These are the answers to questions I presume will be asked frequently. This hasn't existed long enough to learn if they actually are.
Nibasa is a constructed language. It was invented by Justin Kunimune in 2022 with the intention of becoming the language of international communication on Earth. This makes it unlike natural languages like English, French, Arabic, and Chinese, which all arose naturally over thousands of years.
I haven't made it yet, so none. I could probably get it up to the double-digits if I tried. Eventually, I wish billions of people could speak Nibasa.
Even tho Nibasa is not currently useful for communication or school credit, there are two reasons you might benefit from learning it.
it may be that you want to study a language and don't care which. this may be because you want to practice language learning; studies show that someone who has learned a second language can acquire a third or fourth more easily. or you may simply enjoy learning languages. since Nibasa is extremely easy to learn, it is an excellent choice in this regard.
if you want the world to have a universal second language, then learning Nibasa is how you can contribute directly. the more peolpe speak Nibasa, the more others will be incentivized to learn it. so if you believe in the mission, become an early-adopter!
There are also reasons a school teacher or administrator might want to introduce Nibasa to the curriculum. many schools teach students a foreign language not because they expect the students to live in a country where that language is spoken, but because learning a language is an inherently enriching experience. unfortunately, students rarely become proficient enough to actually use and retain the language after graduating. Nibasa is the perfect language in this regard.
teachers and students will be able to reach high levels of proficiency after only one year of study, allowing them to then go on to higher levels of study not usually attainable in a high school format, such as studying their other subjects in Nibasa. a language spoken with fluency is retained longer than one spoken with only a subset of the verb conjugations, so this skill is much more likely to last for years after high school than proficiency in a natural language. in addition, studies have shown that studying an easier language can make students more engaged and motivated about language learning, which enables children who normally struggle in school to achieve on the same level as their peers.
thus, even though there is no tangible benefit to knowing Nibasa, it's probably a more useful language to study for the many high school students who don't benefit from studying their second language anyway.
Nibasa is not based on any particular natural language. Its alphabet is a simplified version of the Latin alphabet, similar to the alphabets used in Spanish, Portuguese, German, Turkish, Swahili, Hausa, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and others. Its words come from all over the world, primarily from English, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Middle Chinese. Its grammar also borrows concepts from all over the world. For example:
- Overall sentence structure from Japanese and Korean
- Whole-root affixes from Hawaiian and Chinese languages
- Flexible parts-of-speech from English and Hawaiian
- Ambitransitive verbs from English
- Demonstrative system from French and German
- Demonstrative-based third-person pronouns from Japanese
- Yes/no question formation from Hindi and Urdu
- Yes/no question answer system from Mandarin
- Ordinal number system from Swahili
- Kinship terminology from Indonesian and Malaysian (with some modifications)
No, Nibasa cannot and should not replace existing native languages. Nibasa is meant to be the second language of all humans. It therefore seeks to replace widely spoken languages in certain contexts (such as English in scientific articles), but in the home and on the street, people will continue speaking their native languages as they do now.
Nibasa is a global language, and as such is based on the idea of wander-words, words that appear in many places around the world. The purpose of this is two-fold. First, it maximizes the number of people who know any given word. Second, it evens out the difficulty of learning Nibasa so that it doesn't advantage any one nationality.
In most cases, the Latin word is the most recognizable word for a given concept. For example, the Latin word "virus" is truly global; it's used in English, French, Russian, Turkish, Hindi, and Japanese, among others. But that's not always the case. For example, the Latin word "bellus", is barely used in any living language. Spanish prefers "lindo", English has "beautiful", and Russian has "krasnyj". The Chinese root "meiˣ", on the other hand, has a similar form across Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.
That's not to say that recognizability is the only factor that plays into which words are used in Nibasa. Other things, like length, ease of pronounciation, cultural significance, and how it affects the diversity of the lexicon are also considered. But recognizability is the most important determining factor.
While sign languages have many advantages over spoken languages for in-person communication, they have a major disadvantages in that there is no simple way to phonetically write a sign language. Since one of the primary media of international communication is written signage, a spoken language with a simple writing system is preferable as an international language.
Yes, but we use it in Nibasa because word recognizability is more important than easy pronounceability. In practice, learning to pronounce new sounds is rarely the limiting factor in learning a language. Unless there are large series of unusual sounds (looking at ye, Arabic and Mandarin), students can usually improve their pronounciation gradually over time while they study other aspects of the language. Those other aspects -- script, grammar, and vocabulary, are what tend to limit students' proficiency.
In the case of a constructed language, the script and grammar can easily be made very simple, so the vocabulary will always be the limiting factor (even the simplest constructed languages still have hundreds of words that must be memorized). One of the best ways to help students learn vocabulary faster is to use words that they already recognize. And in order to render words in a way that students can recognize, we need a decent number of letters. So even though a language without "r" is easier for many people to learn in theory, in practice, students aren't held back very much by not knowing how to pronounce it (they can temporarily substitute "l" or "z" without impacting communication too much), and the advantage that other students gain by being able to recognize words like "roket", "bazar", and "chakra" is more important.
Because it doesn't actually make the language easier to learn, and only leads to problems down the line. Learners can and do substitute unfamiliar letters with familiar ones when learning new languages even when there are minimal pairs between those two sounds. It leads to some confusion, but rarely causes misunderstandings.
