Europaico

Europaico
Europaico, Eɤροпaıкo
Created by	–
Setting	Auxiliary language
Sources	based on Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages.

Slavic nouns, Germanic verbs, Romance grammar and not a lot of sense!

Europaico (Eɤροпaıкo in its own script, pronounced as /eu̯.ʀoˈpai̯.ko/) is a non-naturalistic a posteriori conlang based on various European languages meant as a parody to auxlang projects such as Esperanto, Interlingua, Sambhasa or Lingwa de Planeta.

Intrafictionally, the language would have been created and maintained by the Alternative International Association for International Auxiliary Languages or AIAIAL.

As a 'fake auxlang', it could be considered to be a fauxlang. It could make for a decent artlang, though.

Most of Europaico's features are designed to have a tongue-in-cheek justification explaining why they would make sense for a European auxiliary language (until you actually think about it for more than a couple seconds, that is). Since telling a joke is more fun than explaining it, some of the conlangs features might be presented that way throughout this article.

In addition to a Latin-script orthography, Europaico might be written in its own alphabet, best described as 'an unholy mismatch of Greek, Cyrillic and Roman'.

The conlang was created in March 2024.

Concept

Europaico is a brand new auxiliary language that will finally allow humanity to lift the curse of Babel! Maybe.

Following the long-standing tradition set by such fine language designers such as Esperanto's Zamenhof, Volapük's Schleyer, Europaico only takes the European continent into account. Europaico might nonetheless be advertised as a global language, it's not like it'd be the first one to do so with its creators even managing to keep a straight face.

The European linguistic landscape is dominated by three main linguistic groups: the Romance languages in the west and south, the Germanic languages in the center and north and the Slavic languages in the east. Europaico is meant to be a compromise between these three major groups, borrowing elements from each of them. Greek, as a historically prominent language in the continent that isn't fully accounted for, is taken as a secondary source language to 'fill in the gaps'.

Europaico's grammar is mostly based on that of Romance language, particularly French. Nouns are taken nearly exclusively from Slavic sources, retaining their masculine/feminine/neuter gender distinction. Verbs, meanwhile, are usually sourced from Germanic languages although their conjugation also incorporates Romance and Slavic elements.

Phonology

Consonants

Europaico has a honest-to-the-powers-that-be relatively simple consonant inventory with few surprises aside from a palatal series (a step up from your 'standard average European' language but still a long shot from the phonemic palatalization affecting most consonants in Slavic languages).

The following table gives the consonants in the Latin script orthography, a phonemic transcription in IPA (between slashes) and the corresponding glyph in Europaico's native alphabet.

	Labial	Alveolar	Post-Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Nasal	m /m/ м	n /n/ ɴ		ň /ɲ/ њ
Unvoiced stop	p /p/ п	t /t/ τ		ť /c/ ћ	c /k/ к
Voiced stop	b /b/ б	d /d/ ∂		ď /ɟ/ đ	g /ɡ/ г
Unvoiced affricate		c /ts/ ц	č /tʃ/ ч
Unvoiced fricative	f /f/ ф	s /s/ с	š /ʃ/ ш		h /x/ x
Voiced fricative	v /v/ w	z /z/ z	( /ʒ/ )
Glide				y /j/ ı
Rhotic		r /ʀ/ ρ
Lateral		l /l/ ʌ

Palatal and post-alveolar consonants other than /j/ will be referred collectively as 'palatals'. All of these consonants might alternatively be pronounced as a palatalized alveolars (/nʲ/ for ň, /tʲ/ for ť and so on) if that's easier for the speaker.

The consonant /z/ may alternate freely between an alveolar realization [z] or a post-alveolar one /ʒ/. This explains why words which had a /ʒ/ or /dʒ/ in their source language might enter Europaico with a /z/ instead.

A velar nasal [ŋ] appear as an allophone of /n/ in clusters such as [ŋk] and [ŋɡ]. This consonant sound is not distinguished from /n/ in either orthography.

Vowels and diphthongs

Europaico is surprisingly benign with its vowel inventory, which at just /a e i o u y/ will only give mild trouble to its users.

Vowels other than /i/ and /u/ might be preceded by the glide /j/, yielding four sequences which could be analyzed as rising diphthongs: /ja/, /je/, /jo/ and /ju/.

In addition to those, Europaico features seven falling diphthongs /ai̯ au̯ ei̯ eu̯ oi̯ ou̯ ui̯/, which might also be pronounced as [aɪ̯ aʊ̯ eɪ̯ eʊ̯ oɪ̯ oʊ̯ uɪ̯].

It might be noted that the /eu̯/ diphthong, featured in Europaico's own name no less, is absent from most major European languages (including German, English, French, most Slavic languages, etc). As a way to ease this problem, speakers are allowed to substitute /eu̯/ for whatever might be their native pronunciation of <eu> (as in their local pronunciation of 'Europe'). This means that possible realizations for Europaico's initial diphthong include [jʊ] (English), [ø] (Dutch, Danish, French), [ɛɵ] (Swedish), [ɛv] (Bulgarian) and [ɔʏ] (German) among others.

Europaico does not contrast between diphthong and hiatus sequences involving the same vowel qualities, a sequence such as /ai/ will always correspond to an /ai̯/ diphthong rather than an /a.i/ hiatus.

Vowel reduction

Speakers might optionally reduce non-stressed /a e o/ to a schwa. This is not represented in writing and it will generally not be noted in IPA transcriptions in order to preserve the reader's sanity.

Phonotactics

As most auxlangs, Europaico is very lax with its phonotactics, only requiring the following elements to be met:

Syllables must have at least one vowel (or diphthong).
/j/ might only appear before a vowel other than /i/ or /y/.
Palatal consonants must not be followed by /j/.

This allows for clusters in the source languages to be preserved in Europaico (including the relatively complex ones allowed word-initially in Slavic languages). This, of course, can be marketed as a feature allowing vocabulary to be integrated into the language with as little distortion as possible (or be regarded as an awful decision for an auxlang).

Prosodic stress

Polysyllabic words bear fixed, predictable prosodic stress determined as follows:

If the word ends in a consonant other than /n/ or /s/ or in a (falling) diphthong, stress falls on the last syllable.
Otherwise (words ending in /n/, /s/ or a monophthong), stress falls on the second-to-last syllable.

Orthographies

Europaico may be written either in the Latin alphabet or in its own 'Europaico' script (based on the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets). Slightly different orthographies are used in each script.

Latin-script orthography

Europaico's Latin-script orthography is largely based on that of Romance languages, particularly those of French and Catalan. The palatal (and palato-alveolar) consonants /ɲ c ɟ tʃ ʃ/, however, are written using a diacritic known as caron most commonly associated with Czech (where it is known as háček). Carons typically look like an upside-down circumflex accent, as seen in č and ň, although they adopt a different form closer to that of an apostrophe when applied to lowercase T and D (<ť ď>). This is not a joke feature from Europaico, it's how that diacritic actually works, for whatever reason. Letters bearing a caron are treated as separate letters for sorting purposes, coming after their non-accented counterparts (thus Č is regarded as being the fourth letter of Europaico's Latin alphabet, between regular C and D). The character Ü (an umlauted U) is used for the vowel /y/ and it is also treated as letter of its own, being sorted between U and V.

This orthography also uses the character <ç> (C with cedilla) as a way of representing the /ts/ sound in contexts where regular <c> (which can represent that sound before unrounded front vowels) would be pronounced as /k/ instead. Unlike caron-bearing palatals, <ç> is treated as a variant of <c> for collation, rather than as an independent letter.

