The Duniya Lengua project is actually something I started in 1997, but abandoned, restarted and re-abandoned a number of times. It is an international auxiliary language, like Esperanto and the rest, but intended for a fictional setting.
In the story of DIES IRÆ, Duniya Lengua (DL) emerged part-planned, part-spontaneously as a global trade language similar to a pidgin or creole. It is based primarily on the six most spoken languages in the world in total speakers, but does use vocabulary data from other language that are either closely related or highly influenced by the "Big Six" languages. The language groups, with the most spoken language in each mentioned first (the list is not exhaustive), are as followed, in genetic and geographical order:
The grammar is isolating with some agglutination due to the small number of bound morphemes (i.e. suffixes, such as the -(e)s plural and -(a)l past tense markers), since it is based on the two most spoken languages of all: Mandarin Chinese and English. Word order is usually subject-verb-object (SVO) with adjectives preceding nouns; prepositions are also used rather than postpositions.
The vocabulary list I have so far can be read here (subject to change as work is completed). The list is comprised of the 850 primary words of Ogden’s Basic English plus the numbers and a few other words, but more are to be added. Since the grammar is based in large part on Chinese, a vocabulary based on the most common Chinese characters should be made.
In the story of DIES IRÆ, Duniya Lengua (DL) emerged part-planned, part-spontaneously as a global trade language similar to a pidgin or creole. It is based primarily on the six most spoken languages in the world in total speakers, but does use vocabulary data from other language that are either closely related or highly influenced by the "Big Six" languages. The language groups, with the most spoken language in each mentioned first (the list is not exhaustive), are as followed, in genetic and geographical order:
- English and German (Germanic)
- Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian (Romance)
- Russian (Slavic)
- Hindi-Urdu and Bengali (Indic); Persian (Iranian)
Sanskrit-Pali loans in Tamil, Thai and Malay-Indonesian - Arabic (Semitic)
Arabic and Persian loans in Turkish and Malay-Indonesian - Mandarin and Cantonese (Chinese)
common Chinese loans in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese
The grammar is isolating with some agglutination due to the small number of bound morphemes (i.e. suffixes, such as the -(e)s plural and -(a)l past tense markers), since it is based on the two most spoken languages of all: Mandarin Chinese and English. Word order is usually subject-verb-object (SVO) with adjectives preceding nouns; prepositions are also used rather than postpositions.
The vocabulary list I have so far can be read here (subject to change as work is completed). The list is comprised of the 850 primary words of Ogden’s Basic English plus the numbers and a few other words, but more are to be added. Since the grammar is based in large part on Chinese, a vocabulary based on the most common Chinese characters should be made.
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