Because of that confusion, tho, students are incentivized to keep working on their pronunciation until they can produce "r" reliably. If there are no minimal pairs between "r" and "l", then students in, for example, Myanmar, may be misled into thinking that they don't need to learn the difference, since as long as they and their classmates only use "l", there will never be a problem. This will lead to more confusion later on when they try to communicate with speakers outside of Myanmar.
Thus, it's better to include a few minimal pairs and cause some minor confusion early on in the classroom than to eliminate them and encourage speakers to create branching dialects.
Yes, but we allow them in Nibasa because word recognizability is more important than easy pronounceability (see the question about "r"). Most people can pronounce words that end in sonorants and voiceless obstruents. Those who can't can get by with epenthesis fairly well, and it makes many Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Chinese words more recognizable and more consise.
There is a balancing act to play between recognizablity and pronounceability. Most people cannot pronounce voiced obstruents at the ends of words, and Arabic is the only major word source that uses them. So the inconvenience of including them would be much greater than for other word-final consonants, and the benefit would be much less.
Tenuis occlusive obstruents in Mandarin are conventionally transcribed as voiced in Nibasa because Mandarin does not distinguish between tenuis and voiced sounds, and doing so matches the pinyin spelling better. Also, such sounds are often voiced in other Chinese and Chinese-influenced languages.
It depends on your definition of "sound". Many languages spell "y" and "i" using the same symbol because they are pronounced with the tongue and lips in the same position. However, most languages have two separate pairs of symbols for these sounds to indicate the length and the effect they have on the word's stress pattern. Nibasa uses the latter method because it makes it easier to figure out the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, and because it makes many English, Chinese, Arabic, and Bantu words more recognizable.
Most languages have at least one of /w/ or /v/, but few have both. The goal is to make words as recognizable as possible. That means matching native spellings as closely as possible when those native spellings are in the Latin alphabet. Con
between v and w, the choice is clear.
- Latin-influenced languages exclusively uses ⟨v⟩.
- the Arabic language uses /w/, but doesn't use the Latin alphabet. when Arabic words are spelld with the Latin alphabet in Turkish and Swahili, they tend to use both ⟨v⟩ and ⟨w⟩ respectively.
- Middle Chinese has /w/, which is spelld ⟨w⟩ in most Chinese-influenced languages, but none of them use the Latin alphabet as their primary script.
- Sanskrit languages tend to use both [v] and [w] as variations on /ʋ/, but don't use the Latin alphabet.
In Nibasa, every proper noun must be suffixed with a common noun that states what it is. Most natural languages don't do this as consistently as Nibasa does, but you see similar patterns in affixes like Arabic's "مدينة", Japanese's "国", and Malay's "bahasa". Enforcing these suffixes makes it more clear which nouns in a sentence are proper, and what they refer to. Consider the English pairs "Turkey" (a country) and "turkey" (a bird), or "Georgia" (a country) and "Georgia" (an American state). These similarities can cause confusion in English, but in Nibasa, suffixes like "desa" and "vilaya" clearly distinguish similar pairs.
Nibasa uses hyphens to separate morphemes in compound words. they are an intuitive way to associate words with each other and make sentences more visually interesting while maintaining readers' ability to easily pick out morphemes. while I don't know of any natural languages that use them this much, most that use Latin or Cyrillic alphabets use them to some extent.
The purely left-branching syntax simplifies the grammar, reducing the number of function words and confusing points such as:
- having both da and du (or de and su)
- Where in the sentence can a prepositional phrase appear? Before the subject? Between the subject and the verb? Between the verb and the object?
- Can an adjective take arguments? What about a participle?
For those who aren't aware, Esperanto has a system for deriving antonyms using the prefix "mal-". So rather than having, for example, two different roots for "hot" and "cold", Esperanto has one root -- "varm-" for "hot", and uses the compound stem "malvarm-" for "cold".
this system makes sense for a lot of reasons. it reduces the number of roots in the language substantially, which reduces the time required to learn it, and it allows the derivation of words that don't have common roots in natural languages, like ??? for "unwell".
The more common system of simply having separate roots also has advantages, though. it improves root recognition, while also avoiding the awkward task of deciding which in each pair gets to be a root.
It's not quite accurate to say that Nibasa has twice as many adjective roots as Esperanto. that's because for less common adjectives, Nibasa uses symmetric derivation: a noun like "rupa" will be prefixed with two common roots to form opposing compound adjectives. common examples include "bon-rupa" and "dus-rupa" for "good-looking" and "ugly", "dai-soni" and "peti-soni (sio-soni?)" for "loud" and "soft", "dai-pandu" and "peti-pandu" (sio-pandu?) for "steep" and "gentle", and "poli-mar" and "sau-mar" for "frequent" and "rare".
Participles are not necessary. Many languages have them, but many do not. Nibasa gets by with semantic suffixes, like zen, sei, and gu.
suffixes that convey only syntactic information (like "noun, subject") are challenging to learn if a student is unfamiliar with the concepts they encode, and are rarely useful as anything but a suffix. Suffixes that convey semantic information, on the other hand, are easy to conceptualize, and often double as standalone content words.