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on August 23, 2007 at 7:24:53 pm
 

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日本語 / Español / Français / Русский / 中文 / Neo Patwa


 

 

Neo Patwa is a new international language, designed to be a pidgin to be shared by people around the world.

 

In the world of today, English is often used as an "auxiliary international language," but it is not ideal for a number of reasons. The sounds are difficult, and the grammar is complicated and irregular. There are many words that have almost the same meaning, but are used in different situations. And in addition, the use of English gives native speakers of English an unfair advantage over others in international situations.

 

Neo Patwa, a constructed language or conlang, is designed to overcome these problems. Neo Patwa is made to be easily spoken and understood by people around the world. It does not use sounds that are difficult to pronounce by people of different language backgrounds. The grammar is based on Creole languages, a form of contact language which tend to be simple and regular. The forms of words never change (there are no inflections), making it easy to learn. The vocabulary is small but versatile. And the words are chosen from real languages, such as English, Chinese, Hindi, Swahili, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Indonesian, Korean, and Japanese. So when you learn Neo Patwa, in fact you are learning words that are already in use by people from different cultures around the world.

 

Finally, an important point about Neo Patwa is that it is designed to evolve, shaped by the users. It is an evolutionary project. The overall idea behind the language is that it should become a "creative synthesis" of the people of the world, taking the best of various languages. The basic ideas are universal, but there is room for it to grow within that framework. Neo Patwa is one blueprint, but it is only an example of what the eventual world language will be. Building the world language is something that we can do together as speakers of the many languages of humanity.

 

 

Neo Patwa

 

This provides most of the information on the language that was originally called Dunia Patwa.

 

(Starting Materials)

 

(Other Things)

 

Just as a note, these are not official materials and may be outdated. I will try to keep them up-to-date, but please use the information in (Starting Materials) primarily.

 

 

Simplified Phonology

 

This section describes a simplified phonology (without voiced/voiceless distinctions), and a vocabulary list based on it.

 

 

Questions

1. Isn't it limiting to have such a small vocabulary?

2. Wouldn't it be easier to just have everybody in the world learn English?

 

Links

 

The two following projects are of special significance to the creation of Dunia Patwa: the Mulivo international vocabulary project, organized by Risto Kupsala, and the LangX project, organized by Antony Alexander.

 

Acknowledgements

 

A lot of people helped me with this project, but in particular I should acknowledge the many contributions of Risto Kupsala, who (in addition to providing a lot of impetus through the Mulivo project) also helped a lot through our discussions while working on another language project together (Gaja/Pangaia). Florent Garet also gave valuable suggestions during that project. And I also have to acknowledge the contribution of Antony Alexander, who gave me a lot of encouragement at the beginning and introduced me to what is going on in the auxlang community.

 

In addition to many people who helped through advice, discussions, and suggestions, I would like to mention those who helped with other languages: Dimitry Ivanov (Russian), Florent Garet (French).

 

 

Comments / Learning More

 

If you have comments or criticisms, send them to the author.

 

If you are interested in learning more, please join the discussion group and feel free to try out Neo Patwa or ask questions.

 

There is also a blog here.

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