F.A.Q.
Frequently Asked Questions
What do all those terms mean?
To make sure everyone is on the same page, here are some common terms that will be used throughout this website:
Conlang - Short for "constructed language." Refers to any language that was consciously constructed rather than arising naturally. Natural languages can similarly be referred to as natlangs.
Auxlang - Short for "international auxiliary language." Refers to any language used for international communication for people who do not share a first language. Usually used to refer to conlangs designed for this purpose, rather than any language used for international communication (e.g. English).
A priori - Latin for "from the former." Within the context of conlangs, it refers to languages whose vocabularies are not based on existing languages. The opposite is a posteriori ("from the latter").
Oligosynthetic - Classification of languages with the highest degree of synthesis, meaning that words can be strung together to a degree higher than is found in any natural language. Generally also implies a relatively small vocabulary.
Why did you make this language? Aren't auxlangs a doomed concept?
The main reason I made Dasopya was, frankly, because I was unsatisfied with the current oligosynthetic auxlangs out there.
I'm not really a linguist; my primary occupation is a designer, but this design issue is one that I've long wanted to tackle. I personally do not see a true international auxiliary language taking off in the near future. However, I hope to set a new standard for what an a priori oligosynthetic auxlang would look like, since to me, that is what the ideal auxlang would be. If the language picks up, has speakers, and gains an audience, I would consider that a happy bonus.
I personally see auxlangs as an ongoing worldwide experiment of sorts, and the best I can ask for is that Dasopya becomes a piece in that experiment. I want it to fuel discussion, whether that is to inspire future works or be a small footnote in a sea of languages that never took off.
As you may notice from the next questions, Dasopya was made with many compromises of sorts. It was made to address common auxlang critiques, but in the process it never fully commits to its original ideas (my previous language Taynmoga did this as a comparison, though it resulted in being much less usable). Whether or not it finds success, there should be parts of it that say something about auxlangs as a whole.
In other words, it doesn't need to become a worldwide language. My only real goal is to reignite these ideas in people again.
Why make an a priori auxlang?
Auxlangs are meant for anyone in the world to be able to learn and speak. No matter how universal you try to make the vocabulary, there will be biases towards one or more languages. This can create issues for learnability, but against worldlangs (languages that use a spread of worldwide vocabulary), it's mainly for arguments of ideals -- an international language should not create unfair advantages for any speaker.
How are you tackling the issues of a priori auxlangs?
An a priori language makes sense for things like fictional alien languages, since you don't want it to be recognizable, but for auxlangs, it has been rather unpopular. Few a priori auxlangs have become popular even within the conlang space (arguably, it's only really Kotava) since people gravitate towards what's familiar to them.
The initial intimidation is what I want to circumvent, since learning vocabulary past that is essentially the same as learning any foreign language, minus the cognates. This has multiple parts:
1) Restricting the number of words
With less words to memorize, the vocabulary is less intimidating. This naturally led into the language being oligosynthetic, since word synthesis is the best way to maximize a limited vocabulary.
2) Restricting the length of words
Every word is 2 syllables or less, which also shortens the amount that needs to be memorized. This was primarily done to shorten compound word lengths, but doubles as a helpful piece here.
3) Sorting words by phonology
The second syllable of all 2-syllable words correspond to what the word is related to, which is meant to assist memorization.
4) Using the phonology of natural languages
While I consider Dasopya to be an a priori language, many words still borrow their sounds from sound symbolism studies and natural languages. For example, the "s" in "musu" comes from the English word "sleep." However, that's only to make words "feel" familiar (and as a consequence, less intimidating); the word itself is still completely unrecognizable to an English speaker.
I would challenge speakers of any language to actually find words that are recognizable without context -- if ones are found, I would have no issues with modifying them (though of course, it is inevitable that some words will happen to resemble words from some languages due to the limited phonology).
Examples of words from Dasopya: koko, lase, kuto, podo, byu, kupa
Examples of words from Globasa, an a posteriori language: myaw, abil, vino, suki, lil, vole
Why make an oligosynthetic auxlang?
I believe it's the best way to maximize the vocabulary. An a priori vocabulary means everyone has to learn everything from scratch, so the simplest way to circumvent the difficulty is to make the vocabulary smaller, and to make the words freely able to combine with each other. I also have a soft spot for the idea since it was part of my original language concept before I even knew conlangs existed.
While a small vocabulary might not solve as many issues as it may seem, the biggest issue plaguing auxlangs is convincing people to learn them, so I would consider this a worthy trade-off. I also feel that having a more basic minimalistic language makes it fit better as a language to work alongside existing languages rather than replace them.
How are you tackling the issues of oligosynthetic auxlangs?
A priori auxlangs may be unpopular, but there are essentially no arguments for any oligosynthetic auxlang garnering any sort of fame. I personally feel that biggest issue is that these languages suffered from a distinct lack of good marketing. This is a common issue for conlangs, but especially for the best oligosynthetic contenders.
I do not feel that there is an inherent issue with oligosynthetic languages that makes them unusable. The largest issue is circumventing a smaller vocabulary, but there is no well-defined restriction on how small an oligosynthetic language's vocabulary must be to still be considered oligosynthetic. Some are as small as a few dozen words, while others reach above 500 -- in order to maximize expressiveness against the doubts of possible speakers, Dasopya has a word count that's higher than the average oligosynthetic language (currently aiming for about 800).
