⚠Corrections and Addendums! (Please read before commenting!)⚠ As mentioned, I am not a Slavic or Baltic speaker, so anything that I missed in the video that people have commented and I agreed with or that I want to personally clarify will be here for the sake of everything being in one place. - [Clarification]: My spelling of "Belarussia" with is NOT with analogy to Russia--it has nothing to do with politics. It is, in fact, because it is a compound word in Belarussian itself of + + = , as shown at (57:35). Additionally, since English usually borrows words like this from Latin, in Latin itself, a is used here, such as in the Latin name for the country, (Also , both meaning "White Russia/Ruś/Ruthenia"). - [Clarification]: Bulgars are not the ancestors of ALL Blugarians, but did give their name to the area and its peoples. I knew this, but just wanted to keep the history section short. - [Clarification]: Cyril and Methodius created Glagolitic script first, then their students created the Cyrillic after. I again knew this, but just wanted to keep the history section short. - [Clarification]: and don't line up 100% of the time with the Big and Little Yuses, etymologically speaking, but their cyrillic spellings are too good to not use. - [Clarification]: Soft consonants in Russian such as and are spelt in the Latin as and , respectively, with the acute, just like all other soft letters. - [Clarification]: L-vocalisation in Serbo-Croatian can still be spelt as it was with an , such as in . However, I could be pursuaded to spell them with a regular . - [Clarification]: Merging of Lithuanian /æ:/ with /e:/ both as . Latvian does this already, and it works for them for the most part (even dispite the few minimal pairs). - [Correction]: Serbo-Croatian differentiation of and is a bit more important than I thought. As such, they will be spelt as a regular soft T, /. Similarly, the Shte () will be spelled as /. Additionally, becomes /. - [Correction]: De-nasal 's in Polish were more important for etymological spelling than I thought, As such, they will still be spelt out in the standard language, such as in . - [Correction]: At (16:54), should've specified that is only uncommon in Slavic. It is, in fact, far more common in Baltic, such as Lithuanian. - [Correction]: Baltic languages should distinguish between and (and similar) in writing. - [Correction]: Church Slavonic is shown as a living language, while Latin is shown as being extinct. They are both semi-living in the sense that they are both used as liturgical languages. - [Correction]: The map at (7:04) has a slightly incorrect shade of yellow for the Baltic area. Just assume it's the same as the other yellows.
Missing these clarification will make more patriotic people mad. Sadly you wont be able to avoid some comments trying to correct you or to show disaproval.
About letters: *ć, ś, ź* -- all or some of them are in Polish, Lower Sorbian, Belarusian Latinka. *Ć* is present in Upper Serbian and Serbo-Croatian Latinka. There are series of letters/sounds for these letters (softer to harder): *ć, č, c* + *ś, š, s* + *ź, ž, z*
@@autokratao I cannot agree about: (min 49:50) Śląsk => Sląsk, (min. 51:33) cześć => czest'. In Polish, it is possible to pronounce czesć and cześć. Your proposals will sound like *lisping.* Multiple languages are using *ć, ś, ź* as I stated above, so it is important to keep these letters.
That final ę in Polish needs to be written like that despite being pronounced like an e because this is how we discern between 1st person singular and 3rd person singular in declension. So 'myję' means 'I wash' and 'myje' means 'he/she/it washes". No difference in pronounciation, but different meaning.
I'm Portuguese and our language sounds so slavic... I just wish we would ditch the ch/sh for example and start using š, and a lot of other changes to make our language easier.
I'm a Portuguese speaker (Brazil), though in my personal opinion, I think that the current orthography is fine as it is, it's quite phonetic in general already (I'm not a fan of over-using diacritics lol).
This is really good quality / attention to detail, especially for someone who doesn't speak a Slavic language. Off the top of my head the biggest blunder is probably merging č ć in Serbo-Croatian which have minimal pairs (kuče 'puppy', kuće 'houses'), but assuming you're not using št/щ anywhere in Serbo-Croatian you might get away with assigning it to ć as they both come from *t'. Some Russian minimal pairs are impossible to distinguish in the Latin script without resorting to "scholarly" spelling, e.g. кров vs кровь, but honestly Latin script Russian is an afterthought and word final palatalised labials *with minimal pairs* are an edge case of an edge case, so fair play. The Polish ę ą distinction does not come directly from Proto-Slavic, instead being a former length pair from the vowel length collapse, so spelling ę with small yus and ą with big yus is etymologically unsound half the time, but i have a tingling suspicion you might already know that and chose to roll with it anyway out of convenience. (the nasal vowels got a length distinction mostly from yer loss, palatalised the preceding consonant, merged backness-wise, then the length distinction morphed into a backness distinction). Might have been worth mentioning L-vocalisation in Serbo-Croatian, but I suppose you either swap out for or keep so not much to talk about.
Thanks for your kind words! For the in Serbo-Croatian, I wasn't too sure how common minimal pairs were for it, so if they really need to be depicted, using the palatalized-T / would be the way to go; and yes, would still be used instead of existing as shown in the examples at the end, in . Similar thing with the which would be /. For all the soft signs in Russian, the acute accent would be used regardless of letter, so = , and = just like any other soft letter such as . No need to use the "scholarly" letters here either. Might be a bit difficult to type, but it follows the pattern that way and it makes it easily recognizable. Yeah, I was aware that the etymologies for and don't line up 100% of the time, but the convenience of spelling them with the big/little yuses was too good to pass up. For L-vocalization in Serbo-Croatian, it's fine to just keep the spelling like in , since it sort of past the point of no return in terms of sound mergers. Spelling how it sounds here works just fine. (Though I could maybe be conviced to use if need be such as in , as I wouldn't be completely against it.)
Ъ in Bulgarian is very very far from a rare sound, and there is absolutely no rule allowing you to predict when a proposed "a" would be pronounced as ъ or a...
I don't speak Latvian, but the orthography in this video would be stupid to use for Lithuanian, we took the letters we needed and the spelling of words always make sense. Also I didn't see an Ėė anywhere
I think that Baltic languages shouldn't've been added to this "unified orthography", as there's a clear bias in both explaining the system and the system itself to Slavic languages, and Baltic ones are left unaccounted or poorly accounted for in most of the cases. Main points (mainly about Baltic languages): 1. At 13:53, ł is said to be North Slavic only, despite the fact that it is used in Lithuanian as well to represent a hard l before a front vowel (this only occurs in some south-eastern dialects, but it should not be ignored, e.g. "saulałė" is a very common word in folk songs, meaning "Dear Sun") 2. The choices of spelling initial wo-/wu- as o-/u- (which also occurs to a degree in Samogitian, though this is mentioned nowhere), initial je- as e- (which, by the way, tends to be unrelated to iotation in Baltic languages, e.g. the dialectal "jeknos", related to, for example, Latin iecur, and had a beginning j- since PIE) , and of ґ as г in this same section contradict the earlier laid out principle of "one sound per grapheme" (i.e. of phonetic spelling). If etymological spelling is intended to be at least somewhat kept, it should be specified as such in the principles. 3. At 22:16, in Lithuanian; both -ia and -ija are regular endings of both nouns and verbs; how are we now supposed to differentiate between, for example, "valia" (will) and "valija" (he/she/it is useful; see LKŽ, valyti 3), or "ponia" (lady) and "ponija" (noblemen as a whole)? How are we supposed to know that vyšnia has two syllables, but policia is four? 4. At 30:12, Same problem as above with the -i-, but now that it can apply to any -i- between vowels, it's even worse: -ijo and -io, -iu and -iju, ect. are all simultaneously present and pronounced differently in the language. 5. At 31:23, short o in native words, though very rare, DOES exist (lokys as an an example). The majority of international/foreign words like "atomas" will have a short o as well (except a few like fortepijonas) 6. At 31:43, ę and ė literally make different sounds, there's no reason to make them into one letter. If anything, ę should be merged long e (e can be both long and short, same with a) into é, same applies to a/ą, and ė would simply be kept. Additionally, Samogitian actually differentiates between a short ė and a long ė̄ (also written as õ), which isn't accounted for anywhere. Also, "e/ē" in Latvian can have a different pronunciation depending on the syllables after it, though this is not accounted for nor in the old orthography, nor in the "new" one. Also also, separating y and í because of a few "similar words", but not ų and ú makes little sense: take, for example, siūs (he/she/it/they will sew) and siųs (he/she/it/they will send). You either keep both of them intact or merge both with í/ú. 7. At multiple points, Belarusian is written as Belarussian, probably by analogy with Russian. This is incorrect, though a common mistake. 8. The proposal for stress and pitch-accent does not account for the broken tone of Latvian and the secondary stress of Samogitian. Using acutes for high pitch also doesn't really work well with the pre-established choice to use them for vowel lengths (in my personal opinion, macrons, i.e. āēīōū, are both fairly universal and just look nicer). 9. At 1:02:24, you've forgotten that a/e can be both long and short in Lithuanian; for example, savo has a long a in its stem. Minor points: 1. At 2:38, Church Slavonic is shown as a living language, despite being a liturgical one, having no native speakers and not used outside of the Church. Later, Latin is depicted as dead, despite having a similar status. 2. At 6:35, it is said that Baltic languages have a "very similar system", but since this is speaking about proto-Slavic (and thus, proto-Baltic), it fails to account for palatalization not being present in proto-Baltic, as well as a very clear distinction between long/short vowels (different from the Slavic one). The sound /x/ isn't native to Baltic either. 3. At 6:51, it may serve to mention that Belarusian was also written (by the Tatars) in the Arabic script. 4. At 7:04, only 4 colours are in the legend, but 5 are on the map. 5. At 7:33, Czajkówski would be pronounced as Czajkuwski (ó is pronounced as u) 6. At 16:55, Lithuanian is not accounted for in the explanation, as dž is a very common diagraph, and dz is incredibly common in the Dzūkijan dialect (it's even in the name) 7. At 20:31, Weird to use the third singular person of "to be" for Slavic, but the second person singular for Baltic languages, especially when Lithuanian still has a form "esti" still occasionally used in place of "yra", especially in scientific literature. 8. I'd say better maps could've been chosen, though they're not really the point of the video, so oh well. Probably other points of contention that I missed in the video as well.
