Unish

Unish is a constructed language developed by a research team at Sejong University, Korea. The term “Unish” is used in reference to it being cast as a universal language in the globalized era.

Communication has become more important because of the rapidly increasing amount of exchange and the degree of interdependency existing around the world. People spend a considerable amount of time and money on using interpretation and translation services which necessitates the use of an official language. The most frequently used natural language is English; however, if English were to be designated the global official language, only 4.7% of the global population (approx. 330 million out of 7 billion) whose mother tongue is English would be considered first-class citizens and the rest will inevitably suffer disadvantages. In this sense, it is necessary to develop a constructed language for everyone to fairly and conveniently communicate with each other. Esperanto, the most successful artificial language designed for international communication, was created in 1887 by a Jewish-Polish ophthalmologist, L. L. Zamenhof. Esperanto, however, has been regarded as relatively difficult for most people to learn, as it is based almost exclusively on European languages (mostly on Romance languages, with significant portions of the vocabulary from Germanic languages, and to a lesser degree Slavonic languages).

Unish stands for “Universal Language, One Language.” The goals of Unish are to overcome such shortcomings as those mentioned above, to be developed into the easiest and fairest constructed language for speakers of any language, and be disseminated as such. To this end, the grammar and pronunciation system of Unish are based in principles and are simple and concise.

The vocabulary of Unish, in particular, was chosen from among 15 languages, including Esperanto and 14 major languages which are natural languages for around 70 million native speakers or which were international languages in the past, according to the three principles of commonality, short-word length, and simplicity. Consequently, the core vocabulary of Unish is integrated with the easiest and simplest vocabulary words of existing major languages. To date, Unish has a vocabulary of approximately 10,000 words, with plans in the works to enlarge it to one million words. Sejong University has also offered Unish classes for several years. In 2003, Unish was ranked as Langmaker’s 47th most popular language.

You can find more detail on Unish here: www.unish.org and search Unish words and their sources here: Unish Dictionary

Linguistic Properties

Classification

Unish is a constructed language and not genealogically-related to any particular ethnic language. The phonological and grammatical structures are based on those of pidgins. The vocabulary is derived from fifteen languages (fourteen natural languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Russian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Greek, Latin; and one artificial language: Esperanto).
Typologically, in Unish, prepositions and adjectives are placed before the nouns they modify. The word order of a sentence is “subject-verb-object/complement.” This word order is always kept, regardless of a declarative sentence or an interrogative sentence. New terms are formed through the careful selection of words among the aforementioned fifteen languages by seven principles such as: commonality, short word-length, diversity, distinctiveness, simplicity, cultural priority, and compounding.

Phonology

Unish has twenty-two consonants, five vowels, and two semi-vowels. Unish also accepts commonly-used vowels and consonants that tend to be easier to pronounce.

Vowels

The vowel structure of Unish consists of five vowels that are most commonly used in pidgins as well as in natural languages: [i, e, a, o, u]. In addition to these five simple and general vowels, Unish also accepts the semi-vowels [y] and [w] in making more elaborate sounds. The correspondence between sounds of vowels/semi-vowels and spellings are as follows:^[1] DOWN/PDF/Eun-Joo.pdf

Consonants

Unish accepts consonants that are easy to pronounce and common to natural languages. For example, the dental sounds of [θ] and [ð] are not generally easy to acquire and pronounce. Hence, these sounds are not included in the consonant system of Unish. Moreover, the correspondence between sounds and spellings are as straightforward as possible, as listed below. The aim is such that anyone with a basic knowledge of the Latin script will find the relations between consonants and spellings quite accessible.

Writing system

The Unish alphabet, with twenty-six letters, is based on the modern English alphabet. Its uppercase letters and lowercase letters are as follows:

Uppercase letters

Grammar

The grammar of Unish was constructed on the basis of the principles of “simplicity,” “logicality,” and “regularity.” For example, irrespective of number (plural or singular) or person (first-person, second-person, or third-person) of a subject, the form of the verb corresponding to the subject does not vary.^[2]DOWN/PDF/Dong-Young.pdf

Interrogative Sentence

Unish sentences consist of a subject (S), a verb (V), and an object (O)—ordered (S-V-O). This word order is preserved in declarative sentences (DS) as well as in interrogative sentences (IS). In Unish, the difference between a declarative sentence and an interrogative sentence is that the former ends with a period and falling intonation, while the latter ends with a question mark and rising intonation.

