Universalglot is an a posteriori international auxiliary language published by the French linguist Jean Pirro in 1868 in Tentative d'une langue universelle, Enseignement, grammaire, vocabulaire. Preceding Volapük by a decade and Esperanto by nearly 20 years, Universalglot has been called the first "complete auxiliary-language system based on the common elements in national languages". Pirro gave it more than 7,000 basic words and numerous prefixes, enabling the development of a very extensible vocabulary. In his book describing his own language project Novial, Otto Jespersen praised the language, writing that it is "one to which I constantly recur with the greatest admiration, because it embodies principles which were not recognized till much later". The magazine Cosmoglotta for the auxiliary language Interlingue (then known as Occidental) also praised the language in 1931 for its readability and analysis of international words (in particular the suffix -ion) and regretted that its creator had been forgotten in contrast with the creators of Esperanto and Volapük:Monuments have been erected to the glory of Zamenhof and the name Schleyer has been engraved in marble. Their precursor and master, Pirro, has been honored - with oblivion. Linguistic properties Orthography The Universalglot alphabet contains 27 letters. It uses 24 of the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet, "w" and "y" are not used, and has three additional letters "œ", "σ" and "ü". The non-basic Latin letters are pronounced "Œ/œ" is used for French œ or German ö "Σ/σ" as like English "sh" "Ü/ü" as like German "ü" or French "u" The basic Latin letters whose pronunciation differs from their pronunciation in English are: "c" is like "ts", "j" is like "y", "q" only appears in the digraph "qu" and this is like "kw" "a", "e", "i", "o", "u" are pronounced as in Spanish. Vowels in sequence are pronounced separately. Word classes Nouns and adjectives Nouns (substantives) are invariable except for the feminine form, which ends in "in". Adjectives are completely invariable E.g. (singular): El old man, el old manin. E.g. 2 (plural): Li old man, Li old manin. All words can be used as nouns with the help of an article. Articles Only articles and pronouns have separate singular and plural forms, as follows: Singular: el (the), un (a/an) Plural: li (the) Unmarked nouns will be considered plural: I hab kaval = I have horses. Verbs The verbs all share the same easy conjugation: Transitive verbs, such as