Talk:Slovene language

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Contents 1 editing 2 status 3 phoneme 4 Slovenian translations of section headings 5 New template 6 Basic phonology 7 Dialect section 8 Question 9 Consonant list 10 Slovenian as a second language 11 Sposojenka and tujka 12 Geographic names 13 Slovenian is not a south slavic language - of course it is 14 Common phrases 15 Slovenian literature 16 Palatalization in Slovenian 17 Contradiction 18 Consonants 19 Requested move 19.1 Survey 19.2 Discussion 20 Flagicons in the infobox 20.1 Third opinion on flagicons

[edit] editing

I have edited the section on the history of Slovenian. I took out a lot of (confusing) prose about the details of Freising manuscripts because they belong on that page, not here. I removed the David Crystal quote as it didn't seem to provide any useful information that isn't already elsewhere on the page or Wikipedia, and it seemed POV. I instead added a paragraph about the status of the language since Slovenian independence. I'm not certain if it's entirely correct, so please feel free to fix anything wrong with it. Also, since I found much of the section difficult to understand, I'm not sure that my treatment of German borrowings is correct. I think the section overall is certainly clearer, but if there are any errors, please fix them, but try not to just revert to the previous content as it was not written clearly. I also changed the name of the section to conform to Wikipedia:WikiProject Languages. I am hoping to fix the rest of the sections soon, as they too suffer from a lack of clarity and organization. Nohat 23:01, 2004 Mar 17 (UTC)

[edit] status

I think Slovene has no official status in Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Slovene was only officially recognized by Italy as one of the minoritary languages with la legge n. 482 del 15 dicembre 1999 and given privileges with la legge 38/2001 di tutela della minoranza slovena. Boraczek 10:12, 13 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] phoneme

In my opinion dž is a phoneme in Slovene. It's distinct from č (a minimal pair džem : čem). And it has different pronunciation than d-ž (like in podžupan) even though I don't know if there are any minimal pairs. It's very rare in Slovene and probably it only occurs in loanwords, but there's no reason to exclude it from the list of Slovenian phonemes. Boraczek 11:20, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

---

Yes, it only exists in loan words because it isn't a part of the language. It is the same as the southern slavic "đ", it is only written as "dž" because of lack of the letter. It's very much like writing a german name with an "ü" down using an "i". Another example would be names being written down in german using "ü" in Austria-Hungary because they had no more appropriate letter to assign. That's for example why the current president's last name is Türk instead of Turk, while the actual sound is more of a very strong "u", or something between a "u" and an "o". The same thing still keeps happening in Slovenia, like with the term "borovo gostüvanje", while it would actually be better written down as "gostuovanje" or "gostouovanje"(but still not very accurate). The same way "dž" is a different sound than "đ", but was simply used to write it down. If a word like "džungla" is written down in a slovene form, instead of the original "jungle", that doesn't make the sound slovene, just like writing down "Washington" as "Uošington" or "Vašington" and pronouncing it the american way wouldn't make the "w" slovene. I do however aggree that "đž" in words transcribed in this way usually can't be pronounced in any other way than "đ". Generally if the origin isn't slovene, it isn't considered a slovene sound. But I'm no linguist so let's wait for someone more fit to anwser this to come along. Regards =) 195.210.248.41 (talk) 16:26, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Slovenian translations of section headings

What purpose do they serve? None of the other language articles have them, and as far I can tell they're basically just a almost-completely-useless set of Slovenian words that have been added to the article. I'm not sure that there is any value at all in knowing how to say "geographic distribution" in Slovenian to someone who is just getting an overview of the language. I'd say delete them, as they add basically useless clutter to the article. Nohat 22:22, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

We have it on Belarusian language, but only in grammar-specific part, e.g. noun (nazounik) and pronoun (zajmiennik). --rydel 03:07, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

OK, well after over a month without objection, I removed them. Nohat 03:59, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] New template

New template has been created (copied from Commons): {{template:Slovenian flag}}. It appears like this: . It works also by using:

• template:Slovene
  
• template:Slovenian
  
• template:Slovene flag.
  

