A three-minute video describes (and illustrates) a made-up language that turned out useful for a film; in their summary:
Klingon, Elvish, Dothraki, and Nadsat: there are plenty of invented languages used in movies. But one of them, Interslavic, has the potential to be useful to hundreds of millions of people. The language just made its movie debut in a wartime drama, The Painted Bird, and its creator says it could be used by Slavic speakers from Siberia to Slovenia.
Via Trevor Joyce, who also sent this short and hilarious video, “When Irish People Cant Speak Irish,” which shows that it doesn’t pay to exaggerate your linguistic attainments. Thanks, Trevor!
Ha! That was me trying to speak French in Quebec last summer! (The Oirish vid, I mean)
It was also me trying to speak Russian in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1971 (and getting yelled at by my fellow tour-group members for not extracting the needed information quickly enough, when they couldn’t speak a word of Russian, grr).
Personally, I think it would be much simpler if everybody just agreed to speak Hausa.
Daidai!
Personally, I think it would be much simpler if everybody just agreed to speak Hausa.
…I’m actually mildly surprised that you said Hausa and not Kusaal.
(The obvious choice, of course, is Esperanto, though apparently some natural languages are even more regular.)
Dai(dai) is ainm dom!
I’m actually mildly surprised that you said Hausa and not Kusaal.
But Hausa is so simple! In Nigeria, even little children can speak it.
Ⰿⰻⱄⰾⰻⰿ ⰴⰰ ⰱⰻ Ⰻⱀⱅⰵⱃⱄⰾⰰⰲⰻⱌ ⱅⱃⰵⰱⰰⱁ ⰱⰻⱅⰻ ⱀⰰⱂⰻⱄⰰⱀ ⰳⰾⰰⰳⱁⰾⰻⱌⱁⰿ.
…does Hausa actually have a palatalized glottal stop of all things, and if so, how the triangular heck do they pronounce one?
I can hardly figure out what to do with a regular glottal stop (at least, when it’s not between two vowels).
Ⰿⰻⱄⰾⰻⰿ ⰴⰰ ⰱⰻ Ⰻⱀⱅⰵⱃⱄⰾⰰⰲⰻⱌ ⱅⱃⰵⰱⰰⱁ ⰱⰻⱅⰻ ⱀⰰⱂⰻⱄⰰⱀ ⰳⰾⰰⰳⱁⰾⰻⱌⱁⰿ.
There’s always one. Latin and Cyrillic are just not good enough for some people …
does Hausa actually have a palatalized glottal stop
Of course not. That would be silly. It is a glottalised approximant. Easy. You can glottalise anything if you try.
As one might expect, the fluent speaker’s Irish is little better than the chancer’s, whose errors are not fully expressed in the subtitles. Of course, in a skit that’s forgivable or even intentional.
I can believe that. After all, the child soldiers in the Congo speak French.
(Seriously. I heard one on TV. As if they weren’t scary enough already.)
Yeah. What is this nonsense about having unrelated singular and plural forms for personal pronouns? They don’t do that in China.
Glottal stops are very widespread as postpausal voice onsets. Once you learn to parse [ʔɪˈʔɪz] not as *|ɪ ɪz| or *|ʔɪ ʔɪz| but as |ɪt ɪz|, you’ve got it made.
I’m impressed that the font I’m using can do Italic Glagolitic. Glagolitic Italic. Whatever.
I liked how the non-Irish detective asks about ‘speaking Gaelic’ and the Irish one replies ‘speaking Irish’. I only just learned about that here at Hat. Dead subtle, millions will miss that.
I usually start speaking in Interslavic after having a couple of pints with a few Czechs, Poles or Serbs.
SFReader: I’m very curious about the kind of Interslavic people actually speak with each other! What do you do about mobile stress and akanye, for example? Do you speak like, say, a Polish priest, in order for non-Russian speakers to better get where the word boundary is and what the words actually are?
There’s always one.
It’s really more about whether our resident Slavs can read it. I used an online Glagolitic transliterator, though unfortunately it can’t handle Cyrl, only Latn and Glag. (These are official ISO codes for scripts, not some dubious ad hoc abbrevs I made up.)
