Interlingua
Interlingua is an international auxiliary language developed between 1937 and 1951 by the American International Auxiliary Language Association. It is a constructed language of the "naturalistic" variety, whose vocabulary, grammar, and other characteristics are derived from natural languages. Interlingua literature maintains that Interlingua is comprehensible to the billions of people who speak Romance languages, though it is actively spoken by only a few hundred.
Interlingua was developed to combine a simple, mostly regular grammar with a vocabulary common to a wide range of western European languages, making it easy to learn for those whose native languages were sources of Interlingua's vocabulary and grammar.
The name Interlingua comes from the Latin words ', meaning 'between', and ', meaning 'tongue' or 'language'. These morphemes are the same in Interlingua; thus, Interlingua would mean 'between language'.
Overview
Interlingua focuses on common vocabulary shared by Western European languages, which are often descended from or heavily influenced by the Latin language and Greek language. Interlingua organizers have four "primary control languages" where, by default, a word is expected to appear in at least three of them to qualify for inclusion in Interlingua. These are English; French; Italian; and a combination of Spanish and Portuguese which are treated as a single mega-language for Interlingua purposes. Additionally, German and Russian have been dubbed "secondary control languages". While the result is often akin to Neo-Latin as the most frequent source of commonality, Interlingua words can have origins in any language, as long as they have drifted into the primary control languages as loanwords. For example, the Japanese words geisha and samurai and the Finnish word sauna are used in most Western European languages, and therefore in Interlingua as well; similarly, the Guugu Yimithirr word gangurru is used in latinized form.The maintainers of Interlingua attempt to keep the grammar simple and word formation regular, and use only a small number of roots and affixes. This is intended to make the language quicker to learn.
History
The American heiress Alice Vanderbilt Morris became interested in linguistics and the international auxiliary language movement in the early 1920s. In 1924, Morris and her husband, Dave Hennen Morris, established the non-profit International Auxiliary Language Association in New York City. Their aim was to place the study of IALs on a more complex and scientific basis. Morris developed the research programme of IALA in consultation with Edward Sapir, William Edward Collinson, and Otto Jespersen.Investigations of the auxiliary language problem were in progress at the International Research Council, the American Council on Education, the American Council of Learned Societies, the British, French, Italian, and American Associations for the advancement of science, and other groups of specialists. Morris created IALA as a continuation of this work.
International Auxiliary Language Association
The IALA became a major supporter of mainstream American linguistics. Numerous studies by Sapir, Collinson, and Morris Swadesh in the 1930s and 1940s, for example, were funded by IALA. Alice Morris edited several of these studies and provided much of IALA's financial support. For example, Morris herself edited Sapir and Morris Swadesh's 1932 cross-linguistic study of ending-point phenomena, and Collinson's 1937 study of indication. IALA also received support from groups such as the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, the Research Corporation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.In its early years, IALA concerned itself with three tasks: finding other organizations around the world with similar goals; building a library of books about languages and interlinguistics; and comparing extant IALs, including Esperanto, Esperanto II, Ido, Peano's Interlingua, Novial, and Interlingue. In pursuit of the last goal, it conducted parallel studies of these languages, with comparative studies of national languages.
At the Second International Interlanguage Congress, held in Geneva in 1931, IALA began to break new ground; 27 recognized linguists signed a testimonial of support for IALA's research programme. An additional eight added their signatures at the third congress, convened in Rome in 1933. That same year, Herbert N. Shenton and Edward Thorndike became influential in IALA's work by authoring studies in the interlinguistic field.
The first steps towards the finalization of Interlingua were taken in 1937, when a committee of 24 linguists from 19 universities published Some Criteria for an International Language and Commentary. However, the outbreak of World War II in 1939 cut short the intended biannual meetings of the committee.
