Sambahsa-mundialect
From Langmaker
| Conlang | Sambahsa-mundialect |
| Author | Olivier Simon |
| Year Began | July 2007 (release on the net) |
| Language Type | auxlang |
| Lexicon Size | 5000 |
| Etymologies | No |
| Grammar | Yes |
| Sample Texts | Yes |
| Primer | No |
Sambahsa-mundialect is an international auxiliary language created by Olivier Simon.
Description
Although it has been deviced from IE in order to attain a linguistic neutrality that romance-based auxlangs do not have, mundialect has been refined in simplicity and outlook according to the examples of English, French or German. New concepts can be gotten as well thanks to prefixing, suffixing, compound words as thanks to the borrowing of foreign words. One peculiarity of mundialect is that it uses the same word for personal pronouns of the third person as for the determinant ("the"). Mundialect has two numbers (singular and plural)and four genders (male, female, neutral, undetermined) which always correspond to the real gender of the substantive, as in English with "he, she, it". It has four cases (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive) but only pronouns display the declension. Except for the verbs ses(to be) and habe (to have), all conjugations are regular, for it can be deduced immediately from the stem if the verb will undergo "ablaut" (vocalic mutation) or consonantic mutation (a strengthened version of the "Von Wahl Rules" of Occidental-Interlingue) in the past tense. With the help of all these patterns, sambahsa-mundialect is a little bit less simple than the most famous auxlangs, but all this is rewarded by more precision and a shortness that make it a naturalistic-looking language able to outweigh English in these fields.
Uniqueness
It is a mixture of reconstructed language and auxlang, drawing vocabulary and grammar from Indo-European as modified based on common modern usage. It also has words from outside IE.
Design principles
Vocabulary: The first source of inspiration has been the attested indo-european vocabulary, but words from dialectal areas covering languages from different linguistic families (ex: "sprachbünde") play a prominent role too. The technical and scientifical vocabulary comes from the greco-latin roots common to most european languages. Generally, mundialect tries to include words common to at least two different languages. The chosen languages are in general european ones (and above all English and French) but the spectrum spans between Iceland and Indonesia, therefore including sometimes words from Turkish, Arabic, Swahili, Parsi, Sanskrit and Indonesian. Grammar: Though basically Indo-European, the grammar has been heavily simplified towards regularity and precision. Complicated features of Indo-European were discarded if they did not match a reasonable level of predictability or if they were not present in a significant number of living Indo-European languages. Phonology: The orthograph is regular but allows to integrate as well words directly from old Indo-European (ex: "pater" = father; pronounced "pAt@r")as from modern languages like English or French (ex: "change"; pronounced "chAndzh@").
Language sources
Apart from the major sources already quoted, some other languages may have influenced Sambahsa's grammar to a far lesser extent. The system of the "euphonic vocalisation", i.e. the addition of facultative endings to adjectives and substantives for reasons of euphonics or even for poetical purposes was inspired by standard Arabic. The influence of Von Wahl's Occidental is clearly seen in the system for the derivation of the past tense stems of certain verbs. M.Hucko's Slovio influenced the possibility of different conjugations for the same verb at different tenses.
Interest of others
Mundialect, thanks to its clearly IE structure, can interest not only people who already know an IE language (half the world population), but can provide the other half an easy-to-learn oversight of how IE languages look like and work, and so a gateway to the learning of natural languages of this linguistic family. The richness of the composition of the vocabulary of mundialect is not only a help for beginners which can recognize roots they already know, but also an incentive to discover other civilizations whose languages have participated in the building of its vocabulary. The shortness and the internationality of mundialect makes it a serious and credible auxlang for a worldwide use in international communications.
Sample translation
Apels ne falle dalg ud id stam = Les pommes ne tombent pas loin du tronc Apples don't fall far from the trunk.
Apo el cat, danse i mus = Quand le chat est parti, les souris dansent When the cat's away, the mice dance.
