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Unilingua book

From:Richard Kennaway <jrk@...>
Date:Wednesday, August 23, 2000, 7:43
(Also posted to auxlang.)

Hi all.  Just passing through.

I recently happened to meet Kirk Sattley at a conference in Boston, and
he passed on to me a copy of the book "Unilingua", by Noubar Agopoff.
It is mentioned in Rick Harrison's bibliography.  I don't collect such
things myself, but I would like to find a good home for it.

It is dated 1965.  The pages are slightly yellowed with age but it is
otherwise in reasonable condition.

The book is in French, and describes the universal auxiliary language
Unilingua.  It has an unusual alphabet, drawing on the Roman alphabet
with many diacritics, plus a few letters from Cyrillic.  Spelling is
phonetic.  Vocabulary is constructed in an a priori but not
deterministic manner.  There are a number of principles governing the
choice of a word: each letter has an associated meaning, which one uses
to build up the desired meaning, but also there are requirements that
frequently used concepts should receive short words, and that the
spelling should (somehow) be mnemonic.  One of the claimed virtues of
Unilingua is its brevity compared with other languages.

The book consists of an introduction explaining the desirability of
such a language and the suitability of Unilingua to the task, chapters
on word formation, vocabulary lists arranged by topic, grammar, sample
texts in French and Unilingua, and a French-Unilingua dictionary.

Is there anyone who can provide a good home for this book?

-- Richard Kennaway, jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk, http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/
   School of Information Systems, Univ. of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.