Interlingua

The international auxiliary language Interlingua is a constructed language based on the Romance languages. It was first published in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association, based on words common to French, Italian, Spanish/Portuguese, and English. There is also a simplistic grammar, which is hindered by a vaguely defined pronunciation. It is sometimes called Interlingua de IALA to distinguish it from the other languages which have taken this name. This use of Interlingua is the subject of the rest of this article.

Other uses of the word Interlingua include the following:

• Giuseppe Peano's Latino sine Flexione was called Interlingua until this name fell into disuse after the publication of IALA's Interlingua.
• Interlingua is sometimes used as a synonym for international auxiliary language. See also interlinguistics.
• Abstract intermediary languages used in the machine translation of human languages are also called interlinguas.

There is also Interlingue, a constructed language which was formerly (and now once more) called Occidental.

Rationale

The expansive movements of science, technology, trade, arts, etc. combined with the historical dominance of the Greek and Latin languages have resulted in a large overlap of vocabulary among contemporary languages. Interlingua is designed to be a combination of this pre-existing vocabulary with a minimalist grammar, created in hopes that people exposed to the Romance languages would find it readily understandable. It was designed for passive understanding without much training. For this reason, it was seen as important to retain the traditional spelling and irregular morphology of the source vocabulary, but it was not felt necessary to standardize the pronunciation of these words, or to have a systematic method of word derivation (as in Esperanto, Ido, or Novial).

History

The vocabulary and verb conjugations of Interlingua were initially published in 1951. Alexander Gode, director of IALA during its later years, was one of the prime movers in this effort. He published a basic grammar, a one-way dictionary (Interlingua to English), and an introductory book entitled Interlingua a Prime Vista ("Interlingua at First Sight").

For the next quarter century, Interlingua was used for summaries of articles by several scientific and especially medical journals. Science News Service, the publisher at the time of Science Newsletter, published a monthly column in Interlingua from the early fifties until Gode's death in 1970. Currently, Panorama In Interlingua is the primary Interlingua periodical. It is a small 36-page newsletter published four times a year, covering news, science, and editorials.

Vocabulary

The IALA set up a control group of five widely-known languages with much shared vocabulary, grouped into four units: French, Italian, Spanish/Portuguese, and English. A word is eligible for Interlingua if it occurs with similar meanings in three of these four units. (Spanish and Portuguese are regarded together as one unit, although in recent years, there has been an increased push to make Spanish and Portuguese seperate units.) Secondary controls (originally German and Russian) have varied over the years. Grammatical words, required to operate the language, are taken from Latin if the regular procedure fails.

The form of the international words is based on the historical or hypothetical form from which the national forms evolved. The derivational series is also examined. Though French oeil, Italian occhio, Spanish ojo and Portuguese olho ("eye") are quite different, they all came from a historical form oculus, and international derivatives like ocular and oculista determine the form oculo to be used in Interlingua.

There is no explicit derivational morphology in Interlingua. Since all words are borrowed directly on a case-by-case basis, rather than derived internally, each word has to be learned separately. While this causes difficulties when speaking, it improves reading recognition for those already exposed to one of the control languages.

Interlingua as now used tends to have less Classical Latin vocabulary than IALA's original version, replaced in part by southern Romance vocabulary. For example emer ("to buy") has been mostly replaced by comprar, sed ("but") with mais and nimis ("too") with troppo. However, other classical Latin words, such as "pro" ("for"), "contra" ("against"), "post" ("after") and "ergo" ("therefore") are retained because they are seen as more internationally understandable than their Romance counterparts.

Pronunciation

The pronunciation is based on Romance or ecclesiastical Latin. For the most part, the consonants are like English, while the vowels are like Spanish or Italian.

C and G are hard before a, o, or u, and soft before e or i.

CH can be either the ch-sound, or it can be used to signal a hard C before e or i.

J is the 'zh' as in French, not the 'h' as in Spanish, the 'dzh' as in English, or the 'y' as in German.

Q is the hard C sound, but as with most control languages, it is almost exclusively found before a U. The u of qu is silent before e or i

Stress is irregular, though it usually falls on the vowel before the last consonant of a word.

Grammar

The grammar of Interlingua was simplified by discarding grammatical features absent in at least one of the control languages, but the three verb conjugations common to Romance remain, despite their absence from English. A minimal inflectional morphology is set forth, though there are four irregular verbs: esser, to be; facer, to do or make; haber, to have; and vader, to go. There are also hundreds of irregular past participles ("double-stem" verbs).

There is no adjectival agreement, and the definite article is always le. Nouns have no grammatical gender and are pluralised by adding -(e)s. Many adverbs are derived from adjectives by adding -(a)mente. Pronouns have nominative, accusative/oblique, and genitive cases. Those areas of grammar not explicitly laid out are "As in Spanish or French."

Verbs

Verbs are conjugated as given on the table below. The only verb with a subjunctive form is esser "to be", with subjunctive sia. Esser is also the only verb inflected for person, with singular es and plural son in the present tense. The future is stressed on the final vowel; the conditional, on the final e.

* It is not clear if the conditional can be used as both subjunctive and conditional.

Pronouns

In the 'person' column, sg = singular, pl = plural. The third-person reflexive pronoun is se; in other persons use the oblique form.

Community

Interlingua may be the second-most spoken international auxiliary language (IAL) after Esperanto, although the estimated number of speakers overlaps with that of Ido. It is, however, claimed to be the most widely understood IAL by virtue of its "naturalistic" (read 'Romance') grammar and vocabulary, allowing those familiar with the Romance languages to read and understand it at first sight.

Estimates of the number of speakers vary wildly, from as few as 50 to as many as 10,000. The majority of conservative estimates, however, place the number of active users of Interlingua at between 1,000 and 1,500. There are no known native speakers.

Interlingua has some enthusiastic supporters in North and South America, Europe (particularly Scandinavia) and Russia. There are some Interlingua web pages, and several periodicals, including Panorama in Interlingua from the Union Mundial pro Interlingua (the UMI) and the magazines of the national societies allied with it. There are several active mailing lists, and Interlingua is also in use in certain Usenet newsgroups, particularly in the europa hierarchy. In recent years, samples of Interlingua have also been seen in music and animé.

Every two years, the UMI organizes an international conference in a different European country, which is usually attended by about 50 people. In the year between, the Scandinavian Interlingua societies co-organize a conference in Sweden.

Sample

Interlingua sample: the widely-translated Lord's Prayer (also available as an MP3 file):

Nostre Patre, qui es in le celos,

que tu nomine sia sanctificate;

que tu regno veni;

que tu voluntate sia facite

super le terra como etiam in le celo.

Da nos hodie nostre pan quotidian,

e pardona a nos nostre debitas

como nos pardona a nostre debitores,

e non duce nos in tentation,

sed libera nos de malo.

See also

• Irregularities and exceptions in Interlingua
• International auxiliary language
• Reviews and personal experiences: Anarres.

External links

• Wikipedia in Interlingua
• Union Mundial pro Interlingua (includes text with corresponding audio version (in WAV))
• Interlingua-English Dictionary
• Interlingua Grammar by Gode and Blair
• Directory of websites in Interlingua at Open Directory Project
• Google in Interlingua
• The europa.* Usenet hierarchy which uses Interlingua for the denomination of its newsgroups and as one of the documentation languages
• Generator for Interlingua typographical filler text
• Internodio A website in Interlingua containing news items, of which some are also in audio (occasionally updated)
• Interlingua-English