Page:Sambahsa - Complete Grammar.pdf/10

amount of time, even if the United States lose its hegemony. And personally, I think that English is a very beautiful language.

Despite all the critiques made, English still is the most widespread language in the globe. In practically all schools of the world with a minimum of infrastructure, the English language is taught. It's worth pointing out that, unlike English, no auxiliary language had the support of States and companies to propagate it on the globe. We know that, currently, a work will be much better exposed if it is made available in English, which ironically includes this grammar.

BUT WHY LEARN SAMBAHSA? WE ALREADY HAVE ESPERANTO

Because Sambahsa presents a different approach, it brings something new to the world of auxiliary languages. Esperanto is by far the most successful auxiliary language (for no saying “the only successful one”), with over 50,000 speakers at the worst estimates. To tell the truth, the language created by the Polish Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof has no actual competitors. Still, there are many other auxiliary languages because there are people not satisfied with Esperanto, if you are reading this grammar, most likely you are one of them.

Sambahsa has success in having the regularity – and facility – of an auxiliary language and the naturalness and native beauty of a national language. Sambahsa is as good as English or Portuguese for making poetry or music. Even the imported proper nouns and names of “exotic” things from other languages don't need, in most cases, to have its spelling or pronounce drastically changed to adequate the orthography of the language, the “difficulties” in importing these words will be the same that occurs in any language like English or Spanish.

Regarding its vocabulary, almost half of it is based on Proto-Indo-European, which covers a good percentage of the people of the world, because, in addition to European languages, it also represents speakers of Iranian languages (like Persian) and Indian ones (like Hindi). For reasons that I will explain later, Sambahsa relies on words from some European languages for more modern concepts, but also relies on contributions from other languages such as Arabic and Chinese as far as possible. It is not possible to simply collect words at random to guarantee supposed equality, an example is that it's much more practical to use part of the vocabulary of Greek and Latin to build technical and scientific words. They will say that speakers of non-Indo-European languages would be at a disadvantage, but many of these people learn an Indo-European language at some point in their lives, so Sambahsa will not be alien to them. Some will notice the small number of authentic contributions from African languages, but you have to understand that these languages had little impact on other languages outside Africa, differently from Arabic that influenced important languages like English, French, and Spanish.

This is a finished language, it means you don't have to worry whether what you're learned today will change in five years. What you write today in Sambahsa will be understood even in a century! I want to make this