I usually start speaking in Interslavic after having a couple of pints
Me, I start glottalising approximants (it clears a space at the bar, anyway.)
I think it’s the WordPress software that just takes everything and slants it if a specified italic version of a glyph is not available. Any glyph, including emoji. We’ve italicized smileys here, including flags – and we’ve bolded them, too.
I’ve only witnessed West Slavs. They just keep speaking their own languages, more slowly; after a few days they understand each other quite well.
the WordPress software — the browser and font rendering engine, more like, WordPress just says “Make it italic”. On my machine (Windows 10 default) the slanted Glacolitic is rendered from the Segoe UI Historic font which does not have an italic counterpart, so “font-style: italic” gets fallback-mapped to “font-style: oblique” and implemented as a skew transformation of the outlines before they are filled and anti-aliased. (I’m guessing the details here).
Testing, testing …
???????????? ???? ???????????? ???????? ???????????????????????????? ???????????????? ???? ???????????????????? ???? ???? ???????? ???????? ???? ???????????? ???????????? ???????????????? ???? ???????? ???????????????????? ???????????????????????? ???????? ???? ???????????????????? ???????????????????????????? ???????? ???????????????????? ???? ???????????????? ???????????????? ???????????? ???????????????? ???????????????????? ???? ???? ???? ???????? ???????????????? ???????????? ???????????????????????????????? ???????????? ???????????????? ???????????????? ???????????????? ???????????? ???????????????????????????????????????? ???????????? ???????????????? ???? ????????????
Yup.
Nope. I see only crossed-out rectangles. Samsung S5 mini (or something like that), Chrome.
I see regular upright rectangles on my Chrome under Windows 7 (incognito mode, as it happens, though I doubt that this matters).
Well, naturally I have cuneiform fonts installed …
The more recent Android incarnations have cuneiform fonts out of the box, presumably in a bid to entice the Babylonian market away from their beloved iPhones.
I see italic cuneiform. Who wouldn’t want that?
I see slanted cuneiform (Firefox, Windows 10).
I see dead letters.
Well, report them to the Dead Letter Office.
I too see slanted cuneiform. Unfortunately, Google Translate is no help at all. Google Search, on the other hand, nailed the source and the translation quickly.
TIL what a physical feat the copying of the Behistun Inscription (Old Persian, Elamite, Akkadian) was. Crossing abysses on planks, scrambling up cliffs using cracks.
Google Search, on the other hand, nailed the source and the translation quickly
Yes, it is comforting in these degenerate days to know that it is still possible to perform internet searches in Sumerian. The IME leaves much to be desired, however, and the dedicated keyboard does not fit in my living room.
No need to google. I immediately knew it was the Babylonian version of the old tale of the quick fox and the lazy dog.
Found throughout the Old World, and now known to derive from a Buddhist Jātaka story, relating to a previous incarnation of the Enlightened One as a virtuous typesetter. The Babylonian version is thought to be prophetic.
???? ???????????? ???????????????? ???? ???????? ???????????????????? ????????
I personally think that’s being a little mean to Ush.
I don’t know about that.
After all, ???????????????? ???????? ???? ???????????????????? ????????. That’s pretty unspeakable when you get down to it.
All this reminds me of Portuñol, which Portuguese speakers can speak and Spanish speakers can understand. I expect Galician speakers can also speak it and that it wouldn’t need much modification to be intelligible to Catalan, Provençal and Italian speakers as well.
(For some reason your server, or maybe my operating system, now insists that I write my name in capital letters and makes it as difficult as possible to use my gmail address.)
Sorry about that; Akismet (if that’s the culprit) seems to be getting crankier and crankier.
Certainly my personal experience is that native speakers of Slavic (and especially those of us who read and post on linguistic blogs) tend to grossly overestimate our abilities in the other Slavic languages, no matter how closely or distantly related. I don’t get the impression that this happens in the other language families nearly as much.
