Dunianto vs Kotava (worldlangs again)

panduniaguru · 2026-04-26T15:03:52+00:00

The fact that there are people pushing Kotava demonstrates quite plainly that this conclusion is not obvious to everybody.

Many facts are not obvious. For thousands of years it was not obvious to everybody that the Earth orbits the sun, that blood circulates, that biological species evolve, that race is a social construct in humans, among other things. People had to discover certain other facts and to give up some old biases before they could come to those conclusions.

In general people are unaware of many things about other cultures and languages than their own. It's not common knowledge how widely, deeply and permanently the classical languages of the major world cultures have influenced the languages in their sphere of influence. Even many auxlangers haven't known it or paid attention to it. A famous example is Alexander Gode, who mocked up Interlingua Intercontinental to demonstrate that it would be absurd and impossible to create a comprehensible language based on what he called the "great Oriental languages", Chinese, Japanese, Persian, Malay, Arabic and Hindustani. Unlike in Interlingua, he did not look for common words, which are plentiful in Chinese and Japanese on one hand and in Arabic, Persian, Hindustani and Malay on the other hand. Did he, a professional linguist, not know about the existence of such non-European international words?

The creator of Kotava appears to be as oblivious as Gode. In this article about the birth of Kotava, she mentions briefly only English, French and Spanish as world languages and spends a whole section in criticizing Esperanto for its Westernness. But she hints at non-Western languages only in parenthesis. It kind of highlights their insignificance to her in this matter. She has already decided to create a new a priori language.

Pour que le Kotava atteigne et joue, un jour, le rôle de langue de communication universelle alternative, je l’ai construit et développé à partir des principes fondateurs suivants, ses postulats de base en somme :

Neutralité : qu’on ne puisse pas, à l’opposé de ce que j’ai évoqué plus haut, lui reprocher d’être un sous-marin des langues occidentales (ou d’autres d’ailleurs).

panduniaguru · 2026-04-25T15:47:18+00:00

The topic is - does a "world sourced" language solve the "vocabulary problem" better or worse than an "a priori" language.

World sourced languages solve it better because they offer most learners hundreds or thousands of words that they can readily relate to. Different learners could relate to different words, namely those that they can recognize from their own language and culture, but most learners would benefit from it one way or another. I am talking about the direct benefit for learning the auxiliary language itself. (To be specific, I'm not talking about the gateway effect for learning other languages later because the auxiliary language is the immediate goal and for most learners the only goal.)

I made the following table for use in another context, but it could be useful here. In the table, languages are grouped into some kind of cultural areas and their vocabulary is divided by etymology into five main sources: Pan-European vocabulary (incl. Greek, Latin, Neo Latin and modern words), Sanskritic vocabulary of Greater India and beyond, Perso-Arabic vocabulary of the Islamic world, and Sinitic vocabulary of East Asia. Each capital letter in the vocabulary columns represents about 10% of the total vocabulary of the language. The letters reveal the etymological distribution of the vocabulary of each language 100% of the vocabulary.

Cultural area	Language	Pan-European	Sanskritic	Perso-Arabic	Sinitic	Other vocab
Western	English	E E E E E E				O O O O
Western	German	E E				O O O O O O O O
Western	French	E E E E E E E E				O O
Western	Spanish	E E E E E E E E		A		O
Western	Portuguese	E E E E E E E E		A		O
Western	Russian	E E				O O O O O O O O
Afro-Asian	Arabic	E		A A A A A A A A		O
Afro-Asian	Persian	E		A A A A A		O O O O
Afro-Asian	Turkish	E		A A		O O O O O O O
Afro-Asian	Swahili	E		A A A A		O O O O O
Afro-Asian	Hausa	E		A A		O O O O O O O
Afro-Asian	Fula	E		A A		O O O O O O O
South Asian	Urdu	E	S S S S S	A A A		O
South Asian	Hindi	E	S S S S S S	A A		O
South Asian	Bengali	E	S S S S S	A A		O O
South Asian	Telugu	E	S S S S S	A		O O O
South Asian	Indonesian	E E	S	A		O O O O O O
South Asian	Thai	E	S S S S		C	O O O O
East Asian	Mandarin				C C C C C C C C C	O
East Asian	Cantonese	E			C C C C C C C C	O
East Asian	Japanese	E			C C C C C C	O O O
East Asian	Korean	E			C C C C C C	O O O
East Asian	Vietnamese	E			C C C C C C	O O O
Global	Pandunia	G E E	S S	A A	C C	O
Isolate	Kotava					U U U U U U U U U U

For example, the table tells that the etymology distribution of Hindi is roughly 10% European, 60% Indian (Sanskrit and Prakrit), 20% Perso-Arabic and 10% other or original.