The letters of Europaico's variant of the Latin alphabet are as follows:

Letter	Value	Notes
A, a	/a/
B, b	/b/
C, c	/k/, /ts/	Pronounced /ts/ before E or I or as /k/ otherwise. See Q for the representation of /k/ before E and I and Ç for the representation of /ts/ in other contexts.
Ç, ç	/ts/	Variant of C, used for the /ts/ when not followed by E or I.
Č, č	/tʃ/
D, d	/d/
Ď, ď	/ɟ/
E, e	/e/
F, f	/f/
G, g	/ɡ/	The sequences /ɡe/ and /ɡi/ are written with a silent U: <gue>, <gui>.
H, h	/x/
I, i	/i/, /j/	Read as /j/ when followed by a vowel (see also Y). Also used to write the diphthongs /ai̯ ei̯ oi̯ ui̯/ (<ai ei oi ui>).
J, j	-	Might be used to replace a caron when typing the diacritic is impossible or impractical.
L, l	/l/
M, m	/m/
N, n	/n/
Ň, ň	/ɲ/
O, o	/o/
P, p	/p/
Q, q	/k/	The digraph qu represents /k/ before the vowels E and I, replacing C.
R, r	/ʀ/
S, s	/s/
Š, š	/ʃ/
T, t	/t/
Ť, ť	/c/
U, u	/u/	Silent in the trigraphs gue /ɡe/, gui /ɡi/, que /ke/ and qui /ki/.
Ü, ü	/y/
V, v	/v/
Y, y	/j/	Used for /j/ when not preceded by another consonant in the syllable, otherwise I will be used instead.
Z, z	/z~ʒ/

This orthography uses the Western Romance strategy of contrasting a soft C (read as /ts/ before E and I) and a hard C (read as /k/ otherwise), with Ç being used to force the soft /ts/ pronunciation and the triigraphs que and qui for /ke/ and /ki/. Even though G lacks a soft pronunciation, Europaico also requires the trigraphs gue and gui for /ɡe/ and /ɡi/ in order to fit the expectations for a Romance-like orthography (Slavic carons aside).

The Europaico version of the Latin alphabet lacks the letters K, W and X which must be replaced by their closer equivalents in loanwords or proper names, which are also generally adapted to better fit other orthographical conventions. For instance, Kentucky, Washington, Texas and X will be transcribed as Quentuqui (or Quentaqui), Vašington (or Vašinton), Tecsas (or Tehas) and Ecs (or Tviter).

The Europaico Alphabet

Depending on your taste, the Europaico alphabet might be one of its funniest aspects or one of its most cursed ones. Just as the language (sort of) intends to bridge the gap between major European languages, the script (sort of) attempts to find common ground between the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets.

One advantage of this approach is that all of the glyphs in the script are already encoded in Unicode as part of their source alphabets, allowing the Europaico script to be used in digital devices with little issue.

As its sources, the Europaico Alphabet is a bicameral script, contrasting uppercase and lowercase letters.

The letters of the script, in its own alphabetic order, are as follows:

Europaico	Name	Value	Latin equivalent	Unicode-compatible look-alike
A, a	Alfa	/a/	a	Latin uppercase/lowercase A
B, б	Beta	/b/	b	Latin uppercase B, Cyrillic lowercase Be
Г, г	Gama	/ɡ/	g, gu	Cyrillic uppercase/lowercase Ge
Δ, ∂	Delta	/d/	d	Greek uppercase Delta, Partial derivative sign
Đ, đ	Ďocovič	/ɟ/	ď	Latin uppercase/lowercase D with stroke
E, e	Eta	/e/	e	Latin uppercase/lowercase E
Є, ε	Yeť	/je/	ie, ye	Ukrainian Cyrillic uppercase Ye, Greek lowercase Epsilon
Z, z	Zeta	/z/	z	Latin uppercase/lowercase Z
I, ı	Yota	/i/, /j/	i, y	Latin uppercase I, Turkish Latin lowercase dotless I
K, к	Capa	/k/	c, qu	Latin uppercase K, Cyrillic lowercase Ka
Λ, ʌ	Lamba	/l/	l	Greek uppercase Lambda, Latin lowercase turned V
M, м	Mü	/m/	m	Latin uppercase M, Cyrillic lowercase Em
N, ɴ	Nu	/n/	n	Latin uppercase N, Latin small capital N
Њ, њ	Ňü	/ɲ/	ň	Serbian Cyrillic uppercase/lowercase Nje
O, o	O	/o/	o	Latin uppercase/lowercase O
П, п	Pe	/p/	p	Cyrillic uppercase/lowercase Pe
Ρ, ρ	Ro	/ʀ/	r	Greek uppercase/lowercase Rho
С, с	Se	/s/	s	Cyrillic uppercase/lowercase Es
Τ, τ	To	/t/	t	Greek uppercase/lowercase Tau
Ћ, ћ	Ťoť	/c/	ť	Serbian Cyrillic uppercase/lowercase Tshe
Ц, ц	Ciť	/ts/	c, ç	Cyrillic uppercase/lowercase Tse
Ч, ч	Čať	/tʃ/	č	Cyrillic uppercase/lowercase Che
Ш, ш	Šo	/ʃ/	š	Cyrillic uppercase/lowercase Sha
V, ʋ	Üs	/y/	ü	Latin uppercase V, Latin lowercase V with hook
ȣ, ɤ	U	/u/	u	Latin lowercase Ou ligature, Latin lowercase "rams horn"
Ф, ф	Fe	/f/	f	Cyrillic uppercase/lowercase Ef
X, x	He	/x/	h	Latin uppercase/lowercase X
W, w	Vo	/v/	v	Latin uppercase/lowercase W

In the Europaico script, the sequences involving a 'palatal' consonant (the ones bearing a caron in the Latin orthography) and the vowel /e/ may be spelled as either the palatal followed by Eta or as the non-palatal version followed by Yeť:

Ďe ~ /ɟe/ can be either đe or ∂ε.
Ňe /ɲe/ can be either њe or ɴε.
Ťe ~ /ce/ can be either ћe or τε.
Če ~ /tʃe/ can be either чe or цε.
Še ~ /ʃe/ can be either шe or сε.

Both alternatives might be used indistinctly, a feature which would allow the script to suit each speaker's tastes better and which clearly wouldn't cause any problem down the road like problems with collation or the like.

Other than that, the letter Yeť is used exclusively for the /je/ diphthong, while Yota is used to represent the /j/ glide in other diphthongs.

Grammar

Nouns

Whenever possible, Europaico nouns are taken from Slavic languages, especially Russian, Polish, Czech and Bosnio-Montenegrin. More widespread variants and more conservative forms are preferred, for instance the noun slovo, 'word', preserves a /l/ sound that shifted to /w/ in Polish słowo /ˈswɔ.vɔ/, while Europaico's word for 'wheel' is colo, which has cognates in Polish, Czech and Bosnio-Montenegrin among others, rather than a form like koleso which is restricted to Eastern Slavic languages like Ukrainian and Russian.

Sometimes an Europaico word will not exactly match any of its sources. For instance, the Europaico word for 'wolf' is vulk, made as a compromise between various descendants of Proto-Slavic *'vьlkъ, including Russian волк (volk), Polish wilk, Czech vlk (with a syllabic L that is not allowed in Europaico) and Bosnio-Montenegrin vuk.

In order to boost recognizability, words are borrowed without the final-consonant devoicing found in Polish and Russian, among others. For instance, the word for bread, written as chleb in Polish and as хлеб (khlyeb) in Russian but pronounced as /xlɛp/ and /xlʲep/ respectively, is borrowed into Europaico as hlieb pronounced /xljeb/ (it should be noted that the /b/ phoneme is found in other inflectional forms of the Polish and Russian words).

Gender

Slavic languages generally distinguish between three grammatical genders: feminine, masculine and neuter. This distinction (that doesn't necessarily match the natural/societal concepts of gender and animacy) is carried over into Europaico although in a somewhat simplified way. The gender of a singular noun in Europaico can usually be determined from its ending:

Nouns ending in -o or -e are always neuter.
Nouns ending in -a or in a palatal consonant (č, ď, ň, ť or š) are always feminine.
Nouns ending in a non-palatal consonant are always masculine.

Luckily, the association of -a to the feminine gender is widespread among Romance languages as well, while Catalan and written French share the tendency of having consonant-final masculine nouns.

Thus, hlieb (bread) can be recognized as masculine noun while colo (wheel) is a neuter noun, even though both refer to inanimate naturally genderless objects.

The grammatical gender of nouns ending in a vowel other than neuter -o and -e or feminine -a cannot be determined from its form. Such nouns are rare and can usually be explained as borrowings from other language families such as çunami from Japanese tsunami. Then the gender of the word depends on how it was usually borrowed into Slavic languages. In this case of çunami, we can find that the Japanese word was borrowed as neuter цуна́ми (tsunámi) in Russian, neuter tsunami in Polish, feminine tsunami in Czech and masculine cunámi in Bosnio-Montenegrin; as a result Europaico çunami was made neuter gender as the most common option among those four control languages.

Some Slavic languages have at least some form of animacy marking on top of their three-wise gender system, often distinguishing between animate and inanimate masculine nouns in their grammar. This distinction is not found in Europaico.