Growing up speaking Serbo-Croatian, I added Slovenian to my repertoire while resident there as a teenager. It’s certainly the closest one to BCS and should have been a piece of cake – but for a small language it’s incredibly regionalized and so my dutiful school efforts which resulted in As in the subject also meant I was often speaking in an overly stilted register in everyday settings (in my specific case this was due to my ignorance of the German loans that dominate colloquial speech even for basic terms like “to run” or “father”. And that’s after 2 entire years -took me less time to master English.
So the tempting and kind of self-flattering idea that speaking one Slavic language makes you able to speak or at least understand them all is completely wrong. The three main issues are ones of 1) pronunciation, which causes even identical words to sound different than you’re used to; and 2) semantic drift which means the same word often has radically different meanings (eg. zhivot in BCS (life) vs. RUS (stomach) and 3) borrowings came from completely different languages depending on the political situation (and also changed over time). So BCS is replete with Turkish loans (often so integrated they’re barely recognizable as loanwords), French for furniture, German for mechanical and auto parts, and English for information technology. Some of the others have this, others don’t. It never fails to amuse me that the Russians use a French word for newspaper, but predominantly Slavic words for nuclear technology. Consequently, to us an ordinary Russian newspaper article can appear simultaneously pretentious (using too many foreign words for everyday objects, as if to show off) and colloquial (using Slavic words when actual speakers would just use the English word). Or else the grammar differences make the other language sound replete with errors (as opposed to having different rules ) – eg Russian lack of copula make for caveman-like sentences in BCS and is never not funny to me.
I suppose it’s trivially true that I can understand more of a text in some random Slavic language than a native English speaker. But the task is exponentially more difficult for spoken language where I can’t even determine the word bounderies. Even so, I found that simply speaking BCS to store clerks in Prague and St. Petersburg tended to be more successful than relying on English, to say nothing of the instant goodwill it generated, in Russia in particular. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a “Slavic culture” anymore, but maybe there are some traces here and there that, if nothing else, make for a dellightful experience.
@nemanja
Clearly friends speaking together with local accent and slang in another Slavic language on an unknown topic are hard to understand. But even in your own language this can be true. In cases where you wish to communicate with those people (1) only one speaks at a time; (2) your interlocutor makes an effort to speak slowly and clearly and a bit like a schoolteacher (or relative talking to a child); and (3) the context is clear and rather concrete. I agree that to have deeper discussions you would have to spend time learning their language (and unlearning yours, where speech habits are wrong in their language).
I suppose it’s trivially true that I can understand more of a text in some random Slavic language than a native English speaker. But the task is exponentially more difficult for spoken language where I can’t even determine the word bounderies.
…or when major sound changes are masked by the somewhat conservative orthography, as in Polish and Ukrainian (and probably elsewhere as well).
My mother’s impression of Czech (from her visit to Prague) was the same: obvious-ish when written, essentially unintelligible when spoken.
One common phrase that she remembered was “vyshtup na pzheshtup” – she only understood it after she saw it written down: výstup na přestup, “exit to transfer” (note: I’m not actually sure whether this is correct Czech), and even then it wasn’t immediately obvious (the Russian is выход на переход).
This didn’t work quite the same way for Bulgarian, however – probably because, from a Russian perspective, the orthography masked many cognates (the common vowel ъ usually corresponded to a similar-sounding vowel in Russian cognates, but this was hard to recognize because the same letter in Russian was very much not a vowel).
I suppose in BCS that would be “izlaz za pres(j)edanje”, but “istup na prestup” is wonderfully transparent. (Normally istup is either a public address or a blunder/outburst (it’s rarely used I think), and prestup is a misdemeanor).
The worst is the Bulgarian “bulka”.
Countless Russian soldiers got into trouble for innocently asking for a loaf of bread…
Heh. Bulg. булка (apparently from Turkish) means ‘bride, wife.’
Wiktionary says “From Ottoman Turkish بولا (bola, bula, “wife of one’s paternal uncle; lady, miss”).” and “Unknown, only Ottoman. Attested from the 15th century and deemed obsolete in the 19th.”
Looked Mongolian to me. And indeed, it is from Mongolian.
