Method
Slovo is a sibling of Cognata (the Romance languages through each other), Hebrabic (Hebrew and Arabic) and Ojalá (Spanish and Arabic). It works the same way: one shared ancestor — here Proto-Slavic — and the regular changes that made each daughter language different.
Every entry records the Proto-Slavic form and how each language got its word: inherited (worn down by speech, so the sound laws apply), from Church Slavonic (the medieval literary language, mostly in Russian), borrowed, or a different word altogether. From that the app computes, for any pair, whether two words are cognates, false friends, or unrelated.
Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian are each a language in its own right. BCS is treated as one pluricentric language with Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian standards; where the standards use different words, all of them are shown with neutral labels, and both the ijekavian and ekavian pronunciations are given.
Confidence grades
- Certain — the standard etymology in Derksen and Vasmer, with no serious doubt.
- Probable — the mainstream view, with reservations (a borrowing route, a meaning shift).
- Disputed — real scholarly disagreement; the note names the alternative.
Sources
- Rick Derksen, Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon (Brill, 2008) — the default for Proto-Slavic forms.
- Max Vasmer, Russisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (1950–58; Russian edition by O. Trubachev).
- George Y. Shevelov, A Prehistory of Slavic (1964); Townsend & Janda, Common and Comparative Slavic (1996); Sussex & Cubberley, The Slavic Languages (2006).
- National dictionaries: SJP/WSJP (Polish), SSJČ and Rejzek (Czech), СУМ and ЕСУМ (Ukrainian), HJP and Rečnik Matice srpske (BCS).
What Slovo does not do yet
- IPA is broad. Russian and Ukrainian stress is marked; BCS pitch accent and vowel length are not transcribed.
- Audio uses your device's speech synthesis, so quality depends on the voices installed. Some devices have no Ukrainian or Czech voice.
- Notes and glosses are in English for every interface language.