|
On Pirro's "Universal," Frederick Bodmer in his The Loom of Language (Chapter XII: "Pioneers of Language Planning") states:
Before Volapük, far better artificial languages had appeared on the market without attracting enthusiastic followers. One was [Jean] Pirros Universal-Sprache [1868], a purely a posteriori system of a very advanced type.
The noun, like the adjective, is invariant. Prepositions take over any function which case-distinction may retain in natural languages. The outward and visible sign of number is left to the article or other determinants.
The personal pronoun with a nominative and an accusative form has no sex-differentiation in the third person. A verb without person or number flexions has a simple past with the suffix -ed, a future with -rai, and compund tenses built with the auxiliary haben. Unlike so many before and after him, Pirro did not shirk the task of designing a vocabulary. His lexicon consisted of 7,000 words, largely Latin, hence international, but partly Teutonic. The number of affixes for derivatives was small, but since he took them over from natural languages they were not particularly precise. The merits of the following specimen of the Universal-Sprache speak for themselves:
'Men senior, I sende evos un gramatik e un varb-bibel de un nuov glot nomed universal glot. In futur, I scriptrai evos semper in dit glot. I pregate evos responden ad me in dit self glot.'
In this citation,.Bodmer repeats the common error of calling it Universal-Sprache (German for "Universal Speech", the title of the book introducing the language), which was not its name at all. The actual name was either Universal or Universalglot, depending on how the German text should be translated.
Here are the numbers in Universalglot:
Numbers 1-10: un, du, tri, quat, quint, sex, sept, okt, nov, dec [Source: Zompist.com]
For those who believe that Esperanto had an accusative because it never occurred to anyone at that point not to, Universalglot lacked an accusative, as Gaston Waringhien notes.
In fact, Universalglot may well have been a source of inspiration for the authors of Volapuk and Esperanto.
[This page was compiled from e-mail sent me by Leo Moser, of the Acadon System and an ardent student of IAL history.]
|