As a result of this rule, interrogative pronouns (who, what, when, where, why, and how) appear in situ, as opposed to always being placed initially within a sentence.

Passive Sentence

In Unish, a prefix is attached to a main verb in making a passive sentence. A passive sentence is formed from an active sentence by inserting the verb “es” in front of the active verb and changing the subject-object order. In specifying the agent in a passive sentence, the preposition “de” is used.

Personal Pronoun

In Unish, there is no gender distinction in pronouns, and the plural form of a pronoun is created by attaching an “-s” to its singular form.

Like the plural form of common nouns, a plural personal pronoun is obtained by attaching the suffix “–s” to a singular pronoun. The plural forms of all nouns are made simply by attaching that suffix to their singular forms. There is only one third-person singular pronoun, therefore the referent of that pronoun is determined based on the context in which it is used.

Vocabulary

The Research Team at Sejong University stresses that, as the number of developed lexical items has exceeded 9,600, the lexical inventory of Unish provides a sufficient base for everyday conversation. New words are also under constant development for utilization within the context of various speaking and writing topics.
Unish words are selected from among multiple terms borrowed from the fifteen representative languages and in accordance with seven criteria: commonality, short word-length, simplicity, diversity, distinctiveness, cultural priority, and compounding.^[3]Need for Unish

The first guiding criterion in the development of Unish is “commonality.” Selected Unish words are those commonly used in several other languages or those that have been officially used on a worldwide scale and, in consequence, have already become widely familiar.

The second principle is “short word-length.” Unish seeks to create a concise vocabulary with a special focus on simple spellings, particularly among vocabulary words with similar origins. Moreover, when the stem of a word sufficiently conveys the meaning, the rest of the term is omitted (e.g., mathematics→math).

The third is “diversity.” Words have been chosen from as many languages as possible in order to expand the degree of familiarity and are drawn from a wide range of nations (e.g., autumn→aki [Japanese]; tree→namu [Korean]). Consequently, Unish words are usually shorter than those of any other natural language. This further contributes to the overall efficiency of Unish, a highly prized quality in the Internet age.

The fourth principle is “distinctiveness.” Unish prefers short words. In cases where a simple word might possibly be confused with another word in pronunciation, such words have been excluded.

The fifth goal is “simplicity.” Unish has a structure of CVCV (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant-Vowel) resulting in an easier form of pronunciation.

The sixth is “cultural priority.” The origin of words has been respected in Unish by selecting vocabulary words that have a close relationship with other cultures.

The final principle adopted in the development of Unish is “compounding.” Unish has created new words through composition (e.g., dictionary→motbuk; mot=word, buk=book). Consequently, Unish's vocabulary can be expanded without difficulty.

You can search Unish words and their sources here: http://www.unish.org/search

Sample Text

The following short story—with an accompanying Unish translation—is extracted from Aesop's Fables.

English

The Geese and the Cranes. Some geese and cranes were feeding together in the same field, when a bird-catcher suddenly came to them. Since the cranes were slim and light, they could fly right off and escape the bird-catcher’s nets. The geese, however, weighed down by their fat, could not take off so easily and were all captured.

Unish Translation

Guss e krans Som guss e krans esed fiding junt in same fild, wen tori-kachor sudnli komed to les. Koz krans esed slim e lite, les kaned flai skoro e eskaped tori-kachor’s nets. But guss non kaned eskap izli e al es kaptur koz les es overpeso.

References

Further reading

• Young-Hee Jung. (2004) English, Unish, and an Ideal International Language: From a Perspective of Speech Sound and Writing System.  PDF.
• Purev Jaimai & Hyun Seok Park. (2003) Representing Unish Grammars Based on Tree Adjoining Grammar Formalisms.  PDF.
• Stuart Read. (2001) Like WTO, Why not WCO?  PDF.
• Young-Hee Jung. (2004) Borrowing for a Universal Language.  PDF.
• Andrew Large. (1996) The Prospects for an International Language.  PDF.

External links

• www.unish.org - Website of Unish