Montsim
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'''Montsim''' (from Italian '''mondo''' = world and [[Quechua]] '''simi''' = language) is a full-fledged IAL – short for International Auxiliary Language – launched in late 2007 by '''Jorge de Oliveira''' (born 1955) a Brazilian teacher, translator and language geek, after approximately 35 years of research on over 400 languages from every part of the world. Oliveira created his first rudimentary a priori project at the age of 16 after studying French, English, Spanish, Latin and Greek for five years. Two years later he joined the Esperanto Movement, but soon started working on a new a posteriori project while delving into comparative and historical linguistics. Nearly 1,000 language books, scads of material gathered from the Internet and years on end of untiring work made it possible for him to finally develop Montsim to his satisfaction.
==Technicalities==
* As for word order, Montsim is a typical VSO (Verb - Subject - Object) language, like Classical Arabic, the Insular Celtic languages and Hawaiian.
* It has a minimalistic grammar, lacking the following features often found in natural tongues and in other planned languages: diacritics, grammatical gender and number, cases, definite and indefinite articles, synonyms, verb conjugation (tenses, moods etc.), nominal and verbal agreement, relative pronouns, conjunctions, coordinate and subordinate clauses, passive voice, indirect speech.
==Montsim's strong points:==
* Word position is fixed and clear and stress is completely regular
* The grammar has few rules
* The alphabet is small and perfectly phonetic
* The vocabulary choice is fully democratic
* The lexicon contains only 3,000 words, mostly made up of one- syllable roots
* Word building is simple, based on juxtaposition and affixation.
==Montsim FAQ==
===Why learn a conlang?===
The notion that creating conlangs is just a silly, pointless hobby of eggheads or weirdos is widespread, but a huge number of ordinary people and linguists alike are involved in it, with serious intentions and purposes. It cannot be denied, though, that there are actually too many conlang projects available, most of them
* Mere imitations of natural languages, mostly European ones
* Not genuinely international
* Not very expressive
* Too artificial, often poorly planned
Montsim is extremely simple and expressive, fully neutral and free for all to use, pledging no allegiance to any country and having no sponsors or connections whatsoever with political, religious or economic groups.
It is not meant to be used in science, technology or sophisticated literature, but rather in simple, casual/informal conversation and texts.
===Why such a small vocabulary?===
Montsim lacks synonyms and has a vocabulary of approximately 3,000 basic words, but one can make many thousands more and say everything they like by means of its simple but logical, totally regular word-building system.
===Why aren't Montsim's words easily recognizable?===
Montsim's vocabulary was drawn from nearly 100 different languages. If, for example, most words were easily recognized by speakers of European languages, that would seem or mean that the author (either on purpose or inadvertently) privileged Europeans.
===Why does Montsim lack so many important grammatical features?===
Just because this or that exists in my native language or yours it doesn't necessarily mean that our languages are better or more precise than everybody else's.
* Sumerian had no conjunctions
* Verb tenses don't exist in Chinese
* There are no articles in Russian, Japanese and Latin
* English adjectives do not agree in gender or number with nouns
* A number of English words used for people (friend, boss, teacher, doctor) have no special feminine form
* Many languages do not use a plural noun after a number higher than one
* English and Russian have no diacritics
* The Hebrew alphabet has no vowels
==Example Sentences==
{| class="wikitable" border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"
|- style="background:#dfdfdf;" |
! Montsim !! English
|-
| 'Seretę mik jus.' || 'I love you'
|-
| 'Imę luy novi makin.' || 'He/she/they has/have a new car'
|-
| 'Karę mik nan sak?' || 'What do/did/will I do?'
|-
| 'Nan ors hin?' || 'What time is it now?'
|-
| 'Ar imę jus makin?' || 'Do you have a car?'
|-
| 'Sni imę jus kot.' || 'You don't have a home.'
|-
| 'Salam po jus!' || 'Peace be with you!'
|}
== External links ==
* [http://www.montsim.proboards105.com The Montsim Community]
* [http://montsim.angelfire.com/MontsimGrammar.pdf Montsim Grammar] (English Only)
== Related links ==
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* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language Conlang Article on Wikipedia]
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAL About IAL's]
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto Esperanto Article on Wikipedia]
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constructed_languages Conlang List on Wikipedia]
* [http://www2.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/conlang.html Richard Kennaway's Conlang List]
* [http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/conlang.html The Conlang Mailing List]
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