the language UNI

Ms. Elisabeth Wainscott attended high school in Russia during World War 1. Later she lived in Shanghai, Hawaii, and California. During her retirement she visited many parts of the world and "became convinced of the necessity for an easy to memorize, concise, `Universal language.'" Her attempt to design such a language was published in a book entitled UNI, the new international language (Cleveland, Ohio: Uniline Co., 1974).

J. Klein, in the introduction of this book, dismissed Esperanto with a wave of his editorial pen: "Esperanto is, we believe, too complex for memorization by the average person. Esperanto has had its day in court; the time is now right for introduction of the simpler UNI."

Dr. John L. Lewine, ex-president of the New York Esperanto Society, wrote the foreword. "I found the grammatical structure very simple and easy to learn, much simpler than in many other constructed languages," he wrote. "My actual experience with UNI has demonstrated that it does permit adequate expression of simple concepts."

The UNI alphabet contains 20 letters, always written in upper-case form. Each letter represents only one sound. The vowels have the usual Romance-language sounds, with the possible exception of A. Ms. Wainscott says A should be pronounced like the first "A" in "America," a rather vague example, so one has to wonder if she really intended it to be a schwa or more like "a" in "father." The consonants are B, D, F, G (always "hard"), H, K, L, M, N, P, R, S, T, V, Z. Other consonants occur in proper nouns and "international" words. The author gives no clue about which syllable should be stressed in a polysyllabic word, nor does she explain how vowel-pairs in words like HIIA and IUN should be pronounced.

The numerals zero through nine are: ZE, UN, TO, TI, KA, SI, SA, ET, PO, NI. There is no word for "ten;" it is expressed as UNZE. "One hundred" is rendered as UNZEZE ("one zero zero"). The names of the months are created by prefixing "I" onto the numerals one thorugh twelve: IUN = January, ITO = February, etc.

The grammar of UNI has been made as simple as Ms. Wainscott deemed possible. All nouns are three-letter words and form their plurals by suffixing "I," e.g. KAF = a drink, KAFI = beverages; HII = a sneeze, HIII = sneezes. Adjectives, adverbs, possessive pronouns and ordinal numerals are all created with the suffix "-US": TI-US = third, ERV-US = nervous, UK-US = his.

All verbs end with A in the present tense, and suffixing A onto a noun creates a verb, for example SOM = the sleep, a sleep; SOMA = is sleeping. However, there are many cases in which the author has made exceptions to this pattern; ALB means "half" but ALBA means "praise," ENT means "distance" but ENTA means "is renting (something)," FIL means "a bicycle" but FILA means "feels," PUL means "a wheel" but PULA means "to pull." The past tense of a verb is formed by changing the final A to AT, and the future tense ends with AM. Nothing is said about participles or a passive voice, so there is officially no way to convert the verb "hide" into the adjective "hidden."

Three prefixes are used to expand the usefulness of the vocabulary: BA- is augmentative, BE- is diminutive, and O- either indicates negation or the direct opposite of something, depending on context. Compound words are hyphenated, and the chief radical appears last: ZUB (tooth) + MAN (man) gives us ZUB-MAN = dentist; HAHA-MAN = clown; SIK-MAN = patient.

The book lists 1054 UNI words, divided into a basic vocabulary of 464 words and an "advanced" lexicon of 590 vocables. The words have been borrowed from many sources: VAK (meaning "blind") is Hungarian, DUMA ("to think") is from Russian, and PIG (meaning "pork" or "pig") is from English. Others appear to be utterly synthetic: TEB means "bird," OPT means "young," UD means "I, me."

The vocabulary has been kept small by two techniques: imaginative use of the prefixes, and making some words very ambiguous so that they cover more semantic territory. DAN means "damage," and BA-DAN is defined as "war;" SAB means "sand," and we are told that BA-SAB ("big sand") means "beach." For examples of ambiguous words, consider these: GAF can mean "grass" or "green," LUM can mean "light" (visible electro-magnetic radiation) or "a lamp." There are also several homophones: DOM means "residence" and DOM means "ceiling," DONA means "give" and DONA means "allow." In spite of this severe semantic fogginess, Dr. Lewine in the book's foreword solemnly states that UNI would be useful "as an international set of word-symbols for computer translation."

The book gives a few samples of UNI text. Here is an excerpt from one of them, followed by a literal translation:

The book gave the following address and phone number for those who wished to contact the UNI movement: Uniline Company, 23945 Mercantile Road, Cleveland, Ohio 44122; phone (216) 831-0450. Mail sent to this address is now returned as undeliverable, and the phone number is now occupied by a fax machine.

TOP-US O-GE SIT, USE LUN LEVA.
HEL DEKA O-VIV-US GAN DA KOVI.
IN UKI-US HUZI, ERS-MANI REVA.
UD ZITA DA OGL ETO UVO BOVI.
TATAT-US SEMI OF AVE SOMA.

Above the dirty city, a white moon rises.
Frost covers the dead garden and flowers.
In their houses, peasants dream.
I sit and watch these gray boxes.
Hidden seeds of the future are sleeping.