Proto-Mongolian: *büli
Meaning: cousin, niece (son or daughter of mother’s relative); family
Written Mongolian: bülü, büli, böle (L 147)
Khalkha: bül
Buriat: büle
Kalmuck: bülǝ, bölǝ
Comments: KW 55, 66, MGCD 175. Mong. > Turk. bula, Kaz. bölö, Yak. bile etc.
Damn, I never would have guessed that Bulgarian word for wife comes ultimately from Mongolian (of all languages!)
I wouldn’t either — thanks for that fascinating etymology!
Drill yourself in the relevant sound changes, as David M has done, and these problems will fall over to the left and the right. “You are linguist, no? Listen, and try to understand.” —Roman Jakobsen just before he began a lecture in heavily Russianized Bulgarian for an American audience
Drill yourself in the relevant sound changes, as David M has done, and these problems will fall over to the left and the right.
Wouldn’t help with булка.
Also doesn’t help if you drown in splits & mergers, as you do a lot between Polish, Czech & Slovak, East and South Slavic.
I forgot I’ve heard a full bilingual conversation between employees of an international bus station in Prague and FYLOSC-speaking bus drivers. But I’m sure they weren’t doing that the first time, but had had plenty of exposure to each other’s languages, and the topic wasn’t too wide-ranging either (a delay caused by an accident elsewhere, IIRC).
I recently came across a YouTube channel with some very interesting videos involving native speakers of related languages trying to understand each other while only speaking their native language, and one of the videos involved Interslavic.
To my surprise, I found that I was able to understand almost all of the Slavic subtitles in both videos, despite my only rudimentary knowledge of Slavic languages. Nevertheless, without the Slavic subtitles, I would probably have been completely lost; I can understand written Slavic better than spoken Slavic. I was somewhat amused to find that even though the speakers tried to use only their native languages, English occasionally slipped in, as when the Bulgarian speaker in the Interslavic video said: “Wait, wait. Чакай, чакай, чакай, чакай.”
Interestingly, although there are a few videos involving Romance languages, the channel so far has no videos involving speakers of Germanic languages. I imagine such a video would have to exclude English, as: (a) English is very different from other Germanic languages, such that an English speaker would have a very difficult time understanding them, and (b) I imagine most speakers of Germanic languages have at least some knowledge of English, particularly the younger demographic that is present in these videos. I imagine these problems could at least partially be solved by including a speaker of Scots rather than English, given its more Germanic vocabulary and very different phonology.
I’m watching it now — lots of fun!
(The first link, that is.)
I learned a couple of etymologically interesting Bulgarian words: голя́м ‘big’ is related to the dialectal Russian word голя́мо ‘a lot’ as well as SCr. го̀лем, Cz. holemý, and Old Polish golemszy; ку́че ‘dog’ is of onomatopoeic origin but has a lot of similar-sounding, possibly related words like dialectal Russian кутёнок ‘puppy’ (oddly, that Vasmer article omits Hungarian kutya ‘dog,’ which one of the guys in the video actually brought up when the Bulgarian word was given).
Kutenok is likely Turkic. In numerous Turkic languages, the word for puppy is “kuchek” (literally “a little one”).
@sfr
https://www.etimo.it/?term=cucciolo
The word in Italian is supposed to derive from slavic, although the link mentions the Hungarian and a Swiss parallel.
Interslavic is meant to be something like a national language standard: everyone can read and understand with some effort and practice, but you need to systematically learn to speak and write it (except those lucky/unlucky enough to have the standard or a close relative natively, like me).
All questions of allophones, stress, and intonation are stuffed under the rug.
I did a little experiment to see how much a dumb computer can understand Interslavic. Here’s the same joke in three orthographies and what GT makes of it when told it’s one of various plausible languages.
Latin orthography:
Prihodi muž do doktora i govori:
— Pane doktore, ja imaju problem. Ja myslju, že ne mogu iměti děti.
— Čemu vy tako myslite?
— Tomu že moj otec takože ne iměl děti, i moj děd takože ne iměl.
— Vaš otec i vaš děd ne iměli děti? Izvinite, ale togda odkud vy jeste?
— Ja? Iz Dněpropetrovska!
Assuming Czech (GT default) or Slovak:
Throw a man into the doctor and govori:
– Doctor, I have a problem. I think not mogu babies children.
