Only half joking: unless there is untranslatable wordplay or poetry that is trying to rhyme or scan, I’d be tempted to just “drop” the original sounds and “ascend” to a maximally universal orthographic system that is reasonably standardized and yet still “very pointwise similar (given the extra information about where someone comes from) to how a person might have made mouth sounds”.
So maybe: translate the meaning via Interslavic (Medžuslovjansky / Меджусловjaнскы) and then render the Interslavic via the roman half of its orthographic system (which shouldn’t be too hard for readers to learn to map to Slavic-compatible phonemes in the ear and tongue).
For your given example, you would read “молоко”, then translate to milk, then render the interslavic “mlěko”?
(Taking abstraction to an extreme, you maybe just end up with ideograms? That would be too far. I’m not advocating that “молоко” should go all the way to “乳” or “🥛”.)
I. Pragmatic Barbarism? <3
The primary objection to translating to Interslavic might be that such a move is barbaric and butchers a beautiful source language’s beautiful details. However: Consider the audience! Have you noticed that English itself is practically a creole? <3
A practical motivation here is that I can’t even pronounce Interslavic properly (because I haven’t put in the practice (not because it would be impossible)), but if I’m going to “speculatively learn” an entire new orthographic system, I want the thing that I learn to apply to as much of the world as I can.
Interslavic is one of the best such things that I currently know of, that I might put non-trivial time into learning, that isn’t just IPA or kanji or whatever.
(I’m not saying Interslavic is perfect, anymore than I would say “Python is perfect”. I’m saying something more like “Python in 2001 obviously had legs and would be useful in 2021, and, similarly, Interslavic in 2022 seems likely to not be a waste of learning effort if retained until 2042 (unless universal translation brain chips are introduced earlier than 2042)”.)
I grant that my proposal has a partial DEFECT in that all Cyrillic words for milk in various eastern european languages (with respect-worthy and validly different vocabularies, and different orthographies, and different cultures, and so on) coming out with the same romanized characters, but consider: from my perspective, that is sort of a feature rather than a bug!
II. Features
Feature: I can learn one orthography, and read the text out loud, and it will sound “slavic” and people who don’t know any eastern european language will initially (falsely) think I’m speaking a natural language of eastern europe, and people who DO know one slavic language might get most of the gist and think I’m just speaking some other slavic language than the specific one that they know.
Feature: If you include the original text with annotations, then rendering a romanization VIA Interslavic will help create data that could make Interslavic better :-)
Feature: Totally naive english speakers will get more-or-less “the same gist” no matter what you do, but with interslavic you give them a maximally easy entry point (that has been designed to be a maximally easy entry point).
(My hunch is that it would not cost much (and might help a lot) for naive people to FIRST learn interslavic orthography, and THEN learn the orthography of any of the other languages that interslavic is trying to span? (If this is false, then the “good cheap onramp to learning” feature isn’t actually a feature. I have real uncertainty here.))
A fourth virtue might be political neutrality. The movie “The Painted Bird” is about an orphan who wanders through bad places and the book the movie is based on very carefully left the contextual fact OUT, and the movie wanted to retain that ambiguity, and not imply that any specific regional nationality was bad, so they had the bad people all speak interslavic. (I haven’t seen it, and reports are that it is a harrowing cinematic experience that sometimes causes people to walk out of the theater. Plausibly: this is art that is emotionally powerful enough to really deserve a “trigger warning”?)
III. Weakness In The Particulars
I grant that my proposal would totally fail if your goal was to write about differences in the phonology or morphology or even the vocabulary of Serbian and Bulgarian, or how Moscow Russian and St Petersburg Russian are different. All three languages and all four varieties are romanized to the same roman letters in my proposal. My proposal just goes UP to the “denotational semantics” then DOWN to something systematically easily-learnable.
If you really want to get into these pronunciation/orthography differences, interslavic can maybe start to render these in a standardized way via flavorization (Flavorizacija)?
Sometimes the regional/cultural choices really matters, and it can turn into a comedy of cultural ignorance...
Standard: “English orthography is already full of complex tradeoffs.”
Here’s a video where I think they’re sometimes speaking in Serbian, and sometimes in Interslavic, as a test of mutual-comprehension-with-no-practice, and I think the subtitles use Interslavic romanization conventions all the way through? But I’m honestly not sure.
Anyway. The tradeoffs of interslavic are (1) formal systematicity, with a gesture towards (2) discovery of something (3) universally accessible, while retaining (4) denotational (5) semantics, all of which are potentially virtues :-)
If you are aiming for different virtues, I am happy to respect different choices. Also, if my choices don’t actually hit my goals then I’m interested in hearing about how I’m wrong so I can choose better-to-me things <3
Only half joking: unless there is untranslatable wordplay or poetry that is trying to rhyme or scan, I’d be tempted to just “drop” the original sounds and “ascend” to a maximally universal orthographic system that is reasonably standardized and yet still “very pointwise similar (given the extra information about where someone comes from) to how a person might have made mouth sounds”.
