Dunia

I received the following text on diskette in the mail. The author wishes to remain anonymous, but if you would like to send the author a message, e-mail it to me and I will relay it. - Rick Harrison (hrick@magicnet.net)

a world auxiliary language with a world outlook

The design of Dunia is based on the recognition that all previous proposals for a world auxiliary language have either been entirely oriented towards Europe and the West for their grammar and lexical material, or if they did have a wider outlook in their design, they were so difficult that they pleased nobody.

Dunia draws its grammar and lexical material from the most widely spoken languages throughout the world, for example: Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish/ Portuguese, English, Malay/Indonesian, Arabic, Russian, Japanese and German. However, it does this in such a way as to permit the learner to know in advance where to expect words to come from, and in such a way that learning Dunia will represent knowledge usefully learned, even if one day he or she drops the language altogether. There are no words in Dunia which are not derived from some existing language or other, and as far as possible, within the constraints of having a logical orthographical system, they appear in Dunia in the same form as they appear in the source language.

Dunia is mostly an isolating language. This means there are few endings to learn or recognise and each word usually appears in the sentence in the same form as you would use to look it up in a dictionary. Chinese and, to a large extent, English are examples of isolating languages. Dunia lies somewhere in between Chinese and English in the extent to which it is isolating.

The fact that Dunia is an isolating language does not mean that it has no grammar. There are a number of grammatical or structural words that are need to carry out the purposes that endings fulfill in languages that are not isolating. In Dunia, these words are taken mostly from Mandarin Chinese.

This does not mean that the student of Dunia has to cope with either the complicated writing system of Chinese, or with its tones and other pronunciation difficulties which learners of Chinese face. Dunia is written in the Roman alphabet, with no accents and using the most widely agreed values for the letters. Q and X, which do not have internationally agreed values, are avoided except in personal and place names.

Some languages have quite rigid rules about what combinations of letters are permitted in a word. In Japanese, for example, each syllable must end in a vowel or with an N. There are no such restrictions in Dunia, although knowledge of these kinds of rules may sometimes be useful for determining the etymology of a word.

Stress is not important in Dunia, unlike Russian, where it may even affect the meaning of a word sometimes. In Dunia, the first syllable of a word may be lightly stressed to indicate word boundaries in the same way that spaces do in written text. Intonation does not play a meaningful role in Dunia sentences in the way that that it does matter in many Western languages. All such information is provided by explicit words to convey whether the sentence is a question (ma), or a suggestion (ne), or a command (ba) etc., rather than an ordinary statement. Rising intonation at the end of a question, and falling intonation at the end of a statement may however be used.

Normal word order in Dunia is subject-verb-object as in English and Mandarin Chinese and no particles are necessary to indicate the subject or the object if this order is used. However unlike English and Mandarin, if an indirect object is used this must be explicitly shown by a preposition like gei, e.g. I give the person the book, wo dar GEI al homo al kitab.

If the object does not follow the verb, it is marked by the preposition o, e.g. it is curry that they are eating, o tarkari tamen komer. There is a focus, or emphasis, on the word not in the normal position. Note that although o is a postposition in the source language, Japanese, Dunia always uses prepositions. Although there is a word in Mandarin which would have fulfilled the same purpose (ba ^{3rd
tone}), it cannot be used because it conflicts with the word ba, also from Mandarin (neutral tone), which we have already allocated as the suggestive mood particle, and the Japanese equivalent is used instead.

In addition to the subject-predicate sentence structure most used in Western languages, Dunia also provides for a topic-comment structure with the topic end being marked by wa (from Japanese - there is no word used for this in Mandarin): as for my sister, she is coming on Monday, woski soror wa, ta yao venir getsuyobi. Japanese names for days of the week are quite suitable for use in an international language as they are not terribly culture specific.

The use of particles is generally governed by the principles of necessity and sufficiency, i.e. the number of particles used should be sufficient to convey the meaning adequately, but do not have to be present if they are not needed. For example a/one horse, un ekwus, but two horses can simply be du ekwus, you do not have to say du ekwus men, as the idea of the plurality is already conveyed by the word du.

There are four fundamental parts of speech in Dunia: nouns, verbs, adjectives and 'everything else'. The 'everything else' category includes grammatical/structural particles, modal particles, time expressions, prepositions, case and sentence structure markers, conjunctions, interjections, personal and correlative pronouns, articles, numerals and primitive adverbs. These are drawn mostly from the Chinese, Japanese, Malay/Indonesian, Arabic and Russian languages.

Primitive adverbs are those where the basic idea is that of modifying an action or a quality, and other words are formed from that adverb only as a derivation of that basic adverbial idea. In Dunia such words are taken from Russian: e.g. chasto (often), ochen (very), tolko (only), mnogo (much), konechno (of course).