Number

For the most part, European languages tend to use two different strategies for marking plural in nouns:

Western Romance languages and, for whatever odd twist, also English generally form plurals by adding an -s suffix or -es suffix to the singular form, as in English house, houses or the corresponding Spanish casa, casas.
Southern and Eastern Romance languages (most notably Italian and Romanian) and Slavic languages form their plurals by altering the ending of the singular, as in Italian casa, case or Bosnio-Montenegrin kȕća, kȕće.

Europaico is all about seeking consensus (aside from when it's not) so, naturally, it adopts both strategies. For instance, feminine nouns such as zena (woman) form their plural by both changing the final -a to -e and by adding a final -s: zenes (women, coincidentally the resulting -a / -es alternation is also found in Catalan and Asturian).

At least, Europaico plurals are all regular being formed according to the following patterns:

Gender	Singular ending	Plural ending	Example
Masculine	Non-palatal consonant	-is	muz (man) →muzis (men)
Feminine	Final -a	-es	zena (woman) → zenes (women)
Feminine	Palatal consonant	-is	noč (night) →nočis (nights)
Neuter	Final -e	-is	ďeťe (child) →ďeťis (children)
Neuter	Final -o	-as	miesto (city) → miestas (cities)
(Any)	Other vowels	-s	çunami (tsunami) → çunamis (tsunamis)

Gender agreement marking in articles and adjectives does not distinguish between masculine and neuter nouns in the plural, grouping both into a plural 'common' class (generally presenting the suffix -is) contrasting with the plural feminine class (with the -es prefix). This depends on the inherent lexical gender of the noun rather than its ending, nočis will still take feminine plural adjectives ending in -es despite having a final -is.

Articles

As in (most) Romance languages, Europaico nouns will usually be preceded by an article, be it a definite one (like English the) or an indefinite one (like English a / an).

As in most European languages, articles agree with their nouns in gender and number.

Definite articles are taken from Romance languages with el and la in particular being identical to the corresponding singular masculine and feminine articles in Spanish, giving half a billion hispanohablantes a hint about what el muz (the man) might mean.

Most European languages with indefinite articles derive them from their word for the number 'one'. As Europaico derives numerals from Greek, its word for 'one' is ena (from Modern Greek ένα) which casually happens not to be to different from its Germanic counterparts such as Dutch een, German ein and Norwegian en (despite them not actually being cognates with the Greek word). This similarity is exploited in Europaico to create indefinite articles such as en in en muz (a man) which are structurally similar to Romance, but phonetically similar to Germanic. (This one feature seems sensible enough that it almost feels out of place in this conlang)

As in English and other Germanic languages, indefinite articles are not used in the plural, thus '(some) men' is rendered as simply muzis (rather than requiring a plural form of the indefinite article as in Spanish unos hombres).

The resulting articles are as follows:

Gender and number	Definite	Example	Indefinite	Example
Feminine, singular	la	la zena (the woman)	ena	ena zena (a woman)
Masculine, singular	el	el muz (the man)	en	en muz (a man)
Neuter, singular	lo	lo miesto (the city)	eno	eno miesto (a city)
Feminine, plural	les	les zenes (the women)	-	zenes ([some] women)
Common, plural	lis	lis muzis (the men)	-	muzis ([some] men)

Possessives

As with number marking, there are a handful popular strategies for forming possessives in European languages, from simply using a preposition (like English of and Romance de) to using a variety of suffixes corresponding to grammatical cases, often involving a final -s in Germanic languages (as in the English clitic 's).

Naturally, Europaico picks the best of both worlds (?) and forms possessives by preceding the noun with the preposition des (replacing the article, if any) and a suffix -s which, in order to avoid confusion with the final /s/ found in plural endings, must also be marked with an apostrophe like the English -'s clitic.

The possessive -'s suffix is applied without any regard to the shape of the previous word. This might yield unusual combinations such as des muz's (man's) with a /zs/ cluster which, in practice, speakers might end up simplifying to either /z/ or /s/ (even though, strictly speaking, an unreduced /zs/ cluster is prescribed) as well as sequences of multiple /s/ as in des muzis's (men's) which are not distinguished from a single /s/ (muzis and muzis's will be pronounced identically as /ˈmu.zis/ or [ˈmu.ʑis]).

Possessives are placed after the noun they modified. For instance, lo ďeťe des zena's for "the child of the woman" / "the woman's child" (or 'a woman's child', as des might replace either definite or indefinite articles).

Non-canonical genitive case

While Europaico was never meant to have an extensive case system like those of most Slavic languages (a feature which would clash with the largely caseless Romance languages and the much more limited cases found in Germanic languages), the idea of preserving the Slavic genitive case at least was considered at various points in the development of the conlang. The results, however, ended up looking too much like a Slavic auxiliary language than a generic (though Euro-biased) auxlang, so these Slavic-like genitives where eventually replaced by the less unwieldy des + -'s possessives explained above.

Should anyone care for a non-canonical feature in what is already a fauxlang, the resulting inflectional paradigms were something like this:

Gender	Singular ending	`GEN`.`SG`	`GEN`.`PL`	Example
Masculine	Non-palatal consonant	-a	-ov	muz → muza (man's) muzis → muzov (men's)
Feminine	Final -a	-i	-Ø	zena → zeni (woman's) zene → zen (women's)
Feminine	Palatal consonant	-i	-i	noč → noči (night's) nočis → noči (nights')
Neuter	Final -e	-(i)a	-i	ďeťe → ďeťa (child's) ďeťis → ďeťi (children's)
Neuter	Final -o	-a	-Ø	miesto → miesta (city's) miestas → miest (cities')

Articles would also be inflected, although genitive forms for all articles weren't really decided before the idea was abandoned.

For an example, 'the nights of the city of the woman's children' would have been rendered as something like les nočis leu mista loro ďeťi lei zeni rather than canonical Europaico les nočis des misto's des ďeťis's des zena's.

Personal names

It is recommended that personal names and surnames be adapted to Europaico both in orthography (such as respelling 'Michael' as Maiquel for Maiquel Zacson or as Mihael for Mihael Šumaher) and in morphology - with masculine names and surnames being modified to end in a non-palatal consonant while feminine names must be adapted to end in either -a or in a palatal consonant.

Of course, names are often an important part of personal identity, so this could be pointed out to be a terrible idea. If you've been paying any attention to this, though, that shouldn't be particularly surprising.

Some recommended strategies for adapting names to include the right ending include:

For anyone:

* * Look at historical variants or foreign counterparts of the name. For instance, Spanish José might regain its historical /p/ (preserved in Catalan Josep and Italian Giuseppe among others) to become Hosep, while an English Elizabeth might opt to go instead by Isabela, after the Italian and Latin versions of her name.

For women:

* * Add -a or the very Slavic-esque -va to the end of your name. * ** For instance Mary Sue might adapt her name as Marija Šuva. * * Replace final alveolar letters with their palatal counterparts: Karen → Careň.

For men:

* * Dropping final vowels might be an easy option: Enrico → Enric. * * Add a very Slavic-like -v, particularly for surnames ending in e or o: Vito Corleone → Victor Corleonev. * * Replace final palatal letters with their alveolar counterparts: Ivanovič → Ivanoviç (it turns out that Slavic names don't do all that well either).

For non-binary people:

* * Isn't there enough invisibilization of non-binary identities already for you to bother with a conlang with mandatory gender marking too? Keep your name of choice, use a neuter ending or do whatever else you want, suit yourself! Sorry in advance for past-tense verbs, though.

Placenames

Auxlangs tend to use one of two strategies when dealing with toponyms, none of which is without issues.

Perhaps the most common option among modern auxiliary languages is to use the name locals use for the place in their own language. This seems like a very reasonable thing to do (which, of course, precludes Europaico from doing it) although it has a few problems.

