The Representation of Korean and Other Altaic Languages in Artificial International Auxiliary Languages

Abstract

Korean and other Altaic languages are generally not well represented in artificial international auxiliary languages: the best known such languages (such as Esperanto and Ido) have borrowed almost nothing from them, instead almost exclusively using Indo-European languages as sources. In this paper I will present some auxiliary languages which have taken words and/or parts of their grammar from Altaic languages, looking at which items have been borrowed and in some cases what percentage of the vocabulary they account for. The languages discussed (most of which were created relatively recently) include Ardano, Dousha, Dunia, Konya, Kosmo, Kumiko, Lingwa de Planeta, Neo Patwa, NOXILO, Olingo, Pan-kel, Sambahsa-mundialect, Sona, and Unish. In the cases of most of these languages only a small proportion of the total vocabulary comes from Altaic languages. Further, some of the words said to have been taken from an Altaic language originally came from an Indo-European language. In addition, I will compare the proportion of Korean items to those taken from the other languages of the Altaic family. Overall Korean has been drawn upon less than Japanese, but (not surprisingly) more than Mongolian, Azerbaijani, and Uzbek. Most conclusions are tentative because the vocabularies of most of the auxiliary languages examined have not been fully developed and because often information about sources of words is not given.