The grammar also includes a few rules that will lower word length when specificity isn't required. Roots are small, sentences are pro-drop, and words can be stretched to fit different contexts, meaning that a full compound word isn't needed to express something every time. Sentence particles also assist in making sentence structure more concrete, since words are so multi-purpose.
Why 800 words?
toki pona can be a rather controversial language within the auxlang community -- some people think ~130 words is too little for communication, some people think it's perfectly enough, but to me there's only one takeaway: if I want my language to be less controversial as an auxlang, I need more words! The biggest oligosynthetic languages I read about (e.g. Kah) hovered around 300-400 words, but I considered my upper limit to be 1,000 words, which was how many Mini-Linga had -- a language that considered itself minimalistic but not oligosynthetic.
Taynmoga, my first attempt, had about 450 words, but even as I approached the limit I realized how difficult it actually was to fit everything I wanted to. I do think it'd be possible to make a fully usable oligosynthetic language with <500 words, but since my goal was less for minimalism alone and more for balancing it with usability, I wanted something that was more comfortable for speakers.
According to an informal interview I had with a Mini-Linga speaker, they never found any issues with the word limit, and I felt it was possible to compress the language due to the Esperanto-style inversion prefix along with the higher reliance on compounds. For example, Mini has separate words for big and small, while Esperanto just says granda (big) and malgranda (not-big). If I hypothetically took every Mini word and removed every opposite, that would definitely result in a language with less than 1,000 words, but I also didn't want to just make a Mini-ido.
Either way, the reason I wanted less than 1,000 words was mainly for marketing reasons. I want the language to not feel intimidating to learn, and word count can contribute to that. While 1,000 is definitely minimalistic, it may seem intimidating to the layman, so having less than 4 digits is enough to feel like a significantly smaller amount. 500 became my lower bound after Taynmoga, while 1,000 was my upper bound, so with an initial goal of 700-800 words, I settled on about 800 after I passed 700 words!
What languages are Dasopya based on?
The biggest influences were the conlangs Globasa, toki pona, and Mini-Linga.
Globasa is my favorite contender for a world-wide auxlang since it's very well-made. The documentation and tutorials are accessible and thorough, and being created by a linguist, I felt comfortable using a lot of its concepts as being well-researched.
toki pona is technically not an auxlang, but a minimalist artlang that's well-loved by many, including me. While arguable, it can be considered the baseline of what's required for a working language, so I took that and some concepts of minimalism that I felt would be helpful in an auxlang.
Mini-Linga is a very well-designed auxlang with about 1,000 words, so it had a large influence in the definitions I chose, being a similarly-sized language. I took heavy inspiration from its grammar, since it's possibly my favorite across all auxlangs. The primary drawback is that the vocabulary leans heavily towards European languages, so I tried my best to counteract that with the other influences.
Many features were carried over from my previous conlangs Kaliwe and Taynmoga, but those could be considered prototypical versions of Dasopya.
Esperanto and Kah had notable influence on the vocabulary, and Japanese on the grammar. Many languages influenced the phonology of the vocabulary.
Why have loanwords?
As an a priori language, Dasopya should ideally have 0 words that come from any existing languages, but in practice, that's simply impossible. For example, if you want to refer to a person's name, you necessarily have to take that into the language directly. If someone's name is Hope, it would be ridiculous and rude to say, "oh, 'hope' in Dasopya is 'kobi,' so in Dasopya we'll call you 'Kobi' from now on." Their name must be brought into the language directly, even if spelling/pronunication has to modify it slightly to fit within phonetics.
While not strictly necessary, it's also helpful for a minimalistic language to have a marker for loaned words, so that a name like "Kai" wouldn't be confused with "kay" (the question marker), especially since it would introduce homophones when the base vocabulary has none. Dasopya chose the simplest route, which is adding the prefix "o" to mark a name so it's clear that it's not using the base vocabulary -- "oKay" would be hypothetical Kai's name in Dasopya.
Similarly, words like country names are better to be borrowed. A word could be invented for each country, but would any country like that? If I created an essentially random word like "Geduto" for France, would that be something that the majority of the country would be perfectly OK with using and rallying behind? That would also create ~200 separate words that every Dasopya speaker would have to memorize with no basis on reality, nor the countries' preferences. For reference, even Kotava borrows country names, despite being an a priori language with over 17,000 roots. Just like names, I find it more logical that they be borrowed based on the country's own preference.
Finally, for the most grey area, there are universal words. Many words are essentially universal across all languages, and since Dasopya is 1) only a priori for cultural neutrality, and 2) designed to be generally practical for world-wide adoption as a simple universal language, it would contradict both of these goals to create new words for words that are already known by the majority of the population. These are words like "chocolate" (which most likely spread due to large amounts of trade) and "bus" (which is a recent invention in one country that other countries would not have a name for). These words usually have very similar phonologies across languages, so that it could most likely be recognized even within Dasopya's own version -- even if not, it would be much easier to memorize than an entirely new word.
While I do think this logic is sound, arguments could be made for words that are near-universal but not truly universal. For example, "vanilla" has a very similar form across: English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Arabic, Persian, Swahili, Hindi, Telugu, Japanese, Korean, and others -- but not in Chinese, which happens to be the second-most spoken language on Earth. There could be space made for these words in the base vocabulary, but for now, they will be kept as loanwords. Of course, as with other non-name loanwords, they can be expressed using compounds, but there will just be a bit more ambiguity.