– What do you mean?
– To my father, so he did not imitate children, and my grandfather, so he did not.
– Your father and your grandfather didn’t have children? Izvinit, but togda where do you go?
– Me? Iz Dnipropetrovsk!
Assuming Croatian or Slovene:
The husband comes to the doctor and says:
– Doctor, I have a problem. I don’t think I can have a baby.
– Why do you think so?
– My father will not have a child, too, and my father will not.
– Your father and your grandfather have no children? Excuse me, but where do you eat?
– Me? From Dněpropetrovsk!
Assuming Polish:
Prihodi muž to doctor and govori:
– Pane doctor, I have a problem. I think that ne mogu iměti děti.
– What do you think?
– Tom, that my father also got his neighbors, and my father also his neighbors.
– Do you have any problems and are you? Izvinite, but togda since you are?
– I? Iz Dněpropetrovska!
South Slavic Cyrillic orthography (with Cyrillic ј):
Приходи муж до доктора и говори:
— Пане докторе, ја имају проблем. Ја мысљу, же не могу имєти дєти.
— Чему вы тако мыслите?
— Тому же мој отец такоже не имєл дєти, и мој дєд такоже не имєл.
— Ваш отец и ваш дєд не имєли дєти? Извините, але тогда одкуд вы јесте?
— Ја? Из Днєпропетровска!
Assuming Serbian (GT default):
The husband comes to the doctor and says:
– Doctor, I have a problem. I don’t think I can have a child.
– Why do you think so?
– Therefore, my father will not have a child either, and my father will not have one either.
– Your father and your grandfather have no children? Excuse me, but where do you eat?
– Me? From Dnepropetrovsk!
Iotated-letter Cyrillic orthography (with ю and я):
Приходи муж до доктора и говори:
— Пане докторе, я имаю проблем. Я мыслю, же не могу имети дети.
— Чему вы тако мыслите?
— Тому же мой отец такоже не имел дети, и мой дед такоже не имел.
— Ваш отец и ваш дед не имели дети? Извините, але тогда одкуд вы есте?
— Я? Из Днепропетровска!
Assuming Russian (GT default):
Come husband to the doctor and say:
– Pane doctor, I have problems. I think, but the children cannot.
– What do you think so?
“In the same way, my father did not have children, nor did my grandfather.”
– Your father and your grandfather did not have children? Excuse me, Ale then, if you are natural?
– I AM? From Dnepropetrovsk!
Assuming Ukrainian, Belarusian, or Bulgarian:
The husband comes to the doctor and says:
– Doctor, I have a problem. I think I can’t have children.
– What do you think?
– So my father also had no children, and my grandfather also did not.
– Your father and your grandfather had no children? Excuse me, but then where are you from?
– I? From Dnepropetrovsk!
Assuming Macedonian:
Earn money to a doctor and say:
– Doctor Pan, she has a problem. Я мыслю, ж не не могу имти дети
– Why do you think so?
“That’s why my father didn’t give a damn about my father, and my grandfather didn’t give a damn about me.”
– Your father and grandfather didn’t give a damn? Excuse me, but then what?
– And? From Dnepropetrovska!
So it looks to me like uk/be/bg is essentially perfect, hr/sl/sr are fine except for missing the first instance of ‘grandfather’ and reading ‘come from’ as ‘eat’, ru is mostly fine except for one sentence, pl is complete gibberish, and mk is so bad that one whole sentence is left alone, not even transliterated. Adjusting the writing conventions further to adapt to the various assumed languages would probably help, but there don’t seem to be online “transliterators” from Croatian to Polish.
I’ve listened to a few of the videos. Very fun. Charming participants. Romance works better for me than Slavic. It’s a marvel what some knowledge of sentence structure and words can do for understanding. The one with the French man worked a little better than that with the Catalan woman, not just because I can actually follow French, but because he seemed as ignorant of the languages of the other speakers as they were of his. In the video with the Catalan speaker, she knew Spanish, of course, and also appeared to understand French pretty well. OTOH, that made her able to explore and explain differences in vocabulary.
