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Learn ’Slovio’ first as help to Russian? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7161 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 25 of 36 29 December 2010 at 7:19am | IP Logged | ||
Oh, but it can. See here Cyrillic from what I can tell is just as good (or bad) as the Latin alphabet in expressing Slovio (or any Slavonic language for that matter). What matters is if the script is phonemic and is an accurate representation of the sounds used in the language (e.g. Russian spelling is quite complicated despite its use of Cyrillic since as a rule it does not mark stress placement or vowel reduction. Learning how to spell new words in Russian is quite similar to learning how to do the same in English since pronunciation often differs from what the written representation suggests). Instead of diacritics on certain Latin letters (e.g. š, ž) as is frequently used in Slavonic languages that use a modified Latin alphabet, Slovio's modified Latin alphabet uses diagraphs (e.g. š = sx (pronounced as "sh" in "shut"). The use of "cx", "sx" and "zx" resemble the conventions in Esperanto for computers that cannot replicate letters with Esperanto's diacritics. The profusion of "x" in the diagraphs may be what is giving that impression of an "explosion in an alphabet factory". 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| pfn123 Senior Member Australia Joined 5088 days ago 171 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English* | Message 26 of 36 29 December 2010 at 7:35am | IP Logged | ||
This versatility would be a mark in its favour then. Edited by pfn123 on 29 December 2010 at 7:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| IJzeren Jan Pentaglot Newbie Netherlands steen.free.fr/Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5087 days ago 3 posts - 19 votes Speaks: Dutch*, Polish, English, German, Russian Studies: Hindi | Message 27 of 36 30 December 2010 at 4:59am | IP Logged | ||
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Since Mark Hucko, the person who is hiding behind the ID "babusxka", keep repeating all kinds of lies and falsifications about Slovianski, I feel compelled to rectify a few things, especially the claim that "Slovianski is a plagiarized copy of Slovio." Mark Hucko knows very well that this is not true, but keeps repeating it nonetheless, even though he has never been able to produce a single piece of evidence for this statement. If there is any relationship between Slovio and Slovianski at all, it's only that Slovianski might not have been pulled off if Slovio had been something completely different from what it actually is. But that would hardly qualify it as a "plagiarized copy", now would it? Indeed, you won't find a single word or grammatical feature in Slovianski that does not exist in the natural Slavic languages, yet does exist in Slovio. Slovianski is based on the former only. In the process of compiling grammar and vocabulary ("creating" would not even be the correct term in this case), Slovio has never even been taken into consideration at all.
The truth is, as can be seen on a list I have compiled of Interslavic language projects (http://steen.free.fr/slovianski/constructed_slavic_language s.html), Slovio is just one out of no less than sixty of such projects that exist or have existed over the centuries. According to Mr. Hucko's twisted world view, they can be categorised as follows: 1. Slovio predecessors, 2. Slovio, 3. Slovio clones. Since he is unable and unwilling to substantiate his claim, it should be concluded that he simply considers himself the exclusive owner of the very concept, which is odd, because Slovio is far from being the first language of this kind. If anything, Slovio is the first International Auxiliary Language that is predominantly based on Slavic roots, or if you wish, the first Interslavic language with a mostly Esperanto-based grammar. However, Slovianski neither claims to be a world language (as Slovio does), nor does it have a schematic grammar. In other words, Hucko's claim doesn't hold, no matter what. It's like a painter who paints the Eiffel Tower and then considers all other paintings of the same tower "copy-cat paintings". It should be pointed out here that Mr. Hucko has been extremely hostile towards Slovianski and similar projects from the very beginning. Initially, this was criticism of the type: "These languages are way too difficult, nobody is going to learn them anyway". After Slovianski got a lot of media attention about a year ago, Hucko started a true hate campaign against the people who work on Slovianski - including personal threats, insults (like calling my wife "a Polish whore"), conspiration theories and lots of antisemitic undertones. Lately, he has also started to use the names of more successful projects (Slovianski, Interslavic, Slovianto) as alternate names for Slovio, buying several internet domains (all pointing to Slovio) and disseminating false information in their name, which is also the case f.ex. on YouTube. Apparently with the purpose of discrediting them and winning his "Google War" all in one. To give at least some counterweight against all the false information given about Slovio, here are a few facts: Mark Hucko is the owner of over 40 interlinked internet domains, not only slovio.com, but also sites offering anti-virus stuff, free MP3 downloads, free domain hosting, chat, fora, a search engine, community portals, news sites, links sites, porn sites, etc. Most of them are just empty shells with no other purpose than promoting Slovio. One of them, ruskio.com, is trying to sell off Slovio under a different name as "simplified Russian". A few of them are not directly related to Slovio, but to Hucko's pseudo-scientific blabberings (theories about the Gauls and the Etruscans being Slavs, immortology, cosmology etc.). For the rest, we have the site of the "World Slavic Congress", "Ombudsman International" and a site where Hucko is begging for donations as a means to "Stop Greenhouse". All