Development of a new language
Originally, the association had not intended to create its own language. Its goal was to identify which auxiliary language already available was best suited for international communication, and how to promote it more effectively. However, after ten years of research, many members of IALA concluded that none of the existing interlanguages were up to the task. By 1937, the members had made the decision to create a new language, to the surprise of the world's interlanguage community.To that point, much of the debate had been equivocal on the decision to use naturalistic or systematic words. During the war years, proponents of a naturalistic interlanguage won out. The first support was Thorndike's paper; the second was a concession by proponents of the systematic languages that thousands of words were already present in many, or even a majority, of the European languages. Their argument was that systematic derivation of words was a Procrustean bed, forcing the learner to unlearn and re-memorize a new derivation scheme when a usable vocabulary was already available. IALA from that point assumed the position that a naturalistic language would be best.
IALA's research activities were based in Liverpool, before relocating to New York due to the outbreak of World War II, where E. Clark Stillman established a new research staff. Stillman, with the assistance of Alexander Gode, constructed the methodology for selecting Interlingua vocabulary based on a comparison of control languages.
In 1943 Stillman left for war work and Gode became Acting Director of Research. IALA began to develop models of the proposed language, the first of which were presented in Morris's General Report in 1945.
The four models
From 1946 to 1948, French linguist André Martinet was Director of Research. During this period IALA continued to develop models and conducted polling to determine the optimal form of the final language. In 1946, IALA sent an extensive survey to more than 3,000 language teachers and related professionals on three continents.Model P was unchanged from 1945; Model M was relatively modern in comparison to more classical P. Model K was slightly modified in the direction of Ido. The resulting four models that were canvassed were:
An example sentence:
The vote total ended up as follows: P 26.6%, M 37.5%, C 20%, and K 15%. The two more schematic models, C and K, were rejected. Of the two naturalistic models, M attracted somewhat more support than P. Taking national biases into account, IALA decided on a compromise between models M and P, with certain elements of C.
Finalization
The German-American Gode and the French Martinet did not get along. Martinet resigned and took up a position at Columbia University in 1948, and Gode took on the last phase of Interlingua's development. His task was to combine elements of Model M and Model P; take the flaws seen in both by the polled community and repair them with elements of Model C as needed; and develop a vocabulary. Alice Vanderbilt Morris died in 1950, and the funding that had sustained IALA ceased, but sufficient funds remained to publish a dictionary and grammar. The vocabulary and grammar of Interlingua were first presented in 1951, when IALA published the finalized Interlingua Grammar and the Interlingua–English Dictionary. In 1954, IALA published an introductory manual entitled Interlingua a Prime Vista.Interlingua as presented by the IALA is very close to Peano's Interlingua, both in its grammar and especially in its vocabulary. A distinct abbreviation was adopted: IA instead of IL.
Interlingua's first decades
An early practical application of Interlingua was the scientific newsletter Spectroscopia Molecular, published from 1952 to 1980. In 1954, the Second World Cardiological Congress in Washington, D.C. released summaries of its talks in both English and Interlingua. Within a few years, it found similar use at nine further medical congresses. Between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, some thirty scientific and medical journals provided article summaries in Interlingua. Gode wrote a monthly column in Interlingua in the Science Newsletter published by the Science Service from the early 1950s until his death in 1970.IALA closed its doors in 1953 but was not formally dissolved until 1956 or later. Its role in promoting Interlingua was largely taken on by Science Service, which hired Gode as head of its newly formed Interlingua Division. Hugh E. Blair, Gode's close friend and colleague, became his assistant. A successor organization, the Interlingua Institute, was founded in 1970 to promote Interlingua in the US and Canada. The new institute supported the work of other linguistic organizations, made considerable scholarly contributions and produced Interlingua summaries for scholarly and medical publications. One of its largest achievements was two immense volumes on phytopathology produced by the American Phytopathological Society in 1976 and 1977.
Beginning in the 1980s, UMI has held international conferences every two years and launched a publishing programme that eventually produced over 100 volumes. Several Scandinavian schools undertook projects that used Interlingua as a means of teaching the international scientific and intellectual vocabulary.
In 2000, the Interlingua Institute was dissolved amid funding disputes with the UMI; the American Interlingua Society, established the following year, succeeded the institute.