Thank you for your comments! To address them, I'd say: Main Points: 1. I would keep the current system of for hard and for soft unchanged in Lithuanian. It works just fine for them and I don't really see a reason to change it in this specific case. I mean, you _want_ to use the Polish barred-L system, that's fine, I suppose, but I don't really see a point. 2. The point of this video was not to make something _strictly_ phonemic, but to strike a balance of phonemic, etymology, and historicity. There are give and takes on all sides, but that's what the goal was, a balance--not a one-to-one. 3. If that's the case, then, yes, of course, "-ija" can be allowed in the Baltic languages. I see no problem with that. 4. Same as above. 5. Yes, while it might exist, it's either rare or from loans, just as you mentioned. Either way, it's simply too rare to have its own letter, and exceptions can be made for those. Latvian does it perfectly fine without this written distinction, given its rarity. 6. See pinned commment. For í/y and ų/ú, if you _really_ want to, i'd merge them all as and , then (I do like the , however). 7. If you read the notes in the video, you'll see why I wrote "Belarussian" with two s's. It's not by analogy to Russian, it's because it's a compound word. The video explained it. 8. Pitch accent isn't ever shown in writing except for in dictionaries. The note in the video was just a basis for people to start from, then they can make their own systems, since, again, it's never shown in regular writing. 9. This text was copied from the official source. If there's a misspelling there, I either forgot something or the official source forgot it... Sorry about that. Minor points: 1. Whoops, good catch haha 2. It was just a generalization. I know it's different, but most of the main consonants are there. 3. Might have missed that, thanks for letting me know! 4. The yellow was a slightly different shade, must've missed that. Just assume it's all yellow. 5. This is an English pronunciation of the name, not in Polish. I know is pronounced /u/ in Polish--it's in the video. That's just how Polish names with "-ówski" are pronounced in English. 6. My mistake, I should've written "... is rare in native Slavic words." I'll put that in the pinned comment. 7. It was just to show the example with words starting with "e", not about the word itself. 8. Maps were just for generalizations; like you said, not the point of the video. I've updated the pinned comment with some of your suggestions, thank you!
@@autokratao Woo, quick reply! Well, some notes to that as well. 5. I would've said fair enough, but... Practically every instance of Lithuanian short u (and -ų as well in some cases, like the subjunctive) corresponds to a short o (e.g. medos instead of medus) in Samogitian, but ą in the roots and some other words as well will correspond to a long ō (e.g. žōsės instead of žąsis, drōsiau instead of drąsiau), and so does uo in the Donininkai/Western dialect (e.g. dōna instead of duona). The common word "liōb", used to form the past iterative, also features it (at least in some dialects). 7. I wasn't referring to how it's spelled in the new orthography, but rather in the notes themselves, like in 38:20; the problem is, this is English, and how it forms adjectives like this is separate from how they're formed in Belarusian itself. You don't really say "I just read this Polskian book", or "I'm a fan of Lietuviškan cuisine"; You say "Polish" and "Lithuanian". Likewise, the form "Belarusian" follows a fairly standard "[country/region/city/ect. name] + (i)an format". No one really writes "Lesbossian", they write "Lesbosian", because -(i)an doesn't make the preceding s doubled all of a sudden. 9. I mean in the new orthography: assuming all instances of long a (and not just ą) get turned into á, it would be sávo, not savo. As mentioned before, "a" can be both short and long. On minor points: 1. I actually know how this happened, or at least I think so. The chart from Wikipedia that you often see separates "Ecclesiastical" Latin from simply Latin. However, without this split being present, that doesn't go so well. Additionally, on e/ę/ė once more: in Latvian, the difference I mentioned in the initial post is more or less allophonic: it depends on whether or not the syllable that follows e/ē has a open/closed vowel, whether it starts with a specific consonant, grammar features like adverbs from adjectives and past tense, some standalone words... point is, it's complicated, but predictable. This is not the case in Lithuanian. There are many forms differentiated between ė, ę, and e (mainly short e - e's length, similarly to the openness/closeness of Latvian e/ē, depends on other factors like stress, if it's in an affix, etc., and can thus be reasonably predicted), such as: -The second decl. sing. nom., sing. acc., sing. ins., and sing. voc.: "dukrelė" (dear daughter, nom.), "dukrelę" (dear daughter, acc.), dukrele (with the dear daughter, accented short e at the end), "dukrele" (dear daughter, voc., accented in the middle). -Second conjugation past 3rd pers. and past participle plural: "manė" (he/she/it/they thought), "manę" (having thought), mane (short stressed e; acc. of aš (first person pronoun), unrelated); "skaitė" (he/she/ect. read, past), skaitę (having read); -Second conj. reflexive past 3rd pers. short form and non-reflexive past sing. nom. participle: "prausės" (he/ect. bathed themselves), "prausęs" (having bathed [someone]) -Etc. etc. (also standalone words, like "ne" (e.g. ne vienas - a few) and "nė" (e.g. nė vienas - not a single)) Using ě as I've seen in another comment of yours is certainly better, but it still does not account for the 4-way e-ē-ė-ė̄ distinction Samogitian has. It's even more meaningful there, due to even more similar forms, as ei (of the standard language) turned into ē and i into ė. A new point on palatalization: 1. Samogitian can have soft consonants even where the are no vowels after them, e.g. "veln's" or "vel's" (the Devil). Quite clearly, using ni/nj/lj/li would just be inaccurate to describe how the word's said.
3:11 Correction: The Bulgars are not the ancestors of modern day Bulgarians. A large majority of Bulgarians are just a slavic people group, nothing more and nothing less. Their ancestors took the title "Bulgarian" due to Asparukh's influence and capability to unite the slavic peoples. Modern day turkic Bulgars still exist in Bulgaria today as a minority, though calling *everyone* Bulgars is a very very huge stretch, not to mention the already problematic variation of "Bulgar" the slavs (and the country name) that is used being the aforementioned "Bulgarian". It's obvious that this causes a lot of confusion, and as a "Bulgarian" (or, Macedonian) slav from North "Macedonia" I feel that the slavs in this very southern region have little to no idea why they call themselves these names! The balkans are truly a shitfest.
Some of your proposals are placed in *Interslavic language.* Especially about alphabets. They have different sets from less to more advanced users. They used a lot of solutions from Serbo-Croatian which uses two alphabets. So content could be easily transcribed from one alphabet to another.
I appreciate the thought experiment, but I really don't like the way you dealt with o's and u's in Czech and Slovak. The truth is that the long ú and the ou diphthong are very clearly distinct vowel sounds in Czech, and they both show up a lot, and even though they were different etymologically, merging them with ó and ú in spelling, respectively, which are sounds that exist elsewhere, many in extremely common loanwords, really seems more confusing than not. If I were you, I'd just have ú and ů merge (even though they are used almost always in complementary distribution, because ů cannot occur in an initial position, while ú occurs almost exclusively in the initial position or at the beginning of a word root in a compound, but you want fewer diacritics, so whatever), and I'd keep ou as a distinct digraph, because it's very clearly a distinct sound, and if anything, I'd merge it with ó, which appears less often as a distinct sound. I know etymologically ů comes from a long o, and ou came from a long u, but keeping the etymology in this case is just messy. Similarly, Slovak has a very clearly distinct ou diphthong as well. It even uses it as the pronunciation of final -ov. I don't think it makes sense to have that become a ú either, I'd keep it distinct. Having the ô be spelled ó, sure, whatever, but I'd also rather keep it distinct. But that's just me. I'd even go as far as having final -ov be spelled -ou, to match the pronunciation, but you clearly care about etymology, so I won't. I'm also a bit confused as to why removing the final j in kralj is okay even though it comes back elsewhere in the paradigm, because of pronunciation, but it isn't when changing the vowels in Byelorussian. Sure, the root changes, but that's a better representation of the pronunciation than keeping all the o's, like in Russian, just like the root loses a j in kralj. I guess I just like that Byelorussian does that, it decided to go fully phonological, etymology be damned, and I respect the chutzpah, it really gives it a distinct vibe. But I guess we're all against that distinct vibe here, so it makes sense to make it less distinct.