Cheers! --Eleassar777 17:03, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Basic phonology

I removed the following addition to the "Sounds"-section.

Basic comparison of English and Slovenian consonants

Only three characters in Slovenian alphabet can not be found in English alphabet as well. They are all consonants with the following pronounciations.

• Č (č) - pronounced like ch in China,
• Š (š) - pronounced like sh in hush,
• Ž (ž) - pronounced like s in leisure.

Some characters that can be pronounced in different ways in English, however in Slovenian have standard pronounciations.

• C (c) - pronounced like ts in cats,
• E (e) - pronounced like e in bed,
• G (g) - pronounced like g in god,
• H (h) - pronounced like h in honey,
• I (i) - pronounced like ee in bee,
• J (j) - pronounced like y in yard (notice that sound j from jazz has to be written with the sequence of two characters dž in Slovenian, therefore džez),

A table of IPA with (mostly) phonemes is as basic as you can get. IPA is quite unambiguous for encyclopedic purposes and in those cases where it isn't, it should be supplemented with sound files, not written language and comparisons with English which can never be particularly satisfactory. The section above is based on the assumption that written language is the norm on which pronunciation is based on. A description of the phonology of a language can certainly use orthography of the language in examples, but it should not be an attempt at a letter-to-sound list. That should be covered under "Writing system" (and it already is).

Peter ^Isotalo 11:45, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Dialect section

Could someone write something a bit more neutral about Slovene dialects? No serious linguists actually tally dialects, since these can vary not just from one region to another, but usually from one village to another, which might as well bring the number up into the hundreds or even thousands. There should be a description of the major dialect groups instead. Also, please try to avoid the overt bragging about how much more diverse Slovene is compared to "other languages". My guess is that it's hardly more varied than most languages, and if it is, it needs to be referenced and explained in a neutral fashion.

Peter ^Isotalo 14:56, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Your guess is wrong. I did not write the section on dialects, but I challenge you to find another language nearly as varied. http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/profiles/profs03.htm (compare this profile to those of other languages) BT2 16:45, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

How can I possibly verify that no other language is more varied unless I check every single language in the world? The link you provided states that it is pretty varied, but it doesn't go nearly as far as the overt bragging in the dialect section. I reworded now and I'm hoping for more facts and fewer peacock terms.

Peter ^Isotalo 11:09, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Question

Could a Slovenian speaker tell me what the reflexes of the Proto-Slavonic "tj" and "dj" are in Slovenian? For example the Proto-Slavonic "tj" in /svetja/ (candle) gives ʃt in Old Ch. Sl. and Bulgarian (sveʃta and sveʃt), tʲʆ in Russian (svetʲʆa), ʨ in Serbian (sveʨa in Serbo-Croatian, etc. Pls, answer here or on my talk page, thank you very much! VMORO 23:30, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

It is tʃ <sveča>. Semprio 11:22, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Consonant list

I don't understand the purpose of listing allophones (such as [F]) in the table of consonants. If they should be included (even in brackets), why aren't they listed on pages of other languages? It is, I believe, unnecessary and confusing. Also, as a native speaker of Slovene, I know that the /r/ I pronounce is a trill, not a tap, even in non-sonorant environments. What's more, I don't think that dental articulation needs to be marked in phonetic transcription... /t/, /d/, and even /n/ are dental in Slovene in all cases... I will edit the page so that it looks better to me. If anyone has any counter-arguments, please list them. Semprio 11:32, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Semprio, please refer to proper linguistic literature when editing phonology sections. Preferably material written by trained phoneticians. The Slovenian /r/ is analyzed as a tap by a Slovenian phonetician in the IPA handbook. What are you comparing your own pronunciation with?

Peter ^Isotalo 14:10, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

I rewrote most of the sounds section and removed almost all of the old material, which was quite incomprehensible, even for someone with an avid interest in phonetics. All the additions are based on the Slovenian entry in the IPA handbook.

