Kitabı oku: «Novoslovnica. Guide for a Slavic constructed language»
© George Carpow, 2019
ISBN 978-5-0050-5083-0
Created with Ridero smart publishing system
Acknowledgements
Starting this book I would like to appreciate some persons who had great influence on me writing this book. Such a work never can be done with efforts of a single man. I am grateful to those who believed in the project for the whole development period or just for a while.
First of all I want to thank Rafail Gasparyan. I suppose without his help and collaboration this book would have never been finished. And maybe so Novoslovnica would.
I would like to thank my Macedonian friend Kristijan Cvetanovski. His trust in Novoslovnica have been making me continue my work for all these five years. And with the help of him I discovered some important points that shook the grounds of the project a bit of times.
I want to thank my American friend Harris Mowbray and my Belarusian friend Sergey Yanchenko for editing English and Russian text of the work respectively.
Also I want to thank my Czech colleague Vojtěh Merunka for his critical view on this project. This made me rethink an amount of language details. Without that I don't believe Novoslovnica would have ever become a serious project.
I would like to thank my brother Ivan Carpow who spent his time and efforts on readting this book and making comments and corrections.
Moreover, I would like to appreciate persons that keep the inspiration inside me for these years: Manol Terziev (Bulgaria), Ivan Petrov (Bulgaria), Alexandra Getsich (Serbia), Ljiljana Bradich (Serbia), Igor Achkasov (Russia).
Foreword
Every language is alive – it is born, it grows up, it bares children and it dies.
The process of developing a language is unstoppable and it is cause by a lot of factors we cannot track.
What a beauty is a moment a new language appears. A lot of languages are old and appeared many years ago. However, there exist a very young ones were witnesses to be born i.e. Afrikaans (20 century), Yiddish (19 century) and extinct i.e. Prussian (18 century), Slovinian (20 century), Livonian (2013 year).
The language is naturally born doubly:
• by dialect divergence
• by two languages pidginating
The first way is much popular, though in pure form they both appear pretty rarely. This leads to differentiating of languages into a close language group.
Nevertheless, people sometime get into idea of reuniting these groups into a single language. This is not a natural way but we have examples of such a reunion. For example, modern German language was created from a group of different german languages and dialects to unite people into a single strong country. And they succeeded, so today we ahve a stable literary German language (though some region dialects still exist).
Moreover, people want to unite languages that have diverged much greater than German dialects did. It is rather enviable, though so many examples took place (Volapük, Novial). However, one of them, called Esperanto created by L.L. Zamenhof in 1887 year was very successful. Today more than 2 million people speak Esperanto and several thousand of them use it as a native language.
These examples show that the languages develop both ways – unification and divergence.
Novoslovnica as such a bridge for Slavic languages is working in direction of uniting the language. Collected expressiveness, beauty and purity of all Slavic languages, it tries to rework the idea of what a Slavic language should be.
It is not the only project in this sphere. Starting from Cyril and Methodius, Slavs continue to think about the idea of a common language when loosing the previous project in mind.
The need of a secular common language for Slavs is especially important since the twentieth century. The process of globalization is destroying weak languages and washing out a lot of root nests from others.
Novoslovnica in a row with other Slavic auxiliary language projects try to create something that Slavs could use to struggle the globalization process.
This book is for those who is interested in such an idea of a Slavic language reunion. Moreover, it reveals some historic features of our languages.
Hope you will enjoy reading this book and get something important for yourself when you finish it.
Novoslovnica is a standardized language project with strict rules in it that make the language able to be codified. Hope this will be useful for the interslavic community in developing the bridge between Slavic languages.
Whatever would be, anything you find useful in this book will make it worth writing, my dear reader.
You are welcome to write me all your wishes, comments and marks via email: support@novoslovnica.com
Best wishes,George Carpow
Background
It would be right if we start the book with the article 1that was the first on the way to Novoslovnica construction.
The Slavic world has a deep and rich history. The Slavic tribes appeared on the vastness of Europe, and during their history of growth and development they have reached an extraordinary territorial vastness of settlement. We can say that the formed tribes of the Slavs lived on a huge territory according to Europe standards: from the Elbe in the West to the Volga in the East, from the Aegean sea in the South to the Neva river in the North. Further, due to the development of Kievan Rus and the Russian state, the Slavs settled throughout Eastern Europe and Siberia. Despite all the contradictions in politics and strife, the cultural and linguistic component of the Slavs continued to be preserved. Of course, the tribes bordering on other Nations have experienced enormous cultural and linguistic pressure, including Turkic, Roman, Finno-Ugric peoples.