So maybe: translate the meaning via Interslavic (Medžuslovjansky / Меджусловjaнскы) and then render the Interslavic via the roman half of its orthographic system (which shouldn’t be too hard for readers to learn to map to Slavic-compatible phonemes in the ear and tongue).
For your given example, you would read “молоко”, then translate to milk, then render the interslavic “mlěko”?
(Taking abstraction to an extreme, you maybe just end up with ideograms? That would be too far. I’m not advocating that “молоко” should go all the way to “乳” or “🥛”.)
I. Pragmatic Barbarism? <3
The primary objection to translating to Interslavic might be that such a move is barbaric and butchers a beautiful source language’s beautiful details. However: Consider the audience! Have you noticed that English itself is practically a creole? <3
A practical motivation here is that I can’t even pronounce Interslavic properly (because I haven’t put in the practice (not because it would be impossible)), but if I’m going to “speculatively learn” an entire new orthographic system, I want the thing that I learn to apply to as much of the world as I can.
Interslavic is one of the best such things that I currently know of, that I might put non-trivial time into learning, that isn’t just IPA or kanji or whatever.
(I’m not saying Interslavic is perfect, anymore than I would say “Python is perfect”. I’m saying something more like “Python in 2001 obviously had legs and would be useful in 2021, and, similarly, Interslavic in 2022 seems likely to not be a waste of learning effort if retained until 2042 (unless universal translation brain chips are introduced earlier than 2042)”.)
I grant that my proposal has a partial DEFECT in that all Cyrillic words for milk in various eastern european languages (with respect-worthy and validly different vocabularies, and different orthographies, and different cultures, and so on) coming out with the same romanized characters, but consider: from my perspective, that is sort of a feature rather than a bug!
II. Features
Feature: I can learn one orthography, and read the text out loud, and it will sound “slavic” and people who don’t know any eastern european language will initially (falsely) think I’m speaking a natural language of eastern europe, and people who DO know one slavic language might get most of the gist and think I’m just speaking some other slavic language than the specific one that they know.
Feature: If you include the original text with annotations, then rendering a romanization VIA Interslavic will help create data that could make Interslavic better :-)
Feature: Totally naive english speakers will get more-or-less “the same gist” no matter what you do, but with interslavic you give them a maximally easy entry point (that has been designed to be a maximally easy entry point).
(My hunch is that it would not cost much (and might help a lot) for naive people to FIRST learn interslavic orthography, and THEN learn the orthography of any of the other languages that interslavic is trying to span? (If this is false, then the “good cheap onramp to learning” feature isn’t actually a feature. I have real uncertainty here.))
A fourth virtue might be political neutrality. The movie “The Painted Bird” is about an orphan who wanders through bad places and the book the movie is based on very carefully left the contextual fact OUT, and the movie wanted to retain that ambiguity, and not imply that any specific regional nationality was bad, so they had the bad people all speak interslavic. (I haven’t seen it, and reports are that it is a harrowing cinematic experience that sometimes causes people to walk out of the theater. Plausibly: this is art that is emotionally powerful enough to really deserve a “trigger warning”?)
III. Weakness In The Particulars
I grant that my proposal would totally fail if your goal was to write about differences in the phonology or morphology or even the vocabulary of Serbian and Bulgarian, or how Moscow Russian and St Petersburg Russian are different. All three languages and all four varieties are romanized to the same roman letters in my proposal. My proposal just goes UP to the “denotational semantics” then DOWN to something systematically easily-learnable.
If you really want to get into these pronunciation/orthography differences, interslavic can maybe start to render these in a standardized way via flavorization (Flavorizacija)?
Sometimes the regional/cultural choices really matters, and it can turn into a comedy of cultural ignorance...
Standard: “English orthography is already full of complex tradeoffs.”
“Scottish” (auto-flavorized): “Sassenach orthography is awready stowed oot o’ complex tradeoffs.”
IV. Summary
Here’s a video where I think they’re sometimes speaking in Serbian, and sometimes in Interslavic, as a test of mutual-comprehension-with-no-practice, and I think the subtitles use Interslavic romanization conventions all the way through? But I’m honestly not sure.
Anyway. The tradeoffs of interslavic are (1) formal systematicity, with a gesture towards (2) discovery of something (3) universally accessible, while retaining (4) denotational (5) semantics, all of which are potentially virtues :-)
If you are aiming for different virtues, I am happy to respect different choices. Also, if my choices don’t actually hit my goals then I’m interested in hearing about how I’m wrong so I can choose better-to-me things <3