Peter ^Isotalo 14:47, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Slovenian as a second language

Added a link to "Slovenian Language and Culture Lessons in Switzerland and Austria". These are organised by the Slovenian education ministry and officially recognised by the Swiss authorities. I believe there are similar programmes running in other parts of the world. I thought the link might be useful to potential learners of the language (as I am) and that it fitted best in this section. Forgive me if I was mistaken. ralphb.

Found & added links for Slovenian language resources in Australia and USA also. Likely similar resources in Hungary and Italy are probably beyond my googling abilities. ralphb. 13:46, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sposojenka and tujka

Hi, I'm writing an article about mercury (the element), which had first been translated in French as hydrargyre then later as vif-argent (quicksilver). These two word means exactly the same thing, but one with Latin etymology and the second with French one.

I see the same kind of distinction than between sposojenka and tujka, but I can't find a Wikipedia entry for foreign word. Do you know of such a dual process of assimiliation in English? Especially, are there different names for different degree of adoption? Reply to David Latapie 10:02, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Try this for size: loanword. Btw, I think this would also be the more apropriate term to use in the article. Being a Slovene native speaker, I can see why somebody would want to use the term "foreign word", but I don't think it works that way in English.--213.172.246.40 23:20, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

See also calque. 惑乱 分からん 01:44, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Geographic names

Why do we need so many examples of geographic names? We should remember that Wikipedia is not a dictionary. IMO, we should use them only to illustrate some general principles. --Eleassar ^{my talk} 13:59, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, I moved names from a Slovenian alphabet, even less appropriate place for them. But I agree. --AndrejJ 18:49, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Now I have been bold and have removed them entirely. As I said, we're not a dictionary and I don't see any need for them. Here is the content: [1].

[edit] Slovenian is not a south slavic language - of course it is

I must remind you that Slovenian is not a south slavic language but a western one. It belongs to the same group as Clovak and Czech. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.81.246.92 (talk)

I must remind you that this is not true. It's South Slavic all right. --romanm (talk) 12:42, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

I must disagree. First, slovak and slovenian lanugages have much more in common than slovenian and south slavic lanugages like Croation or Macedonian.

Second, if one would study the history of Central Europe, it would become clear that the Slavs that inhabited the teritory of todays Austria, Slovenia and Slovakia were the same group and that Croatians were another tribe, coming from other teritories.

I've added a few words on this to the page, with a reference to an instructive book review which reveals interesting facts about Slovene. I recommend the review to anyone who is interested, but let me add a few points here. Everyone will be aware that all these supposedly scientific and objective questions of classification are highly political throughout the Slav language area, and always have been - probably always will be. This is principally due to the principle that language=nation=right to your own country, which leads to much confused analysis. But the case of Slovene is unusual. There is self-evidently a sharp underlying division between Slovene and Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Serbian etc., masked as this may be by loan-words and by the effects of Tito's project in Yugoslavia, but the natural-seeming re-classification of the language as West Slavic (Czech or Slovak speakers can get by quite comfortably in Slovene, whereas Croatian or Bulgarian or whatever is much more distant for them) lacks an overall justification in terms of historical explanation. The three Slovenian authors in the book that is reviewed in the link I have added have come up with an ingenious and rather convincing alternative theory - namely, that the Slovenes are survivors of the 'Veneti' recorded in Roman and arguably also Greek texts since fairly remote antiquity - and a key argument is that this accounts for the deep dialect divisions, a feature of languages which have been established in the same place for thousands of years (Welsh, say, or Chinese). The account given by the traditional analysis fails to account for this. There is more suggestive material, but there is no point me going into that here.

- I note that someone has simply removed my edits to the main page, without however giving any explanation or response to the points made above. Simply repeating that Slovenian is a South Slavic language when there are clearly questions to be answered about this classification seems wrong to me.

