Novial is an international auxiliary language (IAL) created by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen in 1928.

Novial's vocabulary is borrowed largely from the Romance and Germanic languages, while its analytic grammar is influenced by English.

[1] It was updated in his dictionary Novial Lexike in 1930,[2] and further modifications were proposed in the 1930s, but the language became dormant with Jespersen's death in 1943.

[3] In the 1990s, with the revival of interest in constructed languages brought on by the Internet, some people rediscovered Novial.

bóni but bónim, not boním; apérta but apértad, not apertád) so perhaps it is better to say that the vowel before the final consonant of the stem takes the stress.

Therefore, the object need not be marked to distinguish it from the subject, and nominative (I, he, she and so on) and oblique (me, him, her) pronouns are identical: meIobservaobservevuyoume observa vuI observe youvuyouobservaobservememevu observa meyou observe meThe accusative (direct object) is therefore most often identical to the nominative (subject).

[dubious – discuss] The personal possessive adjectives are formed from the pronouns by adding -n or after a consonant -en.

This is in fact the genitive (possessive) of the pronoun so men means both 'my' and 'mine' ('of me'): MenMyhundedogMen hundeMy dogLiThehundedogesismenmineLi hunde es menThe dog is mineThe possessive pronouns are thus men, vun, len, etc., lun and nusen, vusen, lesen etc.

[neutrality is disputed] He disliked the arbitrary and artificial character that he found in Esperanto and Ido.

He sought to make Novial at once euphonious and regular while also preserving useful structures from natural languages.

Jespersen rejected a single vowel to terminate all nouns (-o in Esperanto/Ido), finding it unnatural and potentially confusing.

These endings may be taken to indicate natural sex according to the custom in Romance languages, though there is no grammatical gender or requirement for adjectives to agree with nouns.

Patro nia, kiu estas en la ĉielo, Via nomo estu sanktigita.

As Jespersen relates in his autobiography, in 1934 he proposed an orthographic reform to Novial, which displeased a part of the users.

Jespersen abandoned the essential principle of one sound, one letter :[10] I proposed some not inconsiderable amendments, especially by introducing an "orthographic" Novial alongside the original phonetically written language.

(...) Thus the sound [k], besides being represented by the letters k and q and the first part of x, also acquired the new sign c (before a, o, u and consonants), a practice with which nearly all Europeans, Americans, and Australians are familiar from childhood.

(...) I know that this orthographic form has displeased several of Novial's old and faithful friends, but it is my impression that many others have applauded it.Some of Jespersen's colleagues among philologists jokingly referred to Novial as Jesperanto, combining his surname with Esperanto, the prototypical auxiliary language.