Despite this, the Slavs retained their cultural identity and mentality. So, we can easily understand a person from the same group (Eastern, Western, Southern) and with little difficulty can establish communication with a person from another group of Slavs. This gives us the right to talk about the brotherhood of the Slavic peoples.
Many of the Slavic peoples have sunk into Oblivion, some in very recent times. For example, the Polabian culture left with the language by the middle of the 20th century. However, most of them remained alive, and from our common efforts depends on what will be the future of the Slavs.
From modern Slavic peoples only East Slavic group had relative stability and self-sufficiency. Russian experienced several waves of foreign language intervention – Mongolian, German, French and English, from which he, generally speaking, came out the winner, in many cases enriching and diversifying its vocabulary. At the moment, the English intervention, the strongest since the Tatar-Mongolian yoke, which has withdrawn many native Russian words from our everyday life, has not ended. But Slavs do it, assimilating came, and sometimes returning lost.
The situation is different in other Slavic groups. Not possessing constant sovereign statehood, Western and Eastern Slavs were subject to constant influence other peoples. Thus, the intervention of Turkish language in the South Slavic languages and culture can be correlated with the Tatar-Mongolian yoke for Russia. After liberation from Turks, southern Slavs have become to experience Western influence, and we can to see enough a large number of borrowing from English, French and camping on p. in Bulgarian and Serbian languages.
Throughout its history, Western Slavs were constantly terrorized by the influence of Romanesque languages. So, under the onslaught of the Germans, the Slavs lost their land along the Elbe and retreated to the Oder. Thus, the influence of the Romanesque tribes was also facilitated by the adoption of the Latin alphabet by the languages of the Western Slavs, instead of a possible Glagolitic or Cyrillic. Anyway, Slavs, though, and have undergone numerous impacts on their culture, managed to keep a common language to the present day.
The problem of re-consolidation of the Slavic peoples worried all many centuries ago and attempts were made to implement it. This can be considered the creation of Kievan Rus, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the expansion of the Russian Empire to the West, the creation of friendly relations with the Balkans, the creation of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia. However, the problem of the impossibility or short-lived nature of this Union arose not because of the establishment of friendly, fraternal relations, but the prevalence of the interests of one nation over all the other members of the Union, which inevitably led to the collapse and failure.
There is a fair idea that the inability to undertake such an Association is not only in the political interests of any country, Yes, undoubtedly, but also in the language of communication, state or Union language. It is impossible to make official all languages and adverbs existing in any district, and declaring one language more important than another we want this or not we turn ourselves to the further collapse of such relations.
The necessity and importance of the creation of the Slavic (pan-Slavic) language was realized in the 16th century, when the first attempts were made to create a common language for all Slavs. However, they did not bring the expected results and sank into oblivion.
Most recent developments of pan-Slavic languages are based on the principle of simplification, minimizing all vocabulary and grammar of languages. For example, these are Slovio and Medžuslovjansky. We believe this is fundamentally wrong, as the new language should not be aimed at the degradation of cultures, but rather to maintain the grandeur and beauty of Slavic culture and identity. Therefore, our principle is not to "Discard all that is foreign", but to "Unite all the best".
If we analyze why the Slavs need a new Slavic language, we can distinguish several positions:
• the need for an additional consolidating factor to unite the policy of the Slavic peoples.
• The need to strengthen mutual understanding and improve the Slavs ' perception of each other.
• Preserve the original richness and beauty of all Slavic languages.
• The impossibility of taking the role of the Slavic language of Russian (and Polish) due to historical reasons.
• Inability to accept the role of the Slavic language of the previous planned projects in full due to objective reasons.
Historical background
Baltic scientists in their research2 worked out a model of Slavic lexical identity. In the picture, you can see the percentage of common lexicon provided by connections between different Slavic languages.
There are three Slavic linguistic and ethnic branches – East Slavic (Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian and Rusyn), West Slavic (Czech, Slovak, Polish, Kashubian, Silesian, Upper-Sorbian, Lower-Sorbian) and South Slavic (Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian and Bulgarian).
