Dan'a'yo

Dan'a'yo (単亜語(단아요)) is a Universal Language for Far East Asia: China, Japan, Korea, and (to a lesser extent) Vietnam (CJKV). It has an underlying foundation of Chinese characters for every word, with some glyphs being simplified according to the 新字体(신지테) standards of Japan. The Hangǔl alphabet is presented at the same time (whenever possible), and is also used for phonetic transcription. It is not tonal, mostly analytic, SVO, topic-prominent, uses classifiers, is pro-drop, copula-drop, and uses postpositions.

単亜語(단아요) [tan.a.jo]
Timeline/Universe	Universal Languages
Period	Future Utopia
Spoken in	Far East Asia
Total speakers	1500 million
Writing system	Shinjitai/Hangǔl
Classification	Classical Chinese
Typology
Basic word order	SVO
Morphology	Isolating
Alignment	Topic-Comment
Credits
Created by	User:Aquatiki

Anthropology

Dan'a'yo returns a shared world of the w:East Asian cultural sphere. The ancient w:Imperial examination (科挙(콰교)) created a common experience across the region. Everyone read the same w:Chinese classics and learned the same law codes. Peoples from various language families were united and could communicate. With the advent of the internet and Unicode, there is an avenue for peaceful interaction, a reunification of shared cultural and linguistic norms. By taking w:Classical Chinese and updating it, Dan'a'yo can serve as a bridge for those who have drifted apart.

The language communities that Dan'a'yo seeks to incorporate and unify are Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and to a lesser extent, Vietnamese. Korea and Japan have long formed a sprachbund already, and have many calques and grammatical features in common. They even share some vocabulary. (There are those who think they are genetically related, but that has yet to be conclusively proven.) There will be some additional similarities that must occur with southern Sino-Tibetan languages, but that is not a design goal, merely a consequence. There is no proto-language which all our source languages are supposedly descended from. Our ancient form is Classical Chinese, which is well-known and actually exists in documented form.

Phonology

Dan'a'yo has 5 vowels and 16 consonants.

Dan'a'yo Consonants

Consonants
	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Nasals	ㅁ /m/		ㄴ /n/	ㅇ /ŋ/
Aspirates	ㅍ /pʰ/	ㅌ /tʰ/	ㅊ /t͡ɕʰ~cʰ/	ㅋ /kʰ/
Voiced	ㅂ /b~p/	ㄷ /d~t/	ㅈ /dʑ~tɕ/	ㄱ /g~k/
Fricatives		ㅅ /s ~ ɕ/		ㅎ /h ~ ɦ ~ x/
Sonorants	w /w/	ㄹ /l ~ ɾ/	y/j/

(W and Y are achieved with special glyphs.) While there is a great deal of consonantal allophony (see the table), every language's speaker will experience some sounds as difficult, especially in achieving consistency.

Dan'a'yo Vowels

Vowels
	Front	Central	Back
High	이 /i ~ ɪ/		우 /u ~ ɯ/
Mid	어 /e ~ e̞/		오 /o ~ o̞/
Low	아 /a ~ ä/

Again, a great deal of tolerance is required when listening to others. Non-Mandarin speakers will have the hardest time being patient with Chinese vowels, but accents are part of being international! Long vowels do not exist, per se, even if the Latin transcription appears as though they do. 웃/'uu and 의/'ii are actually said as /uʊ/, /uu̵/, or /uǝ/; and /iǝ/ or /ii̵/ respectively. Additionally, there is an epenthetic vowel, which varies considerably among the target nations. It's written as 으 and transcribed as ǔ, and it may be pronounced /ɯ/, /ɯ^β/, /ɨ/, /ǝ/, or /ʊ/. This is only used in transcribing foreign words.

Tone/Prosody

Even for speakers of a tonal language, learning a new set of tones is difficult. Therefore, syllabic tones are not phonemic in Dan'a'yo. However, to easy listening and to distinguish the boundaries between words, the following intonation principles are used:

• The main (finite) verb of an utterance should be the highest point of it.
• The head of a phrase should be the highest point of it.
• The main vowel of a syllable should be the highest point of it.
• The first character's syllable of a compound word should be the highest point of it.

This can be helpful in distinguishing 大(대) 学生(학상) 'big student' from 大学生(대학상) 'college student', as the first is H HL, while the second is HLL.

Pitch cannot be used to indicate a question. Please use the SFP 乎(호) to make a polar-question.

Phonotactics

Maximally, a Dan'a'yo syllable consists of an ONSET consonant, an ON-GLIDE, a VOWEL, and an OFF-GLIDE or CODA CONSONANT. The ONSET can be ø or any consonant except ŋ, the ON-GLIDE can be ø, y, or w, the VOWEL must exist, and the CODA CONSONANT can be ø, y, w, b, d, g, m, n, or ng. Each syllable has no effect upon the next.

Syntax

Dan'a'yo is a Topic-Comment language. Generally, this resembles SVO, but not always. For outsiders, this can be confusing because A) the topic can be dropped if it is easily understood from context, and B) the comment can null at the start of a dialogue. To make matters more confusing, there are technically not the parts of speech found around the world, such as nouns and verb, but instead

• Content words (実詞)
• Modifiers (修飾語)
• Particles (助詞)
• Numbers (数詞)
• Copulas (繋詞)
• Pro-forms (代詞)
• Classifiers (量詞)

Many of these have more fine-grained divisions possible, but this is the broad overview of the language.

Lexica

Dan'a'yo forcibly limits the number of available Chinese characters to ~3200. The standard educational lists from each country were mixed together, as well as name lists.

Universal Languages
AFRICA	SEDES (Horn of Africa), Middle Semitic (Semitic languages), Kintu (Bantu languages), Guosa (West Africa)
CENTRAL ASIA	Jalpi (Turkic languages), Zens (Iranian languages), Dravindian (Dravidian languages), Neo-Sanskrit (Indo-Aryan languages)
EUROPE	Interlingua (Romance languages), Folksprak (Germanic languages), Interslavic Slavic languages, Balkan (Balkans)
FAR EAST	Dan'a'yo (CJKV), MSEAL (Mainland Southeast Asia), Indo-Malay (Maritime Southeast Asia)