-i". Slovio uses "-is / -s" because even though it is not of Slavic origin it is universally understood among Slavic speakers and throughout the World and it does not create conflicts with Slavic word forms.

QUESTION: Why is Slovio called Slovio? ANSWER: The choice of the word Slovio was perhaps not the best, but is is based on the word "SLOVO". Sorry if it sounds to some people Esperanto-like. For now we will keep it, because by now Slovio has become well known under this present name. Alternative name is SLAVSK. Please visit the website http://www.slavsk.com

QUESTION: Why doesn't Slovio have 100% regular grammar like other constructed languages? ANSWER: Because Slovio is not entirely a constructed language. Slovio is a fine balancing act. It is a compromise between existing contemporary Slavic languages and a constructed language. So most of the Slovio grammar is simple and regular, as in a constructed language. The few exceptions from a 100% regularity exist in those cases where it was absolutely necessary to make the Slovio laguage as easily understandable to the 400 million Slavic speakers as possible. For the same reasons, the Slovio spelling is a compromise between a 100% phonetic spelling of a constructed language and a spelling easily understood by most Slavic speakers.