Oh, so Slovenians did record the Bible.

I've written a few times on how hard it is to find text with matching audio for Slovene/Slovenian, after looking high and low and failing to find anything of any great length: Youtube has some songs from Tangled but they are fairly short, tvslo.si has a lot of videos but no matching text, and so on. I always check biblical sites as well as these are the most likely to have such content, but wasn't able to find anything on this site besides text.

But it turns out that this is wrong - I simply selected the wrong translation. SSP-3 (the default translation) has just text, but select SSP and voila, out pops an audio icon and now you can listen to each and every chapter as well as read it.

For example, here is Ecclesiastes.

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Today's new word/term: Brizinski spomeniki / Freising Manuscripts

Something I learned yesterday: Slovenian/Slovene is the first Slavic language to have a written record in the Latin script, a few pages of text from perhaps the 9th century that can be seen with a number of translations (Latin, English, German, Polish, Italian) here.

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A few Slovenian Disney videos with subtitles

On the subject of Slavic languages, I found a few Disney videos in Slovenian / Slovene on YouTube a few days ago. The movie is a recent one called Tangled that I hadn't seen before, so after watching a few of the songs in Slovenian I watched the movie itself since such songs are much more enjoyable when you know the context.

One of them has been subtitled in the video itself:



while the rest of them have the lyrics in the video explanation so you have to go directly to the page to see them. Written Slovenian and Slovenian videos without text (at tvslo.si) are easy to find, videos with matching text not so much. Nothing on Librivox for example, no spoken Wikipedia, no religious texts with mp3 that I can find. Slovenian is about as tough to find as Estonian.

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2000 most frequently used words in Slovene/Slovenian

Wiktionary in English has a page here with frequency lists for a number of languages, but the section on Slovene has but 50 words:

je , in , se , v , da , na , so , ne , pa , ki , bi , za , z , ni , sem , ga , še , po , s , tako , ko , tudi , to , bil , ali , si , mu , od , bilo , kot , že , iz , kaj , bo , če , vse , bila , kakor , mi , pri , jo , kar , jih , sta , o , do , ti , kako , samo , me

Not very useful, especially since the most frequent words are mostly particles and various conjugations of the verb to be. Today though by chance (looking for the meaning of zanj) I came across this page in the Slovene Wiktionary, with not just one but seven lists of the 2000 most frequently used words in the language, each from a different source. The words in the list are also declined and conjugated, which is what I prefer for a frequency list. Especially for a heavily declined language like Slovene/ian where the dictionary form of a word will often not help at all in recognizing a written text.

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Textbooks in Georgian / Macedonian and more, the Polabian language

Two interesting things to share today.

First is this page, containing grammar textbooks for a total of eight languages: Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Georgian, Macedonian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, and Slovene. The most valuable of these due to scarcity of good resources are probably Georgian, Macedonian, and Slovene.

The second is simply a Wikipedia page on a language I never knew about until today called Polabian, an extinct Slavic language with a huge amount of German influence. One look at the Lord's Prayer shows just how extensive this was:

What a pity a language as unique as that ended up dying out.

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