This division goes back into history. Different communication events with other nations, geographical position, territorial pecularity – everything affected Slavic people that became nations that now exist. It is supposed to have three initial tribes of Slavs: Venedes (the ancestors of West Slavs), Antes (the ancestors of East Slavs) and Sklavins (the ancestors of South Slavs). It is controversial, but a viable and a rather popular model within Slavic community.
Lexicon connections in Slavic languages
Nevertheless, Slavs started to separate from each other in the seventh century. South Slavs came to Balkan peninsula and assimulated the Illyrian and Turkic peoples that lived there already. Thus, we see how Croatians and Bulgars appeared. The confrontation of Slavs and Germans lead to West Slavic peoples’ appearance. Spreading to the East and confrontation with Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples poured out into the appearance of East Slavic nations.
Script background
One of the Central ideas of pan-Slavism is the creation of a common Slavic language. This problem was solved many times in one form or another and in different ways starting with the old Church Slavonic language created by St. brothers Constantine-Cyril and Methodius. The invention of the first common Slavic language is associated with the appearance of the first writing, which was to become common Slavic – Glagolitic.
However, over time, the part of the Slavs adopted the Cyrillic alphabet, the part took Latin, and some for a while had the Glagolitic alphabet, the Latin alphabet and a modified Cyrillic alphabet, known as bosancica or horvatica (there are other names). Glagolitic also changed, becoming from rounded "Bulgarian" an angular "Croatian". But the main thing was – the language itself changed. Once a common old Church Slavonic began to divide into version that started to converge with the live Slavic languages. We can name some versions of Church Slavonic: Russian Slavonic, Bulgarian Slavonic, Serbian Slavonic, Croatian Slavonic etc.
Attempts to solve the problem of separation of Slavic languages and scripts gave several options:
• To revive the Church Slavonic language anyhow with adding elements of live languages to it or without adding.
• Take one of the live languages, but with certain modifications – adding new letters or words from other Slavic languages, new grammatical structures and so on.
• As in the previous item, but do not change anything and try to spread the live language through educational courses and other forms of education.
• As in the previous point, but forcibly.
• Create a new artificial / semi-artificial language based on those elements of the Slavic languages that remain common or can be relatively easily reduced to common + a number of different elements, to facilitate the «entry» into the language of the Slavs who speak different Slavic languages, or on the basis of only common elements.
The second part of the problem is writing. Due to the fact that the Glagolitic alphabet and bosancica virtually disappeared and remained only in limited use (bosancica disappeared almost completely, and the Glagolitic alphabet is supported in Croatia), the remaining candidates for the Slavic alphabet stays Cyrillic and Latin.
Generally, it can be said that new interslavic projects often use the Latin alphabet that cuts obsessiveness of these projects, because Cyrillic and Latin alphabets still are native to Slavic writing systems:
• in one case, a literature began almost immediately with the Latin alphabet
• in the other a literature started with the Cyrillic alphabet
• somewhere both Latin and Cyrillic scripts are used
• somewhere the transition from Cyrillic to Latin script took place
In Yugoslavia, Cyrillic and Latin tried to lead to a common denominator through the creation of the so-called Slavica. The essence of Slavica was to leave the backbone of the Latin alphabet (all the basic letters + letters, the same for the Latin and Cyrillic), replace all the digraphs, letters with diacritics and digraphs with diacritics corresponding Cyrillic letters. In Yugoslavia, this was all the easier to do because the Yugoslav Cyrillic and Latin alphabet are completely identical in composition having a mutual transliteration of each other. However, this project failed because of the resistance of nationalists in Croatia.
Interslavic background
We all know that the idea of a common language for the Slavs hovers among the Slavic peoples for more than a Millennium. The first and only successful project to date was the Church Slavonic language of Cyril and Methodius. This language has successfully found its niche in religious use and is used with some changes to the present day. However, such attempts for the secular language were resumed only in the 17th century in the works3.4 Moreover, the working project was neither created nor introduced into society, while some similar projects of planned languages for romance languages have successfully taken root and found a wide response in society (Esperanto, Interlingua).