First of all, the resulting names risk having little international recognizability. This can be easily exemplified with Austria and its capital, Vienna. While the Latin-esque names used in English have a good chance of being understood all around the world, the German names Österreich and Wien are considerably more obscure, and the need to adapt them to Europaico phonotactics would yield even less recognizable results such as *'Estaraič and *'Vin.
The very concept of using the local language presupposes that there is a local language, bringing a whole lot of complications:

* * For starters, the scheme couldn't apply to uninhabited places like most of Antarctica, deserted islands or the State of Wyoming. * * Continents and regions comprising linguistically diverse nations will likely have a variety of possible names. For the most extreme example, consider the name given to the planet itself: if there was a language widely accepted enough to be used for naming Earth as a whole, then chances are that we should be using that instead of any auxlang. * * Last but not least, many nations, provinces and cities are multilingual, often bearing multiple local names. Picking the variant favored by most locals seems like an easy choice but there won't be always a clear 'most used language' (and, even if there currently is one, it would be liable to change over time). Furthermore, the choice of one name over the other could be socially and politically problematic, highlighting regional tensions and stir debates about the colonialism and the repression of minorities.

The second strategy, perhaps more common among earlier auxiliary languages, was to draw most names from a single source, usually an internationally 'prestigious' source such as English, French or Latin. This is the sort of reasoning that would suggest that we do indee pick internationally-recognizable names such as *'Austria and *'Viena for Austria and Vienna, where 'internationally-recognizable' means 'names speakers of major Western European languages are likely to have heard'. The colonialism undertones of that are problematic enough to stay away from that idea.

Fortunately, Europaico provides the ultimate solution for this sort of problem: all toponyms will be based on the names used in Czech. The Czech language is already phonetically close to Europaico, so distortions like the one found between German Österreich and *'Esteraič would be minimal. This solution completely sidesteps all linguistic and political issues with choosing a single 'local language' for each place and, with the Czech Republic lacking a colonial history, few people would question this choice on the basis of it being overly imperialistic (Slovaks might get a pass at it, but I am not aware of there ever being any Slovak placename which isn't the same in Czech).

Thus, Austria and Vienna, rather than having scarcely recognizable names such as *'Estaraič and *'Vin or potentially problematic names such as *'Austria and *'Viena, will be known in Europaico as Racousco and Videň, after the Czech names Rakousko and Vídeň respectively.

Adjectives

Adjectives are generally derived from Greek (with a preference for Ancient Greek forms, especially those found as prefixes in Greek-derived technical terminology). For instance, Europaico's word for 'large' is given as mego from Greek μέγας (megas).

Europaico Adjectives are required to agree with the corresponding noun in number and gender (although masculine and neuter forms are conflated into a single common gender) with the following endings:

	Singular	Plural
Common (masculine or neuter)	-o	-is
Feminine	-a	-es

Adjectives are generally placed after the respective noun in Europaico. Thus we'd find la zena mega for 'the large woman', el muz mego for 'the large man', les zenes megues for 'the large women' and lis muzis meguis for 'the large men'.

Adverbs

Adverbs in Europaico are typically placed after the verb or adjective they modify.

Europaico adjectives can be turned into adverbs by adding the suffix -ment to their singular feminine form as in megament for 'largely, greatly'.

Pronouns

Europaico pronouns are derived from Romance languages and feature contrasts common in that branch such as a case distinction between nominative and accusative forms and gender contrasts for plural pronouns.

Person	Number	Gender	Nominative form	Accusative form	English equivalent
1st	Sg.	Any	Ye	me, m'	I, me
2nd	Sg.	Any	tü	te, t'	You (informal)
2nd	Sg.	Any	Vi	Vi	You (formal)
3rd	Sg.	Fem.	el	le, l'	She, her
3rd	Sg.	Masc.	ela	la	He, him
3rd	Sg.	Neu.	elo	lo	It
1st	Pl.	Fem.	nes	ens	We
1st	Pl.	Masc.	nis	nis	We
1st	Pl.	Neu.	nis	ens	We
2nd	Pl.	Fem.	ves	vi	You (plural), y'all
2nd	Pl.	M/N	vis	vi	You (plural), y'all
3rd	Pl.	Fem.	eles	els	They
3rd	Pl.	Masc.	elis	lis	They
3rd	Pl.	Neu.	elis	els	They

Notes:

As in English 'I', the nominative form of the first person pronoun Ye must always be capitalized.
Accusative forms such as me drop the final -e when followed by a vowel-initial verb.
A formality distinction is made between informal second person singular tü (corresponding to Spanish tú, vos, French tu, Italian tu, Russian ты, etc) and formal Vi (corresponding to Spanish usted, French vous, Italian Lei, Russian вы, etc).

* * As with French vous, or Russian вы, Europaico Vi takes second person plural verbforms, even though it is used for singular 'you'. * * As in Italian Lei, the formal pronoun Vi is capitalized in all cases.

Europaico pronouns might optionally be dropped when in subject position. This hardly ever results in ambiguity as verbs conjugate to agree with their subject. Still, it is preferred to keep subject, even if redundant, for additional clarity, with pronoun ellipsis being more of a stylistic choice to avoid repetition.

Reflexive pronoun si

Europaico also includes a reflexive pronoun only found in accusative form: si ([one]self).

In Romance languages, reflexive pronouns are required when the same a third person referent appears as both the subject and the object of a verb as in Spanish él se ve (he sees himself), which contrasts wordings using the accusative form of the standard third person pronoun as in él lo ve, which is interpreted instead as 'he sees him (a different person)'. Correspondingly, Europaico has el si sei for 'he sees himself' and el le sei for 'he sees him (someone else)'. Making this distinction is mandatory.

Slavic languages such as Russian go one step further in their usage of reflexive pronouns, requiring them whenever the object coincides with the subject, even for first or second person subjects. For instance, Russian would have я вижу себя (ya vizhu sebya) for 'I see myself', using the reflexive accusative pronoun себя instead of the first person form меня, as in он видит меня (on vidit menya, he sees me). This contrasts with Romance usage, which restricts the reflexive pronoun to third person sentences, requiring the accusative first person pronoun both in yo me veo (I see myself) and in él me ve (he sees me). True to its Solomonic wisdom, Europaico allows both wordings to be used in that case: either Slavic-style ye si seic or Romance-style ye mi seic.

These usages are summed up in the following table:

Subject	Object	Usage of si	Example	Translation
Third person	Third person (same)	Required	El si sei	He sees himself
Third person	Third person (other)	Prohibited	El le sei	He sees him (someone else)
Other	Same as subject	Optional	Ye si seic / Ye mi sec	I see myself.
Other	Other than the subject	Prohibited	Ye li seic El mi sei	I see him. He sees me.

Possessive pronouns

Each pronoun has an associated possessive which works in a similar way to an adjective, being placed after a noun and requiring agreement markers for the number and gender of the possessed object with the following suffixes:

Gender	Singular	Plural
Feminine	-a	-es
Masculine	-	-is
Neuter	-o	-is

For instance, we would have el muz min for 'my husband', la zena mina for 'my wife' and lo miesto mino for 'my city'. Possessive pronouns do not indicate the gender of the possessor thus lis ďeťis linis could correspond to English 'his children' or 'her children'.

Pronoun	Possessive	English equivalent
Ye	min	my
tü	tin	your (informal)
Vi	Vin	your (formal)
el, ela, elo	lin	his, her, its
nes, nis	nin	our
ves, vis	vin	your, y'all's
eles, elis	lor	their
( si )	sin	one's own

The reflexive possessive sin is used to indicate possession by the subject, being mandatory when it refers to a third person and optional for the first or second person, much as discussed for accusative si. For example:

El sei lo miesto sino ~ He sees his [own] city.
El sei lo miesto lino ~ He sees his [someone else's] city.
Ye seic lo miesto mino / Ye seic lo miesto sino ~ I see my city.
Ye seic lo miesto lino ~ I see his city.

Verbs

Europaico verbs are mostly derived from Germanic languages, especially English and German. Their conjugation, however, also incorporates elements from Romance and Slavic languages.

Germanic verbs commonly feature vowel alternations, often known as umlaut, as found in English give / gave or their German cognates geben / gab. As such a crucial element of Germanic verbs couldn't be left out, Europaico verbs will often feature two distinct stems, such as present-tense guiv- /ɡiv/ and past tense gav- /ɡav/ for the verb guiven (to give). Forms displaying umlaut are actively preferred over forms without alternations, for instance Europaico helpen (to help) has a past stem holp- reflecting Middle English help / holp / holpen instead of modern English regular help / helped / helped.

Conjugation

Verbs are conjugated for person, number and tense in addition to having an infinitive form, two participles that declines for gender and number and two imperatives. Most Europaico verbs are regular although they still require the speaker to memorize separately their present and past-tense stems.

