Introduction

Be yuboj, ha mir gonbio yansauna gabyuxea dalzeyen. (In the near future, the world will share a common auxiliary language.)

Mirad, formerly known as Unilingua, is an artificially-constructed auxiliary language (conlang) developed and published by Paris-based author Noubar Agopoff as a serious medium for easy and logical international communication. Mirad, which means world speech, and is pronounced mee-RAHD, is categorized by constructed language experts as taxonomic, because its vocabulary is mapped letter-by-letter to a semantic ontology or thesaurus. Also, the wordstock of Mirad is considered a priori, meaning that there is no deliberate association with words or roots in existing natural languages. The vocabulary is from scratch, yet based on internal lexical and semantic rules that help the learner to construct and deconstruct derivations logically, mnemonically, and consistently.

The author claims in his book Unilingua -- Langue universelle auxiliaire that this language is well-suited for universal, logical communication because it is based on principles already exploited globally by sciences like mathematics and chemistry, where symbolic formulas are constructed in accordance with strict rules and a limited sequence of symbols understood by all practitioners.

Mirad is constructed on the following principles:

• Every vowel has numeric, vectorial, scalar, semantic, or grammatical value.
• Every consonant is meaningful either lexically or grammatically.
• Word derivation is systematic, consistent, analogical, and mnemonic.
• Words are as ontologically unambiguous as possible.
• Words are as short and as easy to pronounce as possible.
• Inflection and derivation of words is regular and predictable.
• Word opposites differ only in the stem vowel (iva = happy; uva = sad).
• Words that have similar meanings will share all but one or two letters (iva = happy; ivra = joyful).

This book contains Version 2 of the language with additions and modifications to the original. The principal changes are:

• The letter w was added to mark the passive voice of verbs, among other things.
• The letter s was changed to sound like the s in English sun.
• The letter x was changed to sound like the sh in English show.
• The letter c was changed to sound like the ch in English chair.
• The letter h was added, mainly to create a systematic set of determiners like this, that, and every.
• Grammatical cases were eliminated and replaced by prepositions.
• Some prepositions and conjunctions were changed or added.
• The definite article ha (the) was introduced.
• Much new vocabulary was added and some words were altered.
• The writing system now consists only of letters of the Roman alphabet, with no diacritics.