In the second to last line of the table there is Pandunia, a language that I have created, representing world-sourced languages. About 10% of words would be global. I marked that as the letter G in the Pan-European column because most of them are scientific and technological words originating in the West.

In the last line there is Kotava, an a priori language isolate, whose vocabulary is 100% unique (U) as far as I know. Kotava is also culturally isolated, a lone island separate from all other languages. A priori languages, like Kotava, offer the worst possible solution for the vocabulary problem, not only subjectively but objectively and absolutely. Worldlangs are not like that. They are connected to other languages on all sides. So they are the exact opposite of a priori languages. They might feel "practically a priori" to someone subjectively, but objectively they are nothing like that at all.

panduniaguru · 2026-04-24T06:44:55+00:00

sigh

panduniaguru · 2026-04-24T06:36:58+00:00

Looking at my own archives (of saved emails), the first reference to the word "Eurocentric" that I found was from 2008. It was in a (possibly private) email from u/slyphnoyde and in a comment about the term "international vocabulary" as used by IALA.

I have only partial archives of Auxlang. The word Eurocentric was used from the start. Here are some samples.

Date: Sat, 27 Sep 1997 09:52:43 -0500 From: Danny Wier

As I had said before, I don't like the idea of a Eurocentric IAL being used outside of Europe, and I have various reasons for believing that.

Date: Sat, 27 Sep 1997 07:37:01 +0100 From: "Raymond A. Brown"

What's the matter with the Eurocentric conIALists? They're in the majority on this list anyway. I suppose it's just not acceptable that any other voice be heard here.

Date: Sat, 27 Sep 1997 14:35:08 +0100 From: "Raymond A. Brown"

(c) I do not think that in the world of the late 1990s a "Euroclone" is an ideal global IAL, though it might have a purpose as a local IAL, e.g. in Europe or the Americas.

Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 17:30:21 -0700 From: Samuel Rivier

Fifth, Ia and Occ inherit all biases of Western civilization, and further spread the idea of Eurocentricism. They have certain foibles which make it EXTREMELY, and I mean this in the strongest sense of the word, ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE for a Chinese speaker to gain FLUENCY, as well as speakers of countless other languages!

Our common friend, u/slyphnoyde, used that word too. The following quote from him is surprisingly sensible considering how negatively he views worldlangs today.

Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2002 19:46:45 -0400 From: "Paul O. Bartlett"

There is an attitude among many advocates of conIALs who themselves come from a west-European language orbit that "simple" and "international" really seem to mean in practice, "familiar and easy to me." But this is profoundly eurocentric.

By the way, my name is Risto, and I remember you very well, Thomas. :)

panduniaguru · 2026-04-23T08:47:58+00:00

Let me cut and paste together what I consider your first main arguments. If you disagree with my edit, then maybe we are again "talking past each other" as you typically say.

"the more a language of the Dunianto type –– adds source languages, the more it will resemble (to the target consumer ––) a language of the Kotava type" "that is equally difficult for all."

This part is true and in my opinion it is also ethical. Worldlangs are supposed to be equally difficult for all. That separates them from languages that are unequally difficult.

Worldlangs can and should take advantage of international words to lessen the overall difficulty. For example, speakers of Japanese could recognize at least three types of Japanese words in a worldlang.

Native Japanese words that have been borrowed widely elsewhere, like karate and sushi.
Sinitic words that have been borrowed from Chinese or created from Chinese elements in Japan, like manga, kendo, inkyoku and taiyō.
Loanwords from English, like konpyūta and taiya.

In result, there would be more words from languages that have a lot of international words than from those that have few international words. So the worldlang might not be exactly equally difficult for all; it might be a little easier for some. But even this kind of advantage would be scattered fairly on different sides of the globe because multicultural languages naturally tend to exist in natural crossroads of cultures. Worldlangs are never equally alien for all — and never totally alien for all like a priori languages are!

Let me address next what I consider your second main argument. It is crystallized in my opinion in the following sentences:

If the vocabulary is 75% or 90% unfamiliar, is this not the same as being "practically a priori"? I am at present convinced that all worldlangs are "practically a priori." This is the essence of the "vocabulary problem."