in all, a lot of pompous names and titles, but in reality all of them are just one-man projects without any backing from others. It all leaves the impression of a complete megalomaniac, further supported by Hucko himself who claims to be "the first person since 1000 years who unified the great Slavic nation" (on YouTube). Another possibility not to be excluded is that he is just trying to lure people into giving him money for a good (but sadly fake) cause. Because indeed, even though the Slovio site writes: "We don't need your money, only your help", still all Hucko's sites are full of "donate" buttons; a remarkable contradiction, methinks. The smell of money becomes clear from other texts to be found on the main page, too: "Businessmen: you can make money with Slovio-language. More and more firms around the world are using Slovio to reach some 400-million potential customers". Another statement that is patently false: in reality, there has only been one firm that briefly experimented with Slovio before it ran away screamingly. Similar things can be said about at least 90% of the rest of the site: it claims to sell books that don't exist; it contains testimonies that are false; reports about "Slovio-klubis" all around the world are false (in fact, there isn't a single one). False are also reports about hundreds or even thousands of Slovio users. The truth is that at its peak (around 2003-2004) there were perhaps some 15-20 users, and nowadays there are no more than some three of them left. Yes, the Slovio Yahoo Group has nearly a thousand members, but where these come from is explained by lots of messages of the type "I don't know what all this is about, but can someone please unsubscribe me?". Besides, despite the size of the group, there hasn't been any significant activity for years. Slovio claims to be understandable to 400 million people. This is of course nonsense, and I don't have to explain here why. Still, it is interesting that Hucko treats the Slavic diaspora as a separate Slavic nation of 60 million people, without discounting them from other nations. Priceless is also the fact that Hucko claims Slovio is mutually understandable with Latvian and Lithuanian! Slovio calls itself "neutral" and "universal", and there's a lot of talk about peace and mutual understanding. Yet, Hucko also affiliates himself with radical Slavic nationalism. Not long ago, he even promoted Slovio on a Slovak forum as a means to exterminate the Hungarian minority! All texts ever written in Slovio (with the exception of those in the "sample texts" section) are soaked with antisemitism and racial hatred. And that's just the news site, which claims to be "neutral and objective"; the Slovio forum on the other hand is an antisemitic pandemonium of the worst kind. Even more interestingly, Slovio calls itself "official", which would imply that it has been sanctioned by some institution. Likewise, Slovio calls itself "the standard language for communication in Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Slavic-speaking regions all over the world". Needless to say, all this is just rhetorics, and the truth looks quite different. Like I said, the actual number of people who ever used Slovio for anything is 20 at most. At last, there is the claim of 65,000 dictionary entries. I have analysed the Slovio dictionary lately, and found the following: - thousands of words are actually without a translation - lots of doublets, endless numbers of synonyms - the plural of practically every noun is given as a separate entry - also many verb forms (f.ex. past tenses) are given as separate entries - thousands of names of internet domains, geographic entities, inhabitants of countries, corresponding adjectives, etc. - adjectivisations of a lot of nouns (just by adding "-ju"), often resulting in very strange words - nonsense words like "Europju banan-sojuz". In other words, the easiest way of filling a dictionary. If you remove all nonsense entries, there's not much more than some 10,000-15,000 words left. For the record, I've never told anyone to learn Slovianski instead of Slovio. If you like Slovio, then by all means go ahead and learn it. But be warned, because Slovio is not what it claims to be. And it won't be of much help for learning any other language either, because indeed, the bulk of Slovio vocabulary is (sometimes heavily mutilated) Russian and the grammar has nothing in common with Slavic at all. Regards, Jan van Steenbergen 16 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| GREGORG4000 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5528 days ago 307 posts - 479 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish Studies: Japanese, Korean, Amharic, French | Message 28 of 36 30 December 2010 at 5:29am | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, there seems to be a lot of complicated history behind this. Thanks for taking the time to write all that out.
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| IJzeren Jan Pentaglot Newbie Netherlands steen.free.fr/Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5087 days ago 3 posts - 19 votes Speaks: Dutch*, Polish, English, German, Russian Studies: Hindi | Message 29 of 36 30 December 2010 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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You're welcome. The truth is, I really don't enjoy writing this kind of things. My own private policy regarding Slovio has always been: live and let live. I never liked the language very much, but in the past I have been defending it against deletion from Wikipedia at several occasions. Of course, that was before I found out how deceitful all the Slovio propaganda really was. Still, I maintain that people who prefer Slovio should learn Slovio, people who prefer Slovianski should learn Slovianski, and people who don't care about either of them shouldn't bother at all. But since Mr. Hucko's hatred campain against Slovianski and against my person has been growing more and more violent, I felt compelled to respond at last.