Please prove your statements by linguistic [jezikoslovni] sources und sign it so we'll know who you are. I think there is much evidence that Croatian (and Serbian) are much closer to Slovene than Czech or Slovak (concerning grammer, words, and so on). Please note that there are even intermediate dialects between Slovene and Croatian (in Western Croatia) called Kajkavian_dialect (hr:Kajkavski). -- PhJ 10:44, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Nearly all reputable scholarship on the Slavonic languages classifies Slovenian as a South Slavonic language. The only significant disagreement is whether it was always a South Slavonic language, or was first a West Slavonic language pulled into the southern dialect continuum after the arrival of the Magyars in Pannonia. Wikipedia does not rely on the personal investigations of its editors; all content much be sourced from published scholarship. Your entire discussion above violates WP:NOR and uses the Talk page as a general discussion forum. I'd ask you to remove it. CRCulver 17:21, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

That makes sense: S. was first a West Slavonic language pulled into and mixed with the southern dialect after the arrival of the Magyars in Pannonia... I wasn't aware that I misused or violated etc. I removed my lay investigation.RH 19:03, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Common phrases

I think we should remove common phrases. Wikipedia is not a dictionary. --Eleassar ^{my talk} 18:38, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

As there has been no opposition I've removed common phrases now. --Eleassar ^{my talk} 09:50, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Slovenian literature

On one occasion Count A. Auersperg (Anastasius Grün) entered the diet of Carniola carrying the whole corpus of Slovenian literature under his arm to provide evidence that the Slovenian language could in his view not be substituted for German as a medium of higher education

... I'm assuming there is a point in stating this? TomorrowTime 09:17, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Palatalization in Slovenian

Is a consonant before j or i palatalized? The page Ljubljana gives [ljub'ljʌna], but the sound file sounds like [lʲub'lʲʌna], exactly the same as the corresponding Russian pronunciation. -Iopq 12:03, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

There is misspelling in IPA pronunciation, correct is [ʎub'ʎʌna] or ['ʎubʎʌna].

This is not true. Ljubljana is pronounced as [ljub'ljana] in terms of phonology at least (also note the vowel quality). Slovenian [l] before of front vowels is only slightly palatalized and there are minimal pairs like [polja] `field, genitive singular' ([pol] `field, genitive plural') and [pola] `pole, genitive singular'. This clearly shows that there is no palatal lateral in Slovenian. Please, look at the available literature before making such claims. -Alpha1979 07:43, 29 September 2007 (CET)

[edit] Contradiction

The vowels section says that vowel length is non-contrastive and dependent on stress placement, whereas the Prosody section claims the exact opposite. I understand there may be some controversy on that point, but anyway citations would come in handy. Edricson 13:44, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Consonants

I have added sounds ʎ (lj) and ɲ (nj) to consonant list. Question is about ŋ (ng)/(nk) sound (as in English bank, Latvian banka), as I'm Latvian I don't know is it represented in Slovenian. Slovenian phonetics is much like Latvian. I think that Slovenians could take from Latvian ļ and ņ characters to represent digraphs lj and nj, which fit more to Internet style not for handwriting. For example, Ļubļana (Ljubljana). Roberts7 11:28, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I would agree that this consonants appear, though the pronunciation of lj seems to be slightly different than lj in Croatian. Nj exists in words like Kranj, konj... someone would need to check a source for the correct IPA sounds, I am not really sure at the moment. But for the alphabet, we are perfectly fine with the present one and additional letters would just make a mess :-) --Tone 15:39, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I think all of the sounds (namely the ʎ, the ɲ and the dz) ought to be deleted. The ʎ and ɲ are positional allophones of l and n, respectivelly. The dz is merely a voiced variation of ts. I can't think of any examples of minimal pairs of these and I have never seen them described as separate phonemes in any source. When I saw them listed as phonemes I was shocked. The description on the top clearly says that there are 21 consonantal sounds in Slovene, but in the chart there are 24. How can one distinguish what are phonemes and what are allophones? Next to that, if allophones are to be added to the article (clearly noted as such, though!), the list is far from complete. You have posed a question about the ŋ. It is always written like an n, but only appears before velar consonants (k, g and h). It is not considered to be a separate phoneme. But if one wants allophones in the charts, one has to add them. The same goes for ɱ, appearing only before labio-dental consonants (simfonija). Somewhere on this page I also noted the dispute about dʒ being a separate phoneme. We were taught in school that it indeed is one. My school education is also the main support for all of my arguments - the consonantal phonemes are, they said, p t k ts tʃ f s ʃ h b d g z ʒ dʒ m n r l v j. As soon as I register I will delete these additions to the inventary. And about your proposals to change our alphabet - I don't like it. As I have stated, the sounds in question are not phonemes but rather consonant clusters. Next to that, it would be hard to make people write that way. And even more, if we ought to have new symbols for non-phonemes, why don't you Latvians use a special symbol for the ŋ in "banka"? :) Perhaps I seemed a bit harsh in this reply, so I would like to add it was not meant like that. Have a pleasant day! Aljoša Avani 01:16, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

