Uropi
Creating a link between the peoples
*
The Uropi international auxiliary language was
created by Joël Landais an English teacher and comparative linguist in France. It
is a synthesis of all the common points that can be found in Indo-European
languages, based on the Indo-European roots, international words and
grammatical structures that are common to most European languages. Its
main characteristics are simplicity, internationality and transparency.
The
Indo-European family is the largest language family in the world and
Indo-European languages are spoken on the five continents. Thus the largest
number of speakers in the world can feel at home with Uropi.
★ ★ ★
Loving languages
★ ★ ★
Why do people
create or support an IAL (international auxiliary language) ? There are, in my
opinion, two diametrically opposite motivations - among others - which are
essential.
The first one
is loving
languages. You can love a language - or languages - just as you love a
person: you love her / his beauty (the beauty of its sounds, its poetry for
instance …), the way he / she dresses and makes up with ideograms, hieroglyphs,
runes…, its alphabet… You love his qualities, but also his little faults, his
imperfections: nobody is perfect, no language is perfect.
When you love
somebody, the most beautiful love token is having a child with the person you
love, a child who will share your physical features and traits of character. I
believe that my love for languages induced me to create Uropi. I wanted to have
a child with all these languages I love, or rather I wanted them to have a
child together, a child who would look like them and inherit features from each
of them.
Of course, this
was possible thanks to the common Indo-European roots. These I-E roots are the
genetic inheritance of all Indo-European languages. They would provide this
unborn child with his features and characteristics, together with his likeness
to all those languages. Thus Uropi was born and it made me very happy.
★ ★ ★
A perfect language.
At the opposite
extreme, you will meet people who find languages difficult to learn, who only
see their irregularities, their imperfections, their lack of logic (according
to them): in short, people who don't like languages. They are sometimes
mathematicians or philosophers who are dreaming of a perfectly logical world
governed by rules which admit no exceptions, who are dreaming of creating a new
superior human being, endowed with all good qualities, without any
shortcomings, in a word, a perfect man in a perfect world. Their aim is
therefore to create a perfect language which is mathematically logical and
governed by perfect rules without any exception… a perfectly in-human language.
You can find
many examples of such languages in the past, such as, for example Letellier's
language (1852-1880) which is philosophical and superlogical: â = animal, âb = mammals, âbo =
carnivores, âboje = cat, or
Sotos Ochando's (1852): a
= material things, aba = elements, ababa = oxygen, ababe = hydrogen, ababi =
nitrogen; numerical languages like Grosselin's (1836): 1 = abtract quality, 30 =
opinion, party, 1091 = king, or
musical languages like Sudre's Solrésol (1817
- 1866): doremi = day, dorefa = week, dorela = year; Domisol =
God, misol = good, solmi = bad, Solmido = Satan; languages with symbolic phonemes like
Nicolas's Spokil (1904)
with -rt meaning repairing, cleaning:
art = dirty, urt = clean, ert = to
repair, irt = to wash, ort = remedy, etc.
Of course, such
a "perfect" language, so superior to "natural" languages,
aims at becoming a single world language asserting itself and gradually
eliminating all the other languages on earth. IAL's which met with a certain
success like Volapük or Esperanto, do not escape the temptation, as you can
judge by their respective slogans: menefe bal, püki bal (one mankind, one language), unu mondo, unu lingvo (one world, one
language).
The danger of
such a position is quite clear: a planned destruction of the extraordinary
diversity of languages and cultures which is mankind's riches, which will end
up in an Orwellian nighmare, peopled with "superhumans" who will only
speak a kind of "newspeak". Of course Father Schleyer, the author of
Volapük (1879) or Lejzer Zamenhof (Esperanto 1887) cannot be blamed for not
knowing the advent of single-track thinking that marked the early 20th century
in the form of Hitlerian and Stalinist totalitarisms and their attempts at
creating "the new man": Übermensch
in the 3rd Reich or Homo Sovieticus.
Our struggle
today - together with that of the environmentalists who are fighting to
saveguard biodiversity and the natural balance, i-e for the survival of our
planet - is a struggle to preserve mankind's diversity of languages and
cultures. What a paradox it is to
observe, at a time when many new countries join the E.U, when their languages
become official languages of the Union, that Europeans learn less and less
different languages ! How many West Europeans for instance, learn a Slavic
language when we have at least five Slavic-speaking member countries ?
This is why we
would suggest a common language
which would not replace the other
languages but would be superposed on
them, in order to enable different peoples to better communicate with each
other, and at the same time preserve their own languages and cultures. This
language would act as a guarantor for cultural diversity. Loving languages gave
birth to Uropi, and loving languages should devise a means to protect them
against global standardisation.
★ ★ ★
