URO: A new language for Europe
What is the design of the language?
Computer scientist Robert C. Martin (aka uncle Bob) writes in his book Clean Architecture: A Craftsman’s Guide to Software Structure and Design that every time a programming language uses a new language construct that they take something away. Thus, instead of adding something to write a new computer program, they limit the possibilities.
Exactly because they do that, programs can be written easier and with fewer errors. Besides new language constructs, programming languages also provide compilers. These not only convert code into zeroes and ones, but also check the syntax. It’s impossible to write a working program that is against the syntax rules.
Most applications, written with programming languages, use semantic versioning. Semantic versioning is the idea to use meaningful version numbers (that’s why it is called Semantic Versioning). It uses a 3-component number in the format of X.Y.Z, where :
- X stands for a major version. It can introduce new functionality that can include breaking changes.
- Y stands for a minor version. Here, you add functionality in a backwards compatible manner.
- Z stands for a Patch Versions: Versions for patches are used for bug fixes. There are no functionality changes in the patch version upgrades.
These three traits of programming languages, namely language constructs that limit the possibilities, checks on syntax rules and semantic versioning can also be applied when designing artificial languages. This is opposite to natural languages like English and Spanish. They, too, have grammar and language rules, but these develop by the use of the language. When people want to say something else, they just play with the language. Over time, languages evolve naturally.
Approaches
The design of Esperanto is tightly connected to its inventor Zamenhoff. A modern artificial language could be much more a team effort. In a sense it could learn from online projects like Wikipedia. It could also learn from programming languages. Every time a new programming language is invented, it takes the best syntax from previous languages and evolves over time. Finally, there are new natural language processing and artificial intelligence software that can be used.
To summarize, a constructed language can be made by:
- One person
- A team
- Software
I don’t have a team of linguists at my disposal, but I am a programmer, I thus focus on the first and the last approach. With the first approach I derive words of the language based on the rules by hand, with the second I use ChatGPT (AI) to create new words. Before I do that, I shortly discuss how design a modern constructed language could be a team effort.
The Alphabet
Most European languages use the Latin-style of the alphabet:
But even the Latin alphabet uses different kind of letters. Here are the alphabets for some common European languages:
- English (26 letters): a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
- Dutch (26 letters): a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
- Finnish (29 letters): a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z å ä ö*
- German (31 letters): a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z ä ö ü ß
- Greek (24 letters): α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ τ υ φ χ ψ ω
- Italian (21 letters): a b c d e f g h i l m n o p q r s t u v z
- Spanish (27 letters): a b c d e f g h i j k l m n ñ o p q r s t u v w x y z
- Swedish (29 letters): a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z å ä ö
- Russian (33 letters): а б в г д е ё ж з и й к л м н о п р с т у ф х ц ч ш щ ъ ы ь э ю я
But even in Dutch, special characters like ë or é are used. Esperanto also has an extraordinary alphabet with 28 letters:
a b c ĉ d e f g ĝ h ĥ i j ĵ k l m n o p r s ŝ t u ŭ v z
Some letters in Esperanto even uses a diacritics/glyphs (^).
In Uro we will limit ourselves to the base alphabet of 26 letters:
The English alphabet doesn’t contain special characters, which is nice. In most of the words, q and x aren’t needed and can be replaced by phonetic variants. “x” becomes “ks” and “q” becomes “ku”. Words start with “y” are changed to “j” and words end with y changed to “i”.
Some changes in Uro for coronal vowels:
- ee → ie
- ea → ie
- ou → au
- ue → u
- oe → u
- eau → o
Some other rules
- No double letter endings. For example, “process” becomes “proces“.
- The letter “c” and “ck” pronounced as “k” becomes “k”. Thus electric becomes elektrik.
- Ending on -le will changed to -el. For example “example” becomes “eksampel”.
10 Rules: Syntax & Grammar
In this paragraph, we define ten rules to define the syntax and the grammar of Uro.
1. Structure
Uro like most European languages is a so-called SVO language. Such languages typically begin with a subject, followed by a verb and, where applicable, an object of that verb. The basic structure of a sentence is:
subject-verb-object
2. Article
As in English and French, the language has articles.
English — Uro
the — de
a — un
3. Gender
Uro is gender-neutral by default. Masculine and feminine are optional.
4. Nouns
- Nouns don’t have a special ending.
- Nouns have no gender.
- Nouns remain the same in each case. (nominativ, genitiv, dativ and akkusativ).
The plural of nouns is created by adding an -s or -es to the end of the word.
5. Adjectives
Adjectives come before nouns. These are not conjugated, even for plural.
English — Uro
A big book — un grand libre
The big book — de grand libre
Big books — grand libres
6. Adverbs
Adverbs are adjective ends at li:
English — Uro
Adjective: happy — happi
Adverb: happily — happili
7. verbs
The verbs stay the same for all personal pronouns:
present tense - Doesn’t have a special ending
past tense — ends with -id
future tense — ends with — os
8. Pronoun
The pronouns are a mixture of various language groups. There is not a real difference between ‘he’ and ‘she’. Gender is optional.
9. Capital letters
In English, sometimes words like months (April) or days (Wednesday) are written with a capital letter. In German, all nouns are written with a capital letter. Uro uses Capital letters only for names (personal and geographic names).
10. Numerals
- un
- du
- tri
- fir
- fif
- siks
- set
- okt
- nein
- ten
Next:
Previous:
Introduction:
