Novoslovnica. Guide for a Slavic constructed language. George Carpow

a huge number of shortcomings and is currently not recognized as capable by any of the developers of the inter-Slavic project, but it served as a catalyst for the emergence of a large number of such projects and the development of the idea of creating a planned inter-Slavic language that could meet the needs of modern society.

      After that, more than 20 similar projects, more or less developed, appeared in 10 years. In 2006 there was a project slavianski, created (Ondrej Rečnik and Gabriel Svoboda). This language was developed in parallel in different degrees of detail, he put his ideas Jan van Steenbergen and Igor Polyakov. In 2009, the project broke away from the project Slovioski (Steeven Radzikowski, Andrej Moraczewski and Michal Borovička), which tried to unite the ideas of Slovio and Slovyanski. However, in 2010, all these projects were merged into one under the name Interslavic (see below – Interslavic-2).

      At the same time, the Czech programmer Vojtěch Merunka published under the name of Neoslavonic. This project suggested the idea of how the Church Slavonic language could develop in free development. In 2011, these two projects began cooperative work on a common case. (see figure 1) then, this project has taken a leadership position on the issue of building medullablastoma language. Only in 2012 there was one project of “Northern Slavic language” (Venedčyna), presented by Nikolai Kuznetsov, who then joined Interslavic, and in 2014 there was a project of Novoslovnitsa, presented by George Carpow and the development team mainly from the countries of Eastern and southern Slavs, which at the moment remains the only living independent project outside the project Interslavic.

      Interslavic introduced the idea of flavorisation, which resulted in a valid language differentiation of dialects and spellings and the lack of codification. In 2017, the project Neoslavonic and Interslavic merged into a new project called interslavic-2, which was a compromise between the ideas of Vojtěch Merunka and Jan van Steenbergen (who headed the project interslavic-1). They presented their new ideas in the article5, which was published in July 2017.

      Comparison with other projects

      We can provide a little concept comparison of other interslavic projects: Neoslavonic6 and Interslavic7.

      These projects had been developed before Novoslovnica appeared. Each of the projects has its own flavor or aim:

      • Neoslavonic represents the idea of the possible development of Old Church Slavonic up to nowadays.

      • Interslavic-1 develops the idea of finding a common core of modern Slavic languages and take features and lexicon that is common to all modern Slavic languages

      • Novoslovnica from this point of view develops the idea of creating the language that unites most grammar features assimilated by different Slavic languages along with etymologically developed lexicon with regard to modern days.

      Short comparison of Novoslovnica with other projects

      Phonology

      Phonology – a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in the language. Phonology describes all the sounds that the language possesses.

      Sounds can be divided into different classes. One of the characteristics for separating different sounds is the ability to pronounce them with an open vocal tract. You can notice that vowels (such as a, o, u in English) are able to be pronounced with open vocal tract, whereas consonants are pronounced with partly or completely closed vocal tract.

      Moreover the term of allophone should be concerned before going further.

      Allophone – one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language.

      This leads to the definition of a phoneme:

      A phoneme is one of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a particular language.

      Therefore, an allophone is such a sound (or a set of sounds) that does not influence the meaning of the word.

      Vowels

      In the beginning of this paragraph the description of a vowel should be given.

      A vowel (V) – a sound produced with no constriction in the vocal tract.

      With this information we can distinguish different types of vowels. The classification of vowels is based on two main factors:

      • What is the row of the sound

      • What is the height of the sound

      • Whether the vowel is rounded or not

      The row is the position of the tongue when you pronounce a vowel. There are three main rows: front, central and back. When you pronounce a vowel at the front row, you move your tongue toward the teeth. The descriptions of central and back rows are similar – you move your tongue to the center or toward the larynx to pronounce them.

      The height of the sound is a characteristic of tongue convexity and tension in your mouth. If it is positive, it means your tongue does not touches the palate nor bottom of the mouth, and the tip of your tongue is tense- or closed. If your tongue is flat and parallel to the bottom of your oral cavity, moreover, it lies on it – it is an open one. Between these two positions a middle position can be found.

      The roundedness of the vowel is the amount of rounding in the lips during the articulation of a vowel. Vowels can be categorized as rounded and unrounded. Thus, to pronounce a rounded vowel you should round your lips. To pronounce an unrounded vowel, you should relax your lips during the articulation of a vowel.

      Finally, we can talk about Novoslovnica phonology. Novo-slovnica consists of 20 ordinary vowel phonemes. Among them there are seven closed vowels, three open vowels, ten middle vowels as well as seven front vowels, five center vowels and eight back vowels. On the table 1.1 you can see a chart position of the vowels in Novoslovnica.

      Vowels in Novoslovnica

      In this table you can also see different vowels are font-styled differently. The bold ones are for rounded vowels. The normal ones are for unrounded vowels.

      If you know Czech or Finnish, you might be concerned by the absence long vowels in this chart. It’s time to speak about allophones in Novoslovnica.

      Novoslovnica has allophones of open and long vowels. This means that it does not matter how you pronounce a «modified» vowel – as a long one or as an open one – the meaning of the word will not change. To make this more clear, look at table 1.2.

      Long-vowel allophones in Novoslovnica

      Exception:

      o̞ (only one modified vowel – ɯ)

      Examples:

      Buda [`buda] (Buddha)

      búda [`bu: da] (building) – [`bʊda]

      If you have some knowledge about Slavic languages and their origins, you should know that the Proto-Slavic language had nasal vowels, which we can nowadays be found in Polish and Lithuanian. Do they exist in Novoslovnica? Of course they do! There are two allophones for pronouncing nasal vowels. The first one is actually a nasal vowel, when you pronounce an ordinary vowel through your nose. The second is more common, such as in French, when you add a nasal consonant [ŋ] to an ordinary vowel. Look at the sounds on the next table.

      Examples:

      Dųb (oak) [dõb] – [duŋb]

      Męso

5

V. Merunka and J. van Steenbergen, «Slovjanska kulturna diplomacija – swot analiza, strategija i taktika do budǔcnosti,» 2017.

6

V. Merunka, Neoslavonic Zonal Constructed Language. Nova Forma, 2012.

7

V.Merunka, Interslavic Zonal Constructed Language. Lukas Lhotan, 2018.