Novoslovnica. Guide for a Slavic constructed language

Novoslovnica has a dynamic accent, but it has been formalized. There is a rule, that determines the place you should put the accent.

Rule n. 2: The accent should be put on the first syllable of the word root.

This rule covers about 80% of the words in the lexicon. You know the well-known 80/20 rule, or Pareto principle. It is something alike with the accent. Remained 20 per cent of the words we should cover by introducing extra-rule cases. Accepting these cases, you will be able to cover more than 99 per cent of Novoslovnica word amount.

These cases were created in attempt to unify the accents in different Slavic languages. Surely the Slavic languages have greatly changed since then, as they were one language. Therefore, accents in different Slavic languages often differ. Nevertheless, Novoslovnica tries to obliterate differences between them, producing accent patterns that could be comfortable to pronounce and to hear for all Slavs.

Below you can see the list of all these cases, that you should remember while speaking Novoslovnica.

Accent shifting cases:

– Accented endings (Nouns)

• -a (Dual, Nominative)

• -y (Singular, Genitive/Partitive)

• -ami (Plural, Instrumentative)

• -ama (Dual, Dative)

• -am (Plural, Dative)

– Accented endings (Verbs)

• -i Imperative (see paragraph about verb moods)

– Accented suffixes

• -ova- (Verb)

• -ôva- (Verb)

• -ava- (Verb)

• -óv- (Adjective)

• -ak- (Noun)

• -ok- (Noun)

– verb suffixes in Present Concrete Tense (see paragraph about verb tenses)

– Accent shift in the root

• If the word is a borrowed one, then the accent is put on the place it is in the original word.

• If the root loses its vowel, the accents moves one vowel to the left (if it is possible)

• Words that have more than one root (complex words) have their accent on the first syllable of the main word’s root. (see paragraph about complex words for what root is main)

• Adverbs or other parts of speech, formed with the prepositional construction, have their accents on the first syllable of the main word (see paragraph about collocations)

These rules are enough for you to speak Novoslovnica properly with a few efforts for it.

Accent integrity

There is also one term, that you should to know when you use Novoslovnica or any other Slavic language in your speech. This term is called accent integrity. Firstly I will introduce a term of a dependency structure:

Dependency structure is a prepositional construction or a collocation.

That means, that this abstract term expands the term of collocation by involving prepositional into itself.

Accent integrity is a property of a dependency structure to unify elements of this structure with only one accent on the main word.

What does this definition say? If we have a collocation\index {collocation} or a prepositional construction and we want to pronounce it, we should pronounce dependent words without any accent and put an accent on the first word of the structure. Look at the examples.

Examples:

Pod něbom [`pod nebom] – Under the sky

Surely, you should remember that this might be applied only for brief structures, most often with one dependent word (or a preposition) of one or two syllables. If we have a long dependent word or there are too many dependent words in the construction, we pronounce them with a proper accent on each of the structure elements.

Examples:

Pod sïnïm něbom [pəd `sinim `nebom] – Under the blue sky

Orthography

Alphabet of Novoslovnica

Alphabet

Let’s summarize what we have known about Novoslovnica phonology. Afterwards we will get the list of phonemes and allophones and their connections with Novoslovnica letters in the alphabet.

We have learned that Novoslovnica has 51 consonant sounds and 22 vowels. 13 consonants and 4 vowels are allophones among them. Hence, the amount of phonemes is (51—13) + (22 – 4) = 56 phonemes.

You should know that in Novoslovnica, soft and hard consonants do not differ in writing. That is because of the fact that by the combination of «consonant + vowel» we can always determinedly get what the consonant is like – hard or soft. With this information, the amount of letters needed is reduced to 49.[10 - G. Carpow and R. Gasparyan, «Pǒzǐckóva i zvu˛kore˛dna ote˛̌zǩe vu˛tře prob̌egu búdovan¨a meduslov̌enskoga jazyka,» SLOVJANI.info, 2017 (2019).]

Nevertheless, let’s now look at the table with the alphabet list and see how Novoslovnica is written.

Alphabet of Novoslovnica

Note, that the Cyrillic letters Щ, Ψ, Ќ, Ї in earlier versions of Novoslovnica have been replaced by Шт (Št), Пс (Ps), Кс (Ks) and Ји (Jі).[11 - Cyrillic has two different letters Ь and J that have different functions – the first one defines that the previous consonant is soft (we need this in case vowel is absent) and the second defines a [ʝ] sound. Latin version that you see in the table has no such difference, so you should remember, that J means a soft symbol when you see a C-«J» -C row (where C is for «Consonant») and means a [ʝ] sound when you see a C-«J» -V (where V is for «Vowel»), or use Cyrillic to prevent such a collision. Only in the first case consonant before J is soft while in the second one it is hard.]

Pronunciation

Novoslovnica is a phonetic language, that’s why Novoslovnica has an important rule, which you have to apply to speaking in Novoslovnica.