How would one go about making a Slavic language?

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Isfendil
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How would one go about making a Slavic language?

Post by Isfendil »

Same question as title: How would one go about making a Slavic language?

To elaborate, what are the best sources to consult? (Besides wikipedia)
How would one go about a language of a particular branch of slavic?
How would one make a language of a unique branch?
I may add more questions as I think of them.

Keep in mind while I am no stranger to PIE and IE studies I know next to nothing about the slavic branch, and I can't quite parse cyrilic at least for now so try to use IPA if necessary for any explanations.
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Zekoslav
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Re: How would one go about making a Slavic language?

Post by Zekoslav »

Well, I learned most of what I know about Slavic linguistic history by reading local (i.e. not in English) literature, so I don't know much about sources, however...

1. There's this book which contains a chapter on Slavic, and other IE. studies manuals may as well.

2. There's an excellent historical morphology of Slavic by Thomas Olander available online. You can PM Ælfwine about it.

The obvious answer to you second question would be to find out which features characterize each group of Slavic languages and a) include them in your language or b) invent something completely different. However, you're probably more interested in knowing where to find that out [:D]. Reading about individual languages is a good start, and I can (probably) provide help on any individual issue.

In broad terms, West Slavic languages have distinctive vowel length but no distinctive stress, while East Slavic languages have no distinctive vowel length but have distinctive stress. South Slavic languages... well, there's a big difference between Western and Eastern South Slavic because Bulgarian and Macedonian are outliers in many aspects, but the Western South Slavic ones have both (and often also tone).

Then, Northern (i.e. Western and Eastern Slavic) have phonemic palatalization of at least some consonants (all in East, not all in West - usually dentals) while Southern have no phonemic and usually no phonetic palatalization either (except Bulgarian).

Northern Slavic have conservative and complex nouns and innovative and simple verbs (morphologically), while the South Slavic ones form a continuum from Bulgarian, which is the opposite (innovative and simplified nouns, conservative and complex verbs) to Slovene, which is exactly like Northern Slavic.

There's also some specific sound changes for each group, but I think they can wait.
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MoonRightRomantic
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Re: How would one go about making a Slavic language?

Post by MoonRightRomantic »

InterSlavic may be helpful in understanding the traits common to Slavic languages. http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html
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