Interesting thoughts, but here's my reasoning for doing it the way I did: 1. Old West Slavic /u:/ splits in Czech to form /u:/ at the beginnings of words and /ou/ everywhere else. Slovak does not do this. Compare Czech and Slovak . Sure, while and are indeed pronounced differently (as I acknowledged in the video), they never overlap, since they came from the same sound, Old West Slavic . 2. Old West Slavic /o:/ usually becomes pronounced as /u(:)/ in most places, including Polish. In Polish it is currently written as /u/, in Czech /uo ~ u:/, in Slovak /uo/. The sound /o:/ do not appear natively in modern Czech and Slovak, only showing up in foreign words. These sounds, once again, do not overlap with the long-U, and are etymologically completely separate. Polish was actually the one that got it right this time. The etymological spelling here is regardless of pronunciation, as, even though they aren't quite pronounced like the original long /o:/, it doesn't matter, as the underlying morphology of these languages still treats them as if they were pronounced like they were originally. 1-2a. Basically, alternates with , and alternates with , even today and regardless of pronunciation. 3. The instrumental singular ending comes from Proto-Slavic , which in that region eventually became an early . Compare with the same ending in Sorbian, (they don't have vowel length). Polish actually keeps the original nasal there as . 4. For the final , I was conflicted to whether or not to keep it. However, Slovene already doesn't write final , so I'm just formalizing the pattern.
@@autokratao 1 and 2. I understand, it's less likely that there'll be confusion because the different evolutions of Old West Slavic ú and ó occurred in specific contexts, but it's still strange to me. I feel like native speakers intuitively understand the vowels to be different. 3. I meant the masculine genitive plural -ov ending, which merged in pronunciation with the feminine instrumental singular -ou in Slovak. (By the way, I'm sorry I just commented on all of these videos all at once, in ways that seem pretty critical. The truth is this is all really cool and impressive, it's just clear we have small differences in our aesthetic preferences.)
Thanks! I have some stuff from outside Europe, but those might be harder, given the variety within those families. For semitic, for example, the likes of Hebrew and Arabic already have pretty good orthographies with their own systems, but imagine trying to convince both to use one system...
@@autokrataoThanks for responding! I completely understand the chaos that would come with trying to convince semitic speakers in using a unified orthography haha.
Nice video, good job! Just one thing, I am not a fluent Lithuanian speaker but I am pretty sure that ę and ė are different phonemes: ę = /æ/ and ė = /e:/.
Yes, I know they are. However, neighbouring Latvian also has this very same sound distinction but they ignore it in writing. If Lithuanian _really_ needs to differentiate them, I would write /æ/ with .
Cool video! I liked some changes more and some less but something that really doesn't make any sense to me is why would you delete the [h] sound at the start of Greek loanwords? 59:13 You didn't give any reason against it and I can see a few reasons that make it worth keeping. 1. It's loyal to the original word 2. Other languages like english kept their [h]'s in words like "history" 3. Keeping the [h] makes the word stand out more/be less ambigious ("imn" doesn't look like "hymn" at all) 4. Words that start with [h] are relatively rare in my language (Polish) and when they do start with this sound it often indicates that it's a loanword which I personally just find neat and more objectively it can be useful information for grammar declensions The following part of the vid with "ocean" turning into "okean" is less blatant but I feel like ts/c pronunciation is widely used in Slavic languages? If you want to change this sound, making it a similar-sounding "s" would make more sense I think. That would make it go hand in hand with english and Romance languages as you stated. But I would just keep it as it is tbh
Thanks for your input! About that, two things: 1. The sound /h/ is not native to any Slavic language. Any appearance of the written is either one of two things: either from an older Czech-Slovak and Ukrainian (as discussed in the video at 12:29) or from a loan word from a different language group. English has an /h/ as a native sound and is quite common, so keeping the written from ancient Latin and Greek is fine; but Slavic languages don't have this sound normally. In fact, when Slavic people do come across a written , they usually pronounce it as /x/ (i.e., the same as if it was written in Polish). Medieval Latin and Greek actually lost the /h/ completely, so even in modern Latin and Greek (and by extension, all Romance languages), the written is always silent and has no sound. For example, in my native language of Portuguese, a Romance language, the word for "hymn" is written (inherited from the same origin), but it is pronounced always as /inu/, with no /h/, since that pronunciation was lost over 1000 years ago. Thus, forcing Slavic languages to pronounce a sound they don't have isn't particularly a good experience, hence me getting rid of it in spellings from loan words. 2. Slavic languages (in general) have tended to historically borrow Greco-Roman more often than not as a hard /k/ in all word positions, and rarely as a soft /ts/, likely due to more Slavic speakers having Greek Orthodox influence. Geo-politics aside, however, Slavic is neirther from the Romance language group nor that heavily influenced by them (as was English), so enforcing a Romance-style pronunciation on it doesn't really make much sense to me.
I like what you’ve done with your system on a conceptual level, however in practice it strikes me as 1. too ahistorical, 2. too graphically jarring, and 3. ultimately unnecessary. When the Southwest Europeans (the Latins) were expanding North into the Northwestern European’s lands, they did not create for them a new alphabet. They just gave them their own script and overtime a few new consonants and vowels were added, such as þ ð ä ø, etc. Putting aside Glagolitic a second (Kirilitsa is not an evolution of Glagolitsa, despite what is commonly said), the West European history as I wrote above is quite analogous to the Eastern European history also. Kirilitsa is actually just the Greek’s script with a few additional consonants and vowels, such as ш ж ю я, etc. What ought to be talked about more is the only reason we see the Hellenic and Cyrillic scripts as different is due to Western European-centricity. The difference between the characters that “Cyrillic” and Greek share is actually merely a difference of font, such as λ and л, τ and т, and π and п. The reason why this Western centricity is unfair is because West Europe and the divide between the Germanics and the Latins actually also originally had a font divide that naturally evolved from antiquity, but was then normalized in the modern era. Instead of focusing on this major of a system, a much simpler and historically accurate method would be so normalize the Greek and Cyrillic scripts, regardless of whether the Latin script-based Slavics or Balts join in. And then from there the spelling differences accrued by the development of individual Slavic or Baltic languages could remain. The following is the Polish, Russian, and Serbian translation of “the mouse sat in his house and ate louse”: Polish Μыϣ сιεδζαυα β сβοιμ δομυ ι ηαδυα βϣы Russian Μыϣь сηδελα β сβοεμ δομε η ελα βϣεη̆ Serbian Μηϣ ιε сεδεο υ сβοιοι κυчьη η ιεο βαϣκε
Thanks! For Romance and Germanic, they might be harder to do on such a grand scale, given the fact that they are much more different from each other (in separate sub-groups, at least). I have some stuff for them already, so maybe in the future.
1:04:03 Yeah, ë comes from old y, u, i, but you put them back in a bit wrong places and I'd just leave ë, because it is a distinct phoneme and it may be sometimes hard to foreseenif it should be this thing.
Apologies for the incorrect etymology, as it was a bit difficult to find them for Cassubian. Either way, if you do put them in the correct places, it should be alright, since though "ë" is distinct, (correct me if I'm wrong), it's not really used to differentiate words where the original etymology wouldn't already differentiate, if that makes sense.
Besides the ч/ћ and џ/ђ distinction someone already mentioned, is there a reason for not even mentioning Macedonian or Rusyn? I know some people insist these are not distinct languages, but since Silesian and Upper/Lower Sorbian are in the video, I don't see the reason why they wouldn't be included too. Otherwise, great video.
Yes, the ч/ћ and џ/ђ destinction is clarified in the pinned comment. As for Macedonian and Rusyn (Ruthenian), regardless of politics, they are extremely close (at least phonetically) to Bulgarian and Ukrainian, respectively; and since I didn't find much that was different specifically to them that didn't already apply to the others, I just didn't find it that necessary to discuss them specifically. They are mentioned in text the language trees near the beginning, however. But if you do apply my orthography to them, it would look like this: Macedonian (Makedonski/Македонски): [Latin]: Site čovečki suštestva se radjaat slobodni i ednakvi po dostoinstvo i prava. Tie se obdareni so razum i sovest i treba da se odnesuvaat eden kon drug vo duchot na opšto čovečkata pripadnost. [Cyrillic]: Сите човечки суштества се радяат слободни и еднакви по достоинство и права. Тие се обдарени со разум и совест и треба да се однесуваат еден кон друг во духот на општо човечката припадност. Ruthenian/Rusyn (Rusińskyj/Русиньскый): [Latin]: Všytky lude sia rodiať jak słobodni i rivny i dostojnosti i pravach. Suť obdarovany rozumom i sumliniom i majuť robiti v duchu bratstva. [Cyrillic]: Вшиткы люде ся родять як словодни и ривны и достойности и правах. Суть обдарованы розумом и сумлинём и мають робити в духу братства. The only thing about Rusyn is the merger of and into and keep separate, but otherwise, everything is the same as Ukrainian.
