Talk:Unilingua
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I disagree with the recent change to the representation of the pronunciation of Unilingua "a".
The previous page had "a in English 'rah!'" which corresponds to /A/ in SAMPA for General American, and /A:/ in British Received Pronunciation. The revision shows "a in English 'talk'" which is a much lower vowel, /O/ in General American and /O:/ in RP, and comes closer to the pure O sound in Spanish "no" than to A.
In my dialect of American English (Southern California mixed with Great Lakes), there is a clear distinction between "a" in "father" and "aw" in "awful". The recent change specifies the latter as the general Unilingua A, but this is not usually perceived as a "pure" or general-purpose A sound.
Remember that as an auxiliary language, Unilingua is subject to many different interpretations of its vowel sounds, and to a lesser extent its consonants. The page itself points out that "r" and "j" will have varying pronunciations depending on the origin of speakers.
I believe it is best to specify vowels that will hold up as distinct when a variety of regional accents is applied to them. That means replacing "talk" with "father" or some other comparatively "neutral A" word on the Unilingua page.
To a much lesser extent, I am also concerned about the change from "u in Spanish 'tu'" to "u in English 'flu'", since there are some English speakers who pre-yodify the vowel in "flu" so it sounds like "flyoo." However, I also understand the potential for confusion between Spanish "tu" and French "tu"; the latter is definitely not a generalized U sound! Perhaps English speakers who already pre-yodify U will have to adjust their pronunciation to accommodate Unilingua pre- and post-yodification (I have to do something similar to cope with a minimal-pair distinction between words like cin "picture" and ciyn "mark").
-- Doug Ewell, Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
[edit] Lots of inconsistencies.
[edit] You guys should re-read carefully your entire book.
I've found some inconsistencies in your book. Things that just don't match, or disprove previously said statements. Some phrases and expressions you present here are merely word by word translation of their English counterparts. The greeting (cu baka) is probably influenced by the Russian "Zdravstvuite" (which virtually means the same as Unilinguian "cu baka" - be healthy). Same goes for some other inherently cultural expressions. Word "mir" in Russian means world, just like in Unilingua, and some words that derive from ber resemble Russian words with similar meanings.
[edit] The slogan on your main page (Glojo mir ebdayo zey yacana dayen) is also wrong.
Language according to your word families is dad. Why do you use dayen? I didn't find a word that anyway cognates with it, though it looks similar to daer. Is it meant to be noun derived from daer in instrumental case? Why not dadey (dad+ey)? To complicate things even further, in some languages adjectives should be inflected with same grammatical case as the noun they describe, is it so in Unilingua? You should specify that. I'm not sure if preposition zey (through, across) is appropriate in this specific expression, although it seems to be an instrumental preposition. Neither am I sure about its necessity (you've got cases, why use preposition?). I'd say your slogan should sound: Glojo mir ebdayo yacana dadey (or yacanaey dadey). In language with cases it is a good idea to present a table of prepositions sorted by cases. This way you may know what is the correct perposition to use in every grammatical case.
[edit] You need to make it all more consistent.
Revise it and rethink it. Rethink the idea of dropping original graphemes that English lacks (I know what pain can it be to write it, but one may produce keyboard layout for it, or a script that would reformat the yodification). All the yodification you use may be misleading, and may complicate the fresh students of this language. It has created complications for me. And I speak fluently three languages: Russian, Hebrew and English. They are of different linguistic groups, scripts, morphosintactic typology and have only a very small common vocabulary (mostly of somewhat religious words like halleluia and amen, and technical terms that derive from Latin). Even for me, with my knowledge of such diverse languages it was difficult to get used to the fact that things written like yoy, uy etc, are a single phoneme. As more phonemes have corresponding graphemes so better.
[edit] Now, guys you may curse me and spit on me for the critics I write, but...
Believe me I write it to help and not to annoy. I see the original author's idea as the idea of the language of thought. It won't be a language of thought if its spoken version is merely translation of words of some other language. It should use its own grammar and logics of expressions. Greeting word could be anything depending on your culture. In many cultures the word or expression used like that looses with time its original meaning. You should think about it carefully. The greeting could be some word that would mean glad to initiate conversation. In Unilingua it could be a combined in to a single word that has f, j, and d consonants (I guess). I want Unilingua to stay logical language.
[edit] P.S.
Are there any other sources on-line except this one for this language? Did you know that there is NO wikipedia article about Unilingua and Noubar Agapoff?!
[edit] 88.154.41.42 16:41, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Book rename
Should this book be renamed Mirad since it's not really on Unilingua, but a revision thereof? --Swift (talk) 02:04, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