The revival of the idea of the inter-Slavic language in our days occurred in 1999, when mark Gucco from Slovakia created the language of Slovio. This language has a huge number of shortcomings and is currently not recognized as capable by any of the developers of the inter-Slavic project, but it served as a catalyst for the emergence of a large number of such projects and the development of the idea of creating a planned inter-Slavic language that could meet the needs of modern society.
After that, more than 20 similar projects, more or less developed, appeared in 10 years. In 2006 there was a project slavianski, created (Ondrej Rečnik and Gabriel Svoboda). This language was developed in parallel in different degrees of detail, he put his ideas Jan van Steenbergen and Igor Polyakov. In 2009, the project broke away from the project Slovioski (Steeven Radzikowski, Andrej Moraczewski and Michal Borovička), which tried to unite the ideas of Slovio and Slovyanski. However, in 2010, all these projects were merged into one under the name Interslavic (see below – Interslavic-2).
At the same time, the Czech programmer Vojtěch Merunka published under the name of Neoslavonic. This project suggested the idea of how the Church Slavonic language could develop in free development. In 2011, these two projects began cooperative work on a common case. (see figure 1) then, this project has taken a leadership position on the issue of building medullablastoma language. Only in 2012 there was one project of “Northern Slavic language” (Venedčyna), presented by Nikolai Kuznetsov, who then joined Interslavic, and in 2014 there was a project of Novoslovnitsa, presented by George Carpow and the development team mainly from the countries of Eastern and southern Slavs, which at the moment remains the only living independent project outside the project Interslavic.
Interslavic introduced the idea of flavorisation, which resulted in a valid language differentiation of dialects and spellings and the lack of codification. In 2017, the project Neoslavonic and Interslavic merged into a new project called interslavic-2, which was a compromise between the ideas of Vojtěch Merunka and Jan van Steenbergen (who headed the project interslavic-1). They presented their new ideas in the article5, which was published in July 2017.
Comparison with other projects
We can provide a little concept comparison of other interslavic projects: Neoslavonic6 and Interslavic7.
These projects had been developed before Novoslovnica appeared. Each of the projects has its own flavor or aim:
• Neoslavonic represents the idea of the possible development of Old Church Slavonic up to nowadays.
• Interslavic-1 develops the idea of finding a common core of modern Slavic languages and take features and lexicon that is common to all modern Slavic languages
• Novoslovnica from this point of view develops the idea of creating the language that unites most grammar features assimilated by different Slavic languages along with etymologically developed lexicon with regard to modern days.
Short comparison of Novoslovnica with other projects
Phonology
Phonology – a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in the language. Phonology describes all the sounds that the language possesses.
Sounds can be divided into different classes. One of the characteristics for separating different sounds is the ability to pronounce them with an open vocal tract. You can notice that vowels (such as a, o, u in English) are able to be pronounced with open vocal tract, whereas consonants are pronounced with partly or completely closed vocal tract.
Moreover the term of allophone should be concerned before going further.
Allophone – one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language.
This leads to the definition of a phoneme:
A phoneme is one of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
Therefore, an allophone is such a sound (or a set of sounds) that does not influence the meaning of the word.
Vowels
In the beginning of this paragraph the description of a vowel should be given.
A vowel (V) – a sound produced with no constriction in the vocal tract.
With this information we can distinguish different types of vowels. The classification of vowels is based on two main factors:
• What is the row of the sound
• What is the height of the sound
• Whether the vowel is rounded or not
The row is the position of the tongue when you pronounce a vowel. There are three main rows: front, central and back. When you pronounce a vowel at the front row, you move your tongue toward the teeth. The descriptions of central and back rows are similar – you move your tongue to the center or toward the larynx to pronounce them.
The height of the sound is a characteristic of tongue convexity and tension in your mouth. If it is positive, it means your tongue does not touches the palate nor bottom of the mouth, and the tip of your tongue is tense- or closed. If your tongue is flat and parallel to the bottom of your oral cavity, moreover, it lies on it – it is an open one. Between these two positions a middle position can be found.
The roundedness of the vowel is the amount of rounding in the lips during the articulation of a vowel. Vowels can be categorized as rounded and unrounded. Thus, to pronounce a rounded vowel you should round your lips. To pronounce an unrounded vowel, you should relax your lips during the articulation of a vowel.