There, deleted the /ʎ/, the /ɲ/ and the /dz/ for reasons stated above. If anyone disagrees, they are welcome to put it back, but please state your reason. A pleasant day! Aljoša Avani 01:54, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

According to Slovenski pravopis (last edition), /ɲ/ and /dz/ are present in Slovenian language. However, the book also states that ʎ is never used. So I am putting the first two back. Thank you for pointing out the error. --Tone 08:32, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

This is not true! Slovenski pravopis (SP) says that the nasal is only palatalized (nʲ) rather than palatal (ɲ). However, the former is only a variant (of /n/ in certain positions) and is mainly absent from contemporary standard Slovenian (it is a very marked dialectal feature). As regards [dz], it is only a positional variant of /ts/, the same way as [ɣ] is to /x/. More accurately, as regards [dz] and [dʒ], the jury is still out, since they appear contrastively only in loanwords. Also, SP is not really a good source for phonology, try something more specialized. -Alpha1979 07:52, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Requested move

[edit] Flagicons in the infobox

In order to prevent an edit war I am starting a section on here so we can discuss the merits of having flagicons in the infobox. I removed[3] the flagicons added recently[4] by User:XJamRastafire but was later reverted by him[5] with no explanation of why they would be needed.

My rationale is the flagicons add nothing of encyclopedic value because the name of the country is next to the flag. They are merely being used as decoration therefore not being helpful to the reader, so they should be removed from the infobox. I'm kindly asking XJamRastafire to provide a rationale for why the flagicons belong in the infobox. I am also going to ask for a third opinion at the appropriate talk pages. --Eleassar ^{my talk} 13:00, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Third opinion on flagicons

I am responding to a request for a third opinion.

Because this issue is within the scope of WikiProject Languages, I recommend asking for input to resolve this on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Languages. — Athaenara ✉ 14:05, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

My argument for change was that some language infoboxes contain flags (see for example Finnish language, Karelian language and for partly usage English language). I have informed Eleassar in his talk page for may changes and reverts. He had reverted this article and also made changes in Finnish and Karelian languages (flags were added by 84.251.73.218 ([6]) and Flrn ([7]). Currently Czech, Danish, Faroese, Greek, Hebrew, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Swahili have flag(s) in infoboxes. Flags are in general 'always' merely decorations, so it is a question if they should be used anyhow. --xJaM (talk) 13:55, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Hm, I see that Eleassar had also removed flags from some other articles about languages: (last revision for English is this), Bengali, Chinese, Dutch, Estonian, Hindi, Hindustani, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Marathi, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Vietnamese. So, to repeat - my arguments for including flagicons into article for Slovene language were/are quite strong, since they were already widely used. Therefore I am kindly asking him to revert his recent actions until consensus is reached. Turkish language is also btw a featured article.

I'm reverting Eleassar's edits. If it's true that they add "add nothing of encyclopedic value" for the instances of language infoboxes, then it's true of all uses of flag icons. We have a clear consensus that flag icons are appropriate. Moreover, there's nothing in WP:FLAG that says we shouldn't use flags in this context. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 18:31, 13 June 2008 (UTC)