Glosa


Glosa is an international auxiliary language based on a previous draft auxiliary called Interglossa. Glosa is an isolating language, which means that words never change form, and spelling is completely regular and phonetic.
As an isolating language, there are no inflections, so that words always remain in their dictionary form, no matter what function they have in the sentence. Consequently, grammatical functions, when not clear from the context, are taken over by a small number of operator words and by the use of word order.
Being an a posteriori language, Glosa takes most of its vocabulary from Greek and Latin roots, seen by the authors as international in a sense by their usage in science.

History

Glosa is based on the draft auxiliary language Interglossa devised by the scientist Lancelot Hogben in the empty hours of fire-watching in Aberdeen during World War II. Interglossa was published in 1943 as a draft of an auxiliary.
Ron Clark came across the handbook of Interglossa: a draft of an auxiliary about 1960. Then he met Professor Hogben with the aim of developing the language. They worked to refine it, in order to make it more easily usable in all possible forms of communication. Wendy Ashby joined the project in 1972. When Hogben died in 1975, most changes had already been discussed. Hogben and Clark had agreed that the language should have a phonetic spelling. This principle implied that the Greek CH, TH and PH now should be spelt K, T and F.
Finally a few further changes were introduced by Ron Clark and Wendy Ashby, who then gave the language the new name Glosa, and thus founded a new auxiliary language.
Until about 1979, Ashby and Clark tested the use of Glosa using local volunteers in the town in which they were living. During this period, the vocabulary and some details of sentence formation were developed and revised. They had moved to another town by the time they had published the first Glosa dictionary.
From 1987, the charity-status organisation GEO has promoted the teaching of Glosa as a second language in schools worldwide.
GEO’s official website was set up by Paul O. Bartlett in 1996, and it is managed at present by Marcel Springer. It provides the Glosa Internet Dictionary, as well as an introductory course, and other resources.

Unclear history

According to History behind Glosa, after Hogben’s death “a few further and trivial changes were introduced”. But there is no precise information about them, so it's not clear exactly which changes were made by Hogben and Clark, and which were made by Clark and Ashby.

Overview

In Glosa, words always retain their original form, regardless of their function in a sentence. Thus, the same word can function as a verb, noun, adjective or preposition. Glosa is thereby a completely analytic language: there are no inflections for noun plurals, verb tenses, genders, and so on – the words never change.
Grammatical functions are taken over by a limited number of operator words and by the word order. Subject–verb–object order is the standard word order, and "adjectives" usually precede "nouns", and the "verbs" follow the tense particles and the "adverbs".
Glosa is usually compared to two natural languages which are analytical in different degrees, Chinese and English. It is also similar to the auxiliary Lingua sistemfrater, also known as Frater, published in 1957 by the Vietnamese Phạm Xuân Thái. Frater is also isolating, has a similar vocabulary base, but a slightly different syntactical structure, and has no articles – where Glosa uses u/un for both “the” and “a”/“an”, or gendered pronouns.
Glosa is written with the Latin alphabet without special characters. There are no double vowels or consonants and pronunciation rules are simple and regular.
Most words in Glosa are taken from Latin and Greek roots. Glosa is thus an a posteriori language.
While aspects of Hogben’s Interglossa were explicitly inspired by the auxiliary Basic English, Glosa tends to work like normal English. Interglossa works with a small number of essential light verbs, which Hogben calls “verboids” or “verbal operators”, like the 18 verb operators of Basic English. In Glosa words from this special class can be elided if the context is clear.