Finally, we can talk about Novoslovnica phonology. Novo-slovnica consists of 20 ordinary vowel phonemes. Among them there are seven closed vowels, three open vowels, ten middle vowels as well as seven front vowels, five center vowels and eight back vowels. On the table 1.1 you can see a chart position of the vowels in Novoslovnica.
Vowels in Novoslovnica
In this table you can also see different vowels are font-styled differently. The bold ones are for rounded vowels. The normal ones are for unrounded vowels.
If you know Czech or Finnish, you might be concerned by the absence long vowels in this chart. It’s time to speak about allophones in Novoslovnica.
Novoslovnica has allophones of open and long vowels. This means that it does not matter how you pronounce a «modified» vowel – as a long one or as an open one – the meaning of the word will not change. To make this more clear, look at table 1.2.
Long-vowel allophones in Novoslovnica
Exception:
o̞ (only one modified vowel – ɯ)
Examples:
Buda [`buda] (Buddha)
búda [`bu: da] (building) – [`bʊda]
If you have some knowledge about Slavic languages and their origins, you should know that the Proto-Slavic language had nasal vowels, which we can nowadays be found in Polish and Lithuanian. Do they exist in Novoslovnica? Of course they do! There are two allophones for pronouncing nasal vowels. The first one is actually a nasal vowel, when you pronounce an ordinary vowel through your nose. The second is more common, such as in French, when you add a nasal consonant [ŋ] to an ordinary vowel. Look at the sounds on the next table.
Examples:
Dųb (oak) [dõb] – [duŋb]
Męso (meet) [`mɛ̃so] – [`meŋso]
As you can see, Novoslovnica distinguishes between nasal vowels in two categories – O-nasality (hard) and E-nasality (soft).
The last topic that we will speak of pertaining to vowels, is the firmness and the softness of the vowels. Scientists argue about what is primary in making sound soft or hard – consonants or vowels. Novoslovnica claim vowels are softer or hard primarily, although consonants itself also can be either soft or hard.
There are vowels that tend to make their surrounding soft and there are vowels that tend to make their surrounding hard. As you already know, there are two nasal vowels – one hard (O-nasality) and one soft (E-nasality). However, there are other pairs of hard / soft vowels among ordinary ones. Look at table 1.4 for more information.
Hard and soft vowels
Examples:
Dodatek (addition) [do`datek]
Smërtj (death) [sme̞rc]
There is only one vowel that has no pair in softness / hardness. It is ə. This vowel is named the «schwa» sound and it can be described as the most «middle» sound among vowels. To pronounce it you should relax your oral cavity and pronounce a sound with weakened muscles. This is the «schwa» sound.
Consonants
In this paragraph about consonants, I would like to begin with the definition of a consonant.
Consonant (C) – a sound that is articulated with complete or particular closure of the vocal tract.
Likewise vowels, consonants have three characteristics that determine their position in your articulation. These three parameters are:
• Place, where the consonant is pronounced in the mouth
• Manner, how the consonant is pronounced
• Sonority, whether you use your vocal cords or not
Place of the consonant can be quite different. Here are possible types: Bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, postalveolar, palato-alveolar, retroflex, alveolo-palatal, palatal, labio-velar, velar. There are more types, but they do not exist in Novoslovnica.
Manner is the way how you pronounce the sound. There are also different manners, that are used in Novoslovnica. They are: nasal, stop, affricate (sibilant), sibilant fricative, non-sibilant fricative, approximant, trill, lateral approximant.
Sonority is the boolean attribute of pronunciation. You can either use your voice with the sound you pronounce or not. Notice that vowels cannot be pronounced without the use of your voice.
Combining these three parameters, we get the unique consonant that we want to pronounce. We cannot draw a 3-dimensional table, because there are three parameters on input, so we will combine information into 2-dimensional space as in paragraph about vowels. So, look at the figure and see the different consonants that are used in Novoslovnica.
Consonant sounds in Novoslovnica
Different colors of the cells show the sonority of the consonant. Yellow color shows that the sound is voiced, while green ones are for voiceless sounds.
Blue cells in the table show that sounds in it can be used both in voiced and voiceless forms as allophones.
Novoslovnica has 51 consonants, 21 of them are voiceless and 30 are voiced.
However, not all of these consonants are language phonemes. So, let’s talk about the allophones among these sounds.
