Sambahsa (constructed pronunciation: [samˈbaːsa]) or Sambahsa-Mundialect is an international auxiliary language (IAL) and worldlang devised by French linguist Olivier Simon. It is based on the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) and has a complex grammar. The language was first released on the Internet in July 2007; prior to that, the creator claims to have worked on it for eight years. According to a study addressing recent auxiliary languages, "Sambahsa has an extensive vocabulary and a large amount of learning and reference material". The first part of the name of the language, Sambahsa, is composed of two words from the language itself, sam and bahsa, which mean 'same' and 'language', respectively. Mundialect, on the other hand, is a fusion of mundial 'worldwide' and dialect 'dialect'. Sambahsa tries to preserve the original spellings of words as much as possible and this makes its orthography complex, though still kept regular. There are four grammatical cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Though based on PIE, Sambahsa borrows a good proportion of its vocabulary from other language families, such as Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian, Swahili and Turkish.
Phonology Sambahsa's phonology has little to do with Proto-Indo-European phonology, though the majority of its vocabulary comes from PIE. The changes from PIE are not regular, since the creator of Sambahsa has tried to avoid homophones, which would have become common after the elimination of some PIE sounds like laryngeals or some aspirated consonants. Unlike some auxlangs like Esperanto, the orthography of Sambahsa is complex yet regular and consists only of the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet. This system was chosen to preserve the recognizability of words taken from West-European languages, where orthography plays a key role. For example, according to the rules of Sambahsa, bureau is pronounced as in French, and point as in English. Sambahsa's phonemic inventory has 22 consonants and nine vowels (excluding the lengthened forms of these vowels). To help language learners, and because IPA symbols cannot be written with all keyboards, a special simpler system has been developed, called Sambahsa Phonetic Transcription, or SPT. Compared to other conlangs, Sambahsa words are short, often as short as English words, and highly consonantic. This latter point is in accordance with the PIE background of Sambahsa, where roots have often a consonant-vocal-consonant structure.
Consonants
Vowels
Stress Sambahsa's stress rules are complex but regular, and tend to follow what is often found in German or Italian. This predictability implies that all words with the same orthography are pronounced and stressed the same way as each other. Thus, for example, while German Präsident and Italian presidente are stressed on the "ent" syllable, Sambahsa president is stressed on the "i", since president can also mean "they preside", and a final "ent" never bears the stress. This regularity of accentuation can be compared with English president and to preside, two words that bear the stress on different syllables, though they share the same origin.
Grammar
Declensions In Sambahsa, declensions are only compulsory for pronouns. The declensions of these pronouns (demonstrative/interrogative and relative/personal) are mostly parallel, and often show similarities with their Proto-Indo-European ancestors. Thus, in all Sambahsa declensions, the neuter nominative and accusative are identical, as it was the case in PIE. There are identical forms for the relative and interrogative pronouns, as well as for the third person pronoun and the definite article (the in English). Sambahsa has two numbers (singular and plural; the dual number of PIE has not been preserved) and four grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, neuter, and undetermined. This last gender, which is an innovation from PIE, is used when a noun of uncertain or unknown gender is referred to, and, in the plural, for groups containing elements of different genders. The creator of Sambahsa introduced this non-PIE element to avoid the "gender" dispute found in Esperanto. Gender is attributed in Sambahsa according to the "true nature" of the noun referred to, as English speakers do with he, she and it. Sambahsa has four grammatical cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive; however, their attribution tries to be as logical as possible, and not arbitrary as in many modern Indo-European languages. The nominative is the case of the subject, and the form under which words are given in dictionaries. Except for verbs describing a movement or a position (where the appropriate prepositions ought to be used), all transitive verbs must introduce the accusative case in the first place, before an eventual dative case. However, the dependent clause of indirect speech is considered as a direct object, leading to verbs introducing an indirect object, even if there is no visible direct object. Compare:
Is mi antwehrdt od is ne gwehmsiet cras, 'He answers (to) me that he won't come tomorrow' Is ne mi hat antwohrden, 'He hasn't answered (to) me' In Sambahsa, all prepositions trigger the accusative. The genitive indicates possession, and is used after adjectives that can introduce a dependent clause. Compare:
Som yakin od is ghehdsiet kwehre to, 'I'm sure that he'll be able to do that' Som yakin eysen (genitive plural) imkans, 'I'm sure of his abilities' For substantives and adjectives, there are declined "free endings" (i.e. non-compulsory) used most often in literary context for euphonics or poetry. This system is inspired by the euphonic endings (ʾiʿrāb) found in Modern Standard Arabic.
Conjugation In Sambahsa, all verbs are regular, except ses ('to be'), habe ('to have'), and woide ('to know', in the meaning of French savoir or German wissen). Sambahsa verbs are indicated in dictionaries not under their infinitive form, but their bare stem, because the whole conjugation can be deduced from the form of this stem. The main tenses of Sambahsa are present and past, but many other tenses can be obtained through the use of affixes or auxiliary verbs. Sambahsa uses the following endings, which are close to those found in many Indo-European languages.
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