Qôsmianî (or Cosmian, as its author called it in English) is an international auxiliary language created by Wilbur M. Law Beatty, and published in 1922 in a slim orange volume entitled "Qôsmianî: The New International Language". The book contains a grammatical description of the language, an English-Qôsmianî/Qôsmianî-English vocabulary, some texts in Qôsmianî and the outline of the author's audacious vision of a utopian "Cosmian Republic". Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your point of view, the language seems not to have made an impact on the international language scene and promptly faded into obscurity.
For me, Qôsmianî is one of the funniest and most endearingly quirky proposals for an international language ever published, and it most definitely deserves to have a presence on the web. These Qôsmianî pages are my tribute to Beatty's warped genius.
Some of the salient features of Qôsmianî are:
- A phonetic alphabet of 40 letters devised by Beatty to represent not just the sounds of Qôsmianî but also of English, French, Spanish, and the other "main" European languages; it includes many accented letters taken from various Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages as well as a couple of characters borrowed from Serbian Cyrillic.
- Numerous vowels, including the "short" vowels found in such English words as "pat", "pit", "putt" and "put", which often occur in succession despite the fact that many such combinations are quite unnatural even for English speakers, let alone for speakers of other languages which don't have these sounds. These "short" vowels are also used as grammatical endings as well as appearing in word roots.
- "International" roots (or the author's idea thereof) combined with mostly a priori endings. Each part of speech has its own distinct ending(s).
- Much vocabulary taken directly from English, and many sentences in the exercises and texts are translated word for word from English.