Page:Sambahsa - Complete Grammar.pdf/7

 INTRODUCTION

Sambahsa Mundialect is an auxiliary language created by the French Dr. Olivier Simon and launched on the internet on July 2007. Its base is Proto-Indo-European, a reconstructed language spoken about 5000 years ago, whose daughter languages are widespread from Southern Russia up to the British Isles and India. Sambahsa also counts with many contributions from other languages, especially Arabic, but also Chinese, Indonesian, and many others.

As it is an auxiliary language, Sambahsa is much easier than any national language like Spanish or German, but Sambahsa is a bit more challenging if it's compared to other auxiliary languages because it is a bit complicated at the beginning. However, after that, the learning process shows itself incredibly simple and the advantages of its complexity will make all the effort be worth it, especially for expressing the thought and translation.

Before we go any further, let me explain why I use the term “national language” to refer to languages like English and Spanish instead of “natural language”. I speak “national language” because there is no global generic version of a language, many non‑anglophones learn the English from either the United States or England. In the same way, many people study either the Spanish language from Spain or the one from a Latin American country. I know, at first, you can study variants from different countries, but your speech will not seem natural if you mix words, pronunciations, and ways of speaking from different cultures, so you will have to choose the variant of a country sooner or later. Regarding the problematic of the term “natural language”, it is clear that languages like English and Spanish are natural, in no way am I denying this, even an illiterate person can communicate in his native language. But these languages have a certain degree of artificiality, otherwise, we would not spend years in elementary and high school studying our language, not to mention that even those who have finished school still make minor spelling and grammar mistakes. I avoid using the expression “natural language”, because I would have to speak – explicitly or not – of its opposite, the “artificial language”. Yes, Sambahsa is an artificial language, but if I say “Sambahsa is an artificial language”, many people may understand that Sambahsa would not sound natural, which would be wrong, as the process of using Sambahsa is the same as using Spanish or French, with the difference that you would not need to worry about the constant irregularities of these national languages.

With what the language looks like? The interesting aspect of Sambahsa is its naturalness, you don't see it as a constructed language, but as a national language like any other. As Dave MacLeod has said in his preface for the book The Grammar Of Sambahsa-Mundialect In English, “I always imagined Sambahsa to be an example of a language that could have existed somewhere around present-day Armenia, where a kingdom using a descendant of Proto-