— Ja? Iz Dněpropetrovska!
I first read this joke on the Interslavic website several years ago, but I must admit I still don’t understand the punchline.
Speaking of Slavic mutual intelligibility, here’s an anecdote from Louis Léger’s 1873 book Le monde slave ; voyages et littérature (translation mine):
Nice quote!
I must admit I still don’t understand the punchline.
I don’t think the particular city is important, it’s just that he misunderstands the question (“where are you from?”).
Sorry, that should be “which sometimes consist of literal correspondences” and “a noble warhorse”.
“Where do you come from, then?” (since your father and grandfather had no children).
“Me? From [random city]!”
There is now a followup to the Interslavic video, which includes a kind of projective test: listen to a description of a scene and draw a picture of it (and then describe the picture in your own language). Commenters agreed that the Bulgarian was hard to understand: too fast, too slangy, and too dialectal.
I wonder if the regime would consider Interslavic “anti-Russian” because it uses Є and Е for iotating and non-iotating /e/? (Grammatical discussions of Interslavic distinguish strictly between “palatalization”, the modern reflexes of the first, second, third, (fourth,) changes, and “iotation”, the creation of soft consonants from hard ones; see “Hard and soft consonants” for details.) And this despite the fact that the Voting Machine, which figures out the form of native Slavic words in Interslavic, gives two votes to Russian (and Polish) and only one each to Ukrainian/Belarusian, Czech/Slovak, Slovene/BCSM, and Bulgarian/Macedonian. (Languages with less than a million speakers get no votes but may influence the result in difficult cases.) After all, some 70% of Slavs speak Russian.
It’s been pointed out that Ѣ would be better than Є historically, but nobody has it on their keyboards. If your keyboard lacks Є, simply substitute Е, in the same way that Russians often write Е for Ё, a phonemic distinction not consistently represented in writing. Similarly, if you don’t have (Cyrillic) Ј, use Й instead; even though “йа йу” are decidedly funny-looking, they are more interpretable to most Cyrillics-users than the opaque Я and Ю are to Serbs and Macedonians. By the same token, if you don’t have Ы, write И; if you are a South Slav the distinction is blurred or nonexistent anyway. Lastly, for Љ Њ write the obvious ЛЬ НЬ. as the soft sign is not used in Interslavic except in such keyboard hacks.
On the Latin side, the equivalent of Є is Ě; if you can’t type it, again E is the Right Thing. The only other issues that arise are with Č Š Ž, where the suggested substitutes are CZ SZ ZS (or Ż for Poles). The only actually standard digraph is DŽ/ДЖ; I suppose that Џ (Macedonian) was considered too obscure or too much like Ц though it started life as a variant of Ч for Cyrillic Romanian. There is no /dz/ in the language, and consequently no need for (Cyrillic) Ѕ, dzelo.
And Serbian (and Bosnian and Montenegrin). Ѕ is the one that’s limited to Macedonian (and Montenegrin) in these latter days.
…and sometimes you get entire sentences that are wholly identical between disparate Slavic languages. By now you’re probably all familiar with Гей, соколи!, a Ukrainian patriotic song that’s old enough the original is in Polish (Hej, sokoły!). There’s a Slovak version, too, and it contains the line ty si moja domovina. That line, “you are my home-in-the-geographic-sense”*, is identical to FYLOSC in phonetic detail. The only difference is in spelling: in Slovak & Czech, y merged into i only after i had palatalized the preceding consonant (where possible, which it is with /t/), so the letter y is kept to indicate lack of palatalization (…and etymology where that doesn’t matter), while in western South Slavic this palatalization never happened, so the merger has left no traces and only i/и is used.
* Would “homeland” work, or does that not exist in practice outside the Department of Homeland Security? – The Russian equivalent is completely different, родина. Maddeningly, that gets standardly translated as “Motherland” nowadays, even though there’s no “mother” in it, only “birth”, and “fatherland” with all the usual connotations exists in Russian perfectly well: отечество. While I’m at it, that’s отаџбина in Serbian, with one of the very, very few occurrences of Џ in a word that isn’t Turkish or English; it’s used to spell out the voice assimilation.