@@autokratao It's раѓаат (raǵaat). Macedonian does have ѓ/ǵ and ќ/ḱ which replace the Serbian ђ/đ; ћ/ć. If you use Bulgarian Cyrillic for that суштества will be существа and раѓаат - рагяат.
@@autokratao As a Macedonian, I can tell you you did it pretty well, except for the letter ѓ, which represent a palatalized (soft) sound of г, not of д. Thus, радяат should be рагяат (or рагьаат). But, our alphabet is phonetic and every sound is represented with one letter (thus we write раѓаат, instead of two letters гь). Радяат sounds more like serbian, in which exists palatalized sound of д, which they write as ђ (they also use phonetic principle). In bulgarian would be раждат.
How is the Baltic group apply here? “but they sound simi..” Finnic. Finnic languages. Shared vocabulary and exclusively Finnic-Baltic grammar cases. Unified Finnish-Baltic group when? People who have nothing to do with Northern Europe are amusing..
I don't know what the three scripts you're thinking of, but I definitely have plans for them. Have no idea when that video's gonna come out though haha
Just a regular vowel + an nasal consonant. If it was one of the old nasals, it would've been spelt as * and *, which isn't the case. There might be the odd "colouring" of the previous vowel with a slight nasal sound, but it's not a full nasal vowel.
Belarusian, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian use two alphabets (Latin and Cyrillic). Ukrainian language has multiple proposals for Ukrainian Latinka. You missed letters: *ć, ś, ź* -- all or some of them are in Polish, Lower Sorbian, Belarusian Latinka. *Ć* is present in Upper Serbian and Serbo-Croatian Latinka. There are series of letters/sounds for these letters (softer to harder): *ć, č, c* + *ś, š, s* + *ź, ž, z* *Some letters in Polish language* could be changed to improve ability of Slavs with Latin alphabets (Czech, Slovak, and other) to read Polish and vice versa; this change would be neutral to current Polish orthographical rules: *ż* => *ž* *rz* => *ř* *cz* => *č* *sz* => *š* *w* => *v*
Not sure about Sorbian but Ć, Ś & Ź have different pronounciations in Polish and Belarusian; Ć Polish: ČJ /t͡ɕ/ Belarusian: CJ /t͡sʲ/ Ś Polish: ŠJ /ɕ/ Belarusian: SJ /sʲ/ Ź Polish: ŽJ /ʑ/ Belarusian: ZJ /zʲ/ PL Białoruś [bʲa'wɔruɕ] BY Biełaruś [bʲeɫaˈrusʲ]
Belarusian already widelt use the latin lacinka alphabet and i think it does a pretty good job at it. Also there are some major differences in how vowels are pronounced in belarusian.
Interesting video, the comment fixes some issues. Still, it's funny that you have accidentally reinvented pre-reform Serbian orthography! The reform happened for a good reason - saying that as someone with three Đ's in his name.
Why not? Their phonology and sound system is extremely similar to Slavic languages, and they already use a very similar Latin spelling system to, say, Czech, for example. Unless if I'm missing something obvious (other than political), of course.
@@autokratao Lithuanian speaker here, Baltic and Slavic languages are mostly unintelligible, apart from a few words, and the Baltic languages tend to be more conservative interms of grammar (Lithuanian itself is the *most* conservative PIE language.)
@alyss_aq Phonology is similar between Baltic and Slavic languages due to common ancestor (proto-Balto-Slavic language) and proximity of nations. Lithuanian and Latvian are using modified new Czech alphabet (Hus alphabet). Lithuanian has also *ą, ę* like in Polish an Kashubian.
I like the topic and commend the choice. :) I write this before watching the whole video. I might edit video if I see more facts I believe I have to address, so far: - Cyril and Methodius have created glagolitic script and their students called Climent and Naum upgraded it to Cyrillic ok the rest of the video is quite what-i-think-it-shoul-be kind of video and only comment I have is, you don't seem to be a slav... and in order to do this kind of unification or language reform, I believe you have to be extremely familiar with the core of each language for it to work... nice job though :)
You are correct, Cyril and Methodius created the Glagolitic and their students the Cyrillic. What I spoke in the video was just a brief oversimplification, since that was not the point of the video. And you are also correct in saying that I myself am not Slav (or Balt), nor do I speak any Slavic languages. But I do like researching them, so I'm glad for any input you might have!
I appreciate your efforts (and first video was about Gaelic languages proposal, which was kind of useful to understand spelling and phonological phenomenon there), but thanks, no thanks. We Belarusians already struggled a lot with attempt of intrusion in our spelling (narkomaŭka vs taraškievica) with attempt to make our spelling closing to Russian (and etymologicalization will lead to similar results) that not so many existing carriers starting to lose sibilation assimilation (e.g. it is spelt "lodačcy" in narkamaŭka, but should be pronounces "lodaccy", or "kupaješsia" -> "kupajeśsia"), so please no. And don't you think being involved in topic of languages which you don't know, but which have very difficult and traumatized relations between each other because of precursor (and current) imperialism and linguacid, as at very best naive or even more like cultural mentoring??? We ourselves decide how to write and pronounce our languages, thanks. If you interested in liguistics better adopt just simple descriptive approach of "rozum/razum" channel where he just describes internal reality of individual Slavic languages and show case the different history of evolution from common source.
"South" Slavic group doesn't exist. it's "more or less" geographical definiton. Slovenes (Caranthanians) are West Slavs by it's origins. Today definiton of Slavs is not the same as in 6. century. Bulgarians are Slavicized Bulgars. I am "South" Slav.
This is a linguistic classification, not a political/geographical one. All Slavic languages in the Balkans (i.e., the "south") are closer to each other than they are to say, Russian or Czech.
@@autokratao Partially closer. Bul. & Slo. are like day & night. Many words in Slo. dialects are closer to Czech & Slovak, just like offical one. E. Slovak dialects are closer to Rusyn. That division on west, east, south groups is more or less political. I am Serbian speaker.
@@autokratao Division into West, South and East Slavs is political. According to new theories (mainly based on grammar), Slavs should be divided into: * North-West Slavs (also called Lechitic): Polish, Kashubian, Sorbians, +Vyatichi, +Radimichs, +North Krivichs * South-East Slavs: Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, +Old Ruthenian, partly Russian * mixed: Czech, Slovak, Slovene (and +Carantanian), +Slavic Pannonian, +Old Novgorod, +Ruthenian, Belarusian, Ukrainian [I used *+* to mark extinct languages, and groups]
@@autokratao About division of Slavs into two groups (and about Old Novgorod language): Język staronowogrodzki: nowy sposób klasyfikacji ludów i języków słowiańskich
Now do Germanic languages 👀 Also I'd like to see one for Navajo (maybe also other Native American languages) because I think the orthography could have been made a whole lot simpler/concise and adapted for the language's structure phonology, also it has accents and diacritics everywhere, yáʼátʼééh 🫡
⚠Corrections and Addendums! (Please read before commenting!)⚠
As mentioned, I am not a Slavic or Baltic speaker, so anything that I missed in the video that people have commented and I agreed with or that I want to personally clarify will be here for the sake of everything being in one place.
- [Clarification]: My spelling of "Belarussia" with is NOT with analogy to Russia--it has nothing to do with politics. It is, in fact, because it is a compound word in Belarussian itself of + + = , as shown at (57:35). Additionally, since English usually borrows words like this from Latin, in Latin itself, a is used here, such as in the Latin name for the country, (Also , both meaning "White Russia/Ruś/Ruthenia").
- [Clarification]: Bulgars are not the ancestors of ALL Blugarians, but did give their name to the area and its peoples. I knew this, but just wanted to keep the history section short.
- [Clarification]: Cyril and Methodius created Glagolitic script first, then their students created the Cyrillic after. I again knew this, but just wanted to keep the history section short.
- [Clarification]: and don't line up 100% of the time with the Big and Little Yuses, etymologically speaking, but their cyrillic spellings are too good to not use.
- [Clarification]: Soft consonants in Russian such as and are spelt in the Latin as and , respectively, with the acute, just like all other soft letters.
- [Clarification]: L-vocalisation in Serbo-Croatian can still be spelt as it was with an , such as in . However, I could be pursuaded to spell them with a regular .
- [Clarification]: Merging of Lithuanian /æ:/ with /e:/ both as . Latvian does this already, and it works for them for the most part (even dispite the few minimal pairs).
- [Correction]: Serbo-Croatian differentiation of and is a bit more important than I thought. As such, they will be spelt as a regular soft T, /. Similarly, the Shte () will be spelled as /. Additionally, becomes /.
