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.

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 Eurolang(uage)s and even Euroclones. Some of the best known auxlangs are Eurolangs, including Esperanto (published 1887), Ido (1907), Occidental/Interlingue (1922), Novial (1928), Interlingua (1951), Lingua Franca Nova (1966), and Glosa (1972). 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:

1. 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.
2. Prevalence: Widely spread words are favored. The more people know the word the better.
3. 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:

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].

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