Spelling and pronunciation

Glosa spelling is completely regular and phonetic: one spelling always represents one sound, and one sound is always represented by one spelling. With the sole exception of SC which represents the sound , every letter just represents one sound, and vice versa. Glosa is written with the Latin letters. The alphabet consists of the following letters, and their upper case equivalents:
Letterabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxz
IPA phonemekwks

Unlike several other auxiliary languages, Glosa uses the letters Q and X. C makes the “ch” sound in church. The “sh” sound in short is represented by the letter combination SC – the only digraph. As in many languages, J makes the “y”-sound found in yell or yak. G and S are always "hard". R should be trilled or "tapped", never uvularized.
The practice of pronouncing N before a velar sound as is generally non-preferred but is used commonly in order to simplify pronunciation. X may be pronounced at the start of a word but this is non-preferred.
Some foreign names may include non-Glosa letters in order to retain original spelling.

Vowels

The first pronunciation is the preferred one:
There are no diphthongs in Glosa. Where two or more vowels occur together they are pronounced separately.

Stress

The stress or accent should be placed gently on the vowel before the last consonant.

Word classes

Glosa contains two major groups of words:

Primitives

Primitives are the small number of basic function words present in most languages—these allow us to describe the relationships between the major concepts we convey. These are basically prepositions and conjunctions, such as: de , e , pre , supra , sub .

Substantives

Substantives here are the group of words that represents the more complex things, actions and descriptions present in a language, such as: via , kurso , hedo , vide , celera , tako ; oku . Please note that many of these words have multiple meanings, based on how they are used in a sentence, exempli gratia: "oku" can mean "eye", "optical", "to notice with the eyes", "see ", "perceive ", or "to peep".

Phrases and clauses

Phrases, the basic unit of recognizable meaning in Glosa, follow a Subject–Verb– order and noun phrases are "substantive final", which means that they start with the least important word, and are followed by additional words combining progressively to extend the meaning of the substantive, which comes last.

Parts of speech

Glosa words can often serve as more than one part of speech. Thus part of speech is a role that the word plays in a sentence, not a tightly-bound property of a word.

Personal pronouns

Glosa, unlike English, distinguishes between "you" about one person, which is tu, and about several people, which is vi.
The reflexive pronoun ”oneself” is se, the reciprocal pronoun alelo means ”each other”, and the emphatic auto is used for “self, own“.

Verbs

Most words can act as verbs, depending on their places in the sentence.
"Prior word" here means a word used immediately prior to the verb of the sentence or clause in order to demonstrate or affect its tense. For example:
Adjectives, like the rest of the language, are not inflected. They do not change to fit the tense, number, gender, formality, or etc. of the nouns that they modify. They generally precede the word that they modify. Sometimes an adjective's place determines its meaning:
To create "opposites", one just places "no-" as a prefix to the adjective. This usage is similar to that of the prefix "mal-" in Esperanto which gives the word the exact opposite meaning. So the Glosa usage below means "not beautiful". It is the equivalent of some of the uses on in- or un- in English.
Words used to ask or answer a question of who, where, what, when, why, how or how much. These words form a set in a semi-systematic manner with a particle of the compound indicating abstract quantity and the prefix/other particle indicating the specific function of the word.
Here are some examples. There are other ways to say the following correlatives, the table just shows the most basic and systematic of these:
Question
Indefinite
Very indefinite
Universal
Negative
qo-uno-ali-panto-nuli-
-ra qo-ra?
uno-ra
ali-ra
panto-ra
nuli-ra
-pe qo-pe?
uno-pe
ali-pe
panto-pe
nuli-pe
Individualqo?
uno
ali
panto
nuli, zero
-lo qo-lo?
uno-lo
ali-lo
panto-lo
nuli-lo
-mode qo-mode?, komo?
uno-mode
ali-mode
panto-mode
nuli-mode
-ka qo-ka?
uno-ka
ali-ka
panto-ka
nuli-ka
-te qo-te?
uno-te
ali-te
panto-te
nuli-te
-metri qo-metri?, qanto?
uno-metri
ali-metri
panto-metri
nuli-metri

In addition to the above, there is the prefix/beginning singu-, and the suffixes/endings -numera, -speci and -kron, which can be used in the same way as the above.
Qo horo? can also be used for “What time?” or “What is the time?”.

