Sprak
Classification
Sprak is an auxilary language, invented and presented by Stephan Schneider in 2006, based on Germanic languages. Its purpose is to serve as an interlingua for speakers of Germanic languages. Therefore, the design of Sprak is as simple and regular as possible, keeping as many characteristica of Germanic languages as possible.
Sprak and its naturalistic approach may be compared with Interlingua (based on Romance languages) and Slovio (based on Slavonic languages).
Grammar
Not every grammatical feature of Germanic languages appears in Sprak. For example, there is no conjugation of verbs, like in English (it is, I am, we are, vs. it er, ik er, wi er) and no capitalization of nouns like in German.
On the other hand, Sprak has strong verbs (ik sing, ik sang, ik hav songen - I sing, I sang, I have sung). It is correct to use weak forms only, though (ik sing, ik singed, ik hav singed).
Vocabulary
The vocabulary is based on Protogermanic roots that still exist in modern Germanic vocabulary, for example the Protogermanic root bok (German Buch, Dutch boek, English book, Danish bog, Swedish bok). The respective word in Sprak is bok. In other cases a common change of phonemes is taken into account in Sprak. For instance, the word sprak, the name of the language, means language (German Sprache, Dutch spraak, cf. English speech, Danish språg). Its Protogermanic root is spræk, and since since none of the source languages has kept the Protogermanic vowel æ, it will not be kept in Sprak either.
The vocabulary includes many loan words as well, especially Latin and Greek words.
Orthography
Sprak uses only the English alphabet. Yet another way of writing in Sprak is Spræk. Spræk uses many diacritical letters in order to represent sound shifts of Protogermanic roots. For example, the Protogermanic root fulk (German Volk, Dutch volk, English folk, Danish folk) is folk in Sprak. Its representation in Spræk is fůlk, where the ring above the u indicates the shift from u to o (in most cases, a Protogermanic u doesn't change at all in Sprak).
Related work
Links
- Wikibook about Folksprak german
- yahoo group about Folkspraak and other dialects
- Folkspraak (schwedish)
- Folkspraak-Page
- TidingKonien – News, poems and more in Folkspraak and other dialects
| This article is part of a series on International Auxiliary Languages. Romance-based Auxlangs: Aercant * Atlango * Interlingua * Latin Nov * Novial * Occidental (Interlingue) * Panroman * Romanal |