- [Correction]: De-nasal 's in Polish were more important for etymological spelling than I thought, As such, they will still be spelt out in the standard language, such as in .
- [Correction]: At (16:54), should've specified that is only uncommon in Slavic. It is, in fact, far more common in Baltic, such as Lithuanian.
- [Correction]: Baltic languages should distinguish between and (and similar) in writing.
- [Correction]: Church Slavonic is shown as a living language, while Latin is shown as being extinct. They are both semi-living in the sense that they are both used as liturgical languages.
- [Correction]: The map at (7:04) has a slightly incorrect shade of yellow for the Baltic area. Just assume it's the same as the other yellows.
Missing these clarification will make more patriotic people mad. Sadly you wont be able to avoid some comments trying to correct you or to show disaproval.
@@vasil.kamdzhalov Indeed. Such is the way of politics...
About letters: *ć, ś, ź* -- all or some of them are in Polish, Lower Sorbian, Belarusian Latinka.
*Ć* is present in Upper Serbian and Serbo-Croatian Latinka.
There are series of letters/sounds for these letters (softer to harder): *ć, č, c* + *ś, š, s* + *ź, ž, z*
@@robertab929 Yes, I know, it's in the video starting at around 45:41
@@autokratao I cannot agree about: (min 49:50) Śląsk => Sląsk, (min. 51:33) cześć => czest'. In Polish, it is possible to pronounce czesć and cześć.
Your proposals will sound like *lisping.*
Multiple languages are using *ć, ś, ź* as I stated above, so it is important to keep these letters.
That final ę in Polish needs to be written like that despite being pronounced like an e because this is how we discern between 1st person singular and 3rd person singular in declension. So 'myję' means 'I wash' and 'myje' means 'he/she/it washes". No difference in pronounciation, but different meaning.
If this is the case, then spelling it etymologically like that would be quite useful. I'm not a Slavic speaker, so thanks for clarifying it!
@@autokratao And for some other reasons, ę shouldn't be changed when it's in the of the word. Not always fully phonetic spelling is the best.
@@mrcnkk125 Thank you for the clarification! I've added it to the pinned commend.
@@autokratao Thanks.
there is a difference in pronounciation, what are you even saying
Please do this for mainland germanic
I have some stuff for them, just not sure when that video might come out haha
@@autokratao if you do, have a look at Russian Mennonite Plautdietsch; its sound system is quite different and needs some exceptions
I'm Portuguese and our language sounds so slavic... I just wish we would ditch the ch/sh for example and start using š, and a lot of other changes to make our language easier.
I'm a Portuguese speaker (Brazil), though in my personal opinion, I think that the current orthography is fine as it is, it's quite phonetic in general already (I'm not a fan of over-using diacritics lol).
y’all have X why not use it
This is really good quality / attention to detail, especially for someone who doesn't speak a Slavic language.
Off the top of my head the biggest blunder is probably merging č ć in Serbo-Croatian which have minimal pairs (kuče 'puppy', kuće 'houses'), but assuming you're not using št/щ anywhere in Serbo-Croatian you might get away with assigning it to ć as they both come from *t'.
Some Russian minimal pairs are impossible to distinguish in the Latin script without resorting to "scholarly" spelling, e.g. кров vs кровь, but honestly Latin script Russian is an afterthought and word final palatalised labials *with minimal pairs* are an edge case of an edge case, so fair play.
The Polish ę ą distinction does not come directly from Proto-Slavic, instead being a former length pair from the vowel length collapse, so spelling ę with small yus and ą with big yus is etymologically unsound half the time, but i have a tingling suspicion you might already know that and chose to roll with it anyway out of convenience. (the nasal vowels got a length distinction mostly from yer loss, palatalised the preceding consonant, merged backness-wise, then the length distinction morphed into a backness distinction).
Might have been worth mentioning L-vocalisation in Serbo-Croatian, but I suppose you either swap out for or keep so not much to talk about.
Thanks for your kind words!
For the in Serbo-Croatian, I wasn't too sure how common minimal pairs were for it, so if they really need to be depicted, using the palatalized-T / would be the way to go; and yes, would still be used instead of existing as shown in the examples at the end, in . Similar thing with the which would be /.
For all the soft signs in Russian, the acute accent would be used regardless of letter, so = , and = just like any other soft letter such as . No need to use the "scholarly" letters here either. Might be a bit difficult to type, but it follows the pattern that way and it makes it easily recognizable.
Yeah, I was aware that the etymologies for and don't line up 100% of the time, but the convenience of spelling them with the big/little yuses was too good to pass up.
For L-vocalization in Serbo-Croatian, it's fine to just keep the spelling like in , since it sort of past the point of no return in terms of sound mergers. Spelling how it sounds here works just fine. (Though I could maybe be conviced to use if need be such as in , as I wouldn't be completely against it.)
Ъ in Bulgarian is very very far from a rare sound, and there is absolutely no rule allowing you to predict when a proposed "a" would be pronounced as ъ or a...
Like mentioned in the video, the rule is, if it's stressed, it's pronounced as "ъ", if it's unstress it merges with "a".
Germanic next? Afrikaans is slowly turning tonal so it'd be interesting how that turns out
The fact that you developed glagolotic is impressive. Not many slavs know much about it.
Can't forget it!
I don't speak Latvian, but the orthography in this video would be stupid to use for Lithuanian, we took the letters we needed and the spelling of words always make sense. Also I didn't see an Ėė anywhere
What's the basilisk for Western slavic? Cannot associate it with anything, a griffon could stand for pomeranians.
I think that Baltic languages shouldn't've been added to this "unified orthography", as there's a clear bias in both explaining the system and the system itself to Slavic languages, and Baltic ones are left unaccounted or poorly accounted for in most of the cases.
Main points (mainly about Baltic languages):
1. At 13:53, ł is said to be North Slavic only, despite the fact that it is used in Lithuanian as well to represent a hard l before a front vowel (this only occurs in some south-eastern dialects, but it should not be ignored, e.g. "saulałė" is a very common word in folk songs, meaning "Dear Sun")
2. The choices of spelling initial wo-/wu- as o-/u- (which also occurs to a degree in Samogitian, though this is mentioned nowhere), initial je- as e- (which, by the way, tends to be unrelated to iotation in Baltic languages, e.g. the dialectal "jeknos", related to, for example, Latin iecur, and had a beginning j- since PIE) , and of ґ as г in this same section contradict the earlier laid out principle of "one sound per grapheme" (i.e. of phonetic spelling). If etymological spelling is intended to be at least somewhat kept, it should be specified as such in the principles.
3. At 22:16, in Lithuanian; both -ia and -ija are regular endings of both nouns and verbs; how are we now supposed to differentiate between, for example, "valia" (will) and "valija" (he/she/it is useful; see LKŽ, valyti 3), or "ponia" (lady) and "ponija" (noblemen as a whole)? How are we supposed to know that vyšnia has two syllables, but policia is four?
4. At 30:12, Same problem as above with the -i-, but now that it can apply to any -i- between vowels, it's even worse: -ijo and -io, -iu and -iju, ect. are all simultaneously present and pronounced differently in the language.
5. At 31:23, short o in native words, though very rare, DOES exist (lokys as an an example). The majority of international/foreign words like "atomas" will have a short o as well (except a few like fortepijonas)
6. At 31:43, ę and ė literally make different sounds, there's no reason to make them into one letter. If anything, ę should be merged long e (e can be both long and short, same with a) into é, same applies to a/ą, and ė would simply be kept. Additionally, Samogitian actually differentiates between a short ė and a long ė̄ (also written as õ), which isn't accounted for anywhere. Also, "e/ē" in Latvian can have a different pronunciation depending on the syllables after it, though this is not accounted for nor in the old orthography, nor in the "new" one. Also also, separating y and í because of a few "similar words", but not ų and ú makes little sense: take, for example, siūs (he/she/it/they will sew) and siųs (he/she/it/they will send). You either keep both of them intact or merge both with í/ú.
7. At multiple points, Belarusian is written as Belarussian, probably by analogy with Russian. This is incorrect, though a common mistake.
8. The proposal for stress and pitch-accent does not account for the broken tone of Latvian and the secondary stress of Samogitian. Using acutes for high pitch also doesn't really work well with the pre-established choice to use them for vowel lengths (in my personal opinion, macrons, i.e. āēīōū, are both fairly universal and just look nicer).
9. At 1:02:24, you've forgotten that a/e can be both long and short in Lithuanian; for example, savo has a long a in its stem.
Minor points:
1. At 2:38, Church Slavonic is shown as a living language, despite being a liturgical one, having no native speakers and not used outside of the Church. Later, Latin is depicted as dead, despite having a similar status.
2. At 6:35, it is said that Baltic languages have a "very similar system", but since this is speaking about proto-Slavic (and thus, proto-Baltic), it fails to account for palatalization not being present in proto-Baltic, as well as a very clear distinction between long/short vowels (different from the Slavic one). The sound /x/ isn't native to Baltic either.