Conjunctions are words which can be used to join clauses or sometimes individual words. In Dunia such words are taken from Malay/Indonesian: dan (and), atau (or), tetapi (but), meskipun (although), agar (so that). Run on clauses, where there is no link word are a common feature of Chinese. However, where sentences following this construction method might be difficult to analyse, a conjunction such as dan, or the end of topic marker wa should be added in Dunia.

Many common nouns are drawn from English, but where many derivatives of the root idea use the Latin root in English instead, Dunia does this too. For example tooth is dent because the English for 'dentist' is dentist and so on. For international scientific vocabulary, particularly flora, fauna, parts of the body and medical conditions, the Latin word is used.

Verbs are drawn mostly from Spanish, with some adjustments for spelling, e.g. rekordar (remember), deskansar (rest), korer (run), cerar, pron. /tserar/ (shut), lyegar (arrive) and so on. Verbs in Dunia are invariable for person and number. Various particles (from Mandarin) are available to show tense, aspect and voice where this is relevant. Verbal particles include gou and yao to show past and future tense if this is not obvious from the context, le and zhe to show completed and continuous aspect and shou and cheng to show passive and medial voice. Cheng is used also as a predicative particle: women gou eskoger ta cheng president, we chose him/her as president. Note that verbal particles always precede the verb in Dunia, although some of them do not do so in Chinese. If necessary, participial adjectives can be formed from verbs if required, but these should not be used in a verbal context. These are -ando and -ido respectively for active and passive, replacing the verb infinitive ending -ar, -er or -ir.

Nouns can be turned into a verb meaning to use the noun in the most usual way by the particle da: wo da kitab, I read, nu da jidosha, she drives. For any derivation about which there could be any doubt, use a more conventional verb expression.

Similarly adjectives are drawn mostly from Hindi/Urdu: tanda (cold), safed (white), jaldi (early), kubsurat (beautiful), bahadur (brave), etc. The decision on which of these three categories the root idea actually belongs to may be a slightly arbitrary one in a few cases, so there is no need to be too rigid about it. The normal order is for adjectives to precede the noun they qualify. To convert nouns into adjectives, the ending -ski is used. For the basic root adjectives from Hindi this ending is not needed, and if used imparts a nuance of -ish: un safed jidosha, a white car, un safedski jidosha, a whitish car. The comparative and superlative forms of adjectives can be formed by use of the adverbs bolshe (more), menshe (less) and samo (most) etc.: Berlin estar bolshe bara bi Hamburg (Berlin is bigger than Hamburg), Madrid estar al samo bara urb li Espanya (Madrid is the biggest city in Spain). An alternative construction is modelled on Chinese: Somer bi winter garam (summer is hotter than winter), Esperanto bu gen Volapuk buda (E is not as old as V), Dunia bi minadono al acha lingua (Dunia is the best language of all).

Adjectives can be used as a predicative verb: al dor lal the door is red. Often it is not necessary to mark adjectives as adverbs when the are used to modify actions: al tren viajar tez the train travels fast. If it is necessary to show adverbial use of an adjective, either add -sko or if it already ends in -ski, change this to -sko. To make adverbs out of words other than adverbs, precede them with the particle shang. This word can also be used as an indefinite preposition, like je in Esperanto: shang nokt ta gou lyegar, he/she arrived during/in the night. Opposites of adjectives may be formed by the particle yang. However, ANY adjective may be borrowed from Hindi/Urdu: dry may be translated as either suka or yang gila, and gila or yang suka is wet. Note, of course, that bu suka is not the same as yang suka. The Hindi prefixes kush- and bad- may also be used where appropriate: kushbudar sweet-smelling and badbudar foul-smelling.

However, words which are already in international usage constitute legitimate Dunia vocabulary irrespective of their origin and are to be preferred over any equivalents from a single language, or over Dunia words autonomously created by the rules of word formation. Examining the vocabularies of certain languages, such as for example Hungarian, is a good way of detecting words which have received a sufficiently level of international currency, but we should beware of looking only at European languages and of believing that it is only Western words which are capable of achieving a wide currency. A number of words from Arabic, for example, have been borrowed into a wide range of languages as diverse as Hausa, Swahili, Turkish, Hindi and Indonesian. Such words form a part of Dunia vocabulary as well. Dunia (world) is itself such a word, as is kitab (book) and kalam (writing implement). Where a word is particularly associated with a particular place or language, there is room in Dunia for a LIMITED number of these: these might include kuaizi (chopsticks) from Chinese, zeit (oil) from Arabic, jidosha (automobile) from Japanese, konyak from French, and kanikchak (snow) from Inuit.

