In past few years I've been blogging in Slovak, that is, downscaling from writing in English, a language with 1457 million speakers to a language with 7 million speakers.

From the point of view of the writer, this has been a very different experience. It's not only that for a topic that interests one million English speakers, the equivalent is five thousand in Slovakia, scaling down by factor of 200. It's also that topic that interests 100 English speakers, interests one half of a hypothetical Slovak speaker. In fact, not everybody reads blogs, so the population in question is likely smaller by an order of magnitude or even two, resulting in even more fractional readers... In other words, the reading population is not as big as to fill in all the possible niches and the writing thus has to become much more generic.

It must also be [...]

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.