Consonant allophones in Novoslovnica
Exception: The sound θ has no pair, because its pair ð has never been used in Slavic languages.
Likewise vowels, consonants can be compared with each other in terms of softness / hardness. The common rule is that every consonant has its soft or hard partner.
Exception: Two sounds are exceptions to this rule.
• Also nasal velar consonant ŋ has no soft pair.
• And vice versa, the sound j is soft and has no hard pair.
Remember this exception, let’s look at the table 1.7 to get acquainted with pairs of consonants.
Hard and soft consonant allophones
As you see, every consonant from table has its own soft pair. The soft consonant is usually written as a hard consonant with the sound j attached, but some of them are provided as unique sounds by IPA, because in some languages they can be phonemes.8
Extra sounds
By reading this paragraph you should be aware about Novoslovnica phonemes. At the beginning we will speak about two main features of the language: reproduction and alternation.
Reproduction (extra sounds) – is a process of adding a new sound (consonant or vowel) in the word.
Alternation – is a process of changing some sound (consonant or vowel) or sounds to another one (s).
What are the purposes of alternation and reproduction? These terms both obtain the single aim – to make our speech comfortable for ourselves.
Every language has its own comfortable combinations of sounds and avoided ones. Some languages alternate these uncomfortable character rows into another ones that are comfortable for language speaker in writing, some languages keep writing etymological and alternate the pronunciation of the uncomfortable words. Take into account the fact, that the concept of comfort is relative, that means two different languages (which are spoken by different nations) have different modes of comfort.
Example: you can look at and compare German and Dutch languages. They are very close, but they have different ways for comfortable pronunciation. The word «book» in German sounds like «Buch», but in Holland it sounds like «boek». Thus, you see that these words are familiar, but their pronunciation differs a lot.
Moreover, even one language spoken in different areas can differ greatly in the areas it is spoken.
Example: American and British English. You know that it is still the same language, but pronunciation differs so greatly that American person can not always understand in ordinary speech (quick temp of speaking) what the British person have said.
This is the example how the same language differs in areas it is spoken. Furthermore, these areas may not be far away from each other. You can find information about different patois and even dialects in very small regions.9
Novoslovnica as a panslavic language absorbs different conceptions of the comfort term of Slavic languages.
When reproduction is used, we add a new sound before the word we want to say. It can be whether a vowel or a consonant, depending on the previous letter in the word.
When should we reproduce a sound? To deal with this problem, you should know a thesis, which is widely used in Novoslovnica.
Rule n. 1: After consonant there should be placed a vowel. And after a vowel there should be placed a consonant.
This rule will help you in speaking and writing, when you construct your words with the reproduction.
There is a limited row of sounds that are allowed to participate in reproduction. In the table 2.1 you can see all of them.
Examples:
osem (eight) [`osɛm] – vosem [`vosɛm]
gra (game) [ɦra]} – ïgra [i`ɦra]
So now the only problem is to know about how should we reproduce these sounds.
Reproduction of consonants can be found in different parts of the word. There are three places, where reproduction can appear – the beginning of the word, middle part of the word and the ending of the word.
When we speak about the beginning of the word, we should take into account what sound is at the end of the previous word. Due to rule 2 we should try to keep the «consonant-vowel» sequence inside our sentence. That’s why, we should do actions from the list below:
If the previous word ends with the vowel and temporal word begins also with the vowel we should add in the beginning of the word a consonant V or J. The choice of what letter to add depends on the vowel which is in the temporal word.
• We should choose J for soft vowels
• We should choose V for hard ones.
• If there is one consonant and one vowel in the set of the first letter from the temporal word and the last letter from the previous word, we should not add nothing.
Speaking about word endings, thesis 1 is also very important. We should add a letter B to the end of the word, if the next word begins with the vowel and temporal word ends with the vowel too.
As you see these two principles are practically equal, because wherever we add a consonant, the result will be the same. So the question is, when we should add to the end of the word a consonant and when we should add it to the beginning of the word. In practice, almost always we use the first case, when we add a consonant to the beginning of the word. The second case is used in prepositional constructions with such a word as «O» (about) (Look: «O» – «Ob»). In other cases try to use letters V and J for reproduction.