You can be sure that there won't be any further response from "babusxka". Or, if anything, reiterations of the same thing without any actual proof. Edited by IJzeren Jan on 30 December 2010 at 3:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Radzikowski Pentaglot Newbie United States interslavic.com Joined 5081 days ago 6 posts - 16 votes Speaks: French, Polish, English*, Spanish, Russian | Message 30 of 36 01 January 2011 at 10:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I was formerly a very strong proponent of SLOVIO as a panslavic language and introduced
it into my (international) law firm as a method of email communication between and among our non-Slavic-speaking and and Slavic-speaking employees (we have offices in four Slavic-speaking countries, the US, UK and Switzerland). For two years I championed and supported Slovio. Mark Hucko ("babusxka" in this forum), its founder, made me a Moderator of his SLOVIO YAHOO Forum - where I chatted about the benefits that SLOVIO could offer to non-Slavic speakers as an initial "introduction" or "primer" to Slavic languages. When Hucko was unable to maintain a separate SLOVIO ONLINE DICTIONARY, I personally paid for and operated the SLOVIO ONLINE DICTIONARY for approximately 2 years (more on this later). Within our company, our Slavic-speakers, however, found Slovio's many un-slavic word- forms not really workable between themselves (my colleagues ("kolegi") are Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian speakers). And so they began using word forms that were Slavic-based words, rather than the too-many non-slavic words or too- heavily "Russianed" word forms created by Mark Hucko. Out of this effort, I and my "kolegi" created a "more Slavic Slovio" - which we called "SLOVIOSKI" - enrolling the help of two "outside-the-company" Slavic speakers - a SLOVAK name Michal Borovicka and a RUSSIAN - Andrej Moraczewski (who has posted here). We retained the SLOVIO lexicon initially, slowly adding or substituting word forms that were "more Slavic". On or around December 2009, we changed the name of our language from SLOVIOSKI to "INTERSLAVIC" (in English) / "MEDZUSLOVJANSKI" (in our Slavic form). In March 2010, we completely deleted the SLOVIO lexicon - and elected to use our own word-forms - which included some SLOVIO word forms (such as "slovknig" which became "slovkniga" in INTERSLAVIC - meaning "word book" - for "lexicon"). 95% of our word- forms were created based upon true Slavic word forms versus the more "esperanto" type of words in SLOVIO. Concurrently with our earlier "SLOVIOSKI" efforts, another group of Slavic-speakers, who were originally introduced to each other inside the SLOVIO forum called "Blognik" - likewise found that SLOVIO did not meet the needs of Slavic-speakers like themselves, and so they began to develop what has come to be known as "SLOVIANSKI" - which means "SLAVIC" in nearly all of the natural Slavic languages. SLOVIANSKI created its own lexicon of words - which can be found at http://steen.free.fr/slovianski/english-slovianski.html. Our INTERSLAVIC lexicon was developed at http://www.interslavic.com Around March 2010, our INTERSLAVIC team decided to join efforts with the SLOVIANSKI team to merge the SLOVIANSKI dictionary into INTERSLAVIC - since the word-forms created in SLOVIANSKI were based upon the same principals of INTERSLAVIC. This transition continues. The choice of moniker for this combined effort is: "MEDŽUSLOVJANSKI." And I look forward to our continued collaboration! I had envisioned every reason that SLOVIO and MEDŽUSLOVJANSKI could co-exist for the benefit of those who wished to communicate in a "Slavic lingua-franca" - with SLOVIO being used primarily by non-Slavic speakers and INTERSLAVIC/MEDŽUSLOVJANSKI for Slavic- speakers. My association with SLOVIO, however, sadly came to an end several months ago, when its founder MARK HUCKO chose to rage an all-out attack on SLOVIANSKI and INTERSLAVIC - via threats of legal action for our "plagiarising" SLOVIO. HUCKO even went so far as to send letters to the employer of the JAVA programmer who created the dictionary program in which the SLOVIO lexicon operated, threatening the unrelated employer with legal action for its employing this particular programmer. Alas, because there was no "plagiarising" actions ever undertaken, HUCKO dropped his threats and next resorted to a campaign of spamming our websites. More recently, he has chosen to register domain names using various forms of our "INTERSLAVIC" domain NAMES. My dis-association with SLOVIO, however, occurred when HUCKO chose - a few months ago - to begin to make postings against me, Jan Van Steenbergen and others of our interslavic collaborative, of a deplorable ANTI-SEMITIC nature. Unfortunately, I found that this has been Mr. HUCKO's modus operandi for many years. It led me to conclude that Mr. HUCKO is a very troubled individual - and certainly someone with whom I cannot associate. I immediately terminated my support of the SLOVIO ONLINE DICTIONARY. I wish Mr. HUCKO and SLOVIO well. However, in my humble opinion, the best opportunity for SLOVIO to continue on, would be if its founder handed the reins of its journey over to a new person. Thank you. Steeven Radzikowski 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7161 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 31 of 36 02 January 2011 at 6:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you gentlemen for your detailed comments.
I came across Slovianski by accident several months ago and was struck by how familiar it seemed given my background in several Slavonic languages. Slovio however did not bring forth anything close to the same degree of familiarity. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| babusxka Newbie Slovakia Joined 5090 days ago 8 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English | Message 32 of 36 06 January 2011 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | ||
1 person has voted this message useful |
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