Universalglot
Introduction
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] Pirro’s 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.
Grammar
Universalglot Alphabet: In French The Universalglot uses chiefly the Roman alphabet with the exception of the Greek letter Sigma, which indicates the 'sh' sound as in the English word 'ship'.
Articles and Nouns Universalglot has both an indefinite and definite article. The definite article has a singular and plural form. Nouns do not vary in form for case or number.
[This article was copied from the article at Langmaker, the information in which was compiled by IAL historian Leo Moser.]
The original book introducing Universalglot was 'Essai d'une langue universelle', by MM. Pirro and L. A. It is available in PDF format from the Biblioteque National de France at [1] --Nissalovescats 13:20, 1 January 2013 (PST)
| This article is part of a series on International Auxiliary Languages. Romance-based Auxlangs: Aercant * Atlango * Interlingua * Latin Nov * Novial * Occidental (Interlingue) * Panroman * Romanal |