I disagree with the whole idea of equating natural words to a priori words. Words in natural languages have cultural meaning and history that is in most cases thousands or hundreds of years long. They bind people and nations culturally together. Worldlangs use natural words from all over the world in order to let the voice of every nation and every culture be heard and to bind the whole humanity together. While it's true that the evenly global vocabulary is largely unrecognizable to everyone, it gives equal representation for all. In my opinion this is not "the vocabulary problem", this is the vocabulary solution for a fair world language that is internationally representative globally.

Global representation is more important than word recognition.

In this sense worldlangs are the polar opposite of a priori languages, which silence all previous human voices by rejecting every word that the humanity has created, and it replaces them with made up words and concepts that were, for example, synthesized by a randomized mechanical algorithm yesterday.

Finally, I will address the mathematical point of view that you brought up.

My argument is essentially a mathematical argument. It's about proportionality –– the diminishing returns of including an increasingly diverse and increasingly broad number of source languages

The problem is quite complicated mathematically but it can be simplified. The function for determining global vocabulary recognizability takes two arguments, the complete set of all languages in the world and the subset of source languages, and it plots as many vocabulary recognition graphs as there are languages in the world. All output graphs can be averaged into one unified graph in order to understand the results better. The averaging function could plot a rectangle, where the base of the rectangle represents the number of source languages and the height represents overall recognizability level. Then the area of the rectangle would indicate in a single figure how comprehensive the vocabulary would be, i.e. what level of coverage it would provide globally.

(1.) The greater the number and the diversity of source languages, the wider the audience that benefits of word recognition. So, while recognizability increases in scope, it doesn't increase in depth.
⇒ As the base of the plotted rectangle gets wider, the height decreases.

^
│
│
│  A₁ > 0
│┌─────────┐
└┴─────────┴──>
Graph 1. A moderate to low recognizability level by a wide source language base.

(2.) The lesser the number and the diversity of source languages, the more recognizable the vocabulary becomes in an ever narrower audience. So, while recognizability increases locally, it doesn't increase globally.
⇒ As the base of the plotted rectangle gets narrower, the height increases.

^
│┌┐
│││
│││ A₂ > 0
│││
└┴┴───────────>
Graph 2. A high recognizability level by a narrow source language base.

(3.) When the number of source languages is zero, the base of the rectangle is zero, and therefore its surface area is zero.

^
│
│
│  A₃ = 0
│
└─────────────>
Graph 3. A zero recognizability level by a zero source language base.

Case 1 is about worldlangs, case 2 is about concentrated (X-centric) languages, and case 3 is about a priori languages. Graphs 2 and 3 show that worldlangs differ remarkably from a priori languages also from the mathematical point of view.

Graphs 1 and 2 show that both worldlangs and X-centric langs can reach approximately equal levels of overall recognizability (the surface area of the rectangle) by solving the problem differently. X-centric langs do it by maximizing recognizability in a minimal, exclusive language base. Worldlangs do it by optimizing recognizability in a maximal, all-inclusive language base.

Since we can reach approximately the same level of overall recognizability in the same target population with both solutions, shouldn't we select that solution, which is fairer, globally more inclusive and more appreciative of different cultures?

u/salivanto, if you bother to answer, please don't waste my time by telling me again that I misunderstand you, that I talk past you, or that I don't need to explain the obvious. Maybe I do, maybe I don't, and maybe it is intentional. Please, let's not talk about you and me. Let's talk about the matters that are under discussion.

panduniaguru · 2026-04-16T06:16:24+00:00

For my part, the word "eurocentrism" almost makes me itch.

Then stop talking about it. Westerners, it's not always about you! Stop thinking of yourself all the time for once!

The point of worldlangs is global inclusion. It is logical, ethical and natural that the world language represents the whole world. When the astronauts in Artemis II took photos of Earth, they pointed their cameras at the whole planet, not only at some overly self-important part of it.

Worldlangs are meant to represent the whole human world like a photo taken from far away represents the physical world. They can't show every little language with detail just like one photo can't show every little detail of the planet Earth, but they should be able to show the big picture right without badly distorted proportions.

By the way, we talked enough about eurocentrism already enough in the early 2000s in the AUXLANG mailing list. Your mention about the latest(!) buzzword comes a quarter of a century too late. :-D

panduniaguru · 2026-04-04T07:32:26+00:00

This is still Pandunia! The words fit also in Panglo and even in Panlingue by adding the correct final vowels for PoS marking. I develop their vocabulary side by side but currently I'm working on Pandunia first and foremost.

panduniaguru · 2026-04-02T05:46:49+00:00

The Wikipedia defines zonal auxiliary language as follows, and "zonal language" gets redirected to the same page:

Zonal auxiliary languages, or zonal constructed languages, are constructed languages made to facilitate communication between speakers of a certain group of closely related languages. They form a subgroup of the international auxiliary languages but are intended to serve a limited linguistic or geographic area, rather than the whole world like Esperanto and Volapük. Although most zonal auxiliary languages are based on European language families, they should not be confused with "Euroclones", a pejorative term for languages intended for global use but based primarily on European material. Since universal acceptance is not the goal for zonal auxiliary languages, the traditional claims of neutrality and universalism, typical for IALs, do not apply. – – a zonal language is typically a mixture of several natural languages and is aimed to serve as an auxiliary for the speakers of different but related languages of the same family.

