Ideas behind Pandunia's vocabulary

International words

There are several stocks of international words.

Hartmut Traunmüller divided the world into four major cultural spheres in his article A Universal Interlanguage: Some Basic Considerations. The languages within a certain cultural sphere share words (loan words and translated loan words) and cultural concepts. The four major cultural spheres are:

The European (Western) cultural sphere
The Afro-Asian (Islamic) cultural sphere
The South Asian (Indian) cultural sphere
The East Asian (Chinese) cultural sphere

They are roughly outlined in the picture below.

Linguistic spheres: Western, Afro-Asian, South Asian and East-Asian.

Later Samuel P. Huntington presented a division of the humankind into civilizations in his famous book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). His division substantially matches Traunmüller's division. According to Huntington, civilization is the highest rank of cultural identity of people. It is defined by language, history, religion, customs and institutions. The list of civilization's according to Huntington is as follows, with added information by me. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_civilizations for another description.

Civilization	Area	Religion	Primeval language
Eastern Orthodox	East Europe and North Asia	Eastern Orthodox Christianity	Greek
Western	Europe, North America and Australasia	Catholic and Protestant Christianity	Latin
Latin American	South and Central America	Catholic Christianity	Latin
African	Sub-Saharan Africa	African Christianity	-
Islamic	North Africa and South Asia	Islam	Arabic
Hindu	Indian Subcontinent	Hinduism	Sanskrit
Buddhist	Indochina, Sri Lanka	Theravada Buddhism	Pāli
Sinitic	China, Korea and Vietnam	Confucianism	Middle Chinese
Japanese	Japan	Shintoism and Mahayana Buddhism	Middle Chinese
Lone countries	Ethiopia	Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity	Ge'ez
	Israel	Judaism	Hebrew
	Haiti	Catholicism and Vodou

Many constructed auxiliary languages have concentrated almost exclusively on the Western vocabulary that is mainly rooted to Greek and Latin. Hence they have been called Europe centric languages ("eurolangs" in short). Some of the best known auxiliary languages are eurolangs, including Esperanto (published 1887), Ido (1907), Occidental/Interlingue (1922), Novial (1928), Interlingua (1951), Lingua Franca Nova (1966), and Glosa (1972). These languages rarely – if ever – venture beyond the Western languages in search of new words. However it is symptomatic that none of them have become very popular even in the West, on their home ground.

Languages with wider cultural base have also been created with a variety of approaches. They are called collectively worldlangs in the auxiliary language circle. Such languages include Sona (1935), Lojban (1987), Sasxsek (2003), Neo Patwa (2006) and Lingwa de Planeta (2006). Pandunia is one of the more recent worldlangs. It started off as a Eurolang in 2000 and gradually transformed into a worldlang in the following years as the author's linguistic awareness grew.

The methodology for selecting words to Pandunia

Pandunia's words come from some of the most widely spoken languages of the world. There is a methodology for selecting words. Thethree key criteria for selecting words are:

Equality: Words are be borrowed equally from different regions of the world. In practice it means that Pandunia has words from the languages of Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa.
Prevalence: Widely spread words are favored. The more people know the word the better.
Simplicity: Word forms with easy pronunciation are favored.

Example: Selecting the word for "language"

In the first step possible candidates are surveyed from widely spoken languages. The survey tells that there are several cross-linguistic words including the following:

Arabic لغة [luɣa], which has spread to i.a. Persian and Swahili.
Persian زبان [zæban], which has spread to Urdu and Hindi.
Latinate lingua, which is found in the Romance languages and which has spread to most European languages in the word for linguistics.
Indo-Aryan भाषा [bʱaʂa], which is found in Hindi and Bangla and which has spread to several neighbouring languages including Telugu, Thai and Indonesian.

In the second step the most prevalent word is identified. In this case it is the last one, [bʱaʂa], which is recognised nearly everywhere in India, Indochina and Nusantara.

In the third step the various word forms of the base word are surveyed and the most suitable form is selected to Pandunia. The survey gives the following alternatives:

Language	Word in the original script	Pronunciation in IPA
Hindi	भाषा	[bʱaʂa]
Punjabi	ਭਾਸ਼ਾ	[bʱasa]
Gujarati	ભાષા	[bʱaʃa]
Marathi	भाषा	[bʱaɕa]
Bangla	ভাষা	[bʱaʃa]
Telugu	భాష	[baʃa]
Thai	ภาษา	[pʰa:sa:]
Indonesian	bahasa	[bahasa]
Sundanese	basa	[basa]
Javanese	basa	[basa]

The simplest forms are [baʃa], which is found in Telugu, and [basa], which is found in Javanese and Sundanese (both are languages of Indonesia). They are also very close to the other forms, in fact nearly identical with many of them. [baʃa] appears to be more common than [basa]. However [s] is a universal sound in world languages whereas [ʃ] is much less common.

As the result, the word "basa" is adopted to the vocabulary of Pandunia.