3. At 6:51, it may serve to mention that Belarusian was also written (by the Tatars) in the Arabic script.
4. At 7:04, only 4 colours are in the legend, but 5 are on the map.
5. At 7:33, Czajkówski would be pronounced as Czajkuwski (ó is pronounced as u)
6. At 16:55, Lithuanian is not accounted for in the explanation, as dž is a very common diagraph, and dz is incredibly common in the Dzūkijan dialect (it's even in the name)
7. At 20:31, Weird to use the third singular person of "to be" for Slavic, but the second person singular for Baltic languages, especially when Lithuanian still has a form "esti" still occasionally used in place of "yra", especially in scientific literature.
8. I'd say better maps could've been chosen, though they're not really the point of the video, so oh well.
Probably other points of contention that I missed in the video as well.
Thank you for your comments! To address them, I'd say:
Main Points:
1. I would keep the current system of for hard and for soft unchanged in Lithuanian. It works just fine for them and I don't really see a reason to change it in this specific case. I mean, you _want_ to use the Polish barred-L system, that's fine, I suppose, but I don't really see a point.
2. The point of this video was not to make something _strictly_ phonemic, but to strike a balance of phonemic, etymology, and historicity. There are give and takes on all sides, but that's what the goal was, a balance--not a one-to-one.
3. If that's the case, then, yes, of course, "-ija" can be allowed in the Baltic languages. I see no problem with that.
4. Same as above.
5. Yes, while it might exist, it's either rare or from loans, just as you mentioned. Either way, it's simply too rare to have its own letter, and exceptions can be made for those. Latvian does it perfectly fine without this written distinction, given its rarity.
6. See pinned commment. For í/y and ų/ú, if you _really_ want to, i'd merge them all as and , then (I do like the , however).
7. If you read the notes in the video, you'll see why I wrote "Belarussian" with two s's. It's not by analogy to Russian, it's because it's a compound word. The video explained it.
8. Pitch accent isn't ever shown in writing except for in dictionaries. The note in the video was just a basis for people to start from, then they can make their own systems, since, again, it's never shown in regular writing.
9. This text was copied from the official source. If there's a misspelling there, I either forgot something or the official source forgot it... Sorry about that.
Minor points:
1. Whoops, good catch haha
2. It was just a generalization. I know it's different, but most of the main consonants are there.
3. Might have missed that, thanks for letting me know!
4. The yellow was a slightly different shade, must've missed that. Just assume it's all yellow.
5. This is an English pronunciation of the name, not in Polish. I know is pronounced /u/ in Polish--it's in the video. That's just how Polish names with "-ówski" are pronounced in English.
6. My mistake, I should've written "... is rare in native Slavic words." I'll put that in the pinned comment.
7. It was just to show the example with words starting with "e", not about the word itself.
8. Maps were just for generalizations; like you said, not the point of the video.
I've updated the pinned comment with some of your suggestions, thank you!
Minor points:
5. (I am Polish) It should be: Czajkowski or Čajkovski (if Polish cz, and w would be replaced with č and v)
@@autokratao Woo, quick reply! Well, some notes to that as well.
5. I would've said fair enough, but... Practically every instance of Lithuanian short u (and -ų as well in some cases, like the subjunctive) corresponds to a short o (e.g. medos instead of medus) in Samogitian, but ą in the roots and some other words as well will correspond to a long ō (e.g. žōsės instead of žąsis, drōsiau instead of drąsiau), and so does uo in the Donininkai/Western dialect (e.g. dōna instead of duona). The common word "liōb", used to form the past iterative, also features it (at least in some dialects).
7. I wasn't referring to how it's spelled in the new orthography, but rather in the notes themselves, like in 38:20; the problem is, this is English, and how it forms adjectives like this is separate from how they're formed in Belarusian itself. You don't really say "I just read this Polskian book", or "I'm a fan of Lietuviškan cuisine"; You say "Polish" and "Lithuanian". Likewise, the form "Belarusian" follows a fairly standard "[country/region/city/ect. name] + (i)an format". No one really writes "Lesbossian", they write "Lesbosian", because -(i)an doesn't make the preceding s doubled all of a sudden.
9. I mean in the new orthography: assuming all instances of long a (and not just ą) get turned into á, it would be sávo, not savo. As mentioned before, "a" can be both short and long.
On minor points:
1. I actually know how this happened, or at least I think so. The chart from Wikipedia that you often see separates "Ecclesiastical" Latin from simply Latin. However, without this split being present, that doesn't go so well.
Additionally, on e/ę/ė once more: in Latvian, the difference I mentioned in the initial post is more or less allophonic: it depends on whether or not the syllable that follows e/ē has a open/closed vowel, whether it starts with a specific consonant, grammar features like adverbs from adjectives and past tense, some standalone words... point is, it's complicated, but predictable.
This is not the case in Lithuanian. There are many forms differentiated between ė, ę, and e (mainly short e - e's length, similarly to the openness/closeness of Latvian e/ē, depends on other factors like stress, if it's in an affix, etc., and can thus be reasonably predicted), such as:
-The second decl. sing. nom., sing. acc., sing. ins., and sing. voc.: "dukrelė" (dear daughter, nom.), "dukrelę" (dear daughter, acc.), dukrele (with the dear daughter, accented short e at the end), "dukrele" (dear daughter, voc., accented in the middle).
-Second conjugation past 3rd pers. and past participle plural: "manė" (he/she/it/they thought), "manę" (having thought), mane (short stressed e; acc. of aš (first person pronoun), unrelated); "skaitė" (he/she/ect. read, past), skaitę (having read);
-Second conj. reflexive past 3rd pers. short form and non-reflexive past sing. nom. participle: "prausės" (he/ect. bathed themselves), "prausęs" (having bathed [someone])
-Etc. etc. (also standalone words, like "ne" (e.g. ne vienas - a few) and "nė" (e.g. nė vienas - not a single))
Using ě as I've seen in another comment of yours is certainly better, but it still does not account for the 4-way e-ē-ė-ė̄ distinction Samogitian has. It's even more meaningful there, due to even more similar forms, as ei (of the standard language) turned into ē and i into ė.
A new point on palatalization:
1. Samogitian can have soft consonants even where the are no vowels after them, e.g. "veln's" or "vel's" (the Devil). Quite clearly, using ni/nj/lj/li would just be inaccurate to describe how the word's said.
3:11
Correction: The Bulgars are not the ancestors of modern day Bulgarians. A large majority of Bulgarians are just a slavic people group, nothing more and nothing less. Their ancestors took the title "Bulgarian" due to Asparukh's influence and capability to unite the slavic peoples. Modern day turkic Bulgars still exist in Bulgaria today as a minority, though calling *everyone* Bulgars is a very very huge stretch, not to mention the already problematic variation of "Bulgar" the slavs (and the country name) that is used being the aforementioned "Bulgarian".
It's obvious that this causes a lot of confusion, and as a "Bulgarian" (or, Macedonian) slav from North "Macedonia" I feel that the slavs in this very southern region have little to no idea why they call themselves these names!
The balkans are truly a shitfest.
Yes, you are correct. I was aware of this, but since it was only a brief recap of history, I didn't go too deep into it, but you are correct.
Some of your proposals are placed in *Interslavic language.* Especially about alphabets. They have different sets from less to more advanced users.
They used a lot of solutions from Serbo-Croatian which uses two alphabets. So content could be easily transcribed from one alphabet to another.
I appreciate the thought experiment, but I really don't like the way you dealt with o's and u's in Czech and Slovak. The truth is that the long ú and the ou diphthong are very clearly distinct vowel sounds in Czech, and they both show up a lot, and even though they were different etymologically, merging them with ó and ú in spelling, respectively, which are sounds that exist elsewhere, many in extremely common loanwords, really seems more confusing than not. If I were you, I'd just have ú and ů merge (even though they are used almost always in complementary distribution, because ů cannot occur in an initial position, while ú occurs almost exclusively in the initial position or at the beginning of a word root in a compound, but you want fewer diacritics, so whatever), and I'd keep ou as a distinct digraph, because it's very clearly a distinct sound, and if anything, I'd merge it with ó, which appears less often as a distinct sound. I know etymologically ů comes from a long o, and ou came from a long u, but keeping the etymology in this case is just messy.
Similarly, Slovak has a very clearly distinct ou diphthong as well. It even uses it as the pronunciation of final -ov. I don't think it makes sense to have that become a ú either, I'd keep it distinct. Having the ô be spelled ó, sure, whatever, but I'd also rather keep it distinct. But that's just me. I'd even go as far as having final -ov be spelled -ou, to match the pronunciation, but you clearly care about etymology, so I won't.
I'm also a bit confused as to why removing the final j in kralj is okay even though it comes back elsewhere in the paradigm, because of pronunciation, but it isn't when changing the vowels in Byelorussian. Sure, the root changes, but that's a better representation of the pronunciation than keeping all the o's, like in Russian, just like the root loses a j in kralj.
