So there exists a text which is available in both Sambahsa and Uropi. What is special about these two languages is that instead of being based on a particular group - like Interlingua is on Romance languages and Slovianski on the Slavic group - they are based on the world's largest language family - the Indo-European (IE) languages. Take out the Sinosphere, the Middle East, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Turkey and a couple of other small countries and everywhere an IE language is spoken. In 2007, more than 2.7 billion people had an IE language as their mother tongue, not to mention others who speak an IE language, particularly English and French, as a second language.
Coming back to Sambahsa and Uropi, Uropi doesn't look as antiquated as Sambahsa and it is phonetic! Sambahsa, on the other hand, in its attempt to preserve the orthography of words from West European languages has an "elaborated" (difficult) orthography. Here it's worth mentioning that you may have to make a few changes (not a big deal today for Linux users) to type the Uropi letter ʒ.
Where as written Sambahsa looks similar to Turkish, Albanian; Uropi's orthography makes it look more like a creole.
In Sambahsa, like in Russian, Hindi/Urdu and French, present tense is conjugated for person. As a consequence you don't have to use pronouns as often as in Uropi which has opted for a simpler approach (like in English and Norwegian).
Further compared to four definite articles in Sambahsa (German has three), Uropi (like English) has only one.
Both languages have aspects unique to them. Sambahsa uses demonstrative pronouns as articles and they are declined according to the gender, number and case. At the same time noun declination has been kept optional! In Uropi, there is only a genitive case and it is used to form adjectives!
Both languages have aspects unique to them. Sambahsa uses demonstrative pronouns as articles and they are declined according to the gender, number and case. At the same time noun declination has been kept optional! In Uropi, there is only a genitive case and it is used to form adjectives!
I'm not competent so say anything more so here is a snippet from The Little Prince (Chapter Four, paragraphs two and three):
DE MIKI PRINS (Uropi)
Source: Yahoo Groups! Uropi Varkia
Da mozì ne stono ma mol. I zavì ʒe te usim de gren planete wim Ter, Jupiter, Mars, Venus we av nome, je ste suntade planete we se ekvos sa miki te un moz nerim ne vizo la ki u teleskòp. Wan un astronomìst diskròv un od la, he dav jo u numar po nom. He nom ja po samp “asteròid 3251”. [sic]
I av serios motive po kreo te de planet od wo de Miki Prins venì se asteròid B612. Di asteròid vidì solem vizen unvos teleskopim in 1909, pa u Turki astronomìst.
IS LYTIL PRINCE (Sambahsa)
To khiek staunihes me maung. Ioghi woid od exter ia piwon planetes kam id Ardh, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, quibs nams hieb esen dahn, eent centens alyen qua eent yando tem smulkaquem eet baygh difficil dyehrce ia med un telescope. Quan un astronom aunstohg oin ex ia, el ei dahsit ka nam un adadh. El kiel id mathalan : « asteroido 325 ».
Ho serieusa sababs os credihes od id planete quetos gwohm is lytil prince est asteroid B612. Tod asteroid buit dyohrcto tik oins, in 1909, ab un tyrk astronom.
Sellamat Eto !
ReplyDeleteThanks for this analysis ! I can add that, compared to Uropi, Sambahsa includes non-IE words from other major linguistic areas, mostly Arabic, like "mathalan" & "sabab".
About PIE, I have just reedited my grammar of restituted IE : http://www.scribd.com/doc/76418163/swerxmen-jeriom-grammaire-d-indo-europeen-reconstruit-et-extrapole-avec-lexique
(It's in French, but, as you're a proficient reader of Interlingua, you may make out many words).
Olivier
"written Sambahsa looks similar to Turkish, Albanian"
ReplyDeleteI think it looks more like Latin or an Old Germanic language, even though it has some Arabic and Persian words in it.
"Uropi's orthography makes it look more like a creole"
It rather makes me think of Croatian...
@ Olivier: You are right about the inclusion of words from Arabic. Then, it's perhaps due to my ignorance, I don't find many IE-root words in Uropi. It's so modern compared to Sambahsa.
ReplyDelete@ Anonymous: It really depends on how you see. To me Uropi is more like the Haitian creole than Croatian. :)
Sellamat quantims !
ReplyDeleteIn fact, for basic words, Uropi may include as many IE root words as Sambahsa, and I know that Monsieur Landais, the inventor of Uropi, started with the same IE lexicon as I did. However, Sambahsa tends to accept more lesser widespread IE roots than Uropi, which prefers derivation. From a non-lexical point of view, Uropi, with its agglutinative system, is not an IE language.
IMO, the problem of Uropi's lexicon are the so-called "mestisso" words, that M.Landais created by blending Romance and Germanic roots, so blended that it is hard to identify them as IE.
When I write in Sambahsa on Word, my software analyses it as English, because of its "modern" orthography !
Uropi is for me not like Haitian Creole because, when it is written, I can read it easily, as it is based on spoken French. As M.Landais both chose the one sound/one letter principle but added an uncommon letter for the "zh" sound, it is hard to tell. Sometimes, he compares it to the Romani Chib of European Gipsies, a language related to Punjabi !
Olivier
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWell, 500 Indo-European roots form the basic Uropi vocabulary, which doesn't mean that these roots should look prehistoric, for ex. *sòjuln / *sjwélnes (O. Simon's PIE grammar) has given sol in Spanish and Scandinavian languages, but you cannot say that Spanish and Scandinavian languages are NOT Indo-European languages: you cannot zap 5000-6000 years of linguistic evolution. It's quite interesting to read what Otto Jespersen says about the evolution of languages in one of Mithridates' recent posts on Page30 (sorry I haven't got the address).
ReplyDeleteIt's funny, because, Tohno and Anonymous are both right: Uropi looks sometimes like Croatian essentially because of the -ij- ending and syllable (which can also be found in Dutch: bakkerij, schilderij… and in Lithuanian and Latvian where many words end in -ija), for ex. Ur. kategorije (categories) = Cr. kategorije = Lat., Lit. kategorija (singular). But in sentences like: De gardin se bel (Ha. jaden sa bèl) or Je se u bun idea (ha. se yon bon ide), Uropi looks like Haitian Creole, indeed !
"Agglutinative system" is not an expression I would use for Uropi; it is normally used for languages like Hungarian which are very different, apart from one point (derived adjectives in -i). If by this you are referring to compounds, many I-E languages like German, Russian, Greek build a lot of compounds…
What you call "mestisso" words are called "portmanteau words" in English, and this technique has been deliberately used to create new words: the most famous example is the word "smog" (= smoke + fog). This has also been observed as a natural phenomenon in some languages. For example in the early Middle Ages, old French and old German used to be spoken in the same areas, and thus oFr. aut (high, from latin altus) blended with Frankish hôh (high) to become modern French "haut". At any rate, portmanteau words represent less than 4% of the Uropi vocabulary.
The Uropi letter ʒ (latin letter ezh) is the letter used in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) for the sound "zh" (that is S in "pleasure"). True it isn't a very common letter, but neither are Turkish ğ, Danish ø and æ, Swedish å, Polish ł, ą and ę, Lithuanian ų, Welsh ŵ, Croatian đ, not to mention all the diacritic signs used in Slavic languages or Vietnamese. Most languages using the Latin alphabet in the world have strange letters or diacritic signs, sometimes both. It is perfectly true that Romany (rromani ćhib) uses the letter ʒ and sometimes even ǯ (in the Kalderash dialect). This language is twice Indo-European; first because of its Indian origin; secondly because it borrowed innumerable words (and even sometimes grammatical forms) from nearly all Indo-European languages.
UK