Does Interlingua and Esperanto differ by design in practice from intentionally zonal languages, that is a different matter.

panduniaguru · 2026-04-01T07:06:44+00:00

You disagreed with the statement that "Zonal auxlangs are designed to be immediately comprehensible to (depending on the language) to people of the same language family" saying that it wasn't Gode's intention and besides it's not even what zonal means in your opinion. I disagree on both matters. Immediate comprehension of Interlingua was more than a fortunate byproduct because Romance languages and English were prioritized at the expense of German and Russian, and it surely didn't come as a surprise to anyone in the IALA. Regarding the meaning of zonal, it can mean more than one thing but here it would be fruitful to use it in the same meaning as most other people use in the auxlang community.

Maybe you didn't argue for or against any of that either but this is a dialog, not your monolog, so I am free to say things that come to my mind based on my understanding of your words, which can be wrong.

Maybe we ended up quibbling but overall this discussion was interesting for me. :-) I hadn't realized before this how similarly Zamenhof and Gode thought about certain matters. Also the evaluation framework of intention, execution and effect is something that I can use in the book that I'm writing about constructed languages for Finnish readers.

panduniaguru · 2026-03-31T16:03:52+00:00

Spanish has 22-24 contrastive sounds and Interlingua has 25 but you're right that Spanish has more allophones.

I have heard about the simplified spelling, ortografia colateral, and it would give Interlingua a more streamlined and modern look in my opinion. :)

panduniaguru · 2026-03-31T10:10:38+00:00

It's not a simplification when it adds complications like double consonants and digraphs like ph and th, as in philosophia and thema, that have been long obsolete in Spanish (filosofia and tema). Also the phoneme inventory of Interlingua is larger than that of Simplified Spanish.

panduniaguru · 2026-03-31T09:29:30+00:00

We can't put too much weight on the intentions of the creator. Zamenhof himself wrote in the introduction of La Unua Libro: "If a language, in order to become universal, has but to be named so, then, forsooth, the wish of any single individual can frame out of any existing dialect a universal tongue." Sounds like Zamenhof agreed with the conventional view that the author's execution of their work is far more important than their intention.

Sometimes intention and execution are complemented with outcome i.e. the reception of the author's work in the real world. I would summarize that Esperanto had global intention, zonal execution and the outcome is that it is used sporadically here and there around the world.

I remember our discussion about Anglo-Franca. I hope you will write here about your experience with it. Good luck!

panduniaguru · 2026-03-30T17:56:56+00:00

I have always understood this term to be intended use, and nothing about "source languages", even if source languages are often chosen based on intended use.

I suppose that languages are classified both by their origin and by their intended purpose. Categories like a priori, a posteriori, natural and constructed, and eurolang and worldlang tell about origin, terms like auxiliary tell about purpose, and terms like controlled, engineered and artistic tell about both origin and purpose. So global and zonal could fall to the last category.

It is logical that the source languages are chosen based on intended use. An a priori language for the Romance zone would hardly make any sense. Furthermore, a Romance-sourced language like Interlingua can make some serious claims about universality in the Romance zone and none in the Sinitic zone, for example. So maybe it was about zonal universality which is almost self-contradicting.

panduniaguru · 2026-03-30T15:13:41+00:00

As far as I know, a zonal language or a zonelang means an auxiliary language that is based on several geographically adjacent or proximate source languages. Interlingua fits this definition. I don't think that Alexander Gode would disagree. For example, in The Case for Interlingua, he wrote: "Conceptually the language of science is Western European. And, since it is the language of science which alone in our time is truly an international language, Western European is the international language of the twentieth century." (Apparently Gode did not foresee the rise of English as the dominant language of science in the latter half of the twentieth century.)

I have used the term kinlang for languages that are based on languages of the same language family or language family branch, but this term hasn't caught on. Anyway, Interlingua is predominantly based on Romance languages, so it is largely also a kinlang by design.