But there’s me.
Assuming a Czech ~ Russian pronunciation for ě:
Przychodzi muż do doktora i goworzy:
— Pane doktore, ja imaju problem. Ja myśliu, że ne mogu imieci dzieci.
— Czemu wy tako myślicie?
— Tomu że moj otec takoże ne imieł dzieci, i moj dzied takoże ne imieł.
— Wasz otec i wasz dzied ne imieli dzieci? Iźwinite, ałe togda odkud wy jeste?
— Ja? Iz Dniepropetrowska!
This is gloriously hideous. I won’t even feed it to poor Google.
Anyway, there might be a point in changing the random city. It’s named after a communist hero Петров, so Ukraine renamed it a while ago to just Дніпро, like the river it’s on. The province it’s in is still Дніпропетровська область, though, because the provinces are all listed in the constitution, and the effort of amending it has not been considered worth it so far.
The province it’s in is still Дніпропетровська область
In a similar way, St. Petersburg is still surrounded by Leningradskaya oblast’, although AFAIK the reason here are preferences of local politicians in the period of renaming.
And Serbian (and Bosnian and Montenegrin). Ѕ is the one that’s limited to Macedonian (and Montenegrin) in these latter days.
Oops, yes. At first I had them swapped as to meaning, and when I got that straightened out before posting, I forgot to fix up which language uses what. That said, I guess the reason to avoid Џ is the same as the reason to avoid Я and Ю: lack of transparency. In addition, when transliterating from Latin to Cyrillic you don’t want to have to keep track of whether DŽ becomes Џ if there is no morpheme boundary or ДЖ if there is. (I don’t know how much of an issue this is for LJ/NJ.)
Would “homeland” work, or does that not exist in practice outside the Department of Homeland Security?
Definitely not, though that is a confound (as is a spy-thriller TV series called Homeland). The term is politicized, but it’s politicized in multiple different ways, depending on who’s talking. The first OED3 citation means ‘Heaven’, the homeland of souls to which (if all goes well) they eventually return. In the days of the British Empire the homeland meant Britain and Ireland (as in homeland trade) in opposition to the colonies. For Zionists, the homeland is Israel, and the counterpart term is the diaspora. This same opposition holds true for other peoples as well, not only when speaking of one’s own people in the first person, but also in the third person: “Greece is the homeland of the Greeks.” (Though some might say Constantinople.)
So this is a completely different opposition from that implied by rodina, which is about what is rodnoi, or familial (in the extended sense) as opposed to what is chuzhoi, or alien (inwardly incompatible). If you dig deeper you get to the primal Slavic god Rod, who represents both the family and fate (see below), cf. Latin lar.
Maddeningly, that gets standardly translated as “Motherland” nowadays, even though there’s no “mother” in it, only “birth”
Surely a birth implies a mother? Children of a single birth have a common mother, even if different fathers. In any case, as Slavic paganism develops, Rod sinks down behind his two aspects Perun ‘thunder’ (the storm god who punishes by death in battle) and Veles/Volos ‘wool’, (the harvest god who punishes by disease). These are in opposition to one another, but they have the same consort: the goddess Mokoshь ‘moisture’, whose concerns are sheep and childbirth. (Rod does not have a personalized consort, only the innominate and arbitrarily-numbered rozhanitsy, aka narecnitsy ‘name-givers’ or sudzhenitsy ‘judges’; cf. Sud, the South Slavic name of Rod).
The Interslavic dictionary lists three words for ‘homeland’: otčestvo, domovina, matčina. As usual, use whichever one you like.
This is gloriously hideous
I did feed it to Google, and got this (punctuation fixed up):
He comes to the doctor and says:
— Doctor, I have a problem. I don’t think I can name the children.
— Why do you think that?
— To that my father also had no children’s name, and my son also had no name.
— Your father and your children’s names? Iźwinite, but how long have you repented?
— I? And from Dnipropetrovsk!
So the story winds up being about nameless children rather than nonexistent ones. Where repentance comes into it, I don’t know. There are literally two ghits for iźwinite, which I suppose are typos.
Anyway, there might be a point in changing the random city.
Good point.