Non-finite forms

Infinitives take the present stem and a Germanic-like -en ending as in guiven for 'to give'. This form is used to refer to the action as a noun and is required by modal verbs such as canen (can, to be able to) and in the future-tense construction.

Europaico verbs may inflect for two kinds of participle: an active participle or a passive participle.

Active participles, formed by combining the present stem with the suffix -end and possibly other suffixes for marking gender and number. These participles operate as nouns or adjectives referencing the subject role of a verb, for instance lis guivendis translates to 'the ones that give' or 'the givers'. This form of participle isn't used particularly often.

Passive participles, on the other hand, are far more common in the language due to being required for forming non-imperfective past tense constructions. They are formed by combining the past stem with the Slavic-derived suffix -el as in gavel for 'given'. Less commonly, passive participles might also be used as adjectives or nouns for referencing the direct object role of their verb, as in el muz halpelo for 'the helped man, the man that received assistance'.

Indicative tenses

Europaico contrasts two moods: the indicative which covers most usages and the imperative, used only for issuing commands. This section focuses on the former, which accounts for the bulk of Europaico's verbal morphology, while the next section will cover the much simpler imperatives. Make sure to take time to thank whatever powers may be for Europaico not having a subjunctive mood as well.

Indicative verbs in Europaico might take four different tense-aspect combinations (referred as 'tenses' for simplicity), largely based on French: - The present tense (`PRS`) matches English simple present and present continuous, being used for generic statements, habitual actions and events taking place in the present. For instance, ye singo corresponds to either English 'I sing' or 'I am singing'. - The so-called imperfect tense (following a similar usage in Romance languages), more accurately described as imperfective past (`PST.IPFV`) is used to indicate events in the past that extended over a period of time, either due to it being a habitual, repeated action (as in ye sangueic kate den for 'I sang every day') or to indicate a prolonged activity that might be used to indicate a time frame for other actions (as in otan ye sangueic for 'while I was singing'). - Europaico's past tense (`PST`) covers all other usages related to events in the past, being the most common way to translate English simple past and perfect tenses. The phrase ye au sanguel covers English 'I sang' or 'I have sung' when referring to punctual events in the past. - Finally, the future tense (`FUT`) is simply used for future events: ye guic singuen corresponds to English 'I will sing' or I am goint to sing.

As it can be observed from the examples, the present and imperfect tenses are formed by adding suffixes to the present and past stems of the verb (which, in the case of singuen, 'to sing', are sing- and sang-, after English 'sing' and 'sang'). These suffixes change depending on the subject, with verb endings inspired by French and Catalan conjugation [while basing features in Catalan might seem an odd choice for an international language, it can be noted that due to its geographic position and history it sort of bridges the gap between Spanish and French, the two most spoken Romance languages].

For a regular verb such as helpen (to help, present stem help-, past stem holp-, past auxiliary aven), present ans imperfect forms are formed as follows:

Subject	Present (`PRS`)	Imperfect (`PST.IPFV`)
Ye (`1s`)	helpo	holpeic
Tü (`2s`)	helpes	holpeis
El, ela, elo (`3s`)	helpe	holpei
Nis, nes (`1p`)	helpens	holpeyens
Vi, vis, ves (`2s`, `2p`)	helpeť	holpeyeť
Elis, eles (`3p`)	helpen	holpeyen

Note that verbs such as singuen present slight orthographic irregularities in their conjugation due to the sequences /ɡe/ and /ɡi/ requiring a silent u in the Latin orthography yielding singo for 'I sing' but singues for 'you sing' (still pronounced /ˈsin.ɡes/).

By contrast, the past and future tenses are constructed using an auxiliary verb, in a way that should be familiar to speakers of most Western European languages.

The past tense is formed with an auxiliary verb followed by a passive participle. Most verbs require the auxiliary aven (to have) which is followed by the base form of the participle (generally ending in -el) as in ye au sanguel for 'I sang / I have sung'. On the other hand, reflexive verbs, motion verbs and other verbs that relate to a change affecting the subject such as groven (to grow) require using seinen (to be) as their auxiliary, which must then be followed by a passive participle agreeing with the subject in gender and number. For instance, a male speaker would say ye sin forlesel for 'I [have] left', whereas a female speaker would say ye sin forlesela. This distinction parallels that of French verbs that form their past with être as their auxiliary followed by participles showing agreement (Je suis parti / Je suis partie) instead of the usual avoir auxiliary followed by invariable participles (J'ai chanté), which means that incorporating this feature to Europaico should make the language even easier to learn for the whole Francophonie.

Only the present tense form of the auxiliaries is used for this purpose (there is no equivalent in Europaico to past perfect or pluperfect constructions such as English 'he had sung' or French « il avait chanté »). With this fact in mind, past tense forms as exemplified with helpen (to help, past stem holp-, auxiliary aven) and comen (to come, past stem cam-, auxiliary seinen) are as follows:

Subject	Helpen	Comen (fem.)	Comen (masc.)	Comen (neu.)
Ye (`1s`)	au holpel	sin camela	sin camel	sin camelo
Tü (`2s`)	as holpel	es camela	es camel	es camelo
El, ela, elo (`3s`)	a holpel	is camela	is camel	is camelo
Nis, nes (`1p`)	avens holpel	sins cameles	sins camelis	sins camelis
Vi, vis, ves (`2s`, `2p`)	aveť holpel	seť cameles	seť camelis	seť camelis
Elis, eles (`3p`)	an holpel	sin cameles	sin camelis	sin camelis

Meanwhile, the future tense is formed with guien (to go) as an auxiliary verb followed by the infinitive form of the verb. The resulting wording, as in ye guic singuen, matches English 'I am going to sing', Spanish "voy a cantar" and French « je vais chanter » among others, making this a fairly sensible for a once. As an example, the future tense forms of helpen are as follows:

Subject	Future (`FUT`)
Ye (`1s`)	guic helpen
Tü (`2s`)	guis helpen
El, ela, elo (`3s`)	gui helpen
Nis, nes (`1p`)	guens helpen
Vi, vis, ves (`2s`, `2p`)	gueť helpen
Elis, eles (`3p`)	guen helpen

In principle, it would be possible to combine the constructions for past and future tenses in order to refer to things that were going to happen but perhaps didn't (*'ye au gal helpen for 'I was going to help') or things that are will have happened by a certain point. (*'ye guic aven holpel). Whether such constructions would actually be permitted in Europaico is intentionally left ambiguous, although anyone willing to use them probably should also allow pluperfect tenses such as *'*'ye au adel holpel for 'I had sung' after all. If you'd rather keep things simple, ignoring this whole paragraph (if not the article as a whole) might be a better option.

Imperatives

Verbs in the imperative are considerably simpler presenting only two forms: a 'singular imperative' issuing a command to a single listener (tü, you) and a 'plural imperative' giving and order to multiple listeners (vis/ves, you guys, you all, y'all, youse, etc). However, the fact that Europaico uses Vi, a variant of the second person plural pronouns, as a formal second person singular pronoun, sets things askew as the 'plural imperative' will also be required in this case.

For regular verbs such as helpen, imperatives are formed by combining the present stem with the suffix -i for singular or -iť for plural imperatives:

Subject number	Formality	Imperative
Singular	Informal	helpi
Singular	Formal	helpiť
Plural	Any	helpiť

While not mandatory, subjects are typically omitted in imperative sentences; Me helpi! would be a more common wording for 'Help me!' than Tü me helpi!. Using a explicit pronoun might be required to resolve ambiguity in cases where it is unclear whether a plural imperative was given to a single person (addressed with formal Vi) within a group or to the group as a whole (second person plural vis or ves).

Unlike Romance languages where true imperatives are generally restricted to positive commands (compare Spanish imperative mood "¡Ayuda!" for 'Help!' but subjunctive "¡No ayudes!" for 'Don't help!'), Europaico imperatives interact normally with negative markers as in Ne helpi niť! for 'Don't help!'.

While imperatives can only be formed for second person subjects, constructions about mandatory or suggested actions for other subjects can be expressed using modal verbs such as lesen (let) or musten (must):

El muste te helpen! - He must help you!
Ens lesens helpen! - Let's help!

Irregular verbs

One of the key reasons someone might opt to adopt an auxiliary constructed language rather than a natlang is that auxlangs typically shy away from irregular verbs in order to be easier to learn. Accordingly, it would be an extremely dubious move for an auxlang to feature irregular verbs.

