History of Pandunia

Pandunia is a multifaceted language, and different people tell different stories about how it came to be. Probably the most interesting story says that it began many, many centuries ago (maybe already before the common era) as a trade language along the Silk Road. This theory is not as fabulous as it might first sound. The grammar of Pandunia actually is similar to trade languages, pidgins and creoles, and its phonetics and basic vocabulary sound like a compromise between those of the great languages along the Silk Road.

Origin in imitative words

Many of the most basic words in Pandunia phonetically imitate the sound, which is made by the thing or action that they describe. For example, the word for eating is yam and it imitates the sound of taking a bite. First your mouth is closed, then your tongue glides – producing the y sound – as you open it wide – producing the a sound – and finally you close your lips – producing the m sound – but your tongue is pressed low by the food in your mouth.

Other imitative words work like that, too. The word for agreement, aha, is naturally uttered when you nod, and the word for disagreement, e'e, is uttered when you shake your head. The cry of pain is ai because, when you are hit by a sudden pain, first your mouth opens wide (producing the a sound), and then it tightens into a grimace (producing the i sound). It's easy to imagine where the following words come from: aci ('to sneeze'), glut ('to swallow') haha ('to laugh'), hihi ('high-pitched laughter').

Some imitative words come from the early childhood. When a baby is offered food with a spoon, they will either accept it by opening their mouth – producing the ya sound – or refuse it by closing their mouth tight – producing a kind of nnn or ne sound. These gestures and sounds are universal. This is where the Pandunia words ya ('yes') and ne ('no') ultimately come from.

Some words imitate the sound of an animal. Identifying animals by the sound they make is one of the first things all children learn to do in their language. People hear the cry of a cat almost universally as meaow ~ miau (in the spelling of Pandunia). If someone points to a distance and says meaow, they probably want to tell you that there is a cat. So the word meaow evokes the concept of a cat, and therefore it can serve as the phonetic symbol i.e. the word for 'cat'. Pandunia is not alone with this idea! The word for 'cat' is 猫 (māo) in Chinese, 貓 (maau) in Cantonese, and mèo in Vietnamese. There are imitative words for animals in every language, including also English words, like cock (rooster), crow, cuckoo, and cockatoo.

Yet other words imitate the sound that is heard when some action is done. You hear an abrupt sound, like dik, when you poke something with a finger – therefore the Pandunia word for 'pointing' (with a finger or in general) is dik. Other words for different ways of poking are pik ('to pierce' as with a needle), tok ('to knock' as on wood), sok ('to punch' as with the fist), and juk ('to stab' as with a knife).

Trade language of the Silk Road

The Silk Road was an ancient network of trade routes on land and sea that connected the East and West for over 1,500 years. It spanned over thousands of kilometres on land across Asia, Europe and Africa. It connected many distant cities: Guangzhou, Chang'an, Turfan, Samarkand, Kermanshah, Baghdad, Damascus, Antioch, Byzantium (now Istanbul), Athens, Rome, Alexandria, Aden, Mombasa and many more. It facilitated economic, cultural, political, religious and scientific interactions between the Eastern and the Western worlds.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Tens of different languages were spoken along the Silk Roads. People in the caravans needed to communicate with local people along the way and at each end of the route. People from different cultures had to find ways to communicate somehow without a common language.

The earliest form of Pandunia probably relied heavily on bodily gestures and imitative words. More complex communication became possible, when people started to learn words from each other. Someone would point to a thing and say its name in their language, and others would pick it up and start to use the same word. This simple communication strategy was very important in exchange of goods by bartering.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

At first people would speak an ungrammatical mishmash of both parties' native language, but over time they would develop a more structured form of communication, a trade language, which would have elementary but regular rules of word order. It was a simplified means of communication that few spoke natively. Normally it was only used when talking to foreigners. It was an adaptable language without a stable form, because clever speakers would use such words and expressions that the listeners would understand best.

Travelers, sailors and diplomats picked up this adaptable language, and they would take it with them as a relatively easy way to communicate with locals everywhere. The caravans did not only transport material goods along the trade routes, but they also spread immaterial ideas, like customs, arts, techniques, words and expressions. The common trade language was one of the ideas that spread over great distances. This language was called Pandunia.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Pandunia was not a uniform language in ancient times. It was spoken at the crossroads of different cultures along rivers, deserts, and seas. So it was only natural that it drew words and expressions from the local languages. The trade language spoken around the Taklamakan desert was different than the lingua franca spoken in the Mediterranean. However, the core words and the basic structure of the language were mostly similar everywhere.

Here is a list of Pandunia words for goods that were transported and traded by the Silk Road.

• sir 'silk'
  from Chinese 絲 (sī) and related to Greek σήρ (sḗr) 'silkworm' and Latin sericum 'silk', which is the parental word for English silk.
• cha 'tea'
  from Chinese 茶 (chā). The countries that got tea from China by land via the Silk Road refer to it in different forms of cha, like Turkish çay, Hindi चाय (cāy) and Russian чай (chay). The countries that traded with China by sea call it in different forms of te, like English tea and French thé.
• chin 'porcelain, china' from Chinese 瓷 (cí). The country of origin, China, became in many places synonymous with this hard white translucent ceramic, for example Uzbek chinni, Persian چینی (chini), Hindi चीनी (cīnī) and of course English china.
• chit or lak 'lacquer'. The former is from Middle Chinese 漆 (chit) and the latter from Hindi लाख (lākh). Lacquerware from China were valuable trading articles on the Silk Road.
• pipal 'pepper (long pepper, black pepper)' from Sanskrit पिप्पलि (pippali) or Tamil திப்பலி (tippali). Native to South and Southeast Asia, pepper was one of the most valuable spices transported by the Silk Road.

Pandunia words related to transportation along the Silk Road:

• karvan 'caravan'
• sarai 'hall, court, palace' from Persian سرای (sarây).
• karvan-sarai 'caravanserai, a roadside inn for caravans to rest'
• mar 'horse'. possibly from Mongolial mor'. This is a wanderword that has spread to many different languages across Eurasia, including Mongolian морь (mor'), Chinese 馬 (mǎ), Korean 말 (mal), Japanese 馬 (uma), Burmese မြင်း (mrang). It can be distantly related even to English mare.
• chakre 'wheel' from Indian चक्र (cakra) and related to Chinese 車 (chē) 'wheeled device or vechicle'.

Other Pandunia words along the Silk Road:

• ik 'one'. It is difficult to ascertain the origin of this word. One one hand it sounds like Indo-Iranian ek, and on the other like Middle Chinese yit. Perhaps it's an amalgamation of both of them!
• kara 'black' from Turkish kara, Tamil கரு (karu), Sanskrit काल (kāla) and many more.

Other theories

It is hard to pinpoint the place of origin of Pandunia because of its internationality. The language is not bound to any certain time or place. It could be at home in any international trading hub or port since the beginning of intercontinental trade. It is not markedly Western or Eastern. It is truly cosmopolitan!

That is why there are many theories about where, when and how Pandunia came to be. Was it in Istanbul, Baghdad, Muscat, Singapore or maybe Shanghai? Was it 1000 or 200 years ago? Did it arise spontaneously among uneducated people or was it created deliberately by learned people? For all we know, it could be just an exceptionally cosmopolitan constructed international auxiliary language created in the 22nd century. Maybe we will find it out someday...