All words should be incorporated into Dunia by means of a trade off between spelling and pronunciation. This applies to placenames as well, and the local word should be the one which is used in Dunia. However, as the orthography used may well not be compatible with that of Dunia, and because Dunia cannot represent all sounds in all languages, and because the written form may be an important recognition cue, some compromise is in order. For example Germany might be Deutshland, pronounced /deutSland/, rather than *Doichlant or *Deutschland.

The personal pronouns in Dunia are: wo, ni, and ta for 1st, 2nd and 3rd persons respectively. If it is required to show the plural, -men can be added. If it is required to show sex in the third person, the particles nan and nu, also used to show sex in word formation, can be used instead. Yi can be used as an impersonal pronoun if required. Ji is the reflexive pronoun, normally used to distinguish whether the object in the third person refers to the subject or not, as in many Western languages. In the 1st and 2nd persons ji may be used, or the normal subject pronouns. To express the reflexive in the sense of each other, the word is mei. If it is desired to distinguish between inclusive and exclusive we, then woni and wota can be used instead of women.

Compound words in Dunia are in the format modifier-headword, as in many languages including English and Chinese. Such words may be joined or separated by a hyphen or space.

There are some endings which are used in Dunia for word formation and these are derived from Western usage: kreer, to create, hence kreacion (object and action); kub (cube), hence kubism, kubist. Where a word has become current internationally, and is created by word formation affixes which do not form part of the set normally used by Dunia to actively form new words, this does not prevent the root from being borrowed as it stands. For example the prefix inter- and the suffix -al in the word Internacional meaning an international organisation, as in Rotari Internacional or Komunist Internacional, and hence the use of the word internacional in an adjectival sense would be legitimate. However, the existence of such words would not prevent the use of dunia(ski) or zhongnacion(ski) being used as alternatives.

Numerals in Dunia are derived from their western counterparts: nul, un, du, tri, kwar, kwin, heks, sep, ok, non, dek, and then cent (100), mil (1000), and optionally wan (10 000), and lak (100 000) from Chinese and the Indian languages respectively. Numerals are written one word per digit, e.g. 234 ducent tridek kwar, 234 567 dulak triwan kwarmil kwincent heksdek sep or ducent tridek kwarmil kwincent heksdek sep. For numerals a million and higher, the American, not the German conventions are used. Thus duilion = 10^9, trilion 10^12 etc. Decimal fractions can be expressed with a dot or a comma: 2.5 du punkt kwin or 2,5 du koma kwin. It would be nice also to have a shorthand way of expressing scientific notation and maybe hexadecimal numbers too. Ordinal numbers are formed by prefixing the particle di. Fractions are formed by adding the word fen, and number of times by adding the word ci.

The correlatives in Dunia are mostly taken from Japanese, but with some regularities imposed. These are only two demonstrative groups in Dunia (this versus that), not 3 as in Japanese and Spanish (this, that and yonder). The core words used to form the this and that correlatives are ko (in this way) and so (in that way) respectively. The third basic correlative group are the negatives, which begin with the Chinese root bu, as Japanese negatives are a bit more complicated. The fourth main group beginning with do (how/how?/how!)combines interrogative, relative and exclamatory (for the last of these also adding the exclamatory particle la, from Cantonese, at the end of the sentence). This last group also provides the basis for all the other correlative groups not mentioned so far. The basic table for these four is as follows:

ko in this way
kore this (thing)
kono this (adj.), this person
kona this kind of
koshite for this reason
konokurai this amount
kotoki now
koko here so in that way
sore that (thing)
sono that (adj.), that person
sona that kind of
soshite for that reason
sonokurai that amount
sotoki then
soko there

bu not
bure nothing
buno no, nobody
buna no kind of
bushite for no reason
bunokurai none
butoki never
buko nowhere do how
dore what (thing)
dono which, who
dona what kind of
doshite why
donokurai how much
dotoki when
doko where

If you want to say whose etc., you can say de dono etc. If you want to indicate motion towards in the correlatives of place (hither, thither, to nowhere, whither), these could be jin koko, jin soko, jin buko, and jin doko. Similarly, motion from (hence etc.) could be chu koko, chu soko etc. Other prepositions may be added as desired, and of course the accusative marker if required by the word order: how much do you have? o donokurai ni haber (ma)?

A handful of other affixes are used to form a range of additional correlatives and correlative expressions:

mina- (all), e.g. minadotoki always, minadoko everywhere, minadore everything.
hoka- (other), e.g. hokadotoki at another time, hokado otherwise, minahokadono everybody else.
onaji- (same), e.g. onajidore the same thing, onajidoko the same place, onajidoshite for the same reason.
-ka (some), e.g. donoka somebody, dotokika at some time, hokadokoka some other place.
-demo (any), e.g. donokuraidemo any amount, bunodemo nobody at all, hokadonademo any other kind of.