Europaico features irregular verbs. These verbs can be divided into two classes: semi-vocalic verbs such as groven (to grow) and seyen (to see) whose conjugation show clear commonalities characterized by the alternation of a vocalic stem (grou- and sei-) and a consonant stem (grov-, sey-) and fully irregular verbs where all patterns should be put into question.

Semi-vocalic verbs

Verbs in this class generally feature stems which end in a v or y (as found in groven and seyen, respectively) which would result in valid diphthongs (ai, au, ei, eu, oi, ou or ui) should we replace the v /v/ for an u /u/ or the y /j/ for an i /i/.

The verb seyen (to see) proves to be a particularly fitting example as it features semi-vocalic stems both in the present tense (sey-/sei-) and in the past tense (sav-/sau-), although the latter doesn't affect the paradigm much.

Infinitive	seyen
Past tense auxiliary	aven
Active participle	seyendo
Passive participle	savel
Imperative (tü)	sei
Imperative (Vi)	seyeť

Subject	Present (`PRS`)	Imperfect (`PST.IPFV`)	Past (`PST`)	Future (`FUT`)
Ye (`1s`)	seic	saveic	au savel	guic seyen
Tü (`2s`)	seis	saveis	as savel	guis seyen
El, ela, elo (`3s`)	sei	savei	a savel	gui seyen
Nis, nes (`1p`)	seyens	saveyens	avens savel	guens seyen
Vi, vis, ves (`2s`, `2p`)	seyeť	saveyeť	aveť savel	gueť seyen
Elis, eles (`3p`)	seyen	saveyen	an savel	guen seyen

Forms for other semi-vocalic verbs can be constructed replacing sei- and sey- for the appropriate vocalic and consonant stems for the present, and sav- for the appropriate past stem, with the sole exception that Vi imperatives take the suffix -iť for verbs for stems ending in v as in groviť for 'Grow!' (the form ending in -eť found in seyeť, 'See!', is a result of Europaico's phonotactic restriction disallowing /ji/).

Fully irregular verbs

Fully irregular verbs include ones used as auxiliaries as seinen (to be, also marks past tense for reflexive verbs), aven (to have, also marks past tense for non-reflexive verbs) and guien (to go, also marks future tense), modal verbs such as canen (can, to be able) and musten (must, to have to) and also a few content verbs such as esen (to eat).

aven (to have, `PST` marker)

Infinitive	aven
Past tense auxiliary	aven
Active participle	abendo
Passive participle	adel
Imperative (tü)	avi
Imperative (Vi)	aviť

Subject	Present (`PRS`)	Imperfect (`PST.IPFV`)	Past (`PST`)	Future (`FUT`)
Ye (`1s`)	au	adeic	au adel	guic aven
Tü (`2s`)	as	adeis	as adel	guis aven
El, ela, elo (`3s`)	a	adei	a adel	gui aven
Nis, nes (`1p`)	avens	adens	avens adel	guens aven
Vi, vis, ves (`2s`, `2p`)	aveť	adeť	aveť adel	gueť aven
Elis, eles (`3p`)	an	aden	an adel	guen aven

canen (can, to be able)

Infinitive	canen
Past tense auxiliary	(depends on following verb)
Active participle	canendo
Passive participle	conel
Imperative (tü)	cani
Imperative (Vi)	caniť

Subject	Present (`PRS`)	Imperfect (`PST.IPFV`)	Past (`PST`)	Future (`FUT`)
Ye (`1s`)	canc	coneic	au conel	guic seyen
Tü (`2s`)	cans	coneis	as conel	guis seyen
El, ela, elo (`3s`)	can	conei	a conel	gui seyen
Nis, nes (`1p`)	canens	coneyens	avens conel	guens seyen
Vi, vis, ves (`2s`, `2p`)	caneť	coneyeť	aveť conel	gueť seyen
Elis, eles (`3p`)	canen	coneyen	an conel	guen seyen

doen (to do)

Infinitive	doen
Past tense auxiliary	aven
Active participle	doendo
Passive participle	del
Imperative (tü)	doi
Imperative (Vi)	doiť

Subject	Present (`PRS`)	Imperfect (`PST.IPFV`)	Past (`PST`)	Future (`FUT`)
Ye (`1s`)	doc	deic	au dnel	guic doen
Tü (`2s`)	does	deis	as del	guis doen
El, ela, elo (`3s`)	doe	dei	a del	gui doen
Nis, nes (`1p`)	doens	deyens	avens del	guens doen
Vi, vis, ves (`2s`, `2p`)	doeť	deyeť	aveť del	gueť doen
Elis, eles (`3p`)	doen	deyen	an del	guen doen

esen (to eat)

Infinitive	esen
Past tense auxiliary	aven
Active participle	esendo
Passive participle	atel
Imperative (tü)	esi
Imperative (Vi)	esiť

Subject	Present (`PRS`)	Imperfect (`PST.IPFV`)	Past (`PST`)	Future (`FUT`)
Ye (`1s`)	esc	ateic	au atel	guic esen
Tü (`2s`)	ets	ateis	as atel	guis esen
El, ela, elo (`3s`)	et	atei	a atel	gui esen
Nis, nes (`1p`)	esens	ateyens	avens atel	guens esen
Vi, vis, ves (`2s`, `2p`)	eseť	ateyeť	aveť atel	gueť esen
Elis, eles (`3p`)	esen	ateyen	an atel	guen esen

guien (to go, to walk, `FUT` marker)

Infinitive	guien
Past tense auxiliary	seinen
Active participle	guendo
Passive participle	gal
Imperative (tü)	gui
Imperative (Vi)	guiť

Subject	Present (`PRS`)	Imperfect (`PST.IPFV`)	Past (`PST`)	Future (`FUT`)
Ye (`1s`)	guic	gaic	sin gal	guic guien
Tü (`2s`)	guis	gais	es gal	guis guien
El, ela, elo (`3s`)	gui	gai	is gal	gui guien
Nis, nes (`1p`)	guens	gayens	sins galis	guens guien
Vi, vis, ves (`2s`, `2p`)	gueť	gayeť	seť galis	gueť guien
Elis, eles (`3p`)	guen	gayen	sin galis	guen guien

lesen (to leave, to let, to allow)

Infinitive	lesen
Past tense auxiliary	(depends on following verb)
Active participle	lesendo
Passive participle	lasel
Imperative (tü)	lesi
Imperative (Vi)	lesiť

Subject	Present (`PRS`)	Imperfect (`PST.IPFV`)	Past (`PST`)	Future (`FUT`)
Ye (`1s`)	lesc	laseic	au lasel	guic lesen
Tü (`2s`)	lets	laseis	as lasel	guis lesen
El, ela, elo (`3s`)	let	lasei	a lasel	gui lesen
Nis, nes (`1p`)	lesens	laseyens	avens lasel	guens lesen
Vi, vis, ves (`2s`, `2p`)	leseť	laseyeť	aveť lasel	gueť lesen
Elis, eles (`3p`)	lesen	laseyen	an lasel	guen lesen

musten (must, to have to)

Infinitive	musten
Past tense auxiliary	(depends on following verb)
Active participle	mustendo
Passive participle	mostel
Imperative (tü)	-
Imperative (Vi)	-

Subject	Present (`PRS`)	Imperfect (`PST.IPFV`)	Past (`PST`)	Future (`FUT`)
Ye (`1s`)	musto	mosteic	au mosel	guic musten
Tü (`2s`)	musts	mosteis	as mosel	guis musten
El, ela, elo (`3s`)	must	mostei	a mosel	gui musten
Nis, nes (`1p`)	mustens	mosteyens	avens mosel	guens musten
Vi, vis, ves (`2s`, `2p`)	musteť	mosteyeť	aveť mosel	gueť musten
Elis, eles (`3p`)	musten	mosteyen	an mosel	guen musten

seinen (to be, PST marker)

Infinitive	seinen
Past tense auxiliary	seinen
Active participle	sindo
Passive participle	bül
Imperative (tü)	bi
Imperative (Vi)	biť

Subject	Present (`PRS`)	Imperfect (`PST.IPFV`)	Past (`PST`)	Future (`FUT`)
Ye (`1s`)	sin	seineic	sin bül	guic seinen
Tü (`2s`)	es	seineis	es bül	guis seinen
El, ela, elo (`3s`)	is	seinei	is bül	gui seinen
Nis, nes (`1p`)	sins	seineyens	sins bülis	guens seinen
Vi, vis, ves (`2s`, `2p`)	seť	seineyeť	seť bülis	gueť seinen
Elis, eles (`3p`)	sin	seineyen	sin bülis	guen seinen

Syntax

Europaico's syntax is relatively simple, with no real surprises. As I was able to restrain myself from adding grammatical case to this conlang, Europaico requires an `SVO` word order.