The third case of consonant reproduction is to reproduce it in the middle of the word. It is used, when there is a row of vowels in the word and it is difficult to pronounce them all together. Then you can divide them by the consonant J, which is put between the neighbor vowels. Don’t confuse it with the case, when with the addition of a vowel letter Ǐ transforms to letter J (see the next paragraph for it) and you receive to vowels divided by this consonant two. Look at the examples of consonant reproduction in the middle of the word.
Examples:
ïdiot (idiot) [`idɪot] – ïdijot [`idɪʝot]
The same situation is about vowel reconstruction. You can find it in the beginning, in the middle and in the end of the word, but it is a bit simpler than a previous one. Vowel reproduction appears when there is a rather large amount of consonants in one place of the sentence. This means that you can find a row of consonants in the word or a consonant conjunction in the end of one word and in the beginning of the next one. In any case, you should concern here about whether it is comfortable for you to pronounce these combinations of sounds.
In the beginning of the word we add a vowel Ï and there are no other cases. Very simple.
Examples:
gra (game) [ɦra]} – ïgra [i`ɦra]
In the middle or in the end of the word we add a vowel O. This case is used with prepositions and prefixes («K» – «Ko», «S» – «So» etc).
Examples:
k domu (to home) [k `domu] – ko dvoru [ko `dvoru]
Alternation
Alternation is a very important feature of Slavic languages. All of them provide some cases, when one letter changes to another one (s) and controversially. The cause is the fact that some sound combinations are difficult to be spoken or not comfortable for that. For example, Slavs can say «napisati» (to write), but «napišut» (they (will) write). The variant «napisut» is not comfortable to pronounce and, moreover, it is not understandable. What are you speaking – «to write» with hardened T or «they write» with depalatalized S. So you can see, that these rules are often experimental and cannot be explained in a common way.
Alternation can be found mostly in conjugation or declension of the word, because the process is in changing uncomfortable forms to better ones while changing the base and endings of the word.
In this paragraph we will speak about different examples of vowel and consonant palatalization. Let us begin with the consonants.
Alternation S//Š
This alteration appears in words with the letter S before a vowel A. The basic sound is S, which changes to Š before vowels I, E and in some cases before A in conjugation. Let’s look at examples to understand how it works.
Examples:
Pisati (write) [`pɪsatɪ] – piši [pɪ`ʂɪ]
Vysok (tall) [vɨ`sok] – povyšati [po`vɨʂatɪ] (to increase)
Alternation K//Č
This alteration appears in words with the letter K before a vowel A without a following vowel. The basic sound is K, which changes to Č before vowels Ě, N. Let us look at examples to understand how it works.
Examples:
Věk [vek] – věčen [`vet̠ʃɛn]}
Vëlïk [`ve̞lik] (Big) – vëlïčina [`ve̞lit̠ʃɪna] (Measure)
Alternation C//Č
This alteration appears in words with the letter C before a vowel A. The basic sound is C, which changes to Č before vowels I, E. Let us look at examples.
Examples:
Ptica (bird) [`ptɪtsa] – ptičen (birdish) [`ptɪt̠ʃɛn]
Věnec [`venɛts] (Crown) – Věnčati [`vent̠ʃatɪ] (To crown)
Alternation D//Đ
This one appears in words with the letter D before a vowel I. This consonant changes to Đ before vowels A, E and U. Let us look at the examples.
Examples:
Voditi (drive) [`vodɪtɪ] – vođati [`voɖʐatɪ]
Roditi [`rodɪtɪ] (bare) – rođati [`roɖʐatɪ]
Alternation Ǐ//J
This alternation is very simple. We write Ǐ before a consonant or in the end of the word and we write J before a vowel. The exception is the case, when we write Ǐ in the end of the word, but the first letter of the next word is a vowel – then we pronounce J, but write Ǐ.
Examples:
Môǐ (my) [mʊj] – moja [`moʝa]
However, not only consonants can change in the word when we conjugate or decline it. There are some alterations of vowels too.
Alternation Ò//-
This alternation appears in some old roots (see next paragraph).
Examples:
Tòk (stick) [tək] – tkati [`tkatɪ] (to weave)
Alternation E//-
This alternation is similar to the previous ones, but exist in word suffixes.
