Vocabulary

The origin of Multilingua’s international vocabulary is Indo-European (Euroindo).

Extensive work has created the most international vocabulary of any language in the world. The Multilingua lexicon has more than 15,000 words common to other languages and understandable by the majority of the world’s population so that 30% of the world’s population (2.4 billion people) understand 90% of the vocabulary.

What does international vocabulary understood by the majority of the world’s population mean?

For the selection of words, we have looked for the most common meaning among the majority of languages. Therefore, in Multilingua we are able to recognise the words even if the word is not used as the first meaning in the language we usually speak, it will often exist as a second meaning, as is the case for example:

• The word “pork” in Multilingua would be “pork”, a native Spanish speaker is able to recognise the word because there is a second meaning “puerco” in Spanish. In English something similar happens, the first meaning would be “pig” but there is a second meaning “porc” so an English speaker would also be able to recognise it.

• In other cases, it does not exist as a second meaning but it is present in the root of other derived words and therefore we are able to recognise and understand it. This is the case of “dome” in Multilingua, which in Spanish would be “casa” and this root is intrinsic in Spanish in other words such as “domicilio” or “doméstico”. The same happens in English, the word would be “house” but the root “dome” is present in other words such as “domicile” or “domestic”.

• Another example would be “can”, which is “perro” in Spanish, but we have derived words with the same root such as “canino”, the same happens in English, “dog” being the first meaning but with derived words such as “canine”.

The simplicity and versatility of the Multilingua vocabulary allows words to be created from a very small base using two simple techniques:

Derivation

• The same term acts in different grammatical categories by applying different suffixes. It is a way of increasing vocabulary with minimal fundamental roots. See section on Derivations and Terminology

Composition

• You can create an infinite number of words from the combination of words you already know.