Formal expressions whose function is primarily pragmatic are taken from Arabic: salam (hello), kudahafiz (goodbye), merhaba (welcome), minfadlak (please), asif (sorry), shukran (thanks), etc.

There are no respect forms in Dunia such as e.g. certain Western languages have for the word you, or that Japanese and Korean have of certain nouns and verbs as well. However the word san (from Japanese) may be useful for marking personal names when placed after them. For place names, words like urb, river, land, lingua etc. can be placed after proper names if there is any danger of the sentence being misunderstood, for example if there is a clash between a proper name and a normal Dunia word.

There are a few simple rules for borrowing words from Mandarin. Basically the Pinyin spelling is conserved, rather than the pronunciation. Tones are ignored. If a word with a particular spelling has already been borrowed, then it cannot be borrowed for another meaning even if it has another tone. Words with Q and X cannot be borrowed from Mandarin because there is no suitable way of indicating their spelling in Dunia orthography. ü is borrowed as if it was U. If a C is preceded by an A, O or U, it is respelled TS, e.g. tsong (from). Only single syllable words are borrowed from Mandarin for easy recognition of the source language. Words are pronounced according to Dunia orthography, not Mandarin.

For borrowing from Japanese, the Hepburn romanisation system is used, as this corresponds well to the internationally common values for the letters.

For Spanish words there are a number of changes to the orthography. Spelling is usually preserved rather than pronunciation, except that doubled consonants are rewritten as singles, except for LL which becomes LY. ñ becomes NY and C before A, O or U becomes K. X is always respelled as KS and QU as KW. These rules also apply to Latin borrowings, except LL, which becomes L, and C which always becomes K.

No standards for transliteration from Arabic or Hindi have been decided on yet.

Borrowing words from English presents a number of difficulties. These include the inconsistencies in spelling and the large number of vowels (12), which have to be mapped on the 5 in Dunia. If borrowing from English were unrestricted, this might result in significantly more homonymy than exists even in standard English. The other difficulty is the TH spelling; it does not have an adequate alternative in Dunia which would allow for easy recognition of words borrowed.

To illustrate how English words might be handled, let us take for example the words thorn, tooth, day and fun. These are all normal basic noun ideas and might be expected to be borrowed from English all other things being equal. For thorn, the answer is to borrow dorn from German. For tooth, because its derivatives use the root dent, we should use that instead anyway. For day, we can borrow tag from German again, which also has the advantage of ending in a consonant for easy recognition of the source language, and does not clash with the important structural word de. For fun, there is a problem transcribing the sound of the English u in this word. It cannot be transcribed fan, because this would clash with fan (fan). *Fun would not be an easily recognisable because of the very different pronunciation. Perhaps an answer might be to use a root like amuz or komik, which would also deal with the inherent polysemy of the word fun in English.

Many things have changed in the world since 1887 and this includes people's views on parity of esteem of different cultures, the nature of language, and the role of women, as well as the existence of values for many letters of the Latin alphabet which are agreed to a large extent in international place and trade names and for use in newly alphabetised languages. For historical and practical reasons, Esperanto cannot easily evolve to take these new attitudes and realities on board in the way it ought to, and if Esperanto had been developed today it would be different from both the language proposed in 1887 and the language it has evolved into today as a result of extensive use.

Having said that, the central lesson of all the centuries of constructed language projects is the success of Esperanto over all other competitors. Some may regret this, but it is a fact, and even if Esperanto has not achieved the success that the idea of an international auxiliary language ought to have, that success is still a fact. It must have done a lot of things right. In over 100 years of use, many issues and ideas about how a constructed language ought to work have been experimented with in Esperanto. Many problems were fixed over the years, and others still remain because the changes required are too great or they conflict with the netushebleco of the Fundamento.

Another important principle of Dunia is that its grammar should not be prescriptive. The rules should be seen as models of what is allowed, and not imply that everything else is forbidden.

The model Dunia should adopt is analogous to the modern software development model, with properly researched and tested releases. Upgrade versions should fix bugs, and have as much backward compatibility as possible, but come out infrequently enough to make sure that people upgrade when the time comes.

However, Dunia is only a draft project at its present stage of development. Comments and suggestions are welcome, as are offers of collaboration from those who agree with the basic aims and principles behind it. Dunia may never compete with Esperanto. It may never even leave the drawing board. But it is worth looking into the idea of developing an international auxiliary which is both modern and worldwide in its basis and outlook.

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