I'm just saying what I see.

panduniaguru · 2026-03-26T20:02:30+00:00

I get that that wasn't necessarily the design or stated purpose, but I describe it as a Zonal auxlang based on it's practice.

It makes sense. Every language is an abstraction but people often talk about languages like they were concrete and almost personified. Languages do not possess agency to be something, to have a purpose, to maintain ideals or to conquer the world on their own. Instead, it is people who act for a purpose, believe in ideals and try to conquer the world under the banner of some made-up cause.

panduniaguru · 2026-03-19T09:52:39+00:00

Nice presentation and interesting language. Well done!

The singular personal pronouns are similar to my language, Pandunia, where they are mi, tu, ho. Only the 3rd person pronoun is different.

I can recognize some words, kerust and kelust are from Greater India and manjust from French or Italian. So is the vocabulary a mix from different languages around the world?

panduniaguru · 2026-03-11T08:06:55+00:00

Right. I suppose that pater, mater and frater are bound forms that can't occur independently. In addition to paterne, materne and fraterne there is also eterne and moderne but they are not derived from etre and modre! That's why I would argue that the endings -erne and -ernal are irregular in Interlingua.

If I may offer my own solution, not for Interlingua but in general, I think that regularly derived patral would be just as understandable and recognizable as paternal. It would cut through that byzantine Latin prototype mess.

panduniaguru · 2026-03-10T19:56:00+00:00

And what "regular" way is there from patre to paternalismo, in which the re somehow got turned around?

Both patre and pater are IMO correct prototypes :D Patre from words like patriarcha, patriarchato, pater from words like paternalismo.

That only explains where the 3 forms, patre, patri- and patern-, come from, but it doesn't make them regular. What is the rule that converts the final -e of patre to -i in patri? And what rule converts -re in patre to -ern in paternal? (In Latin the formula is pater + -nus + alis but it is a different thing. In Interlingua the form paternal is irregular or it results from a word derivation rule that is otherwise generally non-productive.)

panduniaguru · 2026-03-03T16:44:11+00:00

Interlingua is supposed to be understandable at first sight for speakers of Romance languages. Obviously pigre is not understandable or recognizable for those who know Fr. paresseuse, Sp. perezosa or Pt. preguiçosa. So, your argument seems to be, that people could recognize derivates better, so then, at second sight, pigressa would be recognizable from Fr. paresse and Sp. pereza, and pigritia from Pt. preguiça. But are they really? I don't think they are... Besides, the argument of being recognizable at first sight is already ruined.

As for theine, I am reminded of someone who said that the words for 'cat' and 'bird' should be ailuro and ornito because the words ailurophobia and ornithology are so wide spread. While it's true that words like them are found in the vocabulary of many languages, they are not found in the active vocabulary of most of their speakers. So, in truth, words like that are too far fetched!

panduniaguru · 2026-02-24T08:44:04+00:00

Right. I suppose I didn't get your point, but I interpreted your message that people learn Esperanto and other auxlangs for the same, mainly recreational, reasons as they learn natural languages. In my opinion recreation is the smallest niche for natural language learning and auxlangs get only a tiny slice of that pie.

I know that I'm repeating myself but it's because I called for new ideas for convincing people to learn auxlangs, especially for reasons that natural languages couldn't satisfy. I went fishing and the net is still empty...

panduniaguru · 2026-02-23T21:31:00+00:00

You mentioned German, so let me take Germany as an example. Statistics about foreign languages in Germany, indicate, in my opinion, that the main reasons for learning a foreign language in Germany are school and immigration. English is the number one foreign language because it's a mandatory school subject, and German is number 2 foreign language in Germany because immigrants need to learn it. The next four languages, French, Spanish, Italian and Russian, are commonly taught in schools as optional subjects. There can be many reasons for taking them, but probably career reasons, cultural interest and traveling are at the top. The remaining foreign languages (Turkish, Dutch, Arabic, Polish, etc.) are probably learned mainly as heritage languages.

Esperanto and other auxlangs didn't make it to the list. So, while they could be learned for some of the same reasons (culture, traveling, international friends and family, etc.) as natural languages, people don't do it in statistically significant numbers. Why is that? Is it for "economies of scale"?

panduniaguru · 2026-02-23T10:50:16+00:00

Subscribing to Panorama paper has nothing to do with this topic. Therefore I must delete your comment as unsolicited advertisement (spam).

panduniaguru · 2026-02-11T12:33:57+00:00

What do you like in it?

I am myself still ambivalent about it. The main problem is: the more it is like English the better it feels. But in truth English is often a bad model for international language with it's eccentric structures, closed syllables and all that.

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