Adjectives and adverbs generally follow the words they modify, although the opposite order is allowed as a stylistic variant, generally as a way to emphasize the descriptor. For instance, 'the big city' will be generally given as lo miesto mego (literally 'the city big'), although lo mego miesto ('the big city') is also allowed but much rarer.

Similarly, Europaico allows for pronouns in subject-position to be dropped, but this is a poetic or otherwise stylistic choice not generally found in the standard form of the language. Thus Ye te seic would be the usual way of translating 'I see you' even though simply saying te seic would also constitute a valid option.

Negatives

European languages generally express negation through the inclusion of a negative particle, typically found before the verb (as in Spanish no, Greek δεν and Polish nie) although some languages place this particle after the verb instead (German nicht, Danish ikke) while French traditionally combines both options, with the particle ne being required before the verb and pas after it.

Naturally, Europaico, in its heroic quest to become as accessible as possible to speakers of all its source languages, takes the French approach, with French and Slavic-based ne being required before the verb and any clitics (such as accusative pronouns) and German-based niť after the verb. Thus the negative form of Ye te helpo (I help you) is Ye ne te helpo niť (I don't help you).

Double negatives are allowed, retaining their negative sense. For instance 'I never help you' will be generally expressed by adding the adverb mai (never) to the negative wording as given above: Ye ne te helpo niť mai, while the similarly constructed Ye ne te guic lesen niť mai could be interpreted as "I will never give up on you".

Questions

Polar questions (those who ask for a yes-no confirmation) may be formed simply by adding the particle que at the beginning of the sentence. Verb-subject inversion (resulting in a `VSO` word order) is optionally allowed for these questions thus 'Am I helping you?' might be expressed either as Que ye te helpo? or as Que te helpo ye? without any change in meaning.

Such questions will generally be answered with particles meaning 'yes' and 'no' which in Europaico are ne and oquei respectively, taken from Greek ναι and όχι respectively. Learners should take notice that ne means 'yes', despite it being otherwise identical to the negative particle ne. Similarly, the negative answer oquei should not be confused with English-derived okey (OK), which might also be borrowed into the language.

Content questions are formed using interrogative pronouns or adverbs similar to the English wh-words including cuo (who), cue (what), cuando (when), cuon (where), cuomo (how) and cuare (why). Questions formed using these interrogatives do not require the marker que. These content interrogatives might be optionally fronted to the beginning of the sentence or left in their natural place in the sentence, so 'who are you helping?' might be expressed either as Cuo tü helpes? or as Tü helpes cuo?.

Relative clauses

Europaico's relative clauses follow the noun they describe (the antecedent) as is the norm among European languages. Their structure, largely modeled off French, varies slightly depending on the role the antecedent has within the relative clause.

When the antecedent works as a subject within the relative clause, it will be introduced with the relative pronoun qui as in « lo ďeťe, qui singue » for 'the kid that sings'.

As in German, relative clauses tend to adopt a verb-final structure meaning that direct objects such as « el hlieb » ~ 'the bread' in phrases such as 'the man who eats the bread' will appear before the verb (el muz, qui el hlieb et) even though it would usually follow the verb in other contexts (as in el muz et el hlieb for 'the man eats the bread'). Arguably, this has the advantage of delimiting the relative clause more clearly.

Relative clauses where the antecedent works as a direct object use the relative pronoun que instead. Due to Europaico's verb-final word order for relative clauses, the usage of the correct relative pronoun might be the only element that indicates the role of the antecedent within the relative clause; compare for instance « les zenes, que lis muzis seyen » (the women who the men see) and « les zenes, qui lis muzis seyen » (the women who see the men).

Clauses where the antecedent takes in a different syntactic role within the relative clause require the pronoun qui preceded by a preposition such as locative na (in, at) in the phrase lo miesto, na qui je vono (the city where I live).

Europaico's orthography requires relative phrases to be surrounded by commas as it is also the case in German and Russian orthography among others.

Numerals

Europaico numerals have been designed to facilitate international communication with the same utmost care present in the rest of the language.

In a rare display of goodwill, Europaico's numerals are not inflected for gender nor any other category, although it should be noted that the numeral for 'one' coincides with the feminine form of the indefinite article which is inflected for number.

Digits are mostly borrowed from Greek, although influences from other languages is also present:

Number	Europaico numeral	Notes
0	zero	Internationalism.
1	ena	From Greek ένα, also similar to German ein. Identical to the feminine form of the indefinite article en/ena/eno.
2	düs	From the Greek-based prefix di-, its source the Ancient Greek adverb δῐ́ς, Albanian dy and Romance words such as Spanish dos and Portuguese dois.
3	tris	From the Greek-based prefix tri- and words for 'three' in multiple Indo-European languages from Europe.
4	quear	From Manx Gaelic kiare /kʲeːə(r)/ which somehow resembles cognates such as French quatre. Despite the fact that Romance, Slavic and Germanic words for 'four' ultimately share the same Indo-European root *'kʷetwóres, modern reflexes have diverged so much that one could scarcely find common ground among them. Since Europaico was severely lacking in Celtic representation, a Manx Gaelic word was chosen, an obvious choice obeying to the Isle of Man position between the territories of Goidelic and Brittonic languages.
5	pinta	Mainly from the Greek-based prefix penta- although also influenced by the i found in Romance words for 'fifth' such as quinta (found in Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan and Italian among others).
6	secsa	From the Greek-based prefix hexa-, its Latin counterpart sex(a)- and many words for 'six' in Indo-European languages including German sechs.
7	septa	A similar derivation to that from secsa, inspired by the prefixes hepta-, sept(a)- and various words for 'seven' or 'seventh' (such as Spanish séptimo).
8	octa	From the Greek and Latin-based prefixes octo-/octa-. The form with a final -a was chosen to agree with the previous numerals.
9	nona	From the Latin prefix nona-, keeping the pattern from previous numerals.

Europaico's word for 10 is deç, a word inspired both by Romance forms of the numeral (such as Spanish diez, Portuguese dez and Occitan dètz) and by Slavic cognates such as Czech deset, Ukrainian де́сять and Macedonian де́сет.

Numerals from 11 to 19 are regularly formed by adding the suffix -nast (taken from Slavic sources) to the digit for the units position: enanast, düsnast, trisnast through nonanast.

Words for multiples of ten from 20 to 90 are formed by suffixing -deç to the appropriate digit, from düsdeç for twenty to nonadeç for ninety. Unfortunately, this means that French-speakers learning this language will have to do some math to work out that the numeral for ninety is formed as nonadeç rather than something that would come more naturally to them such as *'*'quear-düsdeç-deç.

On the other hand, in order to make the language more accessible to German and Polish speakers, among others, other numbers below 100 are formed placing the units before the tens, as in quear düsdeç for 24 (literally 'four [and] twenty').

All other positions are formed as in English, with the higher positions coming up first, each formed by a digit numeral followed by a SI-based term for the power of ten as in ena hecto for 100 (literally one hundred) or ena quilo düs hecto quear trisdeç for 1234 (literally one thousand two hundred four thirty).

Ordinals might be formed adding the suffix -ico to a number as in secsaico for 'sixth'.

Examples

Sample sentences

The following are a set of sample sentences designed to showcase aspects of the Europaico grammar. These are given in the Europaico and Latin alphabets along with an IPA phonemic transcription.

Intransitive, affirmative:

Eɴ мɤz кaı eɴa zeɴa гaεɴ.
En muz cai ena zena gayen.
/en muz kai̯ ˈe.na ˈze.na ˈɡa.jen/
en muz cai ena zena gayen
INDF.SG.M man and INDF.SG.F woman go.IPF.3p
A man and a woman were walking.

Transitive, question:

Ke сeεɴ ʌeс zeɴeс ʌıс мɤzıс?
Que seyen les zenes lis muzis?
/ke ˈse.jen les ˈze.nes lis ˈmu.zis/
que seyen les zen-es lis muz-is
INT see.PRS.3p DEF.PL.F woman-PL.F DEF.PL.C man-PL.C
Do the women see the men?