Examples:
Krasen (Nice) [`krasɛn] – krasna [`krasna]
Alternation Ę//En
This alternation is rather narrow, because it is used in the case of declension nouns of type 3 (look paragraph about noun declension), when the nasal vowel [ɛ̃] alternates to non-nasal pair of vowel «E» and consonant «N» (non-nasal!). To understand it look at the example
Examples:
Vremę (time) [`vrɛmjɛ̃] – vremenï [`vrɛmɛɲi]
Plemę (tribe) [`plEmjɛ̃] – plemenï [`plɛmɛɲi]
In the conclusion of this paragraph it should be mentioned that alterations are very important in Slavic languages and Novoslovnica as well. You can use reproduction in your speech as a recommended feature, while alterations are complimentary in this language. As it was noted before, we cannot ignore anything that can bring a misunderstanding in our speech.
Runaway vowels
Looking back in the Slavic language history we can find out that there were roots with two strange for an ordinary person vowels – «Ò» and «J». First one was named «Yer» and denotes a hard mid central vowel (Shwa). The second one was named «Yerj» (with soft R) and denotes a soft mid central vowel. Now the second one is lost and we use only shwa sound in the letter «Yer». However, the words are still and we need to pronounce them in some way. Novoslovnica uses the soft «E» sound to represent roots with old soft shwa sound.
Main feature of these sounds was to fall out from the root, when a vowel appears afterwards. That’s why there are many words with two consonants consecutively – there is an imaginary shwa sound between them that has been fallen out from the root.
Nevertheless, despite falling out of «Yer», soft «E» in this places does not fall out. So, in the previous paragraph you could see that there are two alternations O//– and O//Ë, that are handled in the similar positions. So the answer on the question, why in the first case there is no sound and in the second there is a soft E is the fact, that words satisfying the first case comprise old hard shwa sound and remain comprise old soft shwa sound, that has transformed into soft E.
The fact should be mentioned that nowadays the letter Ò exists only in roots of the words. In suffixes the letter E is used for this sound and in the prefixes the letter O is used.
Look at the examples:
– pod
– ek
– pòk
However, you should remember that speaking the words with these letters we should pronounce them just as they are written – Ò as shwa, E as E, O as O. You should not reduce all the sounds to shwa.
Accent
Accent is a very difficult topic in most languages, because it is not permanent. There are some exceptions i.e. Czech and French, but in most cases we cannot say where accent will be put in the word without studying definite language. This causes problems for beginners.
Novoslovnica has a dynamic accent, but it has been formalized. There is a rule, that determines the place you should put the accent.
Rule n. 2: The accent should be put on the first syllable of the word root.
This rule covers about 80% of the words in the lexicon. You know the well-known 80/20 rule, or Pareto principle. It is something alike with the accent. Remained 20 per cent of the words we should cover by introducing extra-rule cases. Accepting these cases, you will be able to cover more than 99 per cent of Novoslovnica word amount.
These cases were created in attempt to unify the accents in different Slavic languages. Surely the Slavic languages have greatly changed since then, as they were one language. Therefore, accents in different Slavic languages often differ. Nevertheless, Novoslovnica tries to obliterate differences between them, producing accent patterns that could be comfortable to pronounce and to hear for all Slavs.
Below you can see the list of all these cases, that you should remember while speaking Novoslovnica.
Accent shifting cases:
– Accented endings (Nouns)
• -a (Dual, Nominative)
• -y (Singular, Genitive/Partitive)
• -ami (Plural, Instrumentative)
• -ama (Dual, Dative)
• -am (Plural, Dative)
– Accented endings (Verbs)
• -i Imperative (see paragraph about verb moods)
– Accented suffixes
• -ova- (Verb)
• -ôva- (Verb)
• -ava- (Verb)
• -óv- (Adjective)
• -ak- (Noun)
• -ok- (Noun)
– verb suffixes in Present Concrete Tense (see paragraph about verb tenses)
– Accent shift in the root
• If the word is a borrowed one, then the accent is put on the place it is in the original word.
• If the root loses its vowel, the accents moves one vowel to the left (if it is possible)
• Words that have more than one root (complex words) have their accent on the first syllable of the main word’s root. (see paragraph about complex words for what root is main)
• Adverbs or other parts of speech, formed with the prepositional construction, have their accents on the first syllable of the main word (see paragraph about collocations)
These rules are enough for you to speak Novoslovnica properly with a few efforts for it.
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