As presented in the Tintin books, Syldavian has a superficial resemblance to certain Central European languages, particularly Polish and Hungarian, due to its orthography.
It shares numerous orthographic features found in various Eastern European languages, most notably the "sz" and "cz" of Polish.
[1] But while Brusselian, Hergé's native dialect, was used as a basis for the language, Syldavian has a much more complicated grammar, with other Central European influences added.
The Syldavians often bear names of Slavic origin, such as Wladimir; the dish szlaszeck that Tintin encountered also appears to be a borrowing.
There are some additional digraphs and trigraphs, including ⟨tch⟩ (used in names and pronounced with /t͡ʃ/, the apparent Syldavian version of the common Serbo-Croatian/Balkan surname ending -ić), ⟨chz⟩ (uncertain, but may be an alternative form of ⟨cz⟩ /t͡ʃ/), and ⟨th⟩ /t/.
These demonstrate that the Latin-based orthography has a number of irregularities, or else these are old inconsistent spellings that have been preserved in family names but are no longer used in the standard orthography (as in Hungarian, where for example one may find the family name Széchenyi retaining a traditional spelling rather than the orthographically correct *Szécsenyi).
Unlike Marols, but like German (shown in italics in the table), Syldavian definite articles are extensively inflected.
In copulative sentences, nietz is placed after the verb (or czesztot) : Most adverbs tend to be identical to adjectives in form.
When X is a pronoun, the inversion adds some emphasis: In the kzommet sentences in the corpus, prepositional phrases follow the verb.