Demonstratives

The basic demonstratives used for indication are:
The demonstratives can also be used in the same way as the words in the table above: u-ci mode, u-la mode, u-ci ka, u-la ka, u-ci te, etc.
For “this time”, there's also nu, and for “that much/that many”, you can say tanto; for “that kind” talo.
To change a statement into an interrogative, qe is placed at the beginning of the sentence.

Prepositions

The prepositions of Glosa are here presented with their English translations, and with English example words containing cognates or the same roots in parenthesis, with the corresponding part italicized.
The numbers from 0–10 are: ze, mo, bi, tri, tet, pen, six, seti, ok, nona, deka. For 0, 4, 5, 7 and 8, there's also the longer forms zero, tetra, penta, septi and okto. Higher numbers are formed by combining the numerals in the number, and in some cases by proper names:
NumberGlosa nameExact translation
11mo-moone-one
12mo-bione-two
20bi-zetwo-zero
22bi-bitwo-two
100hekto hundred
101mo-ze-moone-zero-one
1.000kilo thousand
1.000.000miliona million

Note that some use centi, the older form of hekto, for “hundred”. Centi is now used as “hundredth” in accordance with the ISO standard usage.
Numbers placed after a noun will function as ordinal numbers: u bibli tri, “the third book”. Mo, bi and tri also means single, double and triple, respectively.

Vocabulary

Compound words

In order to form a composite word in Glosa, one just combines existing words. For example:
Therefore, a student is stude-pe, a male student is stude-an, a female student is stude-fe and a building where students study is a stude-do. Likewise a hospital is pato-do, literally meaning a house/building for the sick.
Meals can also be formed by noun-compounding:

Phrases and expressions

Generally, the following derivation rules apply when creating new words for Glosa. Some basic words are shortened.
Indefinite words remain as they are.
Latin words in the second declension become the nominative plural. Therefore:
Words built from the perfect-tense-radix become -i. Latin -io, -ionis are not changed to the ablative-ending but keep the nominatives -io.
The same occurs when deriving from Greek :
Occasionally the Greek aorist-root is taken instead of present-tense-root. Greek verbs become -o such as: skizo. Species names keep nominative.
Any time Greek CH, Y, RH, TH and PH occur they become K, I, R, T and F, respectively, in Glosa.

Sample texts

Language planning

The following is taken from a text on language planning by Lancelot Hogben, author of Glosas precursor Interglossa. First a sample with Glosa and English side by side:
And here continued as regular text, first in Glosa:
And the English translation of the last paragraph:

The Lord's Prayer

The following is the Lord's Prayer in Glosa, compared with an Esperanto and English version, respectively:
Glosa versionEsperanto versionEnglish

Na patri in urani:
na volu;
tu nomina gene honora,

tu krati veni e

tu tende gene akti
epi geo homo in urani.
Place
don a na nu-di na di-pani

e tu pardo na plu Mali akti;

metri na pardo mu;
qi akti Mali a na.

E ne direkti na a u proba;

sed libe na ab Mali.

Ka tu tena u krati, u dina

e un eufamo pan tem.

Amen.
Patro nia, kiu estas en la ĉielo,

Via nomo estu sanktigita.

Venu Via regno,
plenumiĝu Via volo,

kiel en la ĉielo,

tiel ankaŭ sur la tero.

Nian panon ĉiutagan donu al ni hodiaŭ.

Kaj pardonu al ni niajn ŝuldojn,

kiel ankaŭ ni pardonas al niaj ŝuldantoj.

Kaj ne konduku nin en tenton,

sed liberigu nin de la malbono.

Amen.
Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come,

your will be done,

on earth as in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.

Forgive us our sins

as we forgive those who sin against us.

Save us from the time of trial

and deliver us from evil.

For the kingdom, the power,

and the glory are yours

now and for ever.

Amen.

Notice that in Glosa the word ”sky” is derived from Greek while Esperanto uses a Latin derived word.