What is a conlang?
A conlang is a constructed language, that being a language that is intentionally designed rather than arising naturally. Some well-known ones are Esperanto, Klingon (from Star Trek), and Na'vi (from the Avatar movies). There are many types of conlangs, with the most important ones for this article being artlangs, which are made for artistic purposes (sometimes for fictional stories, usually just for fun), and auxlangs (short for international auxiliary languages), which are made for worldwide communication.
What is Dagapya?
Dagapya is a minimalistic constructed language with only about 800 words that are designed primarily around sound symbolism. The language has elements of auxlangs, artlangs, philosophical languages, and even a personal language. However, if I had to give it a strict categorization, I would say that Dagapya is an artlang designed as an auxlang. While it was originally created as an auxlang, I felt over time that the artlang label fit it more. I want it to be a language that people enjoy and have fun with, not one associated with government and laws. Of course, if people want to use it as an auxlang, they are more than free to, and I expect it to be well-suited for the role.
Why a priori?
An a priori conlang is one whose vocabulary is made from scratch, as opposed to borrowing words from existing languages. This is a rather unpopular choice for auxlangs, and even as an artlang, it's a strange choice for a language that's advertised as being easy to learn. My choice for an a priori vocabulary comes down to multiple reasons, but the main ones are: idealism (much less discernible bias towards any language), the design challenges (I find this part fun), and just to make things interesting (a unique vocabulary is cool!).
Why loanwords?
The loanword system was a necessity, even if it may seem a bit strange at first. This is because an a priori language isn't supposed to have words from other languages on paper, but in practice it has to. I consider there to be 2 types of loanwords, those being names and common words. Names must be carried over directly -- it would be very disrespectful for me to rename you against your will, in the same way that I am not allowed to enforce my own name for the entire country of France. These words do have to be adjusted to fit the sounds of the language (in the same way that a name from China cannot be pronounced perfectly in English), but are otherwise kept the same.
Common words are less necessary, but since the language is meant to be spoken internationally and have no biases between countries, it isn't against these goals to take pre-existing universal words. You could refer to "chocolate" as something like "brown-candy" and have it be perfectly understood, but the word "chocolate" is almost universally understood across languages, so there's no reason to not allow people to use that word when speaking in Dagapya. However, all loanwords do have the prefix o- to avoid any possible confusion with homophones from the rest of the language (e.g. someone named "Kai" would sound the same as "kay").
Why last-syllable stress? Why sentence particles?
There are a lot of decisions I made that might come off a bit strange, but you're always free to contact me and (politely) ask about any of my design choices. Last-syllable stress was the best solution I found to disambiguate sentences (e.g. "dine gwi" and "din e gwi" sound the same without last syllable stress), while sentence particles were a tradeoff that I decided to take. It may require adjustment from some speakers, but it helps a lot in reducing grammar rules (mainly for word order), making sentence structure clear even with different word orders, and removing ambiguity stemming from word order (e.g. English sentences like "She hit the man with the umbrella" where "with the umbrella" ambiguously applies to either the man or the verb). Most of my design choices came down to "I wanted to reduce ambiguity" and/or "I wanted to make things simpler."