Ditransitive, negative:

Є ɴe τ’aɤ гaweʌ ɴıћ eʌ кaмeɴ бaρo.
Ye ne t’au gavel niť el camen baro.
/je ne tau̯ ɡaˈvel nic el ˈka.men ˈba.ʀo/
ye ne te au gav-el niť el camen bar-o
1s NEG 2.ACC PST.1s give.PST-PTCP NEG DEF.SG.M stone heavy-SG.C
I didn’t give you the heavy stone.

With relative clauses:

Λa oсoбa, кe τʋ aс сaweʌ, фaɴгe ʌa пτıцa, кı ʌıс ∂ʋс đeћıс мıɴıс a фaɴ∂eʌ.
La osoba, que tü as savel, fangue la ptiça, qui lis düs ďeťis minis a fandel.
/la oˈso.ba ke ty as saˈvel ˈfaŋ.ɡe la ˈpti.tsa ki lis dys ˈɟe.cis ˈmi,nis a fanˈdel/
la osoba que tü as sav-el fang-e la ptiça
DEF.SG.F person REL.OBL 2s PST.2s see.PST-PTCP catch-PRS.3s DEF.SG.F bird
qui lis düs ďeť-is min-is a fand-el
REL.NOM DEF.PL.C two child-PL.C 1s.POS-PL.C PST.3s find.PST-PTCP
The person you saw is catching the bird that found my two children.

Schleicher's Fable

Schleicher's Fable is a common sample text used by many of the best and most serious linguists in the world. In order to even things out, we'll use it for Europaico as well.

The text of the fable, in English, is as follows:

The Sheep and the Horses
On a hill, sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly.
The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses."
The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool."
Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

The Europaico translation in the Europaico script is as follows:

Λa Owцa кaı ʌıс Koɴıс
Eпı eɴ пaгoρeк, eɴa owцa, кı wɤʌɴa ɴe a∂eı ɴıћ, a сaweʌ кoɴıс: eɴ кoɴ кı τρoкeı eɴ woz бaρo, eɴ кoɴ кı бoρeı eɴa τowaρa мeгa кaı eɴ кoɴ кı бoρeı τaкaмeɴτ eɴ мɤz.
Λa owцa a сaгeʌ пρo кoɴıс: « Λo сeρцe мıɴo мe ∂oe бoʌ сeεɴ∂o eɴ мɤz кı ∂ρıwe кoɴıс ».
Λıс кoɴıс aɴ сaгeʌ: « Owцa, ʌıсτı! Λıс сeρцıс мıɴıс ɴıс ∂oeɴ бoʌ кɤaɴ∂o ɴıс сeεɴс кeсτo: eɴ мɤz, eʌ гoспo∂aρ, weρaɴ∂eρe ʌa wɤʌɴa ∂eс owцa'с ɴa eɴ пʌaшτ τeρмo пρo сı. Kaı ɴɤɴ ʌa owцa ɴ'a ɴıћ wɤʌɴa. »
Λa owцa a xeρeʌ кeсτo кaı ıс фʌoxeʌa ɴa ʌa ρowɴıɴa.

In the Latin alphabet:

La Ovça cai lis Conis
Epi en pagorec, ena ovça, qui vulna ne adei niť, a savel conis: en con qui troquei en voz baro, en con qui borei ena tovara mega cai en con qui borei tacament en muz.
La ovça a sagel pro conis: « Lo serce mino me doe bol seyendo en muz qui drive conis ».
Lis conis an sagel: « Ovça, listi! Lis sercis minis nis doen bol cuando nis seyens questo: en muz, el gospodar, verandere la vulna des ovça's na en plašt termo pro si. Cai nun la ovça n'a niť vulna. »
La ovça a herel questo cai is flohela na la rovnina.

Interlinear glosses and phonetic transcriptions are given in the following section.

Glosses

La Ovça cai lis Conis

/la ˈov.tsa kai̯ lis ˈko.nis/

la ovça cai lis con-is

DEF.SG.F sheep and DEF.PL.C horse-PL.C

The Sheep and the Horses

Epi en pagorec, ena ovça, qui vulna ne adei niť, a savel conis:

/ˈe.pi en pa.ɡoˈʀrek ˈe.na ˈov.tsa ki ˈvul.na ne aˈdei̯ nic a saˈvel ˈko.nis/

epi en pagorec ena ovça qui vulna ne ad-ei niť

on INDF.SG.M hill INDF.SG.F sheep REL.NOM wool NEG have.PST-.IPF.3s NEG

a savel con-is

PST.3s see.PTCP horse-PL.C

On a hill, sheep that had no wool saw horses

en con qui troquei en voz baro,

/en kon ki tʀoˈkei̯ en voz ˈba.ʀo/

en con qui troc-ei en voz bar-o

INDF.SG.M horse REL.NOM pull.PST-IPF.3s INDF.SG.M cart heavy-SG.C

a horse that pulled a heavy wagon

en con qui borei ena tovara mega

/en kon ki boˈʀei̯ ˈe.na toˈva.ʀa ˈme.ɡa/

en con qui bor-ei ena tovara meg-a

INDF.SG.M horse REL.NOM carry.PST-IPF.3s INDF.SG.F burden big-SG.F

a horse that carried a big load

cai en con qui borei tacament en muz.

/kai̯ en kon ki boˈʀei̯ ta.kaˈment en muz/

cai en con qui bor-ei taca-ment en muz

and INDF.SG.M horse REL.NOM carry.PST-IPF.3s fast-ADV INDF.SG.M man

a horse that carried a man quickly.

La ovça a sagel pro conis:

/la ˈov.tsa saˈɡel pʀo ˈko.nis/

la ovça a sag-el pro con-is

DEF.SG.F sheep PST.3s say-PTCP DAT horse-PL.C

The sheep said to the horses:

« Lo serce mino me doe bol seyendo en muz qui drive conis ».

/lo ˈseʀ.tse ˈmi.no me ˈdo.e bol seˈjen.do en muz ki ˈdʀi.ve ˈko.nis/

lo serce min-o me doe bol

DEF.SG.N heart 1s.POS-SG.N 1s.OBL do.PRS.3s pain

sey-endo en muz qui driv-e con-is

see-GER INDF.SG.M man REL.NOM drive-PRS.3s horse-PL.C

"My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses."

Lis conis an sagel: « Ovça, listi!

/lis ˈko.nis an saˈɡel ˈov.tsa ˈlis.ti/

lis con-is an sag-el ovça list-i

DEF.PL.C horse-PL.C PST.3p say-PTCP sheep listen-IMP

The sheep said to the horses: "Sheep, listen!

Lis sercis minis nis doen bol cuando nis seyens questo:

/lis ˈseʀ.tsis ˈmi.nis nis ˈdo.en bol kuˈan.do nis seˈjens ˈkes.to/

lis serc-is min-is nis doen bol

DEF.PL.C heart-PLC 1s.POS-PL.C 1p.M.OBL do.PRS.3p pain

cuando nis sey-ens questo

when 1p.C see-PRS.1p this-SG.C

"Our hearts pain us when we see this:

en muz, el gospodar, verandere la vulna des ovça's

/en muz el ɡos.poˈdaʀ ve.ʀanˈde.ʀe la ˈvul.na des ˈov.tsas/

en muz el gospodar verander-e la vulna des ovça-'s

INDF.SG.M man DEF.SG.M master change-PRS.3s DEF.SG.F wool POS sheep-POS

a man, the master, changes the wool of the sheep

na en plašt termo pro si.

/na en plaʃt ˈteʀ.mo pʀo si/

na en plašt term-o pro si

into INDF.SG.M garment warm-SG.C for REFL

into a warm garment for himself.

Cai nun la ovça n'a niť vulna. »

/kai̯ nun la ˈov.tsa na nic ˈvul.na/

cai nun la ovça n'-a niť vulna

and now DEF.SG.F sheep NEG-have.PRS.3s NEG wool

And now the sheep doesn't have wool."

La ovça a herel questo cai is flohela na la rovnina.

/la ˈov.tsa a xeˈʀel ˈkes.to kai̯ is floˈxe.la na la ʀovˈni.na/

la ovça a her-el questo cai is floh-ela

DEF.SG.F sheep PST.3s hear-PTCP this and PST.3s flee.PST-PTCP.SG.F

na la rovnina

into DEF.SG.F plain

The sheep heard this and fled into the plain.