I guess I just like that Byelorussian does that, it decided to go fully phonological, etymology be damned, and I respect the chutzpah, it really gives it a distinct vibe. But I guess we're all against that distinct vibe here, so it makes sense to make it less distinct.
Interesting thoughts, but here's my reasoning for doing it the way I did:
1. Old West Slavic /u:/ splits in Czech to form /u:/ at the beginnings of words and /ou/ everywhere else. Slovak does not do this. Compare Czech and Slovak . Sure, while and are indeed pronounced differently (as I acknowledged in the video), they never overlap, since they came from the same sound, Old West Slavic .
2. Old West Slavic /o:/ usually becomes pronounced as /u(:)/ in most places, including Polish. In Polish it is currently written as /u/, in Czech /uo ~ u:/, in Slovak /uo/. The sound /o:/ do not appear natively in modern Czech and Slovak, only showing up in foreign words. These sounds, once again, do not overlap with the long-U, and are etymologically completely separate. Polish was actually the one that got it right this time. The etymological spelling here is regardless of pronunciation, as, even though they aren't quite pronounced like the original long /o:/, it doesn't matter, as the underlying morphology of these languages still treats them as if they were pronounced like they were originally.
1-2a. Basically, alternates with , and alternates with , even today and regardless of pronunciation.
3. The instrumental singular ending comes from Proto-Slavic , which in that region eventually became an early . Compare with the same ending in Sorbian, (they don't have vowel length). Polish actually keeps the original nasal there as .
4. For the final , I was conflicted to whether or not to keep it. However, Slovene already doesn't write final , so I'm just formalizing the pattern.
@@autokratao
1 and 2. I understand, it's less likely that there'll be confusion because the different evolutions of Old West Slavic ú and ó occurred in specific contexts, but it's still strange to me. I feel like native speakers intuitively understand the vowels to be different.
3. I meant the masculine genitive plural -ov ending, which merged in pronunciation with the feminine instrumental singular -ou in Slovak.
(By the way, I'm sorry I just commented on all of these videos all at once, in ways that seem pretty critical. The truth is this is all really cool and impressive, it's just clear we have small differences in our aesthetic preferences.)
I'm loving this series of unified orthographies! Any chance you'll explore outside European languages, like maybe Semitic or Hmong-Mien?
Thanks! I have some stuff from outside Europe, but those might be harder, given the variety within those families. For semitic, for example, the likes of Hebrew and Arabic already have pretty good orthographies with their own systems, but imagine trying to convince both to use one system...
@@autokrataoThanks for responding! I completely understand the chaos that would come with trying to convince semitic speakers in using a unified orthography haha.
Hey, this video is really awesome! I have an idea for you : try creating a phonetic English reform using Cyrillic. Would be cool to try!
Ю кан дефинителы ўрите Енглиш ўитх Цыриллик, ит'с џуст а бит ўеирд. :P
Nice video, good job! Just one thing, I am not a fluent Lithuanian speaker but I am pretty sure that ę and ė are different phonemes: ę = /æ/ and ė = /e:/.
yea, they are
Yes, I know they are. However, neighbouring Latvian also has this very same sound distinction but they ignore it in writing. If Lithuanian _really_ needs to differentiate them, I would write /æ/ with .
Cool video! I liked some changes more and some less but something that really doesn't make any sense to me is why would you delete the [h] sound at the start of Greek loanwords? 59:13 You didn't give any reason against it and I can see a few reasons that make it worth keeping.
1. It's loyal to the original word
2. Other languages like english kept their [h]'s in words like "history"
3. Keeping the [h] makes the word stand out more/be less ambigious ("imn" doesn't look like "hymn" at all)
4. Words that start with [h] are relatively rare in my language (Polish) and when they do start with this sound it often indicates that it's a loanword which I personally just find neat and more objectively it can be useful information for grammar declensions
The following part of the vid with "ocean" turning into "okean" is less blatant but I feel like ts/c pronunciation is widely used in Slavic languages? If you want to change this sound, making it a similar-sounding "s" would make more sense I think. That would make it go hand in hand with english and Romance languages as you stated. But I would just keep it as it is tbh
Thanks for your input! About that, two things:
1. The sound /h/ is not native to any Slavic language. Any appearance of the written is either one of two things: either from an older Czech-Slovak and Ukrainian (as discussed in the video at 12:29) or from a loan word from a different language group. English has an /h/ as a native sound and is quite common, so keeping the written from ancient Latin and Greek is fine; but Slavic languages don't have this sound normally. In fact, when Slavic people do come across a written , they usually pronounce it as /x/ (i.e., the same as if it was written in Polish). Medieval Latin and Greek actually lost the /h/ completely, so even in modern Latin and Greek (and by extension, all Romance languages), the written is always silent and has no sound. For example, in my native language of Portuguese, a Romance language, the word for "hymn" is written (inherited from the same origin), but it is pronounced always as /inu/, with no /h/, since that pronunciation was lost over 1000 years ago. Thus, forcing Slavic languages to pronounce a sound they don't have isn't particularly a good experience, hence me getting rid of it in spellings from loan words.
2. Slavic languages (in general) have tended to historically borrow Greco-Roman more often than not as a hard /k/ in all word positions, and rarely as a soft /ts/, likely due to more Slavic speakers having Greek Orthodox influence. Geo-politics aside, however, Slavic is neirther from the Romance language group nor that heavily influenced by them (as was English), so enforcing a Romance-style pronunciation on it doesn't really make much sense to me.
Scandinavian (Norwegian, Swedish and Danish) languages when?
I have some stuff for them already, just not sure when (if) that video might come out haha
Doing something in the same style for the Romance family would be awesome, I'd love to see what you'd come up with
I like what you’ve done with your system on a conceptual level, however in practice it strikes me as 1. too ahistorical, 2. too graphically jarring, and 3. ultimately unnecessary.
When the Southwest Europeans (the Latins) were expanding North into the Northwestern European’s lands, they did not create for them a new alphabet. They just gave them their own script and overtime a few new consonants and vowels were added, such as þ ð ä ø, etc.
Putting aside Glagolitic a second (Kirilitsa is not an evolution of Glagolitsa, despite what is commonly said), the West European history as I wrote above is quite analogous to the Eastern European history also. Kirilitsa is actually just the Greek’s script with a few additional consonants and vowels, such as ш ж ю я, etc.
What ought to be talked about more is the only reason we see the Hellenic and Cyrillic scripts as different is due to Western European-centricity. The difference between the characters that “Cyrillic” and Greek share is actually merely a difference of font, such as λ and л, τ and т, and π and п. The reason why this Western centricity is unfair is because West Europe and the divide between the Germanics and the Latins actually also originally had a font divide that naturally evolved from antiquity, but was then normalized in the modern era.
Instead of focusing on this major of a system, a much simpler and historically accurate method would be so normalize the Greek and Cyrillic scripts, regardless of whether the Latin script-based Slavics or Balts join in. And then from there the spelling differences accrued by the development of individual Slavic or Baltic languages could remain.
The following is the Polish, Russian, and Serbian translation of “the mouse sat in his house and ate louse”:
Polish
Μыϣ сιεδζαυα β сβοιμ δομυ ι ηαδυα βϣы
Russian
Μыϣь сηδελα β сβοεμ δομε η ελα βϣεη̆
Serbian
Μηϣ ιε сεδεο υ сβοιοι κυчьη η ιεο βαϣκε
It is awesome😮
Thank you for your proposals? Do you plan to make videos on unified spellings of latin and germanic languages?
Thanks! For Romance and Germanic, they might be harder to do on such a grand scale, given the fact that they are much more different from each other (in separate sub-groups, at least). I have some stuff for them already, so maybe in the future.
@@autokratao I think germanic would only be possible excluding english
1:04:03 Yeah, ë comes from old y, u, i, but you put them back in a bit wrong places and I'd just leave ë, because it is a distinct phoneme and it may be sometimes hard to foreseenif it should be this thing.
Apologies for the incorrect etymology, as it was a bit difficult to find them for Cassubian. Either way, if you do put them in the correct places, it should be alright, since though "ë" is distinct, (correct me if I'm wrong), it's not really used to differentiate words where the original etymology wouldn't already differentiate, if that makes sense.
Besides the ч/ћ and џ/ђ distinction someone already mentioned, is there a reason for not even mentioning Macedonian or Rusyn? I know some people insist these are not distinct languages, but since Silesian and Upper/Lower Sorbian are in the video, I don't see the reason why they wouldn't be included too. Otherwise, great video.
Yes, the ч/ћ and џ/ђ destinction is clarified in the pinned comment. As for Macedonian and Rusyn (Ruthenian), regardless of politics, they are extremely close (at least phonetically) to Bulgarian and Ukrainian, respectively; and since I didn't find much that was different specifically to them that didn't already apply to the others, I just didn't find it that necessary to discuss them specifically. They are mentioned in text the language trees near the beginning, however. But if you do apply my orthography to them, it would look like this:
Macedonian (Makedonski/Македонски):
[Latin]: Site čovečki suštestva se radjaat slobodni i ednakvi po dostoinstvo i prava. Tie se obdareni so razum i sovest i treba da se odnesuvaat eden kon drug vo duchot na opšto čovečkata pripadnost.
[Cyrillic]: Сите човечки суштества се радяат слободни и еднакви по достоинство и права. Тие се обдарени со разум и совест и треба да се однесуваат еден кон друг во духот на општо човечката припадност.
Ruthenian/Rusyn (Rusińskyj/Русиньскый):
[Latin]: Všytky lude sia rodiať jak słobodni i rivny i dostojnosti i pravach. Suť obdarovany rozumom i sumliniom i majuť robiti v duchu bratstva.
[Cyrillic]: Вшиткы люде ся родять як словодни и ривны и достойности и правах. Суть обдарованы розумом и сумлинём и мають робити в духу братства.
The only thing about Rusyn is the merger of and into and keep separate, but otherwise, everything is the same as Ukrainian.
@@autokrataoAh I see, and thank you for this detailed answer
@@autokratao It's раѓаат (raǵaat). Macedonian does have ѓ/ǵ and ќ/ḱ which replace the Serbian ђ/đ; ћ/ć. If you use Bulgarian Cyrillic for that суштества will be существа and раѓаат - рагяат.
@@autokratao As a Macedonian, I can tell you you did it pretty well, except for the letter ѓ, which represent a palatalized (soft) sound of г, not of д. Thus, радяат should be рагяат (or рагьаат). But, our alphabet is phonetic and every sound is represented with one letter (thus we write раѓаат, instead of two letters гь).
Радяат sounds more like serbian, in which exists palatalized sound of д, which they write as ђ (they also use phonetic principle).
In bulgarian would be раждат.
How is the Baltic group apply here? “but they sound simi..” Finnic. Finnic languages. Shared vocabulary and exclusively Finnic-Baltic grammar cases. Unified Finnish-Baltic group when? People who have nothing to do with Northern Europe are amusing..
What's next? Unified orthography for Turkic languages im Three scripts?
I don't know what the three scripts you're thinking of, but I definitely have plans for them. Have no idea when that video's gonna come out though haha
@@autokrataoCommon Turkic Alphabet (Latin); Perso-Arabic; and Göktürk Runes (Old Turkic)
If Lithuanian doesn't have any nasal vowels whatsoever, how are the "an" and "un" pronounced in "angis" and "sunkus", respectively?
Just a regular vowel + an nasal consonant. If it was one of the old nasals, it would've been spelt as * and *, which isn't the case. There might be the odd "colouring" of the previous vowel with a slight nasal sound, but it's not a full nasal vowel.
unified proto indoeuropean orthography
Belarusian, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian use two alphabets (Latin and Cyrillic). Ukrainian language has multiple proposals for Ukrainian Latinka.
You missed letters: *ć, ś, ź* -- all or some of them are in Polish, Lower Sorbian, Belarusian Latinka.
*Ć* is present in Upper Serbian and Serbo-Croatian Latinka.
There are series of letters/sounds for these letters (softer to harder): *ć, č, c* + *ś, š, s* + *ź, ž, z*
*Some letters in Polish language* could be changed to improve ability of Slavs with Latin alphabets (Czech, Slovak, and other) to read Polish and vice versa; this change would be neutral to current Polish orthographical rules:
*ż* => *ž*
*rz* => *ř*
*cz* => *č*
*sz* => *š*
*w* => *v*
Not sure about Sorbian but Ć, Ś & Ź have different pronounciations in Polish and Belarusian;
Ć
Polish: ČJ /t͡ɕ/
Belarusian: CJ /t͡sʲ/
Ś
Polish: ŠJ /ɕ/
Belarusian: SJ /sʲ/
Ź
Polish: ŽJ /ʑ/
Belarusian: ZJ /zʲ/
PL Białoruś [bʲa'wɔruɕ]
BY Biełaruś [bʲeɫaˈrusʲ]
Belarusian already widelt use the latin lacinka alphabet and i think it does a pretty good job at it. Also there are some major differences in how vowels are pronounced in belarusian.
Interesting video, the comment fixes some issues. Still, it's funny that you have accidentally reinvented pre-reform Serbian orthography! The reform happened for a good reason - saying that as someone with three Đ's in his name.
I'm assuming from your username "Đukić"? Theoretically, this name would be in the Latin and in the Cyrillic. Let me know if you have any ideas!
@@autokratao Or maybe . Interslavic language is using dj.
I don't think you had to include in Baltic languages in this...
Why not? Their phonology and sound system is extremely similar to Slavic languages, and they already use a very similar Latin spelling system to, say, Czech, for example. Unless if I'm missing something obvious (other than political), of course.
@@autokratao Lithuanian speaker here, Baltic and Slavic languages are mostly unintelligible, apart from a few words, and the Baltic languages tend to be more conservative interms of grammar (Lithuanian itself is the *most* conservative PIE language.)
@alyss_aq he said phonetically you are almost the same, not in comprehension
@alyss_aq Žodžių tarimas yra panašus, o ne patys žodžiai
@alyss_aq Phonology is similar between Baltic and Slavic languages due to common ancestor (proto-Balto-Slavic language) and proximity of nations.
Lithuanian and Latvian are using modified new Czech alphabet (Hus alphabet). Lithuanian has also *ą, ę* like in Polish an Kashubian.
I like the topic and commend the choice. :)
I write this before watching the whole video. I might edit video if I see more facts I believe I have to address, so far:
- Cyril and Methodius have created glagolitic script and their students called Climent and Naum upgraded it to Cyrillic
ok the rest of the video is quite what-i-think-it-shoul-be kind of video and only comment I have is, you don't seem to be a slav... and in order to do this kind of unification or language reform, I believe you have to be extremely familiar with the core of each language for it to work... nice job though :)
You are correct, Cyril and Methodius created the Glagolitic and their students the Cyrillic. What I spoke in the video was just a brief oversimplification, since that was not the point of the video. And you are also correct in saying that I myself am not Slav (or Balt), nor do I speak any Slavic languages. But I do like researching them, so I'm glad for any input you might have!
@@autokratao as I am glad someone is interested in researching them as they are great indeed
I love the Balts and the Slavs.
I appreciate your efforts (and first video was about Gaelic languages proposal, which was kind of useful to understand spelling and phonological phenomenon there), but thanks, no thanks. We Belarusians already struggled a lot with attempt of intrusion in our spelling (narkomaŭka vs taraškievica) with attempt to make our spelling closing to Russian (and etymologicalization will lead to similar results) that not so many existing carriers starting to lose sibilation assimilation (e.g. it is spelt "lodačcy" in narkamaŭka, but should be pronounces "lodaccy", or "kupaješsia" -> "kupajeśsia"), so please no. And don't you think being involved in topic of languages which you don't know, but which have very difficult and traumatized relations between each other because of precursor (and current) imperialism and linguacid, as at very best naive or even more like cultural mentoring??? We ourselves decide how to write and pronounce our languages, thanks. If you interested in liguistics better adopt just simple descriptive approach of "rozum/razum" channel where he just describes internal reality of individual Slavic languages and show case the different history of evolution from common source.
"South" Slavic group doesn't exist. it's "more or less" geographical definiton. Slovenes (Caranthanians) are West Slavs by it's origins. Today definiton of Slavs is not the same as in 6. century. Bulgarians are Slavicized Bulgars. I am "South" Slav.
This is a linguistic classification, not a political/geographical one. All Slavic languages in the Balkans (i.e., the "south") are closer to each other than they are to say, Russian or Czech.
@@autokratao Partially closer. Bul. & Slo. are like day & night. Many words in Slo. dialects are closer to Czech & Slovak, just like offical one. E. Slovak dialects are closer to Rusyn. That division on west, east, south groups is more or less political. I am Serbian speaker.
@@autokratao Division into West, South and East Slavs is political. According to new theories (mainly based on grammar), Slavs should be divided into:
* North-West Slavs (also called Lechitic): Polish, Kashubian, Sorbians, +Vyatichi, +Radimichs, +North Krivichs
* South-East Slavs: Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, +Old Ruthenian, partly Russian
* mixed: Czech, Slovak, Slovene (and +Carantanian), +Slavic Pannonian, +Old Novgorod, +Ruthenian, Belarusian, Ukrainian
[I used *+* to mark extinct languages, and groups]
@@autokratao About division of Slavs into two groups (and about Old Novgorod language):
Język staronowogrodzki: nowy sposób klasyfikacji ludów i języków słowiańskich
@tienshinhan2524 А ти какъв си бе, влах?
37:55
lol thanks for the clarification
Rus' 🇺🇦🔱
jít
Now do Germanic languages 👀
Also I'd like to see one for Navajo (maybe also other Native American languages) because I think the orthography could have been made a whole lot simpler/concise and adapted for the language's structure phonology, also it has accents and diacritics everywhere, yáʼátʼééh 🫡
Thanks! I have some stuff for them, but not sure when that will come out (if ever haha).