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. Its 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.
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. Its 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, lets 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, lets 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.