History of Panlingue

Early ideas

Panlingue was created by Risto Kupsala from Finland. He came across Esperanto and soon afterwards also other auxiliary languages in the year 2000, when he was a young student of computer engineering. He got inspired by them and created several crude drafts of an Europe-centred constructed auxiliary language (auxlang). At first they were inspired mainly by Esperanto and Ido and they used similar word-class markers as the aforementioned languages. Risto also joined AUXLANG mailing list to talk with other auxlangers.

In 2003, Risto published a significantly different kind of auxiliary language draft called Lone in his personal web pages. It had analytic grammar without word-class markers and its words were borrowed from diverse languages around the world. This draft would later evolve into Panlingue.

In 2004 Risto created a quota system for selecting words from different language families. In his opinion the vocabulary of the future world language should be evenly global and not European or Western as in the classical auxiliary languages. Later this idea becomes the guiding principle for the creation of Panlingue's vocabulary. In a time when electronic multilingual dictionaries were not widely available in the internet, Risto created a new collaborative wiki called Multilingual Vocabulary Resource (Mulivo) for finding out common words in widely spoken languages around the world.

Creation of the grammar

In 2010, Risto starts to develop again an agglutinative grammar that uses vowel endings to indicate word-classes. At first this is a private sideproject alongside Panlingue. He invented the three types of verbs and their vowel endings (active -a, passive -u, and stative -i), as a regular solution to the problem of transitivity and intransitivity, which is irregular in Esperanto. The vowel endings for verbs are inspired by Arabic verb patterns faʕala, faʕila and faʕula. These ideas will find their way into Panlingue several years later.

Naming confusion

Risto decides to apply the agglutinative grammar to Panlingue calling this version of the language confusingly Panlingue 1. (In many programming languages indexing starts from zero, so the first version was then called Panlingue 0!) He records a short greeting video in YouTube to showcase an early version of Panlingue 1. This branch of Panlingue is used between 2019 and 2021 but later in 2021 Panlingue switched back to the original track with analytic grammar.

Figure. The tree of evolution of Panlingue and its sibling languages.

    ┌───────────┐  ┌───────────┐  ┌───────────┐
    │ Panlingue │  │ Panlingue  │  │  Panglo   │
    └─────┬─────┘  └─────┬─────┘  └─────┬─────┘
          │1             │2             │3
          │              ├──────────────┘
          └──────────────┤
                         │
                         │0
  ───────────────────────┴───────────────────────

Panlingue

The language with agglutinating structure was renamed to Panlingue. The new name is distinctive but still bears the prefix pan- as a reminder of the